A little Knight music: "Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert"

Tempted as one might be to cite the Christopher Nolan effect, it turns out we have Johnny Marr to thank for the cinema's pre-eminent musical maximalist getting his own Beyoncé or Taylor Swift-style concert movie. Early on in Paul Dugdale's Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert, we learn that it was Marr - who collaborated with Zimmer on the last Bond soundtrack, and whose son Nile plays guitar with the composer's live band - who first suggested Zimmer take a show on the road and thereby reconnect with his pop roots; the film's subject, in what isn't his only display of humility before these cameras, insists he'd have been quite happy staying at home writing music. Video killed the radio star, but the movies have made a touring act of him. What we've ended up with here is a two-and-a-half-hour record of that live show as performed at the Coca-Cola Arena in Dubai, where it was lapped up by a snap-happy crowd doubtless grateful to have something to do beyond idly blowing their personal fortunes in shopping malls and getting burnt up by the sun. 

The Zimmer who fronts this show is a jovial cove, bescarfed and beaming behind his synths, cornily courteous to his hosts ("the future is here"), generally self-effacing (of his Pirates of the Caribbean scores, he insists "I just bashed them out") while dutiful in singling out his collaborators for individual praise. Together with several of the most photogenic musicians in existence, he works through the hits - or most memorable cues - from the Dunes, the Batmen, Gladiator, Inception and the like; by way of additional VFM - this being one of those "event cinema" boondoggles for which you somehow have to pay extra - these crowd favourites are interspersed with filler sitdowns in which Zimmer chats with artistic collaborators (Pharrell, the Eilishes, Denis V, Sir Chris N), backers (Jerry Bruckheimer, a producer here) and those whose movements his music has scored (Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet). These are by far the documentary's weakest element, beset by the conversational equivalent of airkissing, too brief for anyone to go too deep, and clearly inserted out of an insecurity that Zimmer's name and presence alone won't be enough to get bums on seats. (The full houses for Zimmer's live tour - and the recent proliferation of unofficial "Hans Zimmer Experience" concerts in provincial arts venues nationwide - would suggest otherwise.) If you really wanted to find out what drives Zimmer to create these cathedrals of sound, you'd have to send in a seasoned musicologist, not Little Timmy Caramel; as it is, these editorial Hail Marys serve as readymade opportunities for toilet breaks.

Hasten back to your seat, though, because the main event serves as its own, reasonably compelling answer to the question of just how many people, and how much equipment, may be required to make a sound this vast. Zimmer's touring ensemble isn't some delicate, willowy string quartet, travelling from one mega-corporate arena to the next via charabanc, but a proper, robust troupe, roughly characterised as the Blue Man Group x Stomp, some of whom can be seen smashing the shit out of drumkits that resemble Nolanesque metropoli in themselves. We're bordering on prog territory here: a lot of onstage kit, a busy lightshow, elevated degrees of technical difficulty and virtuosity. (Also, and especially in the case of Zimmer's go-to guitarist Guthrie Govan, highly Rick Wakeman-ish hair.) It means Dugdale always has something to cut to whenever we assume the music can't layer up any more: a piccolo solo that might otherwise get lost amid a wall of thumping SOUND, a cellist in bondage gear and warpaint wielding the tool of her trade as if it were some rudimentary torture implement, flaxen-haired giantesses shrieking or speaking in tongues. (There's a nice moment in the spotlight for Lisa Gerrard, the mainstay of indie recluses Dead Can Dance, whose ululations helped make the Gladiator score soar so.) Even without a Nolan or Villeneuve calling action, it's a spectacle.

