Back to the drawing board: "A Grand Day Out" and "The Wrong Trousers"

To celebrate a half-century of Aardman Animations - and better prepare us for this September's third Shaun the Sheep film - we're getting a full retrospective over the remainder of the summer. Revisited almost four decades on from its making, what's most striking about 1989's A Grand Day Out is how closely its form and content align; how clearly it was the work of a mildly eccentric figure, alone at his drawing table in a basement, assembling what would eventually prove his grandest design. For the plasticine Wallace, building a rocket to retrieve cheese from the moon, read the flesh-and-blood Nick Park, then a boyish NFTS student plotting to both update and revolutionise filmed animation via the reapplication of artisanal craft methods. The result now seems more than ever a time capsule, using jerky stopmotion - the same processes viewers of a certain age will recognise as having given life to Morph, Bagpuss and Windy Miller - to fashion choice sight gags: Gromit being used to prop up a workbench, the mice donning sunglasses as one to witness blast-off, the leads finding different ways to counter the boredom of the long Bank Holiday excursion into space, not something Méliès had allowed himself to consider at the start of the century. These characters would get sleeker and more defined, as human performers tend to upon first contact with stardom, and the vehicles they'd travel in got bigger and zippier. Yet the elements moulded into this clay from the very outset included a great charm and wit, an abundant, irresistible cheeriness (best illustrated here by the benign fate of the machine that pursues our heroes across the surface of the Moon), and an overarching comic philosophy that would define the best of Aardman's subsequent work: treat even stratospheric events as though they were the basis of a wet weekend in Filey.

1993's The Wrong Trousers - the breakout success, the Oscar winner, the quantum leap forward - bears about as much relation to its appealingly clunky predecessor as, say, Terminator II: Judgment Day did to James Cameron's directorial debut Piranha II: The Spawning. We're back on the homefront this time, depicted as no less chaotic and hazardous than the wider universe, especially after we factor in a pair of robotic "Techno Trousers" ("Ex-NASA," Wallace coos, "Fantastic for walkies") and the dire financial straits that lead to our heroes taking in a dodgy lodger we instantly distrust. (Partly because, even by Aardman's standards, his eyes are too close together.) That's right, it's Shallow Grave - Danny Boyle's 18-rated breakthrough of the following year - only with a sociopathic penguin in the place of Keith Allen. Both films, made on shoestring budgets by creatives in the first years of their career, were acutely attuned to the interpersonal jeopardies lurking within the flatshare scenario: no-one has any money (why else would the capable, practically minded Gromit still be living with a clueless bachelor like Wallace?), some folks (Wallace) aren't exactly pulling their weight, others (Gromit) feel left out of key decision-making (perhaps an inevitability when you literally don't have a voice), and there's always the possibility someone sleeping under the same roof wants to do away with you (Feathers McGraw).

All of which is to acknowledge how these well-kneaded blobs of plasticine seem to take on recognisably human contours and characteristics; Park and co. built an entire empire out of modelling clay without ever losing sight of what makes us tick (or ticks us off) on a daily basis. The Wrong Trousers remains very funny in this: clock the sleepy Wallace pulling his PJs over those techno-trousers, or Gromit's rightly cherished eyebrow raise as he realises the berryblast of jam conventionally intercepted by a flying piece of toast is instead bound for his face at a considerable rate of knots. (Genius has a way of stopping time, or making its own time.) Yet the lighting of these models and maquettes alone - particularly during the storm sequence, and Gromit's backstreet pursuit of Feathers - elevates this half-hour to the standing of art, and that's before a superb closing setpiece carried as much by sound (the rattle of the toy train, the click of the tracks, the satisfying clunk of penguin in milkbottle) as by anything we see whizzing before our eyes. Later W&G features would prove slicker and smoother yet: they would be Aardman's Avatars, more ambitious, sometimes dazzling, generally well-liked. But I don't think they ever topped The Wrong Trousers: here, unlike Wallace, Park got the dimensions and speed, the set-up and execution just right.

