For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of April 25-27, 2025):

1 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

2 (2) Sinners (15) ****

3 (re) Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (12A) **

4 (new) The Accountant 2 (15)

5 (new) Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (PG)

6 (new) Until Dawn (15)

7 (3) The Penguin Lessons (12A)

8 (4) The Amateur (12A)

9 (new) Thudarum (15)

10 (5) Warfare (15) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Babe

2. Sinners

3. Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit

4. Slade in Flame [above]

5. Pride & Prejudice

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (16) Conclave (12) ****

2 (3) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15) **

3 (2) Captain America: Brave New World (12)

4 (4) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

5 (1) Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PG)

6 (6) A Complete Unknown (12) **

7 (5) Gladiator II (15) ***

8 (new) The Accountant (15)

9 (new) Marching Powder (18)

10 (7) Hop (U)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Hard Truths

2. Anora

3. The Brutalist

4. A Real Pain

5. Nosferatu

My top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Pan's Labyrinth (Saturday, BBC Two, 11.50pm)

2. The Commitments (Saturday, BBC Two, 10pm)

3. Hit the Road (Thursday, Channel 4, 2.40am)

4. Paddington (Sunday, BBC One, 4.25pm)

5. 3:10 to Yuma (Saturday, Channel 4, 12 midnight)

On demand: "The Harbinger"

A Covid-era Carnival of Souls, coming out of nowhere to conjure a very particular, disconcerting mood, the rapid-response indie horror The Harbinger uses the backdrop of lockdown's first days - masks everywhere, inside and out; wipes for groceries; widespread uncertainty as to what was going on, and going wrong - to tell a story about our reliance on one another, and how temporary and fragile life really is. Old college pals Monique (Gabby Beans) and Emily (Emily Davis) agree to form a bubble to help the latter through a pronounced spell of night terrors involving a figure in a medieval plague mask. Yet that's just one tension among many writer-director Andy Mitton sets out: there's a sick child (Cody Braverman) in the apartment upstairs, a snarling anti-vaxxer (Stephanie Roth Haberle) in the flat next door, and soon even the notionally well-balanced Monique finds herself succumbing to bad dreams themed around her late mother - the suggestion on Mitton's part being that nightmares, like viruses, can be sticky, suffocating and far easier to pass on than they are to shake off.

It's visibly been made on a shoestring, centred as it is on small groups of people in humdrum, underlit rooms, but what's crucial is that those people are very convincing as people: flawed, neurotic, unravelling as we all were to some degree in that sorry span between the first lockdown and the rollout of the vaccines. Mitton's quest for the most credible responses to incredible developments extends even to a Zoom call with a woman trying to juggle childcare with her day job as a demonologist; any extravagance on this director's part is reserved for his dreamscapes, which set us down somewhere between the expressive shadowplay of a Val Lewton B-picture and the split realities of David Lynch. Skilfully sustained over 87 minutes, it gets closer than most to redramatising a deeply unsettling period in human existence - doubtless because it doesn't have the budget to throw effects at the screen and overwrite itself - while allowing Mitton to vanquish one of his characters' biggest fears, namely departing this mortal coil without leaving a trace behind. If Blumhouse could still tell their arse from their elbow, they'd be signing this guy up as a potential new Mike Flanagan.

The Harbinger is currently streaming via NOW TV, and available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.

In memoriam: Damien Thomas (Telegraph 28/04/25)

Damien Thomas, who has died aged 83, was a British actor who worked extensively across television, theatre and film; emerging in the late 1960s, his most prominent roles were the bloodthirsty Count Karnstein in Hammer’s Twins of Evil (1971), the cursed Prince Kassim in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) and the Jesuit priest Father Alvito in the small-screen hit Shōgun (1980), for which he learned Japanese.

Born April 11, 1942 in Ismailia, Egypt to an RAF officer father and a French mother, Thomas studied at art college in London before graduating from RADA in 1966. He made his stage debut that same year as Flamineo in a revival of Webster’s The White Devil, his TV debut opposite Felicity Kendal in Love with a Few Hairs (1967), and his film debut in a starry Julius Caesar (1970), playing Pindarus to John Gielgud's Caesar.

