Down by lore: "Cronos"

In his 1992 debut Cronos, the young Guillermo del Toro announced a fondness for design, bric-a-brac, tchotchkes: what if Dracula, the film proposed, but a version of Dracula where the bloodsucker was an objet trouvé, rather than the undead? Its setting, for the most part, would be a Mexico City antiques shop haunted by the ticking of several dozen clocks and operated by the grey-haired, Geppetto-looking Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi), whose first name will become more significant as the film proceeds. One Christmas, Señor Gris takes delivery of a black-market statue whose base contains a golden clockwork device in the shape of a scarab beetle; this he removes before selling the statue on to an American businessman (Ron Perlman). The businessman, it transpires, has been sent this way by his ailing uncle (Claudio Brook) with specific instructions to retrieve the beetle - which, we learn, was originally manufactured by an alchemist to bestow eternal youth on its owner; this it does by clamping onto the owner's flesh and drawing blood, an MO that Señor Gris discovers the hard way. There are gains from this process: the device grants him a fresher-faced appearance (Luppi gets to do the Benjamin Button thing a decade-and-a-half before it was a thing) and injects a renewed vigour into his relationship with wife Mercedes (Margarita Isabel). There are also, he finds, losses: being pursued by those who really, truly want what he's got, all while having to deal with certain enhanced... appetites.

What's notable revisiting Cronos now, in the wake of del Toro's more expansive and extravagant American studio productions, is its underlying economy. (Not for del Toro the indulgent sprawl of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, released the same year. Not yet, at any rate.) This script works to a tried-and-tested three-act structure: thirty minutes of set-up, thirty minutes of transformation (wherein bloodsucking becomes analogous to addiction: not for nothing does it involve a metal spike, and licking up blood from bathroom floors), thirty minutes of resolution. As has always been his wont, del Toro chooses to doodle over the top of this framework, in this instance with an insectoid reading of the Bible, a ludic streak that could only have been put here by a lifelong collector (Gris compares the device to having a toy, but not the instructions), a blackly comic visit to a funeral parlour apparently staffed by Wolverine and Guildenstern, and rich handfuls of lore tossed in like the soil in Dracula's coffin, some eternal, some entirely of del Toro's own invention. Restored as recently as 2024, Cronos continues in this vein to make ancient legend seem new again: it certainly doesn't seem dated at a moment when certain American billionaires are recycling their own bodily fluids in a bid to stick around longer and witness the full extent of the destruction their capitalism has wrought. As del Toro has long understood, we have no need to invent ghouls when so many walk amongst us.

Cronos is now showing in selected cinemas, available to rent via the BFI Player, and on Blu-ray via the BFI.

Gunsmoke: "Normal"

After a decade and a half of restless graft on the cinema's indie fringes, Ben Wheatley appears to have wound up more or less where he wants to be. Every now and again, he'll veer off into experimental, leftfield territory - as was the case with his most recent venture Bulk, with which he's just toured the arthouse circuit. In between times, however, he knocks off a highish-profile, well-compensated American gig - such as 2023's The Meg 2: The Trench - which then allows him to go off and make another foray into more experimental, leftfield territory. (This viewer still hopes Wheatley will someday return to the project that began life as Colin, You Anus, but that may well depend on the BBC not blowing its annual drama budget on Richard Gadd's latest attempt to work through his issues while avoiding paying for therapy.) Normal, a job-for-hire from a script by John Wick III and Nobody scribe Derek Kolstad, opens as Wheatley's stab at a Coen Brothers movie: its title refers to a small, snowy Minnesotan backwater whose recently deceased sheriff went by the altogether familiar name of Gunderson. The sheriff's interim replacement, who goes by the no less familiar first name of Ulysses and is played by Bob Odenkirk, is settling in as we first join him, surrounded by what his voiceover calls "good people, small problems". What he discovers over the course of the movie is that this small, quiet, normal town is, in fact, properly weird rather than merely quirky, covering up - as it has been - not just his predecessor's mysterious death, but the vast sums of money concentrated hereabouts, and the jawdropping array of weapons locked away in the police precinct's backrooms.

