Eastern promises: "Erupcja"

Where February's The Moment found Charli xcx representing what she knew - the vagaries of the modern music business - the new indie curio Erupcja, which may not have been made or distributed as widely here without the singer's participation, offers a slightly bigger challenge: an attempt on the singer's part to walk a few hundred miles in another woman's shoes. Pete Ohs' film revives that Nineties strain of American peregrination - think Before Sunrise or Barcelona - which travelled in search of some greater perspective on the follies of romantic youth; it has good ideas and sound instincts, even if the overall execution left me shrugging for much of its 71 minutes. Charli plays Bethany, one half of a vaguely hipsterish London couple who've booked a weekend break to Warsaw in Poland. Unlike boyfriend Rob (Robert Popper lookalike Will Madden), who hopes to propose on the couple's last night in town, Bethany has been this way before - as, surely, has Ohs, sweeping us up on a guided tour of one of Europe's less filmed and therefore less familiar cities. ("I never thought Warsaw would be this green," the wide-eyed Rob remarks, although nothing in the film proves as green as Rob himself.) Bethany's reasons for returning soon become clear. In passing, we meet Nel (Lena Góra), a reluctant florist who lives and works in the city, with whom, we learn, the lovestruck Bethany once had a fling and hopes to reconnect; yet Nel has another lingering ex in Ula (Agata Trzebuchowska, the young nun of Pawlikowski's Ida). Round and round they all go, to the accompaniment of what sounds like a fairground calliope and beneath the all-seeing eye of a Polish narrator (Jacek Zubiel), until the sudden eruption of Mount Etna plays havoc with European air travel and strands everybody in place. Moral of the story: you can't fight nature.

You can see what Ohs is getting at. Erupcja has the neatness of a short story Rohmer might have filmed, coupled to the openness of those early Godard features; it's one of the few films set over a weekend that you can imagine actually being shot over a (busy) weekend, on the hoof, with a skeleton crew gathering at Stansted around a pop star travelling without make-up so as to prevent any onlookers making a fuss. As a drama, it's fairly conventional: young woman caught between dull security (as represented by poor old Rob, with his deeply trad ideas of couples activities and his longing glances at the nearby Novotel) and the romantic possibility Nel embodies. Taking it out onto the streets freshens this material up, as it did back in Godard's day; but I'm less certain that Ohs succeeds in bulking this anecdote out. As so often with early, microbudget works, the performances are variable, governed less by clear and sharp direction than by who's in town or willing to travel and how prepared they are to work for scale (or less). Ohs is at least fairly shrewd in the way he co-opts Charli's emergent screen persona - here's a gal who cares not for the bourgeois restrictions of the brassiere, and really doesn't want to be pinned down elsewhere else; Bethany, indeed, is such a flighty character the film allows her to vanish from sight for much of its second half - but the supporting characterisations come off somewhere between colourless and wan. Much as Charli's not yet a film star in the way she absolutely is a pop star, so too Erupcja isn't an entirely satisfying movie: increasingly, it seems slight - even jejune - in comparison with the films with which it enters into discussion, gesturing towards rich Rohmerian wisdom, but ultimately stuck at an A24 level of depth. It's a pity, as the stronger scenes and stretches here suggest a semi-promising miniature, fashioned in the right adventurous spirit: at this point in time, it's just reassuring to know there are American filmmakers who've retained possession of a passport.

Erupcja is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of May 29-31, 2026):

1 (new) Backrooms (15)

2 (1) Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (12A)

3 (2) Michael (12A)

4 (3) Obsession (18) *

5 (4) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12A)

6 (6) The Sheep Detectives (PG)

7 (new) Tuner (15) ***

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

9 (new) Power Ballad (15) ****

10 (7) Passenger (15) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Misfits

2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire

3. Power Ballad

4. Bridesmaids

5. Tuner

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

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

3 (10) G.O.A.T. (PG)

4 (5) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

5 (7) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

6 (11) The Housemaid (15)

7 (15) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

8 (6) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (15)