An appearance in the Hammer-produced ITV anthology series Journey to the Unknown (1968) paved the way for Twins of Evil, although Thomas later confessed he wasn’t wholly sure what he was getting into: “I thought I was just being given this screentest to act opposite the others who were taking screentests… I had no idea I was actually in the running for a principal role. It was quite nice to find out that, in fact, I was up for the role. And even nicer to find that I got it.”

Fashioned on Hammer’s usual shoestring budget – Thomas’s prop fangs snapped when the actor bit co-star (and former Playboy Playmate) Madeleine Collinson – the film hardly elevated the actor to Christopher Lee-level stardom: “I was about to face a couple of the worst years of my career. Now when I look back at the film, I don’t think I was as bad as I thought at the time.”

Yet his olive skin kept Thomas in the conversation for comparably exotic roles as the decade played out. Playing the Prophet Muhammad’s son Zaid in The Message (1976) earned the actor a lifelong Middle Eastern fanbase; Kassim in the Sinbad movie endeared him to matinee-goers, although again Thomas admitted some reservations: “I discovered that I was a prince for ten minutes [and then] a baboon for most of the rest of the movie… Well, it was fun, and work, so I did it.”

Doing for samurai what Roots (1977) had done for slaves, the James Clavell adaptation Shōgun became a runaway ratings hit, attracting audiences of 25 million in the US before winning three Golden Globes and two Emmys. In a 1982 interview, Thomas revealed the nine-month Japanese shoot left him pondering whether to adopt a more Zen lifestyle, “but it can’t be done where I live in Richmond”.

Buoyed by this success, Thomas became a TV fixture: he was the shadowy drifter Jake Haulter in Tenko (1984), Jose Camarena in the second series of Lynda LaPlante’s Widows (1985) and Michael Samuels, the liberal-leaning Environmental Secretary outwitted by Francis Urquhart in the original House of Cards (1990).

One professional setback – assuming the villain role in Roman Polanski’s maritime flop Pirates (1986) – was compounded by personal tragedy that October after a depressed former lover, the showgirl-turned-actress Suzie Jerome, died from hypothermia on a beach close to Thomas’s Dorset cottage: “I gather from her friends that she was very much in love with me, but she never told me so… I wasn’t ready to launch into another relationship after the pain of marriage and divorce.”

Thereafter, Thomas returned to the stage, directing several times for Theatre West and understudying Frank Langella in the original 2006 production of Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon at the Donmar Warehouse; he also landed late-career supporting roles in the Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation Never Let Me Go (2010), the Madonna-directed W.E. (2011) and period horror The Limehouse Golem (2016). His final role was in the miniseries Whatever After (2021).

“I seem destined to play the saturnine and tanned roles,” Thomas shrugged to the Daily Mail in 1984. “But I couldn’t care less – because they’re usually good meaty parts.”

He is survived by his wife Julia, three children and three stepchildren.

Damien Thomas, born April 11, 1942, died April 18, 2025.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of April 18-20, 2025):

1 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

2 (new) Sinners (15) ****

3 (new) The Penguin Lessons (12A)

4 (2) The Amateur (12A)

5 (new) Warfare (15) **

6 (5) Disney's Snow White (PG)

7 (3) Six: the Musical (12A)

8 (6) Drop (15) **

9 (11) The King of Kings (PG)

10 (new) Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh (15) *

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Babe

2. Sinners

3. Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit

4. Pride & Prejudice [above]

5. One to One: John & Yoko

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (6) Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PG)

2 (new) Captain America: Brave New World (12)

3 (1) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15) **

4 (3) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

5 (5) Gladiator II (15) ***

6 (32) A Complete Unknown (12) **

7 (28) Hop (U)

8 (2) Nosferatu (15) ***

9 (9) Twisters (12) ***

10 (4) Kraven the Hunter (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Hard Truths

2. Dahomey

3. All We Imagine as Light

4. The Brutalist

5. A Real Pain

My top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Saturday, ITV1, 6.30am)

2. Carlito's Way (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.20pm)

3. The Gift (Friday, BBC One, 11.30pm)

4. Crimes of the Future (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)

5. West Side Story (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.50pm)

Drunk history: "Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh"