A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers return to selected cinemas from Friday.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of June 26-28, 2026):

1 (1) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

2 (new) Supergirl (12A)

3 (2) Disclosure Day (12A) **

4 (new) Jackass: Best and Last (18)

5 (3) Obsession (18) *

6 (4) Scary Movie (15)

7 (new) Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War - The Calamity (15)

8 (5) Backrooms (15)

9 (new) Les Liaisons Dangereuses - NT Live 2026 (15)

10 (7) Michael (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Invite

2. Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie

3. The Furious

4. Taxi Driver

5. Swimming Pool

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Michael (12)

2 (2) Project Hail Mary (12) ***

3 (4) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

4 (24) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (15)

5 (6) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

6 (5) Mortal Kombat II (15)

7 (17) Superman (12)

8 (9) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

9 (10) Wicked: For Good (PG)

10 (3) EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (12) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Hoppers

2. Blue Moon

3. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

4. The Mastermind

5. The Good Boy

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Godland (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.30am)

2. Glory [above] (Sunday, Channel 4, 1.20am)

3. Blade Runner (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)

4. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Saturday, BBC Two, 8.40am)

5. Thunderball (Sunday, ITV1, 6.55am)

Appetites: "The Invite"

Olivia Wilde's new comedy The Invite extends a long tradition of what we might call dinner-party cinema, where the key ingredients are these: a sprinkling of actors, honed to sharp but hopefully still representative points; a single, well-furnished location; a sense of a tumultuous, finally rather testing or trying evening; barbed or otherwise polished dialogue, ideally trialled in a stage setting. Mix them as you would a pre-dinner cocktail, and you end up with the kind of would-be sophisticated entertainment guests can chew over at real-world soirées: think 1967's lodestone Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Woody Allen's gossipy Husbands and Wives, the French smash Le dîner de cons, Polanski's insufferable Carnage. Adapted by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones from a Spanish play-turned-film (known locally as Sentimental and internationally as The Couple Upstairs) which has already been reworked in multiple languages, Wilde's film operates primarily as a study in radically different energies. Representing exhausted middle age: Seth Rogen (Fozzie Bear playing Oscar the Grouch, sore of back, sorer still of spirit) and Wilde herself (status-anxious, overly committed to the fate of a soufflé) as frazzled parents who see a late supper with their upstairs neighbours as a rare chance to reposition themselves as vibrant social butterflies. Gliding into this married couple's recently refurbished space: sexologist Penélope Cruz and her firefighter beau Edward Norton, who may just be everything their hosts dream of being, namely cosmopolitan (they speak Spanish!), childless, audibly passionate in their lovemaking (Wilde has warned Rogen not to complain), cool as cucumbers, and stylishly attractive in their upward mobility. The guests arrive bearing cheesecake that melts in the mouth and a proposal, indecent or otherwise, which will determine just how close our leads want to get to what these outsiders have. An alternative title floats into view: Guess Who's Coming After Dinner.

By all trustworthy reports, Wilde's previous film as director, 2022's much-hyped Don't Worry Darling, had its virtues and selling points, but its narrative chicanery got out of hand. The controlled chaos of her new project, by contrast, provides welcome reassurance that today's filmmakers haven't entirely abandoned the playbook their predecessors passed down. Wilde has found an excellent script, cast the hell out of it (perfectly, indeed), and then endeavoured not to mess up what was set on the page. Here's an overdue return for a cinema that finds ordinary people, with all their hang-ups and insecurities, fascinating; between them, McCormack, Jones and Wilde set up a tasty tag-team encounter between a couple who possibly care too much what other people think and another who have longstanding reasons for not giving a hoot. As a director, Wilde busies herself tracking shifts in energy. This night starts off cranky and awkward, as Rogen and Wilde row and the former eyes Norton from a suspicious distance; it starts to feel more convivial, as the couples split into mutually reinforcing groups of two (Rogen/Cruz, Wilde/Norton); secrets and confidences are shared, bombshells dropped; and then it all starts to get a little too much for some of the participants. Wilde wards off any residual staginess in the text by giving the couples' interactions a borderline manic antsiness, that demonstrated by folks who've been let off the leash for a night: the filmmaking has its own playful, curious, sometimes outright fruity energy, heightened only further by a mischievous Devonté Hynes score, determined to fill any gaps that it can. But Wilde also organises all this conversation intelligently: once the initial small talk is set aside, this foursome get deeper and deeper into it - until at least a couple of them realise they may have got in too deep.