What develops is a multiplex variant of the small, messy situations Wheatley worked through first on TV's Ideal, then in his feature debut Down Terrace, and more recently in 2016's one-location shoot-'em-up Free Fire: the plot, indeed, turns on an attempted bank robbery that goes awry in unusual, unexpected ways. Leaving Coenland behind, Normal next turns left into a John Carpenter scenario, Kolstad's script passing sly comment on the death of Main Street, American self-interest and the perilously easy availability of guns across the continental US, before turning decisively right into cartoon violence, much as Nobody did before it. As was the case there, your mileage may vary: a little of this gruesome Looney Tunes stuff tends to go a long way. If I found Normal an improvement on the slipshod and slaphappy Free Fire, it's because a) Wheatley's working with American money here - giving him more varied shit to blow up - and b) Odenkirk's hangdog humanity provides a steadying counterpoint to all the knockabout nonsense going on around him. The movie that finally emerges through a thick haze of gunsmoke, its face blackened, its hair all up on end, is more than a little ramshackle, bordering on the glib. Just as a job of writing and direction, it feels like a technical or mechanical exercise, reliant on the hero eventually circling back to every last one of the plot points set up in the first act and on those behind the camera finding new ways to film shootouts and instigate shootouts. I spent much of Normal's back end thinking fondly of 2012's underseen The Last Stand, which had Arnie in the Odenkirk role and now feels like a relic of the last moment when independent producers had real money to spend on explosions. The cherry bombs Wheatley tosses our way here will just about do if you're at a loose end of a Friday or Saturday night - and they'll have to do: parsing the threadbare release schedule, it's not as if we're getting a big-budget, Bruckheimer-level action picture this summer, more's the pity.

Normal is now showing in selected cinemas.

"Voidance" (Guardian 18/05/26)

Voidance **

Dir: Marianna Dean. With: Zoe Cunningham, James Cosmo, Eloise Lovell Anderson, Mim Shaikh. 86 mins. Cert: 15 (tbc)

Its eyes and aspirations eternally bigger than its budget and reach, this Brit sci-fi calling card provides the answer to an unlikely question: what if someone remade 2011’s Source Code in an especially rundown outpost of Wetherspoons? Amid reported unrest between neighbouring planets Atopia and Cho-Hacha, mumsy anti-terror agent Alana Toro (Zoe Cunningham) receives orders from a hologrammatic James Cosmo to track down and bring in a troublesome rebel group. Her mission stalls, however, when she walks into a bar for interstellar truckers, where the film’s horizons shrink and – thanks to a timeloop device – our heroine gets several goes at interrogating the same skeleton crew of patrons and trying to resolve a convoluted, stubbornly uninvolving murder-mystery.

Along the way, flickers of B-movie ingenuity and invention catch the eye. Jamie Foote’s grimy, greasy set design hides some of the monetary limitations and ensures this is a rare modern sci-fi that inhabits a palpably physical, non-pixellated space; costumier Ciéranne Kennedy Bell visibly had immense fun dressing this troupe in cyberpunk finery that suggests some crossover between Red Dwarf and Claire’s Accessories; and the score, by Christoph Allerstorfer and James Griffiths, is that of a far more expansive and assured production. Alana herself is a promising pulp creation – a leather-clad, purple-wigged Miss Marple who gets to pull out a space blaster every now and again – even if Cunningham, with her distinct air of a school secretary who’s just uncovered a tuckshop scam, seems more than faintly miscast. 

The torpedoing problems here can be traced back to Simon X. Frederick’s script – and it’s not just that title, with its unfortunate intestinal ring. The set-up entails a lot of deeply clunky expositional dialogue this ensemble struggles to sell, and the timeloop conceit just doesn’t work, reliant as it is on a repeated PA announcement that reaches ‘see it, say it, sorted’ levels of annoyance and a wristwatch that keeps having to spell out what soap alumna Marianna Dean’s direction, with its awkward bouts of action and sluggish pacing, doesn’t always make clear. A very British vision of the future, all told: cramped, impoverished and something of a drag.

Voidance is available to rent via Prime Video and other digital platforms from Monday 25.

