For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 19-21, 2024):

1 (1) Despicable Me 4 (U)

2 (new) Twisters (12A) ***

3 (2) Inside Out 2 (U) ****

4 (3) Longlegs (15) **

5 (5) A Quiet Place: Day One (15) ***

6 (4) Fly Me to the Moon (12A)

7 (new) Bad Newz (12A)

8 (new) To the End (15) ***

9 (7) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)

10 (new) Present Laughter - NT Live 2019 (PG)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Conversation

2. Hundreds of Beavers

3. Chariots of Fire [above]

4. To the End

5. Forrest Gump

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (12)

2 (new) IF (U)

3 (2) Civil War (15) ***

4 (13) Twister (PG) ***

5 (5) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12)

6 (11) Oppenheimer (15) ****

7 (7) Dune: Part Two (12) **

8 (4) Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (12)

9 (3) Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga (15) ****

10 (10) Abigail (18) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Abigail

2. Monkey Man

3. Love Lies Bleeding

4. Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry

5. La Chimera

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. High Society (Sunday, BBC2, 3.35pm)

2. Hell or High Water (Saturday, BBC1, 11.50pm)

3. The Invisible Man (Sunday, ITV1, 10.20pm)

4. County Lines (Saturday, BBC2, 12.30am)

5. Le Mans '66 (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.20pm)

In memoriam: Cheng Pei-Pei (Telegraph 23/07/24)

Cheng Pei-Pei, who has died aged 78, was a petite and punchy actress who made her biggest impact – in the West, at least – as the villainous Jade Fox in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Manipulating a charge into avenging her own heartbreaks, the Havisham-like Fox was central to that much-laurelled film’s enveloping historical sweep – and Cheng, then in her mid-fifties, went toe to dynamic toe with far younger, gym-honed performers. “It’s really not that hard if you have a strong dance foundation,” she shrugged.

Yet Eastern viewers – and genre specialists – knew that the role drew on Cheng’s comparably sprightly turns in a run of 1960s kung fu movies. Foremost among these was King Hu’s Come Drink with Me (1966), where she played Golden Swallow, a young woman who poses as a boy to resolve an impasse between her overreaching governor father and the bandits stalking her province. 

There were few better showcases for Cheng’s delicacy of technique, her ability to pivot smoothly and persuasively from comic beats to the kind of dextrous action that earned her the soubriquet “The Queen of Swords”. “Swords are definitely my weapon of choice,” she told one interviewer in 2015. “You can be more agile with [them]… As I got older, I would fight more with a staff since it looked more appropriate for my age, but I found it to be awfully cumbersome.”

Come Drink with Me was a hit, propelling Cheng to stardom, yet she was ill-served by its sequel Golden Swallow (1966), which – belying its title – marginalised her character in favour of the two men duelling over her. The genre was still struggling to know what to do with its women, as Cheng explained: “Directors were overprotective of us. But I didn’t need any special treatment. I’m very proud, and competitive to a fault. I thought, ‘If a man can do it, so can I’.”

In later life, she broke out of genre films, lending her years of experience to, among other titles, Hong Khaou’s Lilting (2014), one of the great British debuts of this century. Playing a bereaved Chinese-Cambodian immigrant reluctantly reaching out to her late son’s boyfriend (Ben Whishaw), Cheng was fiercely unsentimental yet deeply moving, earning herself a British Independent Film Awards nomination for Best Actress.

As with many of her best roles, it depended heavily on body language, and what could be conveyed through gesture alone: “I have never considered myself a martial arts lady, I’m really a dancer… Fights are universal, but in drama you must know your culture and accept that; otherwise you won’t understand why something happens the way it does.”

Cheng Pei-Pei was born in Shanghai on January 6, 1946, the eldest of four siblings to Xuecheng Jiang, a businessman who opened China’s first ink factory, and his wife, a secretary. When she was six, her father was deemed counterrevolutionary and sent to a Mongolian labour camp; unbeknownst to his family, he died there a decade later. Her mother altered the children’s surnames to spare them any further repercussions.

