Chicken run: "Hen"

Here's an unexpected comeback. The writer-director György Pálfi emerged at the turn of the century as the mad professor of Hungarian cinema, compiling one-of-a-kind films from a variety of diverse and unusual angles. 2002's Hukkle, a U-rated symphony of the natural world, was followed by the raw meat of 2006's Taxidermia, a decidedly 18-rated study of human flesh and blood that repelled almost as many spectators as it compelled. Two decades on, Pálfi returns with - and no, I swear I'm not making this up - a movie shot largely from the perspective of an errant chicken. The 15-rated Hen splits the difference between this unique filmmaker's breakthrough works: the singular path it follows allows us to see, on one side, the wonders of nature and, on the other, the horrors of the human sphere. Opening on a tight close-up of creation - an egg emerging from a cloaca - it then plunges us into the ever-staggering processes of factory farming. The egg is warmed, and a chick eventually breaks out; the chick is funnelled through slides and chutes and into a heavily crowded barn, where she grows up. Our heroine is, as it were, a black sheep, her inky colouration distinguishing her from the mass of Easter-yellow and snow-white birds she's farmed with; she will, indeed, be rejected from this process for being different, less saleable, at which point Hen begins to assume an air of the sociopolitical. Initially earmarked for inclusion in a trucker's soup, she escapes at a service station, and thereafter proceeds to having marvellous, sometimes alarming adventures along an especially sunsoaked stretch of the Greek coast. For long stretches, Hen resembles a live-action version of those animations we show our young, or an ultra-leftfield item of the Incredible Journey/Homeward Bound/Babe school; you may at an early point expect the protagonist to start clucking with the voice of a Kate McKinnon or an Olivia Colman.

But no, because this is an actual hen - beady of eye, scarlet of wattle - albeit one who's been granted the kind of close-ups typically reserved for actresses with L'Oréal contracts. Furthermore, she's an actual hen who's been loosed on the real world, where - even after leaving behind the factory-farming environment - death lurks around every other corner. A riotous early setpiece, likely to stand among the summer's best, answers the age-old question of why the chicken crossed the road, in this case a perilously busy carriageway: she was being pursued by a ravenous fox. (Here we should credit the three "stunt chickens" listed in the closing credits, named as Jackie 1, 2 and 3.) Perhaps Pálfi's film is more readily compared to 1998's Babe: Pig in the City, a euphemistic way of warning animal lovers to approach with some degree of caution: you will, I think, spend much of Hen praying for a happy ending in the form of a "no animals were harmed" disclaimer. (Spoiler alert: there is one.) It's not just that the hen has to dodge that fox and a no less hungry-looking hawk (introduced polishing off a fieldmouse without much in the way of contrition); she will also be snatched up at one point in the jaws of a hound and carried right back into the hands of those pesky humans, always plotting and scheming, quick to anger, invariably peckish. Here, Hen crosses paths with the methodology of the recent EO (after Bresson, about a donkey), Gunda (about a pig) and Cow (about a cow): we're looking at humankind through the eyes of one of those poor, unfortunate creatures obliged to share a planet, or just a backyard, with humankind. To borrow a Manny Farberism that sort of fits the bill, those earlier works were white elephant movies, films in which a director bore down on their animal subjects with the intention of Saying Something Despairingly Profound about the world these beasts were led through, kicking and squealing.

Led instead by Pálfi's far lighter touch, Hen reveals itself as a prime instance of termite art, scratching around at ground level with its subject, and seeing what truths these talons scuff up. Although this chicken's legs carry her within touching distance of a prominent theme in contemporary European cinema - and although her eyes appear to register their fair share of human folly - Hen feels like another of this director's experiments rather than any didactic statement, seizing the opportunity to see how far one might take a chicken for a walk. As an experiment, Hen proves surprisingly successful and engaging. Even amid its occasional dramatic lulls - such as a first-half diversion into a freer-range form of farming - the eye is drawn by Pálfi's virtuosic choices: layering Ravel's "Bolero" over footage of the hen clucking around a yard, allowing the hen to waddle into the bedroom of a child watching a documentary about dinosaurs (thereby presenting our heroine with a moving cave painting of her ancestors), a makeover sequence that demonstrates - after a lot of evidence to the contrary - just how hospitable we humans can be at our best. From around the halfway point, Pálfi and co-writer/wife Zsófia Ruttkay offer us two films for the price of one: the chicken's journey, and a drama about those humans pushed into the background. (There are, believe it or not, points where the two stories intersect, and we're led to wonder whether this chicken can pull a Lassie Come Home and save the day. But, again, no: she's just hen.) What's upfront, a feat of staging and editing, is all the more remarkable for the unified and expressive-seeming performance Pálfi has coaxed out of the eight (count 'em) chickens credited as playing the lead role: this, truly, is the Belmondo of birds, climbing, clambering, strutting and posing, taking a delight in her own freedom, and even throwing herself into a late-breaking romance with a brooding cock called Titan. A question: just how much birdseed did Pálfi get through here?

Hen opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

"Charlie the Wonderdog" (Guardian 20/05/26)

Charlie the Wonderdog **

Dir: Shea Wageman. With the voices of: Owen Wilson, Ruairi MacDonald, Dawson Littman, Elishia Perosa. 95 mins. Cert: PG

In an ever gappier release schedule, there’s little in the way of a back-up plan for any youngsters and parents shut out of this weekend’s The Mandalorian and Grogu. The major studios’ animation departments have already delivered the blockbusting likes of Hoppers, G.O.A.T. and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie to multiplexes this spring, setting distributors scrabbling to source what instinctively feel like matinee contingency arrangements. If a new, Chinese-produced Tom and Jerry caper doesn’t spark undue enthusiasm, the most immediate family alternative would be this very ordinary Canuck digimation, featuring the voice of Owen Wilson as a dog with superpowers; having tanked in the US earlier this year, Shea Wageman’s film gets repurposed here as half-term screenfiller.

Wageman earns some points for weirdness. The titular pooch is one of a menagerie of household pets beamed up one night for alien experimentation. (Here, this PG-rated entertainment comes close to busting out the probes.) Returned home with the ability to fly and speak in a recognisably Wilsonian drawl, Charlie resolves to use his superpowers for good – becoming, if you will, Bark Kent. Animated hackery sets in with more of American movies’ virulent anti-cat propaganda: neighbour’s puss Puddy (Ruairi MacDonald) breaks bad, pledging to punish his now-cowering owner, and indeed humanity entire, for failing to empty his litter tray. Yes, there’s a digimated litter tray: you fear for those programmers tasked with piling the gravel high.

Forget the legacies of Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks Animation, and Charlie might seem passable. (Wageman is hoping his audience hasn’t encountered 2009’s Bolt, where Disney did something similar with greater pizzazz.) This script has one solid, funny idea – that Charlie and Puddy represent differing responses to the sentience we humans take for granted – but it gets squandered amid the usual frenetic, ten-a-penny setpieces, which zip into the eyes and immediately exit via the ears. For Wilson, invited to summon the howls of a canine with cacti spines in his butt and a loud belch after Charlie overdoes his beloved bolognese, this was doubtless an easy paycheque. Let’s just hope this winter’s ominous-looking Fockers sequel brings the earlier, funnier Owen back.

Charlie the Wonderdog opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.

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.