Incognito: "The Christophers"

Steven Soderbergh's London period began with 2023's sketchy, feetfinding Magic Mike's Last Dance, but it clicked up another level entirely with last year's terrific Black Bag, a spy drama that ultimately proved less about spying per se than it was about the nature of all relationships. Soderbergh continues to move quickly while covering his own tracks: his new film, The Christophers, is a curious, minor-key heist movie trailing ideas about the processes of creation and the true value of art. Representing the downtrodden and penniless among us is Michaela Coel's Lori, the Magic Mike of Central St. Martins: a former art student turned occasional art restorer reduced to manning a Thames-side noodle truck to supplement her income. In a nearby pub, she's solicited by old college pal Sallie and Barnaby (Jessica Gunning and James Corden), the ingrate children of a celebrated painter, who want Lori to retrieve a box of unfinished works, the Christophers of the title, which their father has squirreled away among the many other items of bric-a-brac in the attic of his Bloomsbury townhouse. The painter is one Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), an eccentric old cove prone to rants, diatribes and monologues, who looks to have barricaded himself away to shut out the perceived wokery of the modern world. Lori nevertheless inveigles herself into Sklar's life by posing as a prospective personal assistant, only to find her employer is well aware of his own legacy and that he has tricks up his dressing-gown sleeves: one of the first tasks he sets his new PA is to have the Christophers shredded.

If Black Bag found Soderbergh operating somewhere close to the multiplex's cutting edge, the new film is cosier, even cramped; it takes a confoundingly long time for events and their repercussions to unfold. For much of that duration, we're confined among the fusty furnishings of Sklar's narrow bohemian outpost, watching two bristling characters rub up against or otherwise jostle one another. Where Black Bag was propulsive, The Christophers is characterised by a certain pokiness; instead of a Ferrari-tuned plot engine, it has a tub of Peak Freans biscuits. It's as if the challenge Soderbergh set himself was to make two very different kinds of British films: one that could be pitched squarely at the Friday or Saturday night audience, the other at the matinee crowd. (What The Christophers initially suggests, indeed, is a knockoff of Roger Michell's Venus, which offered Peter O'Toole in the McKellen role.) If the new film fits that matinee bill to a tee, it's apparently inspired Soderbergh to abandon any pretence of directorial style - any push for added value - and instead let his actors and Ed Solomon's perilously talky script do the heavy lifting. The pleasures here derive from watching two actors from different places - different worlds, even - meeting head-on somewhere in the middle, yet these characters are almost always more interesting and vivid than the film they're in; they're like figures drawing the eye in what's meant to be a landscape painting. (As if to back up this assertion, Soderbergh makes his backdrop damply nondescript: it screams London in October.)

Coel draws out Lori's wily codeswitching, how the PA's voice and bearing inside Sklar's home varies from her demeanour out in the wider world, but she's never quite as compelling here as she was in David Lowery's recent Mother Mary, a film that embraced and thereby came to take on some of this performer's neo-Cubist angles and edges. Mostly, The Christophers seems much more McKellenish: mildly mischievous, yes, but also windy in its sub-Mametish wrestling with artistic legacy, and more than a little weary from having to labour up and down all these stairs. (For a long while, the supporting cast is limited to a spiralling series of banisters; everyone could have done with a Stannah stairlift.) Both performers are good value, but there's no particular frame around them to speak of: this is one of those projects, much like that Magic Mike threequel, where the speed and economy for which Soderbergh is often feted seems to have precluded any kind of look. (The Christophers does, however, explain the flak this director is currently copping for his use of generative AI in his forthcoming John Lennon doc: that's right, Soderbergh has made another film before you've even had chance to see this one.) It's not entirely artless or worthless - I found myself weirdly gripped by the closing stretch, wanting to know what happens to these people and how the picture(s) would be finished - but for what's notionally a piece about creative individuals, the film is peculiarly indistinct. Perhaps the oddest thing about The Christophers is that anybody could have signed their name to it.

The Christophers is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Circle of friends: "Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft"