It may be that, much as prog had eventually to give way to the blunt-force immediacies of punk, film scoring will itself undergo some revolutionary Year Zero in the not too distant future: that our soundtracks will ditch the numbing parps, the casts of thousands, and revert to new wavers like Mica Levi and this year's Oscar winner Daniel Blumberg making odd, atonal noises on their own in small dark rooms, to movie music that is altogether quicker and quieter about setting a mood or creating a vibe, and that allows an audience to sit more readily with their own thoughts and silence. Yet Dugdale's film allows us to both see and hear why Zimmer's music continues to be as revered as it has been, and why its composer may well have a greater claim to auteur status than many of the filmmakers for whom he's worked: several pieces here (cues from 2019's almost instantly forgotten X-Men: Dark Phoenix, anyone?) actually benefit for being detached and isolated from the sluggish images to which they were once attached. This is music that goes hard, at a time when a lot else about the American popular cinema has lost its directionality and force.

Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert has encore screenings in selected Cineworld, Odeon and Showcase cinemas throughout the week.

In memoriam: Émilie Dequenne (Telegraph 21/03/25)

Émilie Dequenne, who has died from a rare adrenal cancer aged 43, was an expressive Belgian performer who won the Cannes Best Actress prize at seventeen for her debut role: that of a disenfranchised teenager struggling to keep her head above the poverty line in brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Rosetta (1999).

With a rigorous realism, the film enshrined its waffle-making heroine’s resilience and resourcefulness, while also lamenting the tough choices forced upon her by circumstance. Her tomboyish features hardening like batter, Dequenne made a credible grafter, clinging tenaciously to Rosetta’s bedtime mantra (“I have a normal life, I won’t be left behind”) even as her fortunes took several turns for the worse. 

A tearful Dequenne dedicated her Cannes gong to the aunt who’d insisted she audition: “I wanted to respond to casting ads, but I was a little nervous about doing it because you don't really know who you’ll run into in Belgium.” The Dardennes, however, had been so struck by Dequenne’s inner force they’d cast her twenty minutes into said audition; here, as Luc observed, was “someone who had fire in her belly”. 

The performance that resulted was equally physical and intuitive; Dequenne told Cahiers du Cinéma “the role was so realistic, you couldn’t play it, only live it”. Yet that placed clear burdens on one so relatively inexperienced, leading the actress to develop what she called “my little ritual” after each day’s filming: “I took off my shoes, ran a bath, and phoned my mother and insisted we talk about anything else.” 

Émilie Dequenne was born on August 29, 1981 in Beloeil in the Wallonia region, the oldest of two daughters to carpenter Daniel Dequenne and his wife Brigitte. Though the formerly industrialised province of Hainaut, where the family lived, was no cosmopolitan hotspot (“you had to travel 25km to go see a film”), Dequenne grew up in very different circumstances to the put-upon Rosetta. “I was always dancing and singing on tables,” she told The Guardian in 2013. “I loved clowning about.”

 
She studied diction and elocution at the Académie de Musique in Baudour and attended the theatre workshop La Relève in Ladeuze, where she made her stage debut in a production Jean-Paul Alègre’s Comment le Grand Cirque Traviata se transforma en petit navire.

After Rosetta, fully two years passed until Dequenne reappeared, this time resplendent in lipstick amid the effects-driven fantasy-horror Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001). It was a rare genre excursion for an actress who thereafter specialised in French-language auteur cinema, several examples of which crossed the Channel.

Dequenne’s forte became knotty characterisations that defied her cherubic looks: Strindberg’s Miss Julie at the Théâtre Marigny, Paris while she was in her mid-twenties, the victim of an alleged anti-Semitic attack in André Téchiné’s based-on-true-events drama The Girl on the Train (La fille du RER, 2009). She excelled in Joachim Lafosse’s Our Children (À perdre la raison, 2012), as a vulnerable young mother driven to murderous extremes.

She turned up as a sympathetic copper in the first series of the French-set BBC1 hit The Missing (2014-16), then returned to the cinema, winning a César for her supporting role as a betrayed wife in Emmanuel Mouret’s Love Affair(s) (Les choses qu’on dit, les choses qu’on fait, 2020) and playing the grieving mother in Lukas Dhont’s arthouse success Close (2022).