9 (9) Hoppers (U) ****

10 (12) Wicked: For Good (PG)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Hoppers

2. Blue Moon

3. Cold Storage

4. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

5. Nouvelle Vague

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Great Expectations (Saturday, BBC Two, 10.20am)

2. Unforgiven [above] (Sunday, BBC Two, 10.45pm)

3. BlackBerry (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.35pm)

4. Nomadland (Sunday, Channel 4, 1am)

5. Ali & Ava (Tuesday, BBC Two, 12.05am)

Sound of metal: "Tuner"

While the hip young cinekids rally around their preferred online creators, Tuner is being offered as the seniors' special in the screen next door. Here is an old-school New York thriller such as your poppa - maybe even your grandpoppa - used to make: unsexy, unlikely to go viral in the way Backrooms and Obsession have, such a throwback that it features Dustin Hoffman in a leading role. Emergent cherub Leo Woodall, from Nuremberg and the last Bridget Jones, is Niki, a workaday piano tuner with an extraordinary gift: a sensitivity of hearing such that he can also crack safes with the right equipment to hand. Hoffman is his legitimate employer, with whom our boy spends his afternoon bickering as they wend from one chichi residence to the next; Havana Rose Liu is the piano student Niki impresses with his perfect pitch in a scene that recalls what Hoffman was doing with playing cards back in Rain Man, itself now approaching its fortieth anniversary; and Lior Raz is the heavy who makes Niki an offer he feels he cannot refuse after his mentor gets in a financial jam. As if Tuner couldn't be any less cutting-edge, it's pursuing a very old plot - the kid who gets in up to his (in this instance, ultra-delicate) ears - of a kind that might well have been the basis of a poverty-row noir fashioned seventy-odd years ago, a comparison the film appears to welcome, given the copious jazz and blues standards on its soundtrack.

The director is recent Oscar-winner Daniel Roher (who also co-writes with Robert Ramsey), and you could probably drive yourself crazy wondering what the new film has in common with his documentary Navalny. (Most likely scenario: Roher took a meeting the day after his Oscar win, the suits asked him what he wanted to do next, and he suggested something light and fictional.) Some large part of Tuner - actually, its strongest part - does, however, function as a kind of character study, gradually drawing out, as a documentarist might well seek to draw out, the protagonist's personality, belief system, strengths, weaknesses and red lines. This is easily the best showcase yet for Woodall, who exudes something of the young Ryan Gosling's sleepy, shuffling chill from within a snug hoodie, and gets to play diverse duets with each of his co-stars: sparring with gramps Hoffman, flirting awkwardly with Liu, gulping before Raz, and having his hair ruffled by Tovah Feldshuh as Hoffman's wife. One big giveaway that Tuner is an oldtimers' movie at heart: it's not unduly fussed about instant gratification, instead letting all the above relationships build and simmer. 

What thrills there are here remain defiantly analogue: occasional setpieces, made in the editing suite, in which Woodall is set to twiddling a knob against the clock while The Zone of Interest sound designer Johnnie Burn turns circles to discern exactly when a pin drops and the mechanisms click. Here, as elsewhere, the movie is revealed as less concerned with worldbuilding or statement-making than it is with tinkering. Much as these characters are bothered by niggly little things (loud noises, the coda to a piano concerto), so those behind the camera find ways to nudge this narrative on (as with a mid-film, very old-school montage) or set themselves technical tasks to accomplish (Burn, for his part, engineers a couple of wrenchingly violent sound cuts late on). It's neither as spectacular nor as zeitgeisty as what's on in the screen next door, and arguably too mechanical in its closing reels: here, Roher starts to force his plot, where previously he was content to tease out developments. (That noisome crunching you can hear is a clunky gear change or two.) A note-perfect ending, however, should help you forgive some of its flaws - and any truly healthy cinema needs its mechanics and tinkerers as much as it needs its artists and visionaries.