It is, all told, an unlikely partnership. Before the camera: Billie Eilish, the recessive songstrel with the million-dollar mumble. Behind it: James Cameron, the Hollywood alpha dog who should really be back in his shed getting going on the next Avatar movie. Well, maybe the live concert movie Hit Me Hard and Soft is Jim Cameron giving himself a day (or a night) off; maybe it's his way of bonding with his daughters after several long years at sea, or maybe his wife Suzy Amis has told him, in no uncertain terms, that he needed a hobby that doesn't involve blue people. (The movie has been conceived in 3D, so it's not a total break from recent endeavours.) The question cinephiles face is whether we can tell this is a concert movie assembled by one of the great motion picture technicians, and whether Cameron has more of an idea of what he wants to film and show than whoever it was who did the Taylor Swift concert movie, which emerged as all coverage and nothing but coverage. For starters, Cameron demonstrates an inevitable interest in the tech of a tour such as this: the rigging going up, the sea of phones capturing moments, the catapult that propels the singer on stage at a crucial moment. He also engineers several time shifts one might, at a push, describe as Terminator-like ("8 hours before the concert", "Forty minutes earlier", etc), the better to chronicle how this particular show came together at what feels like the last minute. This may just be Cameron, notionally playing second fiddle for the first time since he made 1982's Piranha II: The Spawning for Roger Corman, ceding a certain degree of his usual control. Some of that control is ceded to the crowd, who certainly weren't here to play extras in a Jim Cameron movie; their heads and arms pierce the frame (somewhat joltingly, an effect that tends to be elided from slicker 3D spectacles) while their screams and shouts frequently take over the soundtrack. Most of that control, however, is ceded to Eilish herself: Cameron has even left handheld 3D cameras around the stage for her to pick up and run with in the course of the concert. The results come to seem like a true collaboration, with caveats. "It's going to say 'Directed by Billie Eilish'," Cameron is heard to say backstage at one point, "and then - at the very bottom - 'with James Cameron'". As it happens, the closing credits actually read "Directed by James Cameron and Billie Eilish". Ah well.

In terms of the show itself, the Eilish mumble appears central to her relatability: she is, from the off, far more approachable than La Swift, the Business Barbie with the celebrity athlete husband and the preternatural gift for songwriting. Swift, certainly, wasn't likely to allow a director to film her having her ankles strapped up backstage, or going through a rehearsal session with her vocal coach, or chatting while applying her pre-gig contouring. ("It really reads from a distance," notes Cameron, in full 'cool dad' mode.) Her stage outfit - just the one, unlike Swift's six billion - is a lightly worn shrug: loose sports jersey, backward-turned baseball cap, Limp Bizkit shorts, glasses apparently sourced from the venue's lost-and-found box. It's not even smart casual, and yet over the course of this concert - liberated to move in any which direction, both physically and musically - Eilish becomes a recognisably Cameronian figure of interest: a woman who comes to command an army of diehard followers while reshaping the fabric of time and space. Non-diehards (and here your correspondent must include himself) might want a little more variation in the songcraft, gazillion-sellers though these tracks may be, beloved though they visibly are of this crowd, captured trilling along with tears in their eyes. (Cameron catches so much saltwater I wondered if Hit Me Hard and Soft was going to function as an Avatar origin story: this is how whole planets flood.) And the tropes of these all-new concert movies are now such one senses the Documentary Now! lads in the wings, preparing a bumper double episode: they could have a field day with the 'puppy room' Eilish insists on having backstage so as to reduce pre-gig stress ("everyone needs some dog love"). None of this matters, though, so long as Cameron films his subject with much the same awestruck gaze as he once did Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley. Part of the filmmaker's fascination, I think, is that Eilish has successfully accomplished something he hasn't: to downsize. When Eilish sits crosslegged on her comparatively no-frills stage ("I don't want anything between me and them", she tells her director) and hushes the crowd into total silence before one song, she shrinks a cavernous concert venue to a small, tight friendship circle, as safe a space for creation as her own teenage bedroom. Eilish gets Cameron to think small for the first time in decades: the result is a rare concert movie that converts the colossal spectacle of the internationally touring pop show into something personal, intimate and very charming.

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of May 8-10, 2026):

1 (1) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12A)

2 (2) Michael (12A)

3 (new) The Sheep Detectives (PG)

4 (new) Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft (12A) ****

5 (new) Mortal Kombat II (15)

6 (3) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

7 (5) Project Hail Mary (12A) ***

8 (4) Hokum (15) ***

9 (new) Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition (15) ***

10 (7) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Cronos

2. Top Gun: Maverick

3. Wake in Fright

4. The Christophers

5. Normal

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Scream 7 (18)

2 (new) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (15)

3 (2) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

4 (4) Shelter (15)

5 (7) Send Help (15) ***

6 (new) Hoppers (U) ****

7 (6) G.O.A.T. (PG)

8 (5) The Devil Wears Prada (PG) ***

9 (8) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

10 (3) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Cold Storage

2. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

3. Nouvelle Vague

4. Soul to Soul

5. Send Help

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [above] (Sunday, BBC Two, 2.30pm)

2. And Now for Something Completely Different (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)

3. 10 Things I Hate About You (Saturday, Channel 4, 1.05pm)

4. How to Marry a Millionaire (Saturday, BBC Two, 10.25am)

5. Saving Private Ryan (Wednesday, BBC One, 10.40pm)

Swamp thing: "Shrek" at 25

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."