After making her diagnosis public in August 2023, she continued to work, returning to Cannes last May to mark Rosetta’s 25th anniversary and promote the post-apocalyptic thriller Survive (Survivre, 2024), in which she battled killer crabs. Her final film was the Belgian bullying drama TKT (2024).

In December 2024, Dequenne gave her final interview to the TF1 show Sept à huit, where she reflected on the return of a cancer that had previously gone into remission, and her new, thirty-pills-a-day treatment: “Deep down, I know perfectly well that I will not live as long as expected… I am only 43 years old. I have always dreamed of living until at least eighty and then drifting off in my sleep. That is what I pray for.”

She is survived by her husband, the actor Michel Ferracci, and by a daughter, the actress and artist Milla Savarese, from an earlier relationship with the DJ Alexandre Savarese.

Émilie Dequenne, born August 29, 1981, died March 16, 2025. 

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of March 14-16, 2025):

1 (1) Mickey 17 (15) **

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

3 (new) Black Bag (15) ****

4 (3) Marching Powder (18)

5 (4) Captain America: Brave New World (12A)

6 (5) Dog Man (U)

7 (new) Last Breath (15)

8 (9) Mufasa: The Lion King (PG)

9 (6) The Monkey (15)

10 (new) Fidelio - Met Opera 2025 (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Black Bag

2. O Brother, Where Art Thou?

3. Away 

4. Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.

5. Flow

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (2) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

2 (new) A Real Pain (15) ***

3 (1) Gladiator II (15) ***

4 (3) Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PG)

5 (4) Paddington in Peru (PG)

6 (new) Dog Man (U)

7 (5) Moana 2 (U) ***

8 (6) Mufasa: The Lion King (PG)

9 (7) Conclave (12) ****

10 (15) Kraven the Hunter (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Dahomey

2. All We Imagine as Light

3. A Real Pain

4. Moana 2

5. Gladiator II

My top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Big Sleep [above] (Saturday, BBC Two, 2.40pm)

2. The Producers (Sunday, BBC Two, 10.45pm)

3. The Prestige (Sunday, BBC One, 10.30pm)

4. Get Out (Friday, BBC One, 11.40pm)

5. Selma (Tuesday, BBC Two, 11.05pm)

On demand: "Dog Star Man"

The breakout success of the underground collective billed as Brakhage - husband-and-wife artists Stan and Jane Brakhage - 1964's Dog Star Man proves far less of an endurance test than the later, mortuary-based The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, but may still remain something of a headscratcher: a flickerbook of half-glimpsed, half-digested imagery, composed much like diary entries in five parts shot over three years in the early 1960s, and presented in total silence. What are we looking at? The more pertinent question to ask may be what aren't we looking at, given that some of the answers would seem to include: canine POV footage, flares erupting on the surface of a distant planet, avalanches, landslides and lava flows, glimpses of unidentified cities and forests, surgical footage, cultures being raised in a petridish, the micro set alongside the macro and the metro. You can tell it's an underground film, because for some duration, all we have to latch onto as fully recognisable are hazy shots of human genitalia, smuggled into sight much as Tyler Durden did the rogue phallus in Fight Club. Yet clear areas of interest emerge. Where The Act of Seeing..., made by an artist entering middle age, lingered over death and destruction, Dog Star Man concerns itself with creation and the natural world. (Are those fuzzy blobs spores or nipples?) Were you searching for apt music to run alongside or counteract the film's forceful soundlessness, most commercial recordings of Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" and "The Firebird Suite" run almost exactly the same duration.