Tuner is now showing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "La Grazia"

We're not quite talking Luca Guadagnino levels of copybook-blotting here, but abundance has inarguably dulled the lustre of the Paolo Sorrentino filmography these past few years. Too-easy funding begat far too many movies, few of which sustained the bracing formal rigour of this director's 2004 breakthrough The Consequences of Love, most of which merely restated whatever Sorrentino was getting at with The Great Beauty a decade or so ago. Yet La Grazia marks an appreciable change of tack, and the return of Sorrentino the political junkie, previously front and centre in 2008's Il Divo and 2018's Loro. After a lengthy preamble that briefs us on the legal powers and responsibilities of the Italian President, we're reintroduced to Toni Servillo - baleful as ever - on the rooftop of the presidential palace in Rome, from where his fictional head of state Mariano De Santis gazes out over the country he's been appointed to keep an eye on; from this high vantage point, the presidency would appear as ceremonial a position as the gargoyles carved into the building's walls. 

De Santis, we learn, has been nicknamed Reinforced Concrete: "it's flattering", his top general assures him, although some of that tag's implied dullness lingers. An aging bureaucrat, a sometime judge, widowed and still heartbroken with it, he's a decent cove, broadly liberal in his opinions, far from a tyrant, but even he has to admit "I'm the most boring person I know", a verdict Sorrentino underlines by surrounding De Santis with his usual Felliniesque hangers-on. He has six months left in office - a period he shares with an Italian astronaut orbiting the Earth - so the question becomes what to do with that time. He puts off a proposed Vogue interview about his style choices and threatens to dodder off into his own memories, before his daughter-slash-assistant reminds him he still has official business on the table: two potential pardons, which formalise the grace of the title but are complicated by human emotion and the political climate, and a euthanasia bill which likewise requires delicate handling. Suddenly, thanks to the grace of Sorrentino's framing and Servillo's central performance, this grey old man, who might otherwise strike the eye as an Italianate John Major, becomes an unexpectedly compelling protagonist: someone trying to resist the inevitable, seize the moment, find peace and make a real and positive difference in this world. Just one of those goals would usually be tough enough.

Is Mariano De Santis an analogue of some kind for his aging director? I ask, because Sorrentino has himself presented, in the course of his last few productions, as a filmmaker getting ever more set in his own ways, hung up on the false equation that insists excess + shimmer + sheen = cinema. The first sign he's attempting something new here is the overarching greyness of De Santis's world: overcast skies, pencil-etching exteriors, meeting rooms (this character's natural habitat) where the director practically abandons us to breathe in the dust and feel the silent weight of history bearing down. For a long while, until De Santis beats a midfilm retreat to his Alpine hometown in a bid to clear his head and get some perspective, only Gabo Barranco's electronic score - representing the pulse of the modern world - is allowed to unsettle the status quo. In the meantime, it's the people who grab us, not the places - and one reason Sorrentino has proven much more reliable of late than Guadagnino has been his sure grasp of character: he's something like a cartoonist - a prodigiously gifted visual artist - defining the folks who appear before us in a few brisk, economic strokes before handing over these sketches to his performers to fill in any gaps.

Servillo, one of the great minimalist actors of our time, once more conveys multitudes with a melancholy gaze, a shrug, a reset of the jaw. This De Santis fellow is a man out of time in every sense: agonised by issues of legacy, he's like a better paid (and naturally far better appointed) variant of the wearied salarymen played by Takashi Shimura in Ikiru and Bill Nighy in Living. But he's also a character who speaks fruitfully to the present moment, awash as that is with hands-off politicians elected to oversee managed decline rather than bring about real change, preferable though these may still be to the dogwhistling nostalgia merchants. When we first encounter Mariano De Santis, he appears jaded indeed - as he confesses in passing, he's a man who no longer dreams at night - but Sorrentino's plotting obliges him to look ahead: he has a vision of something, however modest, and then works to make it a reality and Italy a better and more compassionate place. You couldn't quite call La Grazia an example of late style - not least because Sorrentino is a relatively youthful 56 - but it looks and feels like a transition to a more mature mode: a director's recognition that a filmmaker of his standing can, after all, turn down the superficial dazzle to ensure his words and gestures matter and thereby arrive at some greater beauty besides. As the case of Mariano De Santis demonstrates, it's really never too late.