A smart screenplay is one thing, but The Invite also has actors capable of improvising over the top of it for added value; once everyone's taken their seats, we're getting a symphony of people rubbing one another up the wrong way (and finding that they secretly enjoy the sensation). That Rogen has been getting the most glowing notices may partly be down to his status as the underdog in this heavyweight cast, the actor with the most to prove (despite a largely agreeable two-decade career). But his Joe is also the character who has the most to respond to: set on edge by Norton's glibness, irritated by Wilde's urge to suck up to these outsiders, at once startled, aroused and terrified by Cruz's forwardness, he's the one person in this room whom you sense would rather back out and go solo with some weed. (Which may well be the right call, all told.) Yet Wilde, turning cartwheels while hyperventilating, is almost as funny in passing, and though Norton possibly sounds too New Agey to fully convince as a fireman, he also gets a line I don't think I was expecting to hear in a mainstream film in 2026 ("Nobody in America can afford anything these days"). Towards the end, the material's roots begin to show: after all its interpersonal carnage, The Invite offers the conventional closure of a middlebrow stageplay, paying lip service to the idea that what the Rogen-Wilde pairing really needs isn't carnal knowledge but in-person couples' counselling. We're sat down too long; the laughter rate and pulse dips. Yet what comes before it really is stimulating and cheering: a fun night at the movies, a revival of the old-school farce with skill, craft and a progressive, feminist, sex-positive viewpoint (more European than American, finally), and a most effective corrective to a prevailing movie trend. The Invite is what The Drama might have been, if our comedies were still being made by grown-ups with real lives and not sniggering trolls: for once, a talking-point movie actually merits some positive talking about.

The Invite is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

Johnson's travels: "Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie"

The Canadian writer-director-actor-conceptualist Matt Johnson has used the goodwill occasioned by his leftfield tech tale BlackBerry to revive an old pet project. First launched in 2007 as a webseries and later promoted to cable television, Nirvanna The Band The Show was a shuffling postmodern sitcom that tracked two would-be creatives - trilby-sporting schemer Matt (Johnson, playing a flailing version of himself) and tagalong musician pal Jay (Jay McCarrol) - as they pottered around the streets of their native Toronto trying to catch a break, tailed by much the same diegetic camera crew as could be spotted in such millennial mock-docs as The Office and Parks & Rec. This new big-screen variation on a theme actually opens with unused footage of Matt and Jay as they were in 2008, hatching a plan for their band Nirvanna (the spelling or misspelling goes unexplained, but somehow feels pertinent) to headline local nitespot the Rivoli. Cut to: Matt and Jay in the same place in 2025, older and broader in the beam, but no closer to achieving their youthful goal. Still, Matt has a plan. Plans, even, as Matt has always had. All of which is to say you wouldn't have to be au fait with Nirvanna The Band The Series to grasp where Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is coming from. A mix of incredibly complex planning, apparent improvisation and genuine ingenuity, Johnson's film - an answer to the question "what if Jackass had been made by Canadian brainiacs rather than all-American jocks?" - will go on to encompass a death-defying skydive from a prominent Toronto landmark, a time machine fashioned from a rusty old RV, as well as the sight of Matt and Jay, shuffling now towards middle age and its attendant crises, encountering and interacting with their own younger selves. Some of this entails traditional forms of movie trickery, but much of it has been done for real; throughout NTBTSTM, the shooting permits typically issued by municipal authorities to filmmakers never quite seem big enough to cover the full scope of Matt Johnson's imagination. Which may explain why so much of the film looks to have been shot undercover, or otherwise on the fly.

