On demand: "Love Means Zero"

From Showtime's documentary arm, a portrait of a tricky subject. 2017's Love Means Zero sees filmmaker Jason Kohn profiling Nick Bollettieri, founding father of the Nick Bollettieri Academy, the institution that came to exert an iron grip on the pro tennis circuit in the late Eighties and Nineties, thanks to such stars as Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Mary Pierce, Maria Sharapova and, as Bollettieri puts it, "my Serena and Venus" (which will come as news to Richard Williams). He's not a monster, but from an early stage in Kohn's film, it becomes apparent that Bollettieri was an exacting taskmaster, possessed of the ruthless singlemindedness that tends to identify and make champions in pro sports. Kohn speaks to a clutch of the name players, but also those who were left to drift away and forgotten about, like tennis balls knocked over a fence or hedge; several of these players are heard to testify that they were made to feel special, like a son or daughter, then abandoned at a formative moment once Bollettieri and his coaches determined they weren't quite what the Academy was seeking. The selection process comes over as tough, perhaps necessary, but above all else poorly handled, from an interpersonal perspective: the most damning evidence Kohn introduces into the record is that even Agassi - the Academy's erratic golden boy, to the extent that Bollettieri was seen and heard to take his side when he faced fellow Academy find Courier in the French Open quarterfinals of 1989 - refused the filmmaker's request for an interview. (He will be amply represented nonetheless, both in evocative archive footage - awful late Eighties mullets and all - and, more poignantly, in the form of a letter he wrote to Bollettieri in his 2009 memoir Open.)

What follows is one of the few sports docs that owes a pronounced rhetorical debt to the combative Errol Morris; you start to feel the camera itself becoming a net. Kohn isolates Bollettieri among the ruins of one of the resorts that were left to crumble after his declaration of bankruptcy; the director lobs up a probing question or three; and Bollettieri - weathered, RFK raspy, prone to alternating between the first and third person and overusing the dated hipster slang "baby" - insistently smashes answers back. This was all in the past, Jason; I don't dwell on such things; I move on, as you should. It's presumably what he told his charges whenever they lost their serve, but around about the point Bollettieri lets slip he's been married eight times, or when one of his erstwhile prodigies opens up about an eating disorder she developed, you start to wonder just how much collateral damage one man can bring about in his quest for success. Certainly Agassi, a player made in his coach's image - a flamboyant, devil-may-care hustler, burning through endorsement deal after endorsement deal - kept getting found out at the highest level, whether by the focused, matter-of-fact Courier, the machine-like Pete Sampras, or the shithousery of Boris Becker in his sleaze era. (Becker gets ushered on to recall how he once psyched out his opponent by openly flirting with Agassi's then-wife Brooke Shields from the very centre of Wimbledon's Centre Court.) We might even question the Bollettieri definition of success. The business model here seems hazy if not outright dubious, framing players not as individuals but ambassadors for the Academy, and recycling prize money to provide scholarships for aspirant champions; late on, Kohn reveals that Bollettieri was eventually outmanoeuvred behind the scenes by one of his savvier employees. The film's subject, who died in 2022, remains defiant to the last, blurting out "I just react! Nick just does it!", like some Nike-swooshed embodiment of the American id. You conclude Bollettieri would have been great to watch as a player, forever on the attack. His flaw as a businessman, and as a human being, is that he simply had no B game.

Love Means Zero is now streaming via NOW TV.

On DVD: "The Chronology of Water"

Kristen Stewart has acted for so many distinctive auteurs in the decade since the Twilight wrap-up that perhaps it was inevitable she would herself step behind the camera at some point. Her directorial debut The Chronology of Water is exactly the kind of project that might once have tempted her as a performer: an adaptation of a literary memoir (by Lidia Yuknavitch) centred on a muddled, self-harming young woman in desperate search of some purpose and affirmation. We meet this Lidia first as a child, within the framework of a 1960s household made tense by domestic violence; as a teenager, she takes to swimming, thereby internalising all the pressures of a solo competitive sport. When she finally reaches womanhood, embodied by Imogen Poots, she finds her mastery in the pool doesn't apply to dry land, lorded over as it is by the tyrannical men around her. The bulk of this story will outline how Lidia Yuknavitch navigated towards a place of acceptance, happiness and tranquility, a process that proves far from straightforward, and indeed far less straightahead than the average swimming lane. For much of that duration, she's having to outswim - or simply drown out - the negative voices inside her own head. The Chronology of Water will eventually run to a full two hours and eight minutes, which instinctively feels at least a reel too long, but in some ways it needs to be, because what it's detailing isn't an easy fix; like its heroine, the movie can seem tough and hard work.

For starters, you'll simply have to sit with Olivia Neergaard-Holm's free-associative editing, with its (achronological) premonitions of events to come: it's possible Stewart was seeking to emulate Nic Roeg while also intending to conjure a deeply mixed-up headspace. (We're waiting for both film and protagonist to settle down somehow.) Expect sudden swells of turbulence, then, but Stewart also affords us two constants we can cling to whenever matters get especially choppy. The first is the water of the title: the pools Lidia passes through ("how many miles does it take to swim to a self?"), the sweat and sexual effluvia, the ice in the drinks of her (alcoholic?) mother, the spit Lidia contemptuously deposits on the men she hoped might degrade her, the piss stain on one passed-out boyfriend's trousers, the condensation into which our heroine draws smiley faces (for a long time, the only happy faces in the film), the ocean into which she tosses the ashes of a stillborn baby with a muted, quietly devastating "sorry". The water raises up the film's largely floating imagery; it's both running motif and artistic self-justification. And within these emotional high tides, Stewart pins down another, adjacent image: that of the rocks Lidia habitually slips into her pockets on her travels, although it's initially unclear whether she means to ground herself - rocks as markers of time and place - or use them to drown herself à la Virginia Woolf.

The other constant here is Poots, an actress who seems to have been on the fringes of a Winslet-like movie stardom for a decade or more without really getting there. In hauling Poots front and centre, Stewart empowers her star to try things she hasn't before: to play brittle and unsympathetic, to frig herself and flash her boobs, to drink too much and drive too fast, to be as unpretty as this story demands at any given moment. In embracing these tasks, Poots creates the conditions where we cannot ignore this character, hard to be around though Lidia is, liable though she is to hurt herself and those who love her. In passing, Stewart also hands Thora Birch a gentle comeback role as Lidia's understandably concerned sister, and gifts Jim Belushi his best role in decades as the author Ken Kesey, who served as some sort of mentor for Lidia Yuknavitch's creative undertakings. (A sly comment on how fucked-up this moment was in general: we used to let someone as dishevelled as Ken Kesey mentor our young folk.) This is not, on the whole, a movie that wants or solicits the audience's approval, which likely explains why Chronology evaporated without trace within days of its UK theatrical release. (I suspect its maker had her fill of making nice during her teen franchise days.) Yet it demonstrates more than enough steel, a wilfulness its prime mover doubtless absorbed from her more adventurous directors, to be both admirable and promising indeed. Stewart has the makings of a proper filmmaker, just as the past few years have confirmed her as a formidable performer.

The Chronology of Water is now available to rent via the BFI Player and Prime Video, and on DVD via the BFI.

The chronology of water: "Rose of Nevada"

Oddities Week continues with Rose of Nevada, Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin's distinctive take on the ghost-ship subgenre. Jenkin's previous films Bait and Enys Men were set in workaday South West coastal communities beset by social division and supernatural anomalies; collectively, they formed a heartening revival of both a rudimentary film technique (hand-developed film, post-synched sound) and the kind of regional filmmaking that fell out of fashion and favour once everybody else determined they had to go and seek their fortune in London. But now, armed with a BAFTA and an all-access festival pass, Jenkin is himself going places. His latest, shot in vibrant Nic Roeg Technicolor, introduces emergent, adventurous faces (George Mackay, Callum Turner) into this director's familiar milieu: a well-worn fishing village, here one where the trawler of the title, previously involved in a tragedy thirty years ago, has found its way back into harbour with zero hands on deck. Still, the approach remains so distinct from what's around it in the contemporary cinema that it takes a good fifteen-to-twenty minutes to resettle into the Jenkin way; the opening section has to teach us anew how to watch a film removed of all the usual fuss and clutter. What's noticeable - and surprising, even to those of us who saw Jenkin's previous films - is how much Jenkin conveys via his generally taciturn, square-framed, rough-edged close-ups. We sense, for starters, just how this community has split along generational lines, the chatty younger folk itching to talk about the tragedies befalling the local fishermen, even as their elders clam up. (One exception: a lank-haired dementia patient/seer, prone to confusing present and past, as this plot will eventually.) More striking yet: how these shots come to establish a loaded, ominous mood, borne out when a new three-man crew - grizzled captain Francis Magee and hired hands Mackay and Turner - cast off in this same cursed vessel. Etched into the wooden frame of one of the bunks the lads sleep in: a stark warning to "Get Off The Boat Now".

At which point, a fierce local knowledge - or muscle memory - kicks in. This is a trawlerman movie made by someone who's studied how these boats actually work; with its documentary-like coverage of the gulls above and the ropes and pulleys below, the film Rose most closely resembles, for long stretches at sea, is 2012's immersive experiment Leviathan. The old ways become new, pertinent and urgent again - especially once our boys return home and realise they've docked in the recent past. Something's gone adrift; bearings start to be lost. If the narrative is far from plain sailing, Jenkin's shot selection - comprising four weatherbeaten or otherwise textured close-ups to every one suggestive, Deren-like sliver of dream imagery - begins to feel like necessary ballast, exactly what this director needed to tell this particular story. (Here are shots that appear the results of several weeks' beachcombing, visual information laid out as plainly as it would be on the sands; every image is its own seashell or fossil.) And the actors put in a real shift. Few films have made better use of - and more closely relied on - Mackay's open-faced legibility, the actor set to looking ever more aghast at developments. That quality becomes doubly effective when set against the vague air of fecklessness given off by the squintier, shiftier Turner - the market-stall Richard Gere - as a young man only too prepared to go along with this new arrangement, which is to say the old arrangement, if it means sleeping with a dead man's wife. (Arguably, these youngsters are overshadowed by another cherishably characterful turn from Magee, the Bob Mitchum of the cream tea set.) If Rose of Nevada turns out to be a hit, as my packed first-weekend screening would indicate, that may partly be down to star names, and partly down to being horror/fantasy-adjacent: on some basic level, we're dealing with a brinier Brigadoon here. Yet it's also surely attributable to Jenkin attempting what few others have of late: his is a cinema that continues to speak, on some sublimated, unconscious level, to the choppy waters and backwash we're all passing through. Some of the new film's tensions are regional: you do come away with a sense of those pressures felt by the young in crumbling coastal communities to stay in place and knuckle down. But it also strikes me as significant that Jenkin has been a post-Brexit discovery. Steered by a crew of queasy and uneasy shipmates, Rose of Nevada proves unusually attuned to what it means - and how it feels - for a people to be living in the present and the past simultaneously.

Rose of Nevada is now playing in selected cinemas.

Possession(s): "Mother Mary"

Well, April is supposed to be the studios' R&D month, devoted to risks, gambles and shots in the dark. It's no longer Oscar season, so the movies don't have to pretend to be respectable, and it's not yet summertime, so they don't have to be IMAX big. Mother Mary, A24's choice of counterprogramming to this weekend's dubious sure thing Michael, is an old-school women's picture approached from a wildly eccentric angle by the ever-unpredictable David Lowery (Ain't Them Bodies Saints, Pete's Dragon, A Ghost Story). At its heart: a power struggle in the costume department. A scarred, nervy and generally washed out Anne Hathaway is the Gaga-like pop sensation who arrives amid a thunderstorm at the country retreat/workshop of diva costumier Michaela Coel. She's hoping to come away with a dress fit for what she insinuates will be her farewell performance, but progress in this matter is soon complicated by the fact this pair have a past: they may indeed have once been an item, and the designer has retained some measure of resentment over the way the singer subsequently stepped out in other designers' clothes. In theory, then, this is a clash of artistic visions and temperaments: the deeply damaged soul versus the prickly provocateur peering loftily down from her drawing board. Yet even that feels too conventional a reading for what's really going on here. In actual fact, those of us watching on from the cheap seats soon find ourselves scrambling to maintain our bearings and marbles, while also reaching out for a few urgently needed and reassuring reference points.

When Paul Thomas Anderson, for one, moved into this field, he returned with what was, in Phantom Thread, his most hemmed-in project, a Californian's impersonation of Brit period-flick reticence. Mother Mary initially appears far more theatrical: it opens with a long reunion scene in which Hathaway and Coel talk in a way no two human beings have ever talked, and the former performs an interpretative dance routine - with its inferences of demonic possession, it's more Linda Blair than Lionel - to a tune we don't hear. Those trailers weren't lying, one concludes: this is a decidedly odd one, and you may well spend some of it - as I did - wondering whether a script hasn't landed in the wrong pigeonhole. Sudden, stark in-camera scene and lighting changes indicate the director of the scarcely less batshit The Green Knight has set his sights on producing a better-dressed revival of the Sleuth-like filmed play; but then Sleuth, Deathtrap and their ilk never featured a scene involving a possessed FKA Twigs. That Mother Mary eventually won me over had a lot to do with these actresses, who apparently got whatever there was to get in this material, and who elevate it to a rare intensity. Something really does seem to be at stake in the matter of Hathaway versus Coel: it's soft vs. spiky, white privilege vs. lingering slights, fairytale princess vs. perhaps the most extraordinary looking performer working today. In the second half, Lowery's gift for image generation returns to the forefront; although shot on a far smaller budget, his concert scenes - reframing pop as something mythic, closer to a ritual or rite - make the Taylor Swift movie seem newly unimaginative. So there's another battle going on within Mother Mary: between the stagey and the cinematic, and - in the eyes of this judge - the latter just nicks it on points. Lowery's film doesn't attain the layered surrealism of, say, Peter Strickland's In Fabric, another treatise on the alchemy of creation fixated on a haunted red dress; some part of me couldn't shake the suspicion this is an artefact designed to justify the existence (and hefty pricetag) of a lavish, A24-published coffee table tome. Yet as flop Anne Hathaway vehicles go, Mother Mary is more intriguing, even fascinating, than 2023's Eileen - and it dares to go places next week's conventionally tailored The Devil Wears Prada 2 likely won't.

Mother Mary is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of April 17-19, 2026):

1 (1) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

2 (2) Project Hail Mary (12A) ***

3 (3) The Drama (15) **

4 (new) Lee Cronin's The Mummy (18)

5 (new) Akira (15) ***

6 (4) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

7 (new) Time Hoppers: The Silk Road (U)

8 (6) BTS World Tour 'Arirang' Live Viewing in Japan (12A)

9 (new) All My Sons - NT Live 2026 (12A)

10 (new) Bhooth Bangla (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Stand By Me

2. Fight Club

3. Rose of Nevada

4. The Stranger

5. My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

2 (8) Hamnet (12) **

3 (6) Wicked: For Good (PG)

4 (7) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

5 (5) The Housemaid (15)

6 (12) The Super Mario Bros Movie (PG)

7 (2) Sinners (15) ****

8 (9) G.O.A.T. (PG)

9 (new) Reminders of Him (12)

10 (3) One Battle After Another (15) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

2. Nouvelle Vague

3. The History of Sound

4. The Chronology of Water

5. Whistle

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Untouchables (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)

2. Minority Report (Saturday, ITV1, 10.20pm and Thursday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

3. Living (Saturday, Channel 4, 9pm)

4. The World's End (Friday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

5. The Man in the Iron Mask [above] (Sunday, five, 1.45pm)

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of April 10-12, 2026):

1 (1) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

2 (2) Project Hail Mary (12A) ***

3 (3) The Drama (15) **

4 (4) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

5 (5) Hoppers (U) ****

6 (new) BTS World Tour 'Arirang' Live Viewing in Goyang & Japan (12A)

7 (new) You, Me & Tuscany (12A)

8 (new) undertone (15) **

9 (new) California Schemin' (15)

10 (new) The Stranger (15) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Stand By Me

2. The Stranger

3. My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow

4. Orwell: 2+2=5

5. Akira [above]

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

2 (4) Sinners (15) ****

3 (5) One Battle After Another (15) ****

4 (6) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

5 (2) The Housemaid (15)

6 (7) Wicked: For Good (PG)

7 (3) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

8 (9) Hamnet (12) **

9 (8) G.O.A.T. (PG)

10 (22) Apollo 13 (PG) ***

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

2. Nouvelle Vague

3. Die My Love

4. Song Sung Blue

5. Marty Supreme

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Jurassic Park (Saturday, ITV1, 7am)

2. Don't Look Now (Friday, BBC Two, 11.05pm)

3. Four Weddings & A Funeral (Tuesday, BBC One, 10.40pm)

4. Pearl (Friday, Channel 4, 1.05am)

5. The King's Speech (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)

Un air de famille: "Father Mother Sister Brother"

Much as any family is composed of disparate parts, so too Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother - surprise winner of last year's Venice Golden Lion - is made up of separate, only loosely connected items. This new film marks a return to the portmanteau form of Jarmusch's earlier Night on Earth and Coffee and Cigarettes: it's really three shorts, of roughly thirty minutes apiece, on a familial theme. The first, "Father", finds a straight-edged brother and sister (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) venturing deep into the New Jersey woods to pay a long-overdue visit with the hermit-like father (Tom Waits) who's been scrounging money off the pair of them. "Mother", set in and around Dublin's suburbs, describes a gathering of matriarch Charlotte Rampling and her two daughters, uptight Cate Blanchett and pink-haired free spirit Vicky Krieps; it's unclear whether or not it's a good sign that all three women have shown up wearing Bergman scarlet. (Ingmar, not Ingrid.) Finally, in "Sister Brother", the most wide-ranging of the three shorts, Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat play recently orphaned American twins in Paris, wondering what to do with the apartment - and the material objects - their folks have left behind. A very Jarmuschian - indeed, very indie - idea of the family emerges: people have secrets they hide from one another, communication is often awkward, strained and unnatural, and were it not for the fact they share a surname and a bloodline, nobody would think to put some of these individuals together. (For starters: Adam from Girls and Blossom from Blossom. And you're telling me Tom Waits gave life to these two?!) And yet: in a moment where America's conservative faction is getting weird (again) around the family unit and the roles we play within it, there is something heartening about Jarmusch's Zen insistence we could all stand to be a good deal chiller about everything familial. So yes, some of our relatives are flawed and imperfect; and yes, those closest to us by birth are still often kind of unknowable. But - and here you can almost hear Jarmusch adding a "hey man" as a footnote to every frame of each story he tells here - that's cool, too.

Onscreen, the worldview manifests as a radical simplification of form. The shorts are self-contained units, affording ample time and space to small, manageable casts whose individual components have either worked with this director before or are hip enough to know the effect Jarmusch seeks: not straining but being, with no labouring of the point. "Father" is an especially effective platform for Waits to play the sly old goat (or Jersey Devil); one of its takehomes is that every film would be improved with a bit more Tom Waits. While we wait for Hollywood to address that issue, Jarmusch leaves us to savour the eternal pleasures of the uncluttered frame: FMSB is unmistakably the work of a creative who's been left to do his own thing for nigh-on fifty years, who feels beholden to no contemporary trend. The crisp, clear photography - credited to veteran Lynch favourite Frederick Elmes and the versatile, much-travelled Yorick Le Saux - allows a hundred tiny gestures to register; one overhead shot of a table set for tea in the second part may be the most elegant spread I've seen in the American cinema this side of Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. (Jarmusch finds it so tasty he keeps cutting back to it.) If there's a slight limitation, it's that the film's overarching philosophy is consistent to the point of repetition. Jarmusch acknowledges as much, writing in links between the three shorts: shots of passing skateboarders (liberated from familial duty, unlike his main characters), a recurring use of the phrase "Bob's your uncle" (more family), an ongoing discourse on the properties and uses of water (being thinner than blood). Everything (kind of) connects, but only the third short feels like any true progression - being what happens after mother and father, and indeed "Mother" and "Father", have passed - and Moore and Sabbat work up what feels instinctively like an authentic, earnest sibling bond. (They've got one another's backs, which still counts for something in Jarmuschland.) The whole project is as vibes-based as the contemporary cinema gets without the manager hanging crystals up in the foyer, but it's fun to see Jarmusch, erstwhile king of ironic detachment, getting a little cuddlier with age: he's still chill, but he's grown into welcoming a little more warmth into his frames.

Father Mother Sister Brother is now playing in selected cinemas.

Midsummer night's dream-film: "Miroirs No. 3"

Our beleaguered arthouse distributors are having a firesale on festival favourites before this year's Cannes gets under way: everything must go on release. As of tomorrow, the new François Ozon will find its screens under threat from a new Christian Petzold, the German writer-director whose naggingly academic dramas have, in the past, left this viewer markedly more quizzical than many of my colleagues. (I'm not looking to write a thesis; I'm really just here for a good time.) Miroirs No. 3 is a miniature - an 86-minute four-hander - but also a throwback to the ambiguous artfilms of yore; like some cross between Three Colours Blue and Philip Haas's underrated movie adaptation of Paul Auster's The Music of Chance, it pivots on a car crash before making vague movements in the direction of a study of happenstance. The crash, on the backroads of the German countryside, robs pianist Laura (recent Petzold favourite Paula Beer) of her boyfriend, but throws Laura herself clear into the home and life of Betty (Barbara Auer), an older woman who was first on the scene. Betty, who initially appears hung up on painting the fence surrounding her roadside property, refers to Laura as Yelena, and wistfully recounts the story of Tom Sawyer to her bedbound charge as a means of getting her unexpected new housemate to pick up a paintbrush of her own. It feels like the kind of bedtime story a parent might well tell her child, much as the film around this scene gradually shapes up as a Petzoldian reverie, shifting away from the taut psychological realism of this director's early, breakthrough films in favour of something altogether more dreamlike.

The signs are there from the off. Miroirs' early scenes are somehow too bright, too sunny, too placidly quiet to belong to the real world. If we're being rational about it, it makes no sense for Laura to move in with a stranger like Betty, save that this is exactly the sort of spiritual connection the women have in, say, certain Bergman movies; it also makes no sense that Betty's rough-edged husband and son (Matthias Brandt and Enno Trebs), mechanics who make their living tampering with the GPSes on sportscars, should have left Betty rattling around on pills in a remote country property, except that's what bluffly unthinking men do in arthouse movies. (Well, that and ply the women who pass through their lives with beer. I can't rule out the possibility Petzold is floating a free-associative pun on his lead actress's surname in such moments: it's that kind of film.) The scene strategy is generally perverse, as it would be in any dream. No character is ever quite where they ought to be, which occasions a lot of huffing and puffing around between Betty's home and the garage where the men work; whether bikes, dishwashers or cars, things keep breaking down or falling apart; and Petzold positions Beer upfront as a postergirl for preoccupation. (Setting us, in turn, to wonder whether this is a limbo of Laura's own making, or one which exists solely inside her own imagination; on the soundtrack, Frankie Valli belts out the night begins to turn your head around.) Miroirs does enough, in this way, to invite spectator speculation: this, you feel, is one reason we critics have collectively had such a soft spot for everything Petzold. (He often needs explaining.) It's also that flight of fancy a filmmaker only gets to make once the moneymen have learnt to trust in them totally. As a narrative, the film feels loose, rattly, as if it too could fall apart at any moment; this script's screws forever seem in need of tightening. But it does conjure up an idea of leisure, of being far from home with no particular plans: it wouldn't surprise me to learn Petzold made it because the money and actors were available, the weather was good, and he had a gap in his schedule. Minor, but intriguing.

Miroirs No. 3 opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

Needles and the damage done: "Diamonds/Diamanti"

Completing this week's line-up of festival faves: the Turkish-born, Italy-based Ferzan Özpetek, whose early Noughties melodramas positioned him as a back-up Almodóvar. (To the extent that he would later bill himself, with no small measure of grandiosity, as simply Özpetek.) Much as the beloved Pedro has started to get self-referential with age, so too, apparently, has Özpetek: his latest Diamonds, its maker's biggest domestic hit, opens with footage of the filmmaker gathering his favourite actresses together for a meal at which he announces he has a new project for them all to star in. One of the party, observing the almost exclusively distaff line-up, wonders whether the project might be titled Vaginodrome, a suggestion her director overrules as inappropriate. Yet Diamonds does unfold within a milieu that might indeed merit such a description: a demanding costumier's female-staffed workshop in 1970s Rome, sprung into frantic life to provide the clothes for a (female) Oscar-winning director - for which cinephiles are bound to read Lina Wertmüller - as she gears up on her next production. (Özpetek, we should note, has never even been nominated for an Oscar, but a fellow can dream.) By day, the assembled minions measure, cut, ruche and stitch, pausing in between to bicker and gossip; after hours, they endure a variety of issues, from ingrate children to abusive spouses. They're the real diamonds, you see.

As a rugged, red-blooded heterosexual male keeping one eye on this year's tense Championship run-in, your correspondent is almost certainly not the target audience in this instance, but even he could broadly see the appeal: for two-and-a-quarter hours, Özpetek outlines a lavishly furnished safe space into which viewers might retreat for a few laughs, tears, sobs and swoons. (An alternative title: Glamma Mia!) Although he gets distracted when, for some reason, his women have to measure up a phalanx of shirtless young actors in tighty-whities, this is clearly a director who adores actresses, granting even the lowliest of clothiers a close-up, a moment or a signature flourish; Özpetek ends the film with a list of those grande dames he still wants to work with, which is either touching or desperate. Only if you switch on your critical faculties do you notice there's no variation of tone, no heightening of stakes, a liability in a 135-minute feature: even when Diamonds turns its hand to something more dramatic - as in the domestic abuse subplot - it soon snaps back so as to give the other gals something light to do. Everything is sunny, fabulous, bella; everyone is handsome, sassy, well-dressed; the year's most insistently applied musical theme, meanwhile, plods and pulls its strings. There are, of course, worse things for a semi-prominent filmmaker to do with the money afforded him; and there are worse ways for us to spend an afternoon than being cosseted. (It's the movie equivalent of a spa day or long lunch on someone else's dime: an indulgence.) Yet there's a reason Almodóvar is routinely hailed as a great of world cinema and Özpetek isn't; I came away from Diamonds with a newfound respect for the way Jocelyn Moorhouse's slightly under-appreciated The Dressmaker, from a decade or so ago, troubled to mix up its camp.

Diamonds opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

On demand: "My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow"

In a generally patchy year for the documentary form - too much reality for everybody, not enough funding to do those events justice - the Oscar went to Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the tale of a smalltown teacher and part-time videographer whose self-shot footage revealed the insidious creep of Putinism into his community as Russia began its "special military operation" in Ukraine. Had the Academy time, they might well have watched and voted for Julia Loktev's My Undesirable Friends: Part I, a variant of the same story told in granular detail at far greater length. (As a five-hour, five-chapter enterprise, no less, complete with built-in episode breaks.) Loktev, who was born in Russia before emigrating to the US as a child, returned to her homeland in October 2021 to make a film about her friend Anna Nemzer, a journalist with the independent Moscow media channel TV Rain. As the film opens, TV Rain has just been restricted to broadcasting online, and several correspondents, including Nemzer, have been designated "foreign agents" by Putin's administration, meaning their every public statement has to be prefixed with a preamble in pure legalese. (Nemzer dubs it "the fuckery"; fascism always begins with labels and tags.) Part of Loktev's project here has been to reflect TV Rain's output in the run-up to and early days of the Ukraine conflict, which provides a counterpoint to all those Putin pressers Western news outlets carry live. In her interview series Who's Got the Power?, Nemzer is seen talking with activists fighting the cause of minorities in today's Russia, be they queer, homeless, handicapped or merely opposed to the PM's policies. This programming - sober, intelligent, well-researched yet open-minded journalism - would be no issue whatsoever in a free society; trouble is, this Russia is far from a free society.

That's what's on the box, yet another critical aim of Loktev's project is to gently investigate what's going on inside Anna Nemzer's head as the state propaganda machine gears up and the war drums sound ever louder. The choice Nemzer faces, which she outlines to Loktev in car on her daily commute to and from the broadcaster's studio, is a stark one: stay put in the country you love and face mounting charges for essentially doing your job - as with so many recent Russian dissidents, including the late Alexei Navalny - or emigrate, if the visa system and international borders allow, and start from scratch somewhere else. The quandary sticks in the forefront of the film's own mind, because in the course of her day job, Anna is interviewing those who find themselves in a comparable bind, while her colleagues are under pressure themselves, worrying where and how to cache their laptops, material and sources in the event of FSB raids on their properties in the small hours. During a promotional photoshoot for the station, Anna idly ponders what she might look like in a prison uniform; a regulation passport renewal sets her to wonder how long she'll get to use it. One of the journalist's colleagues has just moved into a new flat in one of Moscow's hipper enclaves: while giving Loktev the grand tour, she confesses that, since being declared a foreign agent, she's wondered what the point is of doing up the guest room. Her friends have already started fleeing town; she herself might have to follow at some point. One way or another, Putinism arrives on your doorstep.

Visibly, this is a tentative, trepidatious, drainingly temporary way to live. The "Raindrops" - as the journos call themselves - are trying to think of the bigger picture: the future of Russia, the future of TV Rain, in some cases a future for their children or for the children they hope to have. Yet they're continually obliged to roll back their ambitions and think about themselves, their own future, their own safety: one journalist admits to thinking at length about the underwear she's choosing to put on in the event of a nocturnal raid on her home. Such quandaries may well seem oddly relatable to non-Russians who've seen their own states' mechanisms hijacked by ideologues and zealots, lunatics and maniacs in recent years: what Loktev's film most closely describes is the process whereby despotism - like so many isms, including Trumpism - can get into and foul up your head. The personal and the political, then, become utterly inseparable. Loktev's secret weapon - her stealthiest decision here in the matter of engaging an audience - is that she's basically made a diary film, the work of a trusted pal checking in, day after day, to see that Anna and colleagues were still there, still visible, still fighting, still standing. As hinted at early on by the film's second chapter, in which Loktev spends an evening drinking, smoking and chatting with Anna's colleagues Ina and Alesya, My Undesirable Friends could even, in some reality, be claimed as a hangout movie. The camaraderie and solidarity this camera observes afford us some hope, but as the film progresses and the mood music darkens, the conditions for hanging out get steadily worse and worse - to the point where you fear hanging out itself might be deemed a crime, seditious conspiracy against an all-controlling state. One of the tragedies Loktev filmed: the sudden dispersal of a close-knit friendgroup, seen from the off to be watching out for one another.

Loktev and co-editor Michael Taylor identify a clear, compelling narrative arc: by chapter four, opening on the very eve of the Russian invasion, the station is forced into round-the-clock hyperdrive, even as the restrictions on reporting and reporters ("put out propaganda and only propaganda", as Raindrop Sonya summarises) become so tight as to prove stifling. The journos, several of whom have friends and family in Ukraine, are left reckoning with what one calls "the monster" that has been growing unchecked inside Russia for the best part of twenty years. Here as elsewhere, Loktev identifies an initially curious-seeming recurring quirk: the tendency among the younger, more Westernised Raindrops to reframe breaking news in terms of the Harry Potter franchise. Chronologically, I guess, it makes sense: these twenty- and thirtysomething journos, clinging to their Insta and TikTok stories as one might a teddy bear, are part of a generation raised on such fairytales, with their olde-worlde belief in people doing right and the inevitability of good's triumph over evil. Yet if the years since The Deathly Hallows have demonstrated anything, it's surely that those rules no longer apply - and, indeed, that those pushing such fictions, as Putin pushes his claims that Ukraine requires denazification, may themselves be far more capable of evil than good. What Loktev's magnum opus ultimately bears witness to is a foul sorcery, less event-movie spectacular than grimly humdrum, whereby freedoms, restful nights and eventually any semblance of a normal life are magicked away. As Anna puts it - on the morning Putin announced his military misadventure, shortly before she too vanishes from this story - "I don't have a country any more". It's left to a veteran activist, taking her leave from the journos in the aftermath of one subsequent anti-War protest, to have the final words, infused with both the blackest Russian humour and an inkling of things to come: "Believe me, everything will get worse."

My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow is now streaming via MUBI; a follow-up, Part II - Exile, is currently in postproduction.

Being and nothingness: "The Stranger"

There's a new François Ozon; there usually is. Yet after a decade or so of middling period pieces and familial melodramas, one senses this one might mean a little more in the long run, and demand more from its maker than merely converting France's apparently infinite public funding for cinema into middlebrow festival fare. In adapting The Stranger this far into the 21st century, Ozon has set himself a proper challenge: translating the colonial-era concerns of Camus' 1942 novel, revered touchstone of post-War existentialism, for a post-colonial audience who've long sensed existentialism was just a phase our polonecked predecessors felt they had to go through. Perhaps wisely, the writer-director adopts a double-jointed approach. With one hand, he ensures this narrative looks like a thing of the past, filming the novel's Algiers setting in a lush monochrome, high-contrast blacks and whites bookending suggestive shades of grey; the choice allows this Stranger to mesh both with the Casablanca of Casablanca and the Algiers of The Battle of Algiers, to exist on a timeline somewhere between the early 1940s and the late 1960s. (Some part of Ozon has elected to make the movie the French film industry would have made not long after the book became the literary sensation it did.) With the other hand, though, Ozon gives his material a rigorous, modernising tweak, maintaining Camus' focus on the mopey Meursault (played here by emergent star Benjamin Voisin) while also fleshing out those Arab characters he encounters and finally takes up arms against.

In suspending the action between two states of being, two moments in time, Ozon preserves a certain strangeness essential to Camus's book: what we're watching feels like a dream - then a nightmare - unfolding under the blazing noonday sun, which might be as good a definition as any of the whole colonial project. Working closely with cinematographer Manu Dacosse - better known for his striking horror/fantasy endeavours (2015's Evolution, 2025's Reflections in a Dead Diamond) - Ozon affords his typically considered and handsome images a new, uncanny twist, positioning most of these set-ups somewhere between 1950s Buñuel, Welles's Kafka and de Chirico's etchings. We notice, because - after a run of chatty Ozon tales - this one is told chiefly through images, the most lingering of which is the blankness of Voisin's face. It's one of those performances that shouldn't work - where a director has clearly told an actor to do less and less, until he's finally seen to do all but nothing - and yet it's one that grows only more effective (and troubling) by the frame: a facade hiding very little. This Meursault, less obviously heroic than Camus's, is a wastrel, a benumbed observer who lets slip the odd shudder of horniness (in a relationship with Rebecca Marder's Marie, which he blows) but otherwise betrays no fellow feeling, no empathy, merely a cruel indifference to the world around him. He is, in Ozon's eyes, pure white privilege, a walking critique of every role Tom Hiddleston has played over the last decade and a half; he's an enigma to be puzzled over if not ultimately figured out (there may be nothing there; there may be nothing there but self-interest), yet no more an enigma than the colonial mindset that inspires certain states to try and lord it over others.

He also presents as one risk among the many Ozon forces himself to take here: a protagonist who's a decidedly odd and cold and slippery fish, who probably shouldn't be the hero of a motion picture. (For starters, Meursault doesn't act, he shrugs; he shrugs his way into a courtroom where, even with the advantage of time and perspective, nobody can quite explain the events to which we've all borne witness.) Ozon keeps his Meursault front and centre so as to keep an eye on him; it's an example of a director tracking a character he knows we cannot trust. But he also doesn't blind himself to the flickers of actual life around this void: the vivacious Marder, with increasingly poignant hope in her eyes; Denis Lavant as Meursault's scrofulous, dog-beating neighbour Salamano, who proves preferable company to Meursault, in that he at least misses the dog after it's gone; Algiers itself, a far livelier destination than its overlords would prefer; and Hajar Bouzaouit as the drained, exhausted sister of the Arab Meursault kills (in a scene Ozon frames as almost a cruising-ground encounter gone bad; is Meursault a stranger even to his own sexuality?), who has good reason to feel numb. Mostly, this Stranger stays at Meursault's shoulder, not to exalt him, but to detail, in as much as any camera can, his fetid, cowardly, nihilistic and finally deadly worldview. It's that rare film adaptation of a tricky text that doesn't in the least shy away from what's prickly, difficult, perhaps alienating about its source; it may, in fact, be at least as much critique as straightforward adaptation, as though someone had refilmed The Fountainhead with a pompous, egotistical jerk of a hero whose architectural dickswinging fouls up multiple city skylines. It is the work of Ozon the enfant terrible who wanted to shake up and scatter the bourgeois audience's assumptions, but also that of the worldly, professorial figure Ozon cuts today, who spies the dangers inherent in youthful posethrowing. It is, finally, a L'Étranger for grown-ups, and not the mooning hipsters and adolescents who've historically taken this book and its worldview to their hearts. If that makes Ozon's film hard to like or embrace especially, I also doubt we'll see a more admirable adaptation in 2026.

The Stranger is now playing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Song Sung Blue"

We've arrived at the point where one of Hollywood's most pressing creative concerns, going into the year of Our Lord 2026, was paying tribute to a real-life Neil Diamond tribute act and thereby engineering a Neil Diamond jukebox musical: Song Sung Blue is one for the teenagers, and two for the show. Hugh Jackman toplines as the somewhat improbably named Mike Sardina, a jobbing musician and recovering alcoholic eking out a measly living on Milwaukee's chicken-in-a-basket circuit at the turn of the 1990s. Backstage at one such gig, he crosses paths with a Patsy Cline tribute act, Claire Stingl (Kate Hudson); the pair click, fall for one another, and re-emerge on the circuit as Lightning and Thunder, belting out "Cracklin' Rosie", "Forever in Blue Jeans" and other such standards. Despite Mike's understandable reluctance to perform "Sweet Caroline" (the most overplayed song in Christendom, an anthem for sheep, baa baa baa), the duo start to get somewhere before fate intervenes, and we realise this must have been one of those long-gestating projects afforded a leg-up by the success of 2018's A Star is Born redo: the folks putting the show on here aren't the fresh faces you'd find in Glee or any other bandcamp, rather midlifers with baggage beyond the remit of any roadie (addiction issues, depression, a family at home to raise). It's a vision of showbiz as last-chance saloon, serving until late.

Writer-director Craig Brewer, who oversaw the rap game melodrama Hustle & Flow in another life, duly sets about soliciting texture and experience: the film's backdrop is an unfussy, lived-in, come-as-you-are blue-collar America, and even as the narrative wades into sticky, TVM-adjacent territory in its second half, a distinctive editing strategy makes unusual bedfellows of unlikely developments in the Sardina household. That's one selling point: between senile motorists and Mike's dodgy ticker, the arc is never as predictable as you might think. (The wrinkles of life haven't been entirely smoothed out of it.) And it's fun in a broad-brush kind of way. Brewer evidently prefers performers who can come on and give a longish film some necessary oomph here and there: Michael Imperioli as a silver-fox Buddy Holly impersonator, Fisher Stevens as Mike's dentist manager, Jim Belushi as a phlegmy local entrepreneur. We also get an oddly miscast Eddie Vedder when this story takes a sharp leftfield turn (and the actor in question is actually supposed to be playing Eddie Vedder, not an Eddie Vedder tribute act), but elsewhere Brewer clears ample space for Jackman (wearing the sideburns well, which is to say unironically) and Hudson (who seems to be turning into Janice Long) to be as impressive offstage as they are on. You buy this pair as a double act, which is crucial; they're like an unpretentious Aldi own-brand variant of Joaquin and Reese as Johnny and June. What's around them is often cheesy and corny, caught singing an at least semi-familiar tune; we are, ultimately, many miles from the cinematic cutting edge, and at least three decades removed from where the rest of the American cinema is at in 2026. But that's part of Song Sung Blue's plaid-covered charm: not unlike the real Diamond's secular hymns, Brewer's film has a way of bypassing your most critical faculties. Stick it on, and it kinda works.

Song Sung Blue is now available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube, and on DVD and Blu-ray via Universal.

Dead air: "undertone"

21st century horror cinema has in certain respects been a history of terrifying technologies. It began with a new wave of video nasties (the various iterations of the Ring series), before going digital, scrolling through and past dodgy websites (feardotcom), spooky surveillance footage (the many Paranormal Activitys) and killer apps (Friend Request, Countdown) to arrive - come the pandemic - at cursed Zoom calls (Host). It's almost as though the movies have been trying to warn us about something. Now there's Ian Tuason's much-trumpeted A24 buy-in undertone, which centres on a haunted Irish singer who's become a spokesperson for the UK's rivers... no, sorry, it's podcasts, as everything else is nowadays. Some cursory preamble establishes the circumstances of an especially fateful recording session for an apparently popular paranormal pod. Sceptical host Evy (Nina Kiri) is dialling in from the US, and the home she shares with her ailing mother (Michèle Duquet). Her more suggestible co-host Justin (Adam DiMarco), dialling in from London, has a new mystery for the pair to investigate: an anonymously submitted email containing ten attached audio files, made up of what appear to be the conversations of a fraught couple, heavily doctored children's nursery rhymes, earsplitting shrieks and screams, and what even Evy starts to believe are hidden messages. It's a radio play, essentially, one that's taken a wrong turn and ended up in the Cineworld by mistake.

It is, also, a demonstration of horror cinema's recent sound design tendency run amok. One element of undertone has been prioritised above all others: the ears are duly piqued, battered and traumatised, but the eye grows bored and sleepy, and the entire lower half of the body grows terribly restless. My heart sank the minute it became apparent Tuason's main visual focus was going to be a woman sat alone at her own dining table clicking links on her laptop; for much of the movie, we're either eavesdropping on a production meeting or listening to a podcast that is the paranormal equivalent of a local radio station's misheard lyrics phone-in. The hosts incessantly tell one another they've heard something they haven't (and, more crucially, that we haven't), while Tuason cuts to a clock on the wall that, I swear, starts to go backwards beyond a certain point ("but we've still got two more files to listen to!"). So bare-bones you could play its ribcage like a xylophone, undertone is reflective of a wider trend, but it's a lamentable trend: filming people recording podcasts, thinking that'll do as either television or online content, rather than spending money on actual entertainment. Pivoting to video has sure worked out well for Tuason, who's just been tapped to oversee some Paranormal Activity reboot only four or five people on the entire planet can possibly be excited about. If there's one thing the studio system in its present form has almost been set up to effectuate, it'll be to stifle this recent horror renaissance with terminally flimsy product and morbidly unoriginal ideas.

undertone is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of April 3-5, 2026):

1 (new) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

2 (1) Project Hail Mary (12A) ***

3 (new) The Drama (15) **

4 (2) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

5 (3) Hoppers (U) ****

6 (new) Fuze (15)

7 (4) Dhurandhar: The Revenge (18) **

8 (new) Vaazha 2: Biopic of a Billion Bros (15)

9 (5) Reminders of Him (PG)

10 (6) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Stand By Me

2. The Stranger

3. My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow

4. Orwell: 2+2=5

5. Father Mother Sister Brother

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

2 (20) The Housemaid (15)

3 (new) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

4 (1) Sinners (15) ****

5 (2) One Battle After Another (15) ****

6 (30) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

7 (3) Wicked: For Good (PG)

8 (new) G.O.A.T. (PG)

9 (33) Hamnet (12) **

10 (10) The Super Mario Bros Movie (PG)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Nouvelle Vague

2. Saipan

3. Song Sung Blue

4. Marty Supreme

5. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Wicker Man (Friday, BBC Two, 11.05pm)

2. Rear Window [above] (Sunday, BBC Two, 2.10pm)

3. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Saturday, ITV1, 3am)

4. Jurassic Park (Sunday, ITV1, 2.10pm)

5. The Royal Hotel (Friday, BBC One, 11.25pm)

On demand: "Motherboard"

As gestured to by its punning title, the British indie doc Motherboard functions as a reverse-angle on Richard Linklater's much-admired Boyhood. Sometime TV director Victoria Mapplebeck picked up a camera of her own upon giving birth to her son Jim in 2004, when she was 38, and kept it running over the ups and downs of the two decades that followed. In the film's opening montage, we glimpse Jim as he is today, befringed and upright graduate of the Brit School; then we flash back twenty years to a pivotal life moment, and Mapplebeck begins to show how everybody got here. She fell pregnant from a man she confesses she went on a total of four dates with - a fellow who then dumped her, before moving to Spain - so the film's subject is more precisely single motherhood. Mapplebeck quit TV, aware it's not the most supportive industry to work in as a single parent, took a new gig teaching film, then set about raising a child and making a film about raising a child. As you can imagine, it wasn't always fun and games: dad insisted on a paternity test, there was a brush with breast cancer, and Jim had his moodier moments as he approached and passed through adolescence. But Mapplebeck wound up making a young man and a film in parallel: for an hour and a half - rather than Linklater's three - we're watching an extended process of fruition. Women tend to get things done with far less fuss than we men.

A lot of Motherboard could be described as routine: it's washing up, bedtime stories, bus journeys, mother telling son not to pick his nose, holidays, Christmas, small conversations on major topics (Jim's relationship with his dad, Victoria's medical issues). There are small but noticeable changes. Life gets rapidly more digital than it was in 2004: Jim describes his father's Facebook profile as "ones and zeroes", consumer video footage is succeeded by smartphone footage. The big change is that Jim gets bigger and stroppier, both more independent and more troubled, because that's how growing up works. Mapplebeck, for her part, seems very conscious of the fact this is mostly home video, and so strives to mix up her approach with montage, slow-motion, the South London equivalent of Ozu's pillow shots, freeze-frames, X-rays, despairing texts and answerphone or voicemail messages as well as snippets of retrospective narration; Motherboard is absolutely a film made by someone who's taught issues of film form, and resolved to convert theory into practice. Most obviously, she's reviewed the hundreds of hours she must have shot and worked out exactly what story she wanted to tell in these 87 minutes, which is bigger than it first appears, and possibly even bigger than Victoria and Jim themselves. Much as the filmmaker has a realisation while observing her cancer cells through a microscope, Motherboard curates its scenes of small, everyday activity in such a way that they start to speak to far bigger themes: adaptation and endurance, responsibility and care. (You may also wonder to what extent Mapplebeck kept on filming to show Jim's absent father just what he chose to miss out on; though dialled down over time, this is, on some level, film as fuck-you.) It may not look like much at first glance - a low-budget, independently rendered documentary, pieced together for the price of home editing software - but Motherboard remains alert and true to the contours of life.

Motherboard is exclusively available to rent via the BFI Player from Monday.