2019's Kesari, in which the finer points of colonial history fought a losing battle with the ego of leading man Akshay Kumar, got lucky: opening before the pandemic, when these flagwavers were still deemed to be worth leaving the house for, it proved a bigger hit closer to home than abroad, but a hit nevertheless. Now we have what Wikipedia euphemistically labels a "spiritual" sequel: a project that began life as an entirely unrelated screenplay, renamed as recently as February this year - after filming was completed - to yoke it to the Kesari Cinematic Universe. We advance a quarter-century in history, shaking off original director Anurag Singh (Karan Singh Tyagi takes over), to another pivotal moment in Indian self-determination: the aftermath of the 1919 massacre at Jallianwala Bagh - India's own Peterloo or Bloody Sunday - initiated when a British command opened fire on peaceful protestors, killing somewhere between 379 and 1500 people, depending on estimates. Returned to this stark, sobering moment, as we are in Kesari Chapter 2's opening minutes, one begins to hope the newly minted franchise has toned down the grandstanding of its first instalment. At which point it cuts to a full-screen close-up of Kumar, face painted Kermit green, while narrator Vicky Kaushal extols this new character's credentials and virtues, and an electric guitar score underlines his status as, you know, a total rockstar. The film's first, keening song juxtaposes the bodies of the fallen and Kumar's upright lawyer C. Sankaran Nair while a female singer cries out "where have you gone, my saviour?"; it will end with the star cast in a hazy saffron glow, as even his onscreen opponents bow to his brilliant legal mind. Thus does history repeat itself, first as tragedy, then as abject farce.

So we have a franchise: Akshay Stirs Shit Up While Setting The Past Right. Proven facts remain visible in KC2: the appalling brutality of the massacre itself, the case brought against the Crown by Nair. Yet more often than not, you sense these facts being co-opted - conscripted, even - by a dramatisation that plays as utterly flimsy when it's not ripely overcranked; so much piffle has been applied to the past that even the proven facts start to seem piffling. It begins during the massacre itself, and the clumsy inserts of British officers all but sticking their riflebutts up the nostrils of wide-eyed young children; it persists into this script, which smacks its lips with relish whenever one of the dastardly oppressors hones into view. There they go again, harassing old ladies, tearing up crucial documents, perjuring themselves, or pointing out with a smirk that Indian citizens enjoyed the same status in the gentlemen's clubs of the Raj as dogs. (Kumar's Nair briefly offers site-specific pushback in this respect, glancing across the urinals at a peeing British adversary and gravely noting "the Empire is shrinking".) It's far from inaccurate to portray the Brits at Jallianwala Bagh as baddies - this is one of the film's more truthful generalisations, all told - but these are never especially compelling baddies. Simon Paisley Day, as the loathsome General Dyer (memo to history: bit on the nose, that), speaks a commendable amount of his own Hindi rather than submitting to the indignity of a botchjob dub, but he has only one note to play throughout: the pinched constipation of a man who hasn't opened his bowels since the Second Boer War. These aren't characters, so no real drama flows from them; they're the straw men so many nationalist arguments rely on, nailed haphazardly to the screen so as to aggravate before being cut down.

They do, however, make a perfect match for a not terribly compelling hero. By most accounts, the real Sankaran Nair was a fascinating, conflicted Establishment figure; yet the movie instead gives us Saint Akshay, whose internal struggles are instantly rendered moot by the way KC2 has been conceived, pictorialised and scored. You don't need a sentient actor in this part (and I shall take the higher ground and resist the obvious joke); shot from the right angle, in the right light, and with the orchestra cranked up to eleven as it often is here, a mop would do the job just as effectively. Ananya Panday, the Dharma discovery whom you might think would appear somewhat out of place in a 1920s courtroom (like, where's the wifi?), has a strong opening scene in which she confronts Nair, those big eyes burning with injustice; she also plays her part in the one noteworthy movie image, her pristine white robes popping out of a crowd of establishment black silk. Yet increasingly this camera regards her as somewhere between an intern and a beneficiary of Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. "We have to keep my involvement secret," Nair tells her early on, but within minutes, our guy is giving forth at the bench, and rarely thereafter stops. If he seems ill-briefed throughout, it's because the writing has little to no interest in legal strategy and the process of discovery: Nair pulls intel from the air like a conjuror does rabbits from a hat, and the sorry facts of this case matter far less than the stage the courtroom provides to make the kinds of speeches these films trade in. "How's that for a confession?," asks Kumar at one point, turning towards the camera as Axar Patel would the umpire. Alas, this just isn't cricket. The nonsense Kesari entered into the record was half-funny, in a big dumb movie way; here, it falls somewhere between exasperating and infuriating, because it reduces a meaningful story to the crassest movie slop. The star has taken the film's success on home soil to announce plans for a Kesari Chapter 3: I have an awful feeling I'm going to spend some part of the rest of my days watching Akshay Kumar Photoshopping himself into the most turbulent moments of India's history, like the world's worst Forrest Gump impersonator.

Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh is now showing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Kesari"

An early 2019 entry in the cycle of ideologically skewed Indian period dramas - featuring all the flagwaving and Muslim-bashing a certain audience and their governors could desire - Kesari attempts something Zulu-like with the 1897 Battle of Saragarhi. Announced at the deb ball of history by portentous voice-of-God narration (a trope in these things), Akshay Kumar is accessorised with a beard as wide as his turban as Havildar Ishar Singh, the good Sikh farmer-turned-soldier who led a heroic last stand against Afghans attacking a crucial fort in the North-West Frontier. Within minutes, we gather Anurag Singh's film will be trading in a decidedly simplified (not to mention weaponised) idea of history. Faced with British commanding officers who maintain the region's growing tensions are "not our problem", Kumar adjusts his turban (his hero move) before singlehandedly leaping into battle so as to rescue a woman from the invading hordes. Two scenes later, he can be observed leaping off the ramparts of his clifftop station clutching only to a rope, like Ethan Hunt in a Mission: Impossible. Given a dressing down for general insubordination by his superiors, he's eventually packed off to the remote Saragarhi base to train its wayward recruits, like Maverick from Top Gun: Maverick. What we're witnessing, then, is colonial history with the Bollywood equivalent of Tom Cruise choppered into it, a figure who will prove less than willing to serve as a historical footnote or a mere face in the crowd.

The resulting movie is a lot of things: widescreen, overlong, partially entertaining, partially nonsense, partially entertaining nonsense, but increasingly less energised as it goes along, as if it were gradually boring itself to sleep. The one thing is isn't is especially reliable or credible history. It's been conceived first and foremost as another slightly different Akshay Kumar vehicle, that slightly being a consequence of the fact Kumar works so insistently nowadays it's getting harder to discern any real or meaningful deviation from what's gone before. Yes, this is one of Akshay's historicals: "First the Mughals ruled us, then the British," sighs our hero, caught in the grip of nationalist self-pity. "When will we ever rule ourselves?" (Saragarhi can thus be repositioned as a fleeting experiment in self-determination.) But as he sets about drilling the fort's 21 shirtless wastrels and part-time cockfighters into a semi-effective fighting unit, Kesari becomes only vaguely distinguishable from the previous year's Gold, where Akshay drilled the national hockey team to Olympic glory of a sort; swords and guns have been swapped in for sticks, that's all. One might suggest the alternative title Khaki - the prevailing hue of these frames, taking a visual cue from the soldiers' uniforms - were the Hindi title not already translatable as Saffron.

Producers Dharma at least ensure it's attractively packaged: it's one of those flagwavers where you can sort of see why the home crowd turned out for it, even if you don't share its set of beliefs. Singh fills these frames with striking desert formations, and earns bonus points for favouring boots-on-the-ground action, involving hundreds of extras, over cheap, weightless CGI. He's also not quite as swivel-eyed about the ideology as others working within this field have been, although when photographed from a certain angle, the chakkars (steel bands) the Sikh heroes use to keep their headgear in place catch the sun and remind one of angelic halos; the invaders, for their part, are portrayed as distinct tribes with strategies of their own, but are mostly defined by their tendency to brutalise their women, as no Indian has ever done of course. Its biggest problem, ultimately, is that it also has to be an Akshay Kumar vehicle, and thus continually find ways for the star to distinguish himself and justify his doubtless elevated fee. These include: rescuing a small child from a collapsing building, conversations with (inevitably younger) mirage-wife Parineeti Chopra, mansplaining history and philosophy to a desperately unlucky waterboy, bellowing this cycle's watchwords "I will bleed saffron!" to the heavens, and taking to the ramparts before battle to bash a very loud drum at earsplitting volume. Guess who's also the last man standing, flaming cutlass in hand? At some point during Kesari, you may even wonder whether there wasn't some behind-the-scenes negotiation to ensure the star's beard and turban were measurably the biggest on screen.