(Quote commonly misattributed to Antonio Gramsci.)

Hard to believe Shrek screened at Cannes this week in 2001, but then that was the moment: Pixar's Toy Story and Toy Story 2 had made computer animation both artful and universal, giving Hollywood a new box of tricks to play with, money to spend, and a renewed sense of creative confidence. Everyone was getting on the boat, or yacht. This was the fledgling DreamWorks studio (and more specifically its ex-Disney chief Jeffrey Katzenberg) scuzzing up the Mouse House's aesthetic, rubbing Mickey's nose in the mud; in Shrek's opening moments, the kind of picturebook that graced the prologues of Disney's post-War golden age animations is revealed to have been taken into the outhouse by the titular green ogre, its pages used as bog roll before Shrek marches cheerily out of the crapper to the strains of Smash Mouth's "All Star". Welcome back to the summer of 2001: everything was about to go down the pan. New century, new crudeness. Before the decade was out, these voice performers would gift the world The Love Guru, Norbit and The Sweetest Thing; on the road to toppling the tyrannical Lord Farquaad (voiced by John Lithgow), whose surname proves interchangeable with "fuckwad", Shrek (Mike Myers) and Donkey (Eddie Murphy) spend most of their time burping and farting. I'd forgotten just how relentlessly lowbrow the movie is. In the Farquaad-ruled kingdom of Duloc, a singing exhibit rhymes "keep your feet off the grass" with "wipe your... face"; an inexplicably French Robin Hood (Vincent Cassel, for some reason) inspires a song-and-dance number in which the Merry Men do something similar, rhyming "maid" with "he likes to get... paid". Schtick might have been a good alternative title. Stink might be another. If you can hear a low industrial rumbling while revisiting Shrek this weekend, that's surely Uncle Walt, the man who made Fantasia, being rotated in his cryogenic capsule.

If there's been any measure of critical debate over Shrek this past quarter-century, it hinges on just how ugly the film was always meant to be. The animation really is ugly, in the same way the first Toy Story now looks clunky. (Chief takehome: how rapidly processor chips and modelling tech improved over the course of the century's first decades.) Granted, the rough-and-readiness does set Shrek apart from, say, Pixar's comparatively verdant A Bug's Life, engineered only a couple of years before. But it's very rough, from the uncanny humanoid faces (Fiona and Farquaad especially) to the dragon whose firebreathing recalls a PS2 cut scene to the sequence where Shrek and Donkey traverse a field of sunflowers, the Klein-blue sky behind them entirely untroubled by sun, clouds, detail. Watching Shrek in 2026 is a little like watching one of those cheap Russian timewasters the major chains now import - somewhat against the spirit of any trade embargo - to fill Screen 6 during half-term. (It's also closer than you'd think to watching today's AI slop.) It's briskly told at 86 minutes; if you were feeling generous, its sarcastic approach to the fairytale qualifies as a kind of wit. (There are fun bits of comic writing, from Farquaad's interrogation of the Gingerbread Boy - "Do you know the Muffin Man?" - to the use of cue cards at Farquaad and Fiona's wedding.) And I guess it's novel (and very un-Disneyish) that all the characters should seem so fundamentally horny, though again here, we're not so far from those early Internet pages that did blasphemous things to beloved cartoon characters. We've had four of these things in the years since, plus spinoffs, and - one reason for this reissue - there's another to come next year. People apparently love Shrek: we have it (more specifically, a late-film John Cale cover version) to thank/blame for that Noughties revival of the song "Hallelujah", and even Al Pacino, for heaven's sake, has admitted to using a Shrek phone case. But then enough people bought that Crazy Frog record to get it to number one. Sometimes there really can be no accounting for popular taste.

Shrek returns to cinemas nationwide today.