Amid the Brakhages' blitz of found and filmed footage, some evolutionary thinking gradually makes itself apparent. If the prelude is a rat-a-tat-tat barrage, at once stunning and somewhat discombobulating, later parts are composed in a more measured fashion, in line with the film's structuring narrative device: one bearded man's long, slow climb to the top of a mountain in wintry conditions. (With dog.) Patience is obviously required, but you can both see and feel the underlying vision deepening and maturing as the Brakhages press on with their project and approach the age of thirty: the initial attempt to look at everything in great haste, as a newborn would, is eventually replaced by an emphasis on the kind of imagery - some beautiful, some bloody, some plain bewildering - which sears itself onto the memory, that stays with us for the remainder of our days. That the film has endured - while passing out of the bowels of the Anthology Film Archives and into mainstream circulation via YouTube - is surely down to the fact it was left eternally open to interpretation and reinterpretation. At its most profound, Dog Star Man plays like a dazzling highlights reel for the cinema, and for life itself; at its most trivial, a ready lookbook for works to come. Terrence Malick built an entire career on it, and 95% of art-school graduates who directed music videos from the late 1980s onwards had to have seen it - rising to 97% for anyone working in the dance and shoegaze sectors.

Dog Star Man is now streaming via YouTube.

A river runs through it: "Flow"

The Latvian Gints Zilbalodis announced himself as a major new player in global animation with the surreal, wordless imagery of 2019's Away, to all intents and purposes a one-man job. His follow-up Flow reaches for greater scale and heft - familiar production bodies are listed in the opening credits, as is a director of animation who isn't Zilbalodis himself - and perhaps for a dash more mass appeal in its centring of a wide-eyed feline, living on what appears to be some sort of Cat Island and navigating rapidly rising water levels. So far, this expansion plan has proved a success: at both this year's Golden Globes and Oscars, Flow beat out Pixar's Inside Out 2, DreamWorks' The Wild Robot and the new Wallace & Gromit to win the Best Animated Feature prize. Even so, Zilbalodis continues to operate some way from the animated norm, rejecting the recognisably Disneyish for other influences (and, indeed, the otherworldly). More so than even the immersive Away, Flow owes some debt to many long hours of gaming; it's clearly been raised on folktales, in its preference for parables and suggestive metaphor over frenetic motion; and it often recalls Ghibli, not just in its backdrops and messaging, but in its frequent pauses for reflection. (As with the image Zilbalodis opens with and returns to time and again: that of our black tabby hero peering into a swelling mass of water.) It's open, in other words, to other approaches. Take, for example, the dogs our furry adventurer encounters on his travels, which initially strike the eye as ugly for avatars in a commercially released animation: blockily pixellated, bluntly unfinessed, they recall turn-of-the-millennium screensavers, or the dancing baby in Ally McBeal. They are also, demonstrably, a deliberate choice. In this landscape, cats are naturally more than a little nervous about the rising tides. These dogs, on the other hand, bound on blithely, running with the pack, confident it's only a drop of rain. You wouldn't have to take too great a leap to map these reactions onto humankind's responses to the climate crisis.

So there's a message - and we should, as ever, heed Sam Goldwyn's apocryphal zinger about messages in movies - but you could equally allow yourself just to be swept away by the strange, beguiling (yes) flow of the images that message is carried within. There's something both very striking and seductive about the way Zilbalodis's camera (or line of approach, if camera is too concrete a term for animation) floats; it changes not just our understanding of this environment, but our sense of how we move around it, and actually brings the viewer closer to how we dream (and sometimes - as when we see the tiny cat adrift in an ever more vast lake - to how we submit to nightmare). The dreaminess is heightened by the fact Flow plays out in as close to silence as our movies are now allowed to get, with only the odd evocative sound effect for echolocation. Somewhere in the Zilbalodis method is a rejection of the anchoring sureties of so much commercial animation: gone is the photorealistic design, the camera tethered to a human POV, the characters intended to look, sound and behave like us for the most part. He's not yet gone full Švankmajer, but Zilbalodis doesn't want to mollycoddle or pacify us; he's okay with the viewer being discombobulated, unsettled or stressed, not least because it fits with what he's saying. Even so, Flow drifts into more abstract territory than Away, which gave us a boy with human features to latch onto. Weirdly, the film shares with autumnal megahit The Wild Robot a near-total absence of bipedal life, but leans more heavily into the implication we may have long since gone under as a species. 84 minutes remains a long time for a film to have to sustain itself without obvious human interest; and if you're neither much of an animal person nor an animation nut, there are stretches here that will resemble a game on autoplay mode, very pretty but not as involving as they might be. As a vision of the future, Flow is also by definition grim. (Inside Out 2 retains the advantage when it comes to human behaviour. And gags.) Like his tabby protagonist, attempting to paw out what remains of his sodden kingdom, Zilbalodis is walking the boundaries of his artform, seeing how far he can go in any one direction while still taking an audience with him. Some have followed enthusiastically, others still have cheered; if I hung back and dragged my feet a little here, the animator's endeavour remains admirable all the same. There aren't many attempting something so conspicuously different in this most crowded of fields.

Flow opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.

She's gotta have it: "Just Another Girl on the I.R.T."

Making a welcome return to UK screens this weekend, Leslie Harris's 1992 film Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. was for some decades one of the lost texts of American independent and New Black Cinema: much acclaimed at Sundance (where it won the Special Jury Prize), briefly toured around the Western world (including Britain, where it was distributed by the late, lamented Metro Tartan), and thereafter confined to a dusty shelf in the Miramax vaults. Shot on a shoestring after the fashion of Spike Lee's early, breakthrough works, this is the fresh and freewheeling tale of Chantel (Ariyan A. Johnson), a whipsmart teenage New Yorker - the acronym of the title refers to a local rail network - who, between Ferris Bueller-like asides to camera, has to negotiate minimum-wage, convenience-store labour, babysitting her younger brothers, and the condescension of the men around her, from suitors with possessive tendencies to a headmaster who insists she "tone that mouth down". Harris, by pointed contrast, affords this character full voice. From an early stage, the film offers the joy of watching young performers who respond to one another as actual teenagers do - rudely, raucously, indifferent to how any grown-ups might tell them how to behave.

Issues will eventually encroach upon these frames - AIDS, the elevated deathrate among African-American men, and both pregnancy and abortion after Chantal succumbs to the dubious charms of some twit with a Jeep - but this remains first and foremost a film made about people and places, scenes and situations this director clearly knows; it wasn't trading in the lip service American movies have rather rotely come to pay, but real, vital representation. The tradeoff is with some occasionally rough-edged construction: the initial, winning sunniness gives way to still astonishing nihilism amid the kind of finale the Sundance Lab was set up to finesse. Still, rougher-edged independent films of this moment earned their (male) directors the keys to the castle - and there's an element of strategy in play that makes it even more surprising (and depressing) to discover Harris hasn't directed a feature since. Some of the limited resources here went towards a terrific early Nineties hiphop soundtrack that lends sequences a dynamism and energy whenever the performances wobble or the filmmaking syntax gets rudimentary. And the sparky Johnson, a sometime choreographer whose acting career looks to have petered out in the early Noughties, should really have become a postergirl the way Jada Pinkett and Angela Bassett did - but then Hollywood was subsequently more invested in providing us with three Chrises to choose between, and a Ryan for every occasion.

Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. returns to selected cinemas from Friday.

Neat neat neat: "Black Bag"

One of the pleasures of cinemagoing in the March-April period is the sensation we're entering Hollywood's research-and-development lab, to observe those projects deemed too chancy for an awards season berth, yet not turbocharged or otherwise commercialised enough for the summer months. Say what you like about Mickey 17 - and I did - it was a gamble, and it's been followed into the multiplexes by Black Bag, the second film in two months (after January's Presence) from the ever-industrious, ever-experimentally minded Steven Soderbergh. Penned by the seasoned David Koepp, the new film folds in intelligence gained from such recent TV hits as Apple's Slow Horses and Prime's Mr. & Mrs. Smith reboot. It's equal parts spy thriller and romantic drama, parsing how international ideological conflict might be heightened and complicated by developments on the domestic front, yet with a characteristic perversity Soderbergh casts the two coldest performers of their generation in the lead roles, and - unexpectedly, miraculously - gets these icy slivers to strike genuine sparks. As with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the action centres on an odd, bespectacled cove called George, played here by the slippery, quasi-reptilian Michael Fassbender as a British intelligence officer apparently fused into his own black polo necks. (You wonder where he served his apprenticeship: the Left Bank?) We join him as he's assigned the task of ferreting out the suspected mole in his unit, a challenge made trickier by the fact his wife and fellow agent Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) is herself on the list of five suspects. His initial plan involves inviting this quintet round for a sitdown meal of daal laced with truth serum, at which point we note Soderbergh has cast film and TV faces schooled in doubletalk, innuendo and backstabbing: bearded elder Tom Burke involved in a tempestuous but not necessarily dangerous liaison with tech wonk Marisa Abela, shrink Naomie Harris (a sometime Moneypenny, no less) surely too worldly for cocky gamer swain Regé-Jean Page. George and Kathryn are meant to be the old hands in this context, a couple who've weathered countless storms together - but is she now cheating on him, and/or betraying her country? Given that the couple are keen cinemagoers - watchers by trade - and that a discarded ticket stub gets introduced as potentially damning evidence, Black Bag also poses a further, more self-reflexive question: can we trust an American movie this far into the 21st century?

Strap me to a polygraph - as George does several of his colleagues heading into the last reel - and my answer would still be yes, though the film's wider success may depend on your having the ambivert-neatfreak sweet spot that Soderbergh and Koepp are targeting here. Set beside the agreeably scuzzy Slow Horses, this is certainly a gentrified vision of the spy game, its harder yards gained not on park benches but at dinner parties in well-furnished rooms. (The suspense hinges on the fears of loners invited to enter into group social activity.) Already, there has been much online lusting over Kathryn's wardrobe; I'll confess my own head was turned by the tea lights that pop off the screen when these couples first sit down to eat. Mid-period Soderbergh delights in setting himself limitations - one location in Kimi and Presence, extended sitdowns here - but he knows how to tart these spaces up, to stoke visual pleasure. Clock the film's especially diffuse idea of lighting, which threatens at points to white-or-black out the screen like the foggable glass MI5 uses to shield meeting rooms from prying eyes. (Not seeing is the enemy of seeing.) These nifty games of control only bolster Koepp's script, which forces its characters into two-person tête-à-têtes designed to eke something out or get someone to show their cards. Soderbergh appears to have spent much of the last two decades watching even more TV than he's directed, and thinking about both what works there and what merits being restored to the bigger screen: the scenes in the therapist's office ensure Black Bag owes as much to HBO's In Treatment as it does to, say, The Ipcress File. What he's pulled into shape here is a limber, double-jointed hybrid entertainment: a movie that feels as involved and detailed as any spinoff, or as if it could inspire a spinoff, but which crucially doesn't require you to have sat through ten hours of preamble, and - even more crucially - wraps itself up inside 93 minutes, giving us all time to get home and pay the babysitter. Like its characters, Black Bag is spectacularly self-contained. Yet it speaks to an intriguing moment in pop culture, when after a decade-and-a-half of megabudget multiverse splurges, shows like The Pitt and Adolescence are demonstrating there may well be some back-to-basics virtue in resisting the call of the tech bros; in arming good directors with good scripts and good actors, allowing actors' faces to be read rather than obscuring them in vast clouds of pixels, and ditching the exposition in favour of suggestive silences and the mysteries of the human heart. There may be no more radical proposition made inside a multiplex in 2025: what if we went back to doing things the way we once did, in the days when our movies used to work?

Black Bag is now playing in cinemas nationwide.