Kesari is currently streaming via Prime Video; a sequel, Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh, is now showing in selected cinemas, and is reviewed here.

A fistful of Skittles: "Good Bad Ugly"

Good Bad Ugly is a prominent example of those fan-service star vehicles that have become specific to the Indian cinema over recent years. If you catch it in a multiplex, it'll likely be preceded by the trailer for the next/last Mission: Impossible, which isn't quite the same thing: people go to see those films for Tom Cruise, yes, but they also go for the stunts, the supporting cast and/or the entire package, and Cruise is playing Ethan Hunt rather than some amalgamation of every role he's played. Here, the star is the entire package: Tamil audiences go to see Ajith Kumar - the foursquare, salt-and-pepper-haired action hero who resembles Ray Winstone playing John Virgo - performing the most Ajith Kumar feats imaginable in the most maximalist of Ajith Kumar films. (To put it another way: if Cruise were to make one of these, he'd have to end one setpiece with a "respect the cock" gag, have minor characters repeatedly cast aspersions on his sexuality, and at some point make a winking reference to David Miscavige's wife.) I'm late to the cult of AK, but as far as I can discern, he's not undeserving of such treatment: I enjoyed his post-pandemic Marxist heist movie Thunivu, it was a smart idea to remake the Kurt Russell thriller Breakdown (as this year's Vidaamuyarchi) and more generally Kumar has combined flair and heft with a broadly upstanding public persona. His latest is nothing if not straightahead in its hero worship. From an opening section headed 'Good', we gather Kumar's ex-gangster AK has walked himself into a prison framed like a Marvel comic strip and choreographed as if by Bob Fosse, where he's so renounced his old ways he's even taken night shift work as a guard. In 'Bad', his return to civvy street is complicated after his moptopped teenage son (Karthikeya Dev) is snatched by ne'er-do-wells and nogoodniks. As AK goes full Liam Neeson, investigating the flow of dark money through the Spain of Money Heist and paella Western shootouts, things turn - you guessed it - 'Ugly'.

They get funny and entertaining, too, at least for some while. Let's make no bones about this: Good Bad Ugly is nonsense on toast - naansense, if you wanted to be culturally specific - but in no other form of contemporary cinema has the phrase "what if" been seen to hold such sway. What if a 53-year-old man could be observed kicking seven bells out of men thirty years his junior? What if the latter group were dressed like characters rejected from Scarface for being a bit much? What if we disguised AK in leather-bar garb for a meeting with money launderers? What if those money launderers did their bidding in a What'sApp groupchat headed "DARK WORLD"? What if their casino hangout had a microwave in the middle of it, which our hero could then toss a bomb inside? What if that hero had a gun disguised as a Box Brownie camera? It's like a story an eight-year-old would make up about themselves and their friends - which may explain the comic-book panels that sporadically pop up, and the action figures on AK's table, and the Korean heavy with the Hello Kitty phone. (It may also explain the cuts the film's UK distributor made at the end of Week One, softening a 15 certificate movie to a family-oriented 12A.) That's the source of GBU's appeal: the possibilities are endless. (One scene ends with Kumar casually chatting to the camera crew.) It also struck me as GBU's limitation: like a kid hopped up on Skittles, it eventually tires itself out, and exhausts those of us who aren't hardcore fans with it. Director Adhik Ravichandran and his six-strong team (I'm tempted to say creche) of writers have their strongest ideas in the first half; in the absence of anything like a coherent, thought-through plot, the supply of Super-Cool Things for Our Hero To Do runs thin after the intermission. The second half really does suggest the star and his entourage took a nice European break, during which some killjoy occasionally pulled out a camera and some prop guns and insisted AK film something for the fanclub. The prevailing air of daftness remains rather charming, though: it's the first Indian film I've seen to remind me of both John Wick and the Status Quo lark Bula Quo!.

Good Bad Ugly is now playing in selected cinemas.