She studied ballet at Shanghai No. 3 Girls’ School, and moved to Hong Kong in the early 1960s, where she attended actors’ training at the Shaw Brothers studio, turning heads with her fluent Mandarin and dancer’s flexibility. She landed her first lead in the Taiwanese drama Lovers’ Rock (1964), although the subsequently released The Lotus Lamp (1965) had been filmed a year earlier.

In 1970, Cheng married the Taiwanese businessman Yuan Wen-Tung and followed him to California. Though she gained a business degree there, the marriage eventually faltered: “My ex-husband didn’t like me to act and said I should study… I was pregnant eight times and […] only had three daughters and one son. Maybe I was doing too much, so had many miscarriages.” The pair divorced in 1987.

Returning home, she became a fixture of the Asian film and TV industries, making her comeback alongside Stephen Chow and Gong Li in the martial-arts parody Flirting Scholar (1993). She hosted a popular cookery-and-chat show, Pei-Pei’s Time, during which she interviewed and befriended Ang Lee, and even became a reality TV star after appearing in the first season of Chinese hit Divas Hit the Road (2014-15).

Occasionally, she ventured further afield, appearing in the arcade spin-off Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li (2009) and as a brothel madam in Aussie murder-mystery Goldstone (2016). Her final role was as the Matchmaker in Disney’s live-action Mulan (2020); she had previously appeared in two separate Chinese TV retellings of the same legend.

In 2019, Cheng was diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration, an acute form of Parkinson’s; four years earlier, she told Time Out Hong Kong: “There isn’t anything that I really want any more at this stage. I just want to help my children out in whatever way I can, so they can fulfil their own dreams.”

She is survived by those four children with Yuan, including the actress Eugenia Yuan, who starred in the Netflix sequel Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016).

Cheng Pei-Pei, born January 6, 1946, died July 17, 2024.

Supergran: "Thelma"

As faster fingers than mine have pointed out, Thelma - light comic folderol from writer-director Josh Margolin - runs in unexpected parallel with January's slam-bang actioner The Beekeeper. A scam is being perpetrated on the elderly; the protagonist sets out in pursuit of those responsible. One of several crucial deviations is that where The Beekeeper's Jason Statham was out for retribution, Thelma's June Squibb, ninetysomething mascot of a film industry that honours its elders by putting them out to work, is merely seeking restitution for the $10,000 of savings she's handed over. Another is that she's observed setting out on a customised mobility scooter belonging to pal Richard Rowntree, who's just been cast as Daddy Warbucks in his care home's production of Annie. Cue another episodic senior citizens' road trip, closer to the antics of Rita Moreno and co. in last year's 80 for Brady than to Richard Farnsworth in David Lynch's The Straight Story. Here, we're being offered a mix of the daft and the prescriptive. The attempt to frame Thelma's progress as akin to the action movies she watches from her sofa proves sputtering at best; this is all too clearly a middle-of-the-movie-road anecdote - reportedly drawn from Margolin family lore - stretched to feature length via a titteringly low-speed chase. Thelma and her rechargeable steed are pursued in turn across L.A. by her concerned family (daughter Parker Posey, son-in-law Clark Gregg and grandson Fred Hechinger) in scenes that, in large part because of Posey's presence, fleetingly reminded me of 1996's fun The Daytrippers. But every now and again matters grind to a halt for an interaction intended to make a serious point about how confusing the Internet can be for silver surfers, the dishevelment they can fall into if overlooked or the condescension with which certain sections of society still view the elderly. Fine, except splitting the action between the heroine and her loved ones feels like a tacit admission that Thelma as written here can't quite carry a feature in her own right: Squibb, recently heard as the voice of Nostalgia in Inside Out 2, is deployed as little more than a mascot for old age, a novelty gonk plonked on the film's dashboard as it meanders forward. The underemployed Rowntree is good alongside her, and your reward for staying the course is Malcolm McDowell effing-and-jeffing as the man behind the scam, but otherwise it's a matinee proposition that just doesn't have the comic or dramatic juice in the tank to prevent its target audience from dozing; when Thelma declares late on that "this whole thing has been ridiculous", you may find yourself nodding in agreement, if you aren't also nodding off.

Thelma is now playing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Little Sister"

Sometimes it takes a musical interpretation of 9/11 for a movie to grab you. Zach Clark's 2016 film Little Sister appears to be heading towards Indie Plot 101: The Tumultuous Homecoming when its heroine Colleen (Addison Timlin), a novitiate in the New York of 2008, wanders into a Brooklyn artspace where hipster kids dressed as commercial jetliners are smashing into cardboard representations of the Twin Towers to a soundtrack of industrial crashes and bangs. Colleen's there to support a friend, wimpled angel that she is, but we sense she's also been drawn here by a pre-existing interest in confronting the recent past. Awaiting her back at her family's North Carolina retreat - to which she's due to return for the first time in a while, and where her teenage bedroom has been preserved exactly as it was when she fled - is her brother Jacob (Keith Poulson), a badly scarred Gulf War II veteran who's holed himself up in a guest annexe, taking his anger and frustration out on a drumkit morning, noon and night. The pair's manic-depressive mother Joani (Ally Sheedy) greets our girl with the scarcely reassuring "I'm on medicine now", a line that instantly communicates what she's been through, where she's at, and what drove Colleen to the nunnery in the first place. From the outset, Clark reveals himself as a filmmaker big on context and understanding. That the 9/11 performance art never feels like an edgelord's shock-and-awe tactic is down to the fact a) we're a further fifteen years on, b) it does seem exactly the kind of sophomoric anti-Dubya protest a Brooklyn art collective might have staged in 2008, and c) like Colleen and Jacob, that collective are themselves visibly struggling to process it all. One of the liberating joys of Little Sister is how it acknowledges the first years of this century have been, well, a lot.

It gets there by striking a distinctive, assured, persuasive tone. Between the opening Marilyn Manson quote (rendered, like the faintly ominous title, in a baroque font that nods to Colleen's past life as a Goth), the eerie theremin creeping onto the soundtrack, the presence of scream queen Barbara Crampton as Colleen's mother superior, the bandages Jacob wears about his head and the Hallowe'en party with which Clark brings matters to a close, it wouldn't be inaccurate to describe the film as horror-adjacent. But then Little Sister realises 21st century American life could itself be described as horror-adjacent, all guns and bombs and violent lurches to new extremes. (Time and again, this camera lands upon those consolations these characters use to take the edge off, be they prayer, beer, pot or porn.) If it never tips over into full-blown American nightmare, it's because Clark balances the offscreen carnage and chaos with onscreen compassion and connection: Colleen ordering a kebab for a homeless man (cuing a blink-and-you'll-miss-it Alex Karpovsky cameo), Colleen's schoolfriend Emily (Molly Plunk) sharing war stories from her time on the animal liberation front, family friends offering guided tours of their herb farm and encomiums to the adoption process. Once upon a time, around that pre-millennial golden age, indie films were predisposed to sneer at such obviously bourgeois concerns, but Clark frames his creations as people trying to do the right thing, to effectuate positive change, in a world where it's increasingly hard to know what that might look like.

What the film does discern is a clear generational faultline, separating those older liberals who assumed electing a Black Democrat to the highest office would fix everything from those who've seen and absorbed the full extent of the damage, and how bad things might still get. Little Sister proposes an alternative index of progress, slower and steadier: it grants Colleen seven days, as long as the Lord took to create the universe, to intervene in the lives of her nearest and dearest, and it recognises there will be as many problems she can't fix as can. In a weird way, it's another faith movie - albeit a faith movie that opens with the words of the Antichrist Superstar, and denies itself the get-out clause of miracles. These are forever people problems, and it helps that Clark has such excellent people on his side. Timlin certainly has the poise and gentle mien of a nun-to-be, but she also conveys someone who might readily blanch her face in anticipation of a GWAR gig - as, indeed, she does for some mid-film performance art of her own, which might also register as highly offensive were it not this sweet and charming, so touchingly well-intentioned. Sheedy's presence has an elevated extratextual resonance: if you've ever wondered how John Hughes and his characters might have fared had they endured into this century and been forced to confront the consequences of conservatism, this film's for you. Sheedy still has that appealing glint of crazy about her, especially in a scene that demands Joani wield a large kitchen knife, but then - