"Traces of Justice" (Guardian 10/11/26)

Traces of Justice ***

Dir: Chen Sicheng. With: Zhang Yi, Ma Li, Arthur Chen, Chen Minghao. 140 mins. Cert: 15

The latest from Chen Sicheng, prime mover behind the hit Detective Chinatown franchise, offers a disarming mix of propaganda, copaganda and grabby, gripping narrative strategy. It’s essentially a portmanteau biopic, its hero Cui Xun a fictional stand-in for the venerable Cui Daozhi, a still-extant figure who so revolutionised local forensic science he became known as “China’s Sherlock Holmes”. Ripping three-and-a-bit tales from the Daozhi casebook – involving a Seventies child killer, a grisly Eighties multiple murder and a Nineties bus bombing, plus one lingering loose end – Chen constructs a history of forensic investigation that is also, in variably oblique ways, a history of Chinese law enforcement, shown evolving from boozy, gloveless crime-scene trampling to something far more streamlined and professional.

Within a handsome period framework, Chen follows the science: one era’s crazy innovation becomes commonplace in the next. The rookie Cui (played here by Zhang Yi, aging up subtly) uses boiled potatoes to take dental imprints; when those run out, he and his colleagues start biting one another’s cheeks to make their points. (Their scars are a terrific visual gag: scientists literally showing their working.) By the Nineties, when Cui’s heading a team working out of a vast, well-staffed warehouse, we seem mere moments away from David Caruso’s sunglasses and the most memorable Who guitar riffs. The forbidding subtext is presumably that, after fifty years of such breakthroughs, there’s no more getting away with it; as one suspect insists, “everyone pays for what they’ve done”.

Yet Chen’s impressively limber storytelling also accommodates thumping setpieces and knotty forensic puzzle-solving, remaining necessarily alert to key details: Yi, in a likably unshowy turn, really does look like someone who’s spent long afternoons studying fingernail structure. If the character’s personal life soon drifts out of focus, the wider picture compels: a nation both becoming more baroque in its sociopathy – the bus bombers are an Asian Leopold and Loeb – and sharpening its eye. (End titles cite the centrality of Cui’s work to China’s current surveillance schemes.) Hardly Memories of Murder then – Chen’s pursuing reassuring closure – but a fascinating counterperspective for anybody in this field, and an arresting, effective entertainment besides.

Traces of Justice is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 23-25, 2026):

1 (new) Wicker (15) ****

2 (new) Primetime (15) ***

3 (1) Ghosts: The Possession of Button House (PG) ***

4 (2) Clayface (18)

5 (4) Wildwood (12A) ***

6 (6) Forgotten Island (PG) **

7 (5) Street Fighter (12A)

8 (10) Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (U) ****

9 (7) Verity (15)

10 (8) Other Mommy (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Raise the Red Lantern [above]

2. Pan's Labyrinth

3. I Love Boosters

4. Wicker

5. Rocky

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Spider-Man: Brand New Day (12) ***

2 (12) The End of Oak Street (12) ***

3 (4) Obsession (18) *

4 (new) Pressure (12) ***

5 (40) Project Hail Mary (12) ***

6 (3) Practical Magic 2 (12)

7 (5) Minions & Monsters (U) **

8 (6) Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie (U)

9 (new) The Frighteners (15) ****

10 (32) Monster House (PG) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. The Invite

2. Coyote vs. ACME

3. Normal

4. Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition

5. Dead Lover

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. In Which We Serve (Tuesday, BBC Two, 2.40pm)

2. Die Hard with a Vengeance (Friday, BBC Two, 10pm)

3. Misericordia (Sunday, Channel 4, 1.30am)

4. This is England (Friday, Channel 4, 12.10am)

5. Hell or High Water (Thursday, BBC Two, 11pm)

Contenders: "I Play Rocky"

Not so much triumph of the underdog as history rewritten by the victors, I Play Rocky returns us to the formative days of one Sylvester Stallone, when he was just a hopeful with a speech impediment, pounding the New York streets in a succession of odd jobs: fishmonger, ticket-tearer, valet, softcore porn star. Above all else, it's yet another of Hollywood's recent legacy projects, greenlit because a) there's IP money on the table, b) there's something worth commemorating (whether fifty years since Rocky, itself returned to cinemas this weekend, or the publication of Stallone's memoir The Steps) and c) some sharp-eyed casting director has found a dead ringer for the film's subject. Here, it's newcomer Anthony Ippolito, giving an uncannily accurate impersonation of Sly in the first phase of his career, all swelling muscles, mumbled consonants and shrugging bearing. One early victory for Ippolito is that he reminds you the original Rocky Balboa was a street stray, a wounded animal: not so much a Raging Bull as a dumb mutt, kicked around from pillar to post. (It took a pet shop gal to take care of him.) The doggedness with which this fictionalised Stallone refuses to take the money to step away from his self-penned Rocky script feels believable enough: he's like a mastiff with a shiny new chew toy his handlers can't prise from his jaws. But I Play Rocky isn't shy about introducing notes of good old Hollywood bullshit, either. Early on, the film suggests Stallone was cast in softcore for the size of his package, which anybody who's ever witnessed 1970's The Party at Kitty and Stud's - retitled and rereleased as The Italian Stallion years later, in the wake of Rocky's success - will know simply isn't true. Still, the scene might be corralled into a useful working definition of contemporary star privilege: once you've made it, not only are you empowered to endlessly rehash and retcon your most enduring creations, you will also be afforded a movie about the making of your own making, which will insinuate to a captive global audience of millions that your dick is bigger than it actually is. Fame gives you inches; it turns a light-middleweight into a super-heavy.

If that seems at all crude, bear in mind that I Play Rocky is the handiwork of director Peter Farrelly, rejoined here on Oscar-baiting Green Book form rather than irreverent Stuck on You form. The script he's alighted on (by Peter Gamble) is Hollywood trad, never particularly backward about congratulating movieland for handing this scrapper a break in the first place; Farrelly locates within it the most basic movie building blocks, and constructs from them a movie that even the dumbest mutt could easily follow. We get an actual puppy named Butkus (another Dick joke); romance with usherette sweetheart Sasha (AnnaSophia Robb), who types up Stallone's scripts and gives him notes, and whose tears upon reading Rocky confirm that our guy is onto something; and plentiful homilies along the lines of "if you don't believe in yourself, who will?" Farrelly and Gamble's canniest move is to stress the struggle - showing this Sly having to put back groceries at the checkout and even sell the dog - in such a way that the eventual uplift will land all the more effectively with cinemagoers taking time out from their own cost-of-living crisis. It's corn, but it's good, hearty, satisfying corn, the kind of corn that wins you round and sends you home with a full belly, the kind of corn the American studios once reliably traded in, the kind of corn that rounds out a Best Picture longlist. Even in its nerdier second half - handed over to what seems like a Rocky Re-Enactment Society, for the benefit of the original's most obsessive fans - IPR gets a boost from having to re-engage with that rich strain of character acting that was Rocky's bedrock. There's fun stuff with Tracy Letts as United Artists' carnivore-capitalist production chief Sandy Maddox; Toby Kebbell and P.J. Byrne do a nice, light-comic double act as producers Chartoff and Winkler; Stephan James catches Carl Weathers' ebullience in passing; there's a very sweet cameo from Farrelly loyalist Matt Dillon as Stallone Sr.; and a final push to glory from Jay Duplass as a hyper John Avildsen. (Farrelly remains a generous director: everybody gets their flowers.) Anyone with any degree of media literacy will spot the tricks the film is playing, but also that they've been played well - and I think having fresh(ish) faces like Ippolito and Robb centre frame helps, too: these younger performers are having to sell this script's more idealistic schtick as if for the first time, with minimal cynicism, in the hope of making their own careers. (This was Rocky's trick, too, of course - though nobody thought to call it a trick at the time.) So it's not just Hollywood talking about itself, it's also Hollywood talking to itself, at a moment when its gatekeepers have rarely seemed so cowed and risk-averse. If the film it comes in appears somewhat safe - a foursquare box-office and awards contender - the message here is one about the risks and rewards of more adventurous creative thinking. Take a chance on someone, the movie urges. Take a chance on a longshot, even. You never know. You never know.

I Play Rocky is now previewing in selected cinemas; it opens nationwide on Wed 11.

Nag nag nag: "Wild Horse Nine"

After 2022's widely admired The Banshees of Inisherin, writer-director Martin McDonagh reverts to playing the hits. Wild Horse Nine centres on two white male malcontents abroad, bickering and busting one another's balls in the wider absence of anything more constructive to do. In this variation, they're a pair of CIA agents being flown out of Allende's Chile and deposited on the altogether more absurd territory of Rapa Nui - or Easter Island, as these thoroughly unreconstructed reprobates insist on referring to it. Unbeknownst to them, they're being put out to pasture, partly for knowing too much about previous American interventions in other countries' internal affairs, partly as punishment for failing to bring about the Chilean coup that will subsequently take place, initiated by more ruthless (and doubtless less chatty) operatives. And there's something else going on besides: the older of the two agents, first heard with a Movie Cough that may or may not be linked to his continual smoking, is keen to set the record straight on his time with the Agency by writing and publishing a memoir. The question this raises is whether the younger of the two has been sent this way as a means of managing his wayward travelling companion, or to walk a potential whistleblower towards a premature grave. For the time being, though, they sit and talk, sniping predominantly at each other, with their hapless hosts and innocent bystanders catching the odd verbal stray. I should at this point establish that the leads are played by John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, and therefore have a whole arsenal of tricks at their disposal to catch and retain the interest of those viewers who might otherwise feel somewhat queasy about being asked to care about - and maybe even root for - murderous functionaries of the State. One of the hits McDonagh is replaying here is the generation of sympathy for old devils, previously undertaken in 2008's In Bruges, where the heroes were stone-cold contract killers, and 2017's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a defining film of the Trump 1.0 era, where Rockwell made off with an armful of awards for playing Best Supporting Racist.

As encores go, Wild Horse Nine feels like a naggingly slight return, all told. Banshees, rightly, was acclaimed for its inherent soulfulness, its thoughtful gestures towards some diagnosis of How Men Are. (It made sense that the image of the Barry Keoghan character lamenting the death of a dream became a meme: there was a moment that meant so much more than just a director cramming ribald words into an actor's mouth.) This follow-up can be funny, in a glib way: Malkovich's breakfast-table spiel on the relationship between democracy, gayness and cheese has the much-workshopped air of a bit in an anti-woke stand-up's Netflix special. But even when it's funny, the film feels heartless, a bit of a coast for a director more than ever in love with his own writing. This is the project that confirms McDonagh as Tarantinoid in his default mode of expression: surfacey, posturing, determined to make flinty dialogue the entire show. You can still see why expert performers are drawn this way, but the rewards now seem less substantial. Casting director Sarah Halley Finn pulls off a coup of her own in landing Tom Waits for one (good, lived-in) scene as Malkovich's estranged brother - eccentricity runs in this family, clearly - but Parker Posey is wasted as Rockwell's philandering wife, a sour-joke character who doesn't even merit a punchline, and Steve Buscemi is left to trade in one-note crabbiness as the agents' junkie boss. It's all about the central double-act, this time: two vaguely different but essentially similar men, underlining the narrowness of this worldview. One Malkovich aside on protesting ("If you're not going to get what you're marching for, you may as well stay in bed") suggests McDonagh was aiming to chime with the overriding cynicism of the second Trump administration; if I Love Boosters, with its openness to societal and diegetic change, felt like the perfect release for the week of the 2026 midterms, Wild Horse Nine presents as the diametric opposite. Gone is Banshees' finely worked balance between the profoundly funny and the profoundly sad; in its place, a wobbly melancholy, tipping over into outright morbidity. Its organising image is that of a horse left to die in the road, while its theme and sensibility are summarised by one Buscemi tirade: "Life's sad. Everything's sad. That's why I take so much smack." For their part, Malkovich and Rockwell are eminently capable of replaying the hits: they're too wily not to feast on dialogue such as this (viz. the meal the former makes of the term "cahoots"). But there's too little difference between the Malkovich character when he's on morphine and when he's off it, and it struck me as revealing indeed that the film should end with the character worrying whether critics will find his suicide note overly verbose. These actors can give individual lines and scenes a lift, but they can't give Wild Horse Nine anything more than the most resigned and pessimistic idea of life: McDonagh has already given it nowhere to go but the grave.

Wild Horse Nine is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

"Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint" (Guardian 04/11/26)

Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint ***

Dir: Jack Spring. With: John Bradley, Richard E. Grant, Celia Imrie, Sophia Di Martino. 98 mins. Cert: PG

The annual drive to expand the festive film canon begins unseasonably early with a modest, sentimentally inclined Britpic that opens like a penny-pinching John Lewis ad and thankfully improves from there. The titular Mr. Flint (John Bradley) is a Napoleonic history buff whose animus around late December dates from seeing his (French) mother perish under tinsel; now he spends the holidays caviling at carolers and insisting that the icy pavements of his native York come with health-and-safety warnings. This very much not being the kind of film to confirm a fellow in such beliefs, Aubrey is instead nudged towards a developer-targeted retirement community planning one last theatre production: the OAPs’ choice – A Christmas Carol – all but closes the book on where Jack Spring’s film is headed.

The real hero here is casting director Lucy Amos, gathering familiar faces who deserve their Christmas bonus for making a formulaic narrative seem far livelier than it is; atop a mince-pie frosting of sugar, we get a welcome sprinkling of comic stardust. Sure, you may struggle to identify Richard E. Grant beneath the frizzy wig-and-‘tache combo that transforms his toy shop owner Mr. Hopkins into a modern Geppetto, but the care home alone gifts us Dave Johns as a former manager, Kiell Smith-Bynoe gardening under Karl Pilkington’s ever-irascible eye, and such eminent residents as Celia Imrie, Brian Bovell and Nigel Planer, whose eventual Ghost of Christmas Present forms a funny little coda to the Nicholas Craig story.

Collectively, these old pros stage a show of fellow-feeling which Dickens himself might have cheered, and while Chris Boyle-McQuarry’s script mostly runs on familiar tracks, potent little tangents suggest the creatives have themselves known amateur players and mirthless administrators in their time. The upcoming Ebenezer surely won’t match Jim Broadbent’s sporadic narration (you’d pay for the audiobook), while Imrie’s impromptu Scrooge audition shakes off cosiness and reconnects us forcefully with a foundational text. What Spring builds on these highlights is basically Costcutter Capra, but his stronger scenes form their own sort of advert for how good, well-synched performers can rescue a project from mediocrity. Even before Aubrey Flint’s inevitable redemption, that’s quite touching in itself.

Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint opens in selected cinemas today.

Anything is possible: "I Love Boosters"

Boosters, for the uninitiated, are shoplifters or fences or some extra-entrepreneurial combination of the two: you feel Boots Riley had to call his return to the big screen I Love Boosters rather than I Love Shoplifters to stave off potential objections from whoever's now sitting in the Mary Whitehouse seat. (There might have been full-on, old-school tabloid outrage had distributors Universal troubled to put the film in more UK cinemas.) Our heroines here are a less Caucasian variant of Sofia Coppola's Bling Ring: a ragtag girl gang - led by sisters Corvette (Keke Palmer) and Sade (Naomi Ackie) - struggling to get by in the graveyard of late capitalism. Operating out of an abandoned chicken shop, they earn a hand-to-mouth existence by nicking off with posh frocks from the collections of lofty designer Christie Smith (Demi Moore); this is, it transpires, a course of revenge former fashion student Corvette has alighted upon after seeing one of her more recognisably outré dress designs converted into haute couture without credit or financial restitution. Design will be key to the film. Every location has its own, Funny Face-like colour scheme, picked out by production designer Christopher Glass, set decorator Lizbeth Ayala and DoP Natasha Braier, and Riley has visibly determined to use a caper-movie template - get to the heart of capitalism, get even, get out while you're still alive - as a platform to stage vast, vibrant Tashlin-Tati-style setpieces. Among its many selling points, I Love Boosters yields the year's funniest sight gag. At an early juncture, Riley throws in an insert of Christie Smith's HQ, a cockeyed skyscraper looming over downtown Oakland. Ah, we think: a crack about postmodern corporate architecture. But then we head inside, where we see Smith struggling to navigate a K2-ish slope in her office: yes, it's capitalism as practiced from on high, but it's also capitalism on the brink of collapse, sliding into a precipice. This is, by most standards, an expensive film - everyone in it has been dressed and styled, shot and lit to look a million dollars - but this one gag alone was worth the ticket price: every time Riley circled back to it, it made me laugh.

Wonkiness, indeed, is the other key factor in play here: we're watching our world - the corporate exploitation, the low wages and labour disputes, the workplace liabilities - viewed askew at what begins at a 45-degree angle before Riley starts to turn the remaining dials. Anything is possible, and all bets are off - for these performers, as for those of us looking on. Entering into Bootsland allows Lakeith Stanfield to become a lachrymose French model who eats out women's souls through their nether regions; it allows Don Cheadle to don Whoopi Goldberg dreads as a self-help guru who is also, for some reason, a claymation zombie. The possibilities are endless: Taylour Paige plays a Black booster who, in holding her breath, can transform into a white society matron and thereby avoid detection. The set-up allows Moore to go full Cruella de Vil, in what feels like a far better use of her time, status and talents than anything in The Substance; it also allows Will Poulter to run off a neat Andrew Rannells impersonation as the prissy manager of one Christie Smith boutique. Not even the props sit still here. At some point, the girls take delivery (Temu?) of a Chinese teleporter that revolutionises their endeavours, functioning as it does like a T-shirt gun, a water cannon such as the authorities love to turn on unruly mobs, a portable particle accelerator, and a semiotician's opposites machine. Riley uses it to shoot holes in an already chaotic screen, allowing us to catch glimpses of another, more helpfully and healthily connected reality. Globalisation, he eventually posits, wouldn't be such a terrible, leeching, draining thing if it allowed workers to regain control of the means of production. There is, shall we say, a fair bit tucked away within these frames.

The joy of I Love Boosters - and this is, ultimately, a joyous film - is that that anything is possible credo applies for us, too. Atop my second page of notes, I scrawled two quick questions, first "where the fuck is this movie going?", then "is this film ever going to settle down?" The answer to the latter would be: no, it isn't. Unfolding to a consciously cacophonous Tune-Yards score, Boosters has no interest in settling into one of the old familiar grooves wherein individual artistry and personal vision are channelled towards saleable mass culture; it aims to be unmanageable, untameable, unclassifiable. (The BBFC's 18 certificate appears harshly punitive for what - even before the claymation zombies - often resembles a live-action cartoon, but equally it won't do anything to harm the movie's reputation as the Marxist caper flick the powers-that-be don't really want you to watch.) It is the anarchy it wants to see in the world, a rare show of American cinematic disobedience bound to irk those literalists who want to know what a pussy-eating succubus is doing here and how exactly that teleporter unit works. (There's another Avengers movie in a month, if you want hours of exposition and other nerdy shit.) For the rest of us, however, there is much to revel and delight in here, not least the sight of a big-screen comedy with bags - indeed, magic bags - of style, fashioned by a director who's plainly having more fun than anyone else turning money into light. In five, ten or fifty years from now, someone will look anew at I Love Boosters and wonder how on earth something this gleeful got made in America during the darkest days of the second Trump administration. The answer, I suspect, is that for all his surface goofiness, Riley has seen a fairer, happier world around the corner - and it's not one that lies beyond a shoplifter's reach.

I Love Boosters is now showing in selected cinemas.

"Blockhead" (Guardian 02/11/26)

Blockhead ***

Dir: Matt Harlock. With: Danny Horn, Joe Sims, Michele Moran, Hussina Raja. 80 mins. Cert: 15

Nothing to do with Ian Dury, rather a brisk, effective Brit indie thriller informed by the legend of Robert Louis Stevenson wrestling his shadow self while writing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The latter-day equivalent writer-director Matt Harlock proposes is effete BritLit posterboy Will Mercer (Danny Horn), much admired for his debut novel Random Act yet presently so mired in indecision over a follow-up it seems likely to cost him relationships, representation and reputation alike. Retreating to a friend’s Dalston garret, he’s woken by a builder, the bulletheaded, charismatic hulk Mikey (Joe Sims), who both merits and invites closer literary study. Mikey is unarguably an arresting character – a very handy golem in overalls – even if we worry which path he’s leading our guy down.

No prizes, then, for guessing which David Fincher enterprise provides another template here: Write Club might have served as an alternative, somewhat on-the-nose title. Typing to a soundtrack of his own best reviews (“the world needs to hear your story”), an emboldened Will is soon exploring grislier avenues, including home invasion and murder, while his increasingly unhinged rants to creative-writing students attract a rapt protégé headed only further into the void. Evoking a world where publishers push books with unequivocally positive pull-quotes like “confrontational” and “dangerous”, Harlock is clearly taking a red pencil to hackneyed notions of bad-boy writers: there is, he knows, only so much muscle one can wield while hunched over a laptop developing carpal tunnel syndrome.

Crucially, he matches his literary smarts with cinematic elan: suggestive use of masks and screens, a stark contrast between the blank-page sparseness of Will’s lodgings and the night he strays into, a final, symmetrical mise en abime tying everything together. (One nicely Hitchcockian touch: the string of fairylights following one victim over a balcony.) Horn nails the neophyte scribe’s tempestuous mix of bravado and insecurity, while Sims’ Mikey revels in skewering Will’s loftier pretensions, giving key scenes an energetic arsekick. A few first-feature wobbles aside – a mid-film drug trip is only partly justified by a Coleridge namedrop – we’re walking similar streets to Christopher Nolan’s microbudget breakthrough Following, this time in wittier, satirically minded company.

Blockhead opens in selected cinemas from Friday.