The wider the film roams, the higher it climbs, the richer this decidedly sui generis item becomes: these 100 minutes are at once an expansion or remix of the original show, a lap of honour allowing the real Matt and Jay to realise at least one of their earlier dreams, a remake of Back To The Future with heroes who couldn't be any less like the aspirational Marty McFly, a magic trick of sorts (Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch's super-sharp cutting helps, but you'll also spend at least half the running time wondering how certain shots and effects were realised) and, in its own shambling, shrugging, insistently minor-key way, a demonstration of the cinema's infinite possibilities. NTBTSTM unfolds within a universe of wipeclean boards, where anything and everything could still happen; it involves the chicanery common to summer event movies - giving a sense that our protagonists are adrift in a world that is much bigger than it initially appears - but has none (or fewer) of the overheads and expenses. Somehow both artisanal and spectacular, the film keeps changing shape in surprising, confounding, funny ways. (One early sign Matt's thinking out of the box: the time travel movie he cites onscreen is that mad Ashton Kutcher thing The Butterfly Effect.) Best of all, Johnson makes this questing back-and-forth immense, infectious fun: watching NTBTSTM, you can physically feel the joy of someone making a film on their own terms, revisiting the buoying popular art of their youth, creating and tricking out a world of their own, and doing all of the above while hanging out and goofing off with old friends. (As in The Dirties and BlackBerry, the whole movie hinges on a bromance between two men who have nothing if they don't have each other: the middle stretch is The Butterfly Effect by way of Power Ballad.) The resulting experiment - the closest any film this summer has come to recapturing the puckish, playful, anything-goes spirit of the blockbusters of our childhood - confirms this filmmaker as a prodigious ideas man, perhaps a 21st century Preston Sturges, constitutionally unable to tell a story in the routine manner. In a healthier film ecosystem, our studio chiefs would be dangling the biggest cheques in the Western world before Matt Johnson's busy head - but maybe he's happy with playing the Rivoli.

Nirvanna The Band The Series The Movie is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of June 19-21, 2026):

1 (new) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

2 (1) Disclosure Day (12A) **

3 (2) Obsession (18) *

4 (3) Scary Movie (15)

5 (4) Backrooms (15)

6 (5) Masters of the Universe (12A)

7 (6) Michael (12A)

8 (7) Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (12A)

9 (new) Cocktail 2 (12A)

10 (9) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Furious

2. Cactus Pears

3. Portrait of a Lady on Fire

4. A Better Tomorrow

5. Swimming Pool

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Michael (12)

2 (2) Project Hail Mary (12) ***

3 (re) EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (12) ****

4 (5) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

5 (4) Mortal Kombat 2 (15)

6 (new) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

7 (18) The Good Boy (15) ***

8 (3) Scream 7 (18)

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

10 (27) Wicked: For Good (PG)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Hoppers

2. Blue Moon

3. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

4. The Mastermind

5. The Good Boy

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Saturday, BBC Two, 4pm)

2. Licorice Pizza (Friday, BBC Two, 12 midnight)

3. Diego Maradona [above] (Saturday, Channel 4, 12 midnight)

4. Shiva Baby (Thursday, Channel 4, 2.25am)

5. Thunderball (Sunday, ITV1, 3.10pm)

"The Furious" (Guardian 25/06/26)

The Furious ****

Dir: Kenji Taniyaki. With: Miao Xie, Joe Taslim, Enyou Yang, Brian Le. 113 mins. Cert: 18

It keeps happening: every few years, usually during a run of especially lethargic American spectacles, the needle of screen violence gets recalibrated by a muscular wonder from the East. Thundering along in the bloody footsteps of the Raid films and the Hindi punch-‘em-up Kill, this martial-arts showcase from Japanese-born, Hong Kong-based director Kenji Taniyaki opens in generic dadsploitation territory: “somewhere in Southeast Asia”, as a caption has it, mute Chinese handyman Wang Wei (Miao Xie) tears off after the traffickers who’ve nabbed his daughter (Enyou Yang). Having Hulk-smashed its way out of the Taken box, though, The Furious starts to crank up. Boy, does it crank up: the closing half-hour achieves a pummelling intensity unlikely to be matched by any other 2026 release.

There are further developments: cribbing from John Woo’s buddy movies, Taniyaki has his hero run into an undercover journo (Danny Dyer lookalike Joe Taslim) with his own reasons for chasing the traffickers. Yet this route-one plot chiefly bears out the advantages of creatives following straight narrative lines while turning the dial to eleven. The complexities are reserved for the frame itself: here, jawdroppingly limber, seemingly boneless performers pull off bruising manoeuvres on concrete floors, Taniyaki’s well-placed cameras capturing unexpected delicacies and flourishes amid otherwise crunching dustups. It’s that deathless critical cliché for movie action – balletic – only someone’s brought a crossbow and a ballpeen hammer to the dance, and they’re intent on using them.

The Saturday night crowd won’t care, but Taniyaki doesn’t yet have the architectural sense that elevated the Raids, projects born of dojo and drawing board alike. And some may prefer their action more culturally specific: the film screens here in a base-covering polyglot version, part-subtitled, part-dubbed. The precision of its setpieces, though, is inarguable: wherever editor Chris Tonick cuts, he crafts soaring rhymes between bodies in motion. Climaxing with a royal rumble for the ages, Taniyaki’s film is never quite as bludgeoning as it might have been, tempering its ferocity with athletic and technical skill, matching that intensity with invention and delivering as much exhilaration as evisceration. One note of warning: you may require a long lie down afterwards. 

The Furious opens in selected cinemas from today.

On DVD: "The Mastermind"

To the freewheeling mobility of the American independent cinema, Kelly Reichardt has introduced complication and obstruction in a series of droll anti-thrillers that also functioned as lucid, probing character studies. (The Kelly Reichardt Obstructions would be a fine title for any monograph.) In her 1994 debut River of Grass, the lovers on the run didn't - and couldn't - get very far; her 2010 Western Meek's Cutoff stranded its characters in the middle of nowhere; 2013's Night Moves centred on system-smashing anarchists who, in succumbing to their own paranoia, couldn't follow through on their own best intentions. Things ain't easy in a Kelly Reichardt film - another monograph title there, perhaps - and her characters have a tendency to make life doubly difficult for themselves. The Mastermind - its title as ironic as you like - bears down on another of this director's drifters, a non-complimentary term in this instance, as the film's anti-hero is someone who really should have gained some sort of direction by the point we find him: thirtysomething deadbeat JB Mooney (Josh O'Connor), who's forsaken steady employment and responsible parenting in order to plot a heist on a provincial art museum. By complete coincidence, Reichardt's previous film, 2022's Showing Up, concerned the trials and tribulations of a working artist; here, by contrast, is someone aiming to get rich quick without putting in the hours, a career criminal for the age of A.I.. In the non-Reichardt version of this story, Mooney pulls it together in tense setpieces and redeems himself in the process, possibly even reuniting with his estranged family. In the Reichardt version, however, he messes up again: he just about gets the heist done - in the clumsiest, most half-assed way imaginable - but then falls to pieces, leaving JB Mooney with and as a big nothing.

So there's already a major caveat here: you will need to know what this filmmaker is getting at (and has long been getting at) in order to even partly vibe with it. (Were you to stick it on expecting another Thomas Crown Affair, you would likely be wholly underwhelmed: save your money for Michael B. Jordan's upcoming remake.) The perverse fun of The Mastermind instead lies in watching Josh O'Connor potter around aimlessly. This proves a markedly different pleasure from watching O'Connor in the recent Wake Up Dead Man, where his character was altogether more focused and purposeful under his cassock: that guy had the Lord in his heart. God only knows what JB Mooney's deal is. (I'm not sure even he knows beyond a certain point, though Reichardt floats the intriguing possibility that this lawbreaking may be Mooney's delayed adolescent rebellion against his father, a senior judge.) Time and again, this camera emphasises the physical aspect of the protagonist's pottering. A long stretch either side of the midpoint reframes Mooney as akin to a small woodland creature - a weasel, possibly - squirrelling his ill-gotten gains away for the winter while kicking soil over his own mess. It's a funny if somewhat deflating and anticlimactic gag that absolutely no good comes from all this huffing and puffing: like the lovers in River of Grass, Mooney doesn't get very far, either. (Not least as there are wilier predators on this trail.) Is there too much pottering, not enough plot? Almost certainly. And I couldn't quite shake the thought that Reichardt has paced similar mean streets before, albeit with the less saleable Larry Fessenden in the lead role. But The Mastermind is finally very indie in the old, oppositional sense of the word: what Reichardt means to say is that there is another way of looking at and telling these stories, and that the kinds of men our crime fictions lionise aren't always as aspirational as they appear.

The Mastermind is available on DVD through MUBI from Monday, and available to stream via MUBI.