La Grazia is now streaming via MUBI.

From the archive: "The Misfits"

Death famously hovered over the set of John Huston’s The Misfits, like buzzards over the desert. This was to be Clark Gable’s final film, and Marilyn Monroe’s final completed film; Monty Clift, his agonised beauty withered by the combination of a car accident and subsequent drug dependency issues, would make only three more, his final words a definitive “absolutely not!” when asked whether he wanted to revisit Huston’s film on TV.

Ideas of ageing and mortality were already present in the marrow of this woozily elegiac drama: it finds the Hollywood that grew up swooning over the likes of Gable, Monroe and Clift pausing to consider what happens when the dew comes off our illusions, what follows once the honeymoon is over. As penned by Arthur Miller, salvaging what he could from the wreckage of his marriage to Marilyn, it may be the most personal and deeply felt American movie of its moment.

Monroe – in the only role to showcase her as a woman, rather than a starlet or sex object – plays Roslyn, just arrived in Reno to finalise her divorce. The proceedings concluded, Roslyn falls in with a community of fellow ragtags either looking for a second chance, or resigning themselves to their fate: cynical, tail-chasing cowpoke Gay Langland (Gable), widowed mechanic Guido (Eli Wallach), garrulous old broad Isabelle (Thelma Ritter), beat-up bronco rider Perce (Clift).

For a while, this group share a paradise on Earth – rebuilding, replanting, availing themselves of the fresh desert air – but it’s a temporary one. Not for nothing, Isabelle points out Nevada is the Leave It state, so-named for the way it encourages gamblers to leave their money (and spouses one another) behind; even the roughneck Gay, not generally one for philosophising, notes – with a recognisably Miller-like brevity – that “nothing’s it, not forever”. We’re heading for a fall of one kind or another.

Huston reportedly spent much of the shoot sleeping off a hangover: though he conjures a world of dusty bordertowns, home to a lot of drunks, divorcees and front porches that could do with a sweep, and does something radical late on with a long shot that undoes everything the movies had taught us about Marilyn Monroe, he mostly makes himself secondary to the material. We’re watching a handful of characters rubbing up against each other, and finding – as per the title, and the jigsaw pieces under the credits – that they don’t entirely tessellate.

This may be one of the few instances where Hollywood got out of a writer’s way, which explains the film’s integrity, its evenness of tone: it seizes upon a pretty vague, very literary theme – the nature of things – and then dedicates everything (characters, actors, score, Russell Metty’s sunburnt photography) to bringing it into sharper focus.

Accordingly, the symbolism pops right out at you, without ever seeming too obvious: Guido’s unfinished home, the bandages holding the Clift character together, the wild horses that possibly stand for happiness or success, and serve to point up how one person’s pursuit of these goals can impact negatively on those around them. (The finale has faint echoes of Huston’s Sierra Madre morality play, as interpersonal differences blow a shot at a fortune.)

If it can’t quite be filed alongside Death of a Salesman in the tragedy top-drawer – not least because the closing moments suggest somebody behind the camera had a happier ending in mind – we’re not far off it: consider, for one, Gable’s “when you get through wishing, all that’s left is a man’s work, and there ain’t much of that left in this country.”

A half-century on, at a moment when Hollywood has given itself over more or less entirely to escapism, it’s striking to encounter a star vehicle with this degree of hard and painful life experience seared into it. Things change, Miller concludes ruefully, and that’s as much a cause for sadness as it might be a source of comfort.

(Moviemail, June 2015)

The Misfits returns to selected cinemas from Friday.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of May 22-24, 2026):

1 (new) Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (12A)

2 (1) Michael (12A)

3 (4) Obsession (18) *

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

5 (new) Drishyam 3 (15)

6 (3) The Sheep Detectives (PG)

7 (new) Passenger (15) ***

8 (new) Finding Emily (12A)

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

10 (7) The Christophers (15) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire [above]

2. Power Ballad

3. Tuner

4. Legally Blonde

5. Bullet in the Head

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

2 (1) Project Hail Mary (12) ***

3 (re) Fight Club (15) ****

4 (new) Lee Cronin's The Mummy (18)

5 (5) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

6 (3) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (15)

7 (2) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

8 (new) The Bride! (15)

9 (4) Hoppers (U) ****

10 (6) G.O.A.T. (PG)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Blue Moon

2. Cold Storage

3. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

4. Nouvelle Vague

5. Avatar: Fire and Ash

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Searchers (Sunday, BBC Two, 3.30pm)

2. The Nice Guys (Sunday, BBC One, 10.30pm)

3. Shrek 2 (Sunday, BBC One, 4.25pm)

4. Lion (Sunday, Channel 4, 12.05am)

5. The Blues Brothers (Sunday, BBC Two, 10.45pm)

Road games: "Passenger"

Having broken through internationally with 2010's fun Troll Hunter and headed west with 2016's fitfully inspired The Autopsy of Jane Doe, the Norwegian genre specialist Andre Øvredal now beds down in America with the horror equivalent of a road movie. Passenger, Øvredal's latest, presents as either The Hitcher for a generation who came along in the wake of that film's lacklustre 2007 remark, or a revival of that Jeepers Creepers/Wrong Turn/Dead End school that flourished around the millennium; approached on its own terms, however, it works surprisingly well. After a pre-title prologue establishing the many things that can go wrong while driving along remote backroads in the middle of the night - a taut short film in itself, to the extent that it provided the bulk of the movie's trailer - we arrive at the main event: the flight of a young, photogenic, upwardly mobile couple who leave their New York home in a camper van so as to undertake what's planned as a six-week road trip. The pair have reason to celebrate: on the first night, Tyler (Jacob Scipio) successfully proposes to Maddie (Lou Llobell). Yet they also have reasons to be on guard, not least the sudden proximity of the same claw-wielding antagonist who brought the prologue to such a grisly halt, and who early on here leaves three prominent scratches on the once-gleaming bodywork of Tyler and Maddie's vehicle. A quick glance at the Hobo Code - apparently as useful in 2026 as it was back in 1936 - confirms the worst: this couple have been marked for death. Hold the invites, put the wedding champagne on ice.

The cat-and-mouse game that results follows a familiar route - and, indeed, goes especially route-one in setting its supernatural passenger's lore in place. (At one point, we see Maddie logging on to a webpage that bears the none-too-snappy headline "My Sister Died In A Road Crash, We Still Don't Know What Caused It". Maybe the Passenger did for the subeditors, too.) But Passenger gets a lot of the multiplex basics right. Øvredal casts well, for starters: unknowns Scipio and Llobell foster a loving relationship we hope to see prosper, while Melissa Leo channels both the Frances McDormand of Nomadland and Maria Ouspenskaya as the veteran traveller warning these youngsters off this path ("people don't take trips; trips take people"). While forever keeping events in motion, Øvredal also knows how to use the widescreen frame to convey unease; this is very much one of those instances where a director has found ways to overcome the limitations of a makeweight script. The setpieces here, tricksy yet effective, get better as they go along: a walk across a deceptively empty carpark, the unlikely redeployment of a portable movie projector (showing studio Paramount's Roman Holiday) to discern who or what has been trampling the foliage amid one nocturnal pitstop. Best of all is a quietly unnerving suspense sequence that finds the van up on a jack, a handful of wheel nuts going AWOL and this director and DoP Federico Verardi working small wonders with a red-flashing emergency light. Set against the Weapons of this world, it's meat-and-potatoes fare, but not every film in this current horror renaissance has to come burdened with grandiose vision; sometimes you just want your popcorn kernels lightly jostled of a Saturday night. Passenger, an honest-to-goodness B picture, will absolutely do that for you.

Passenger is now showing in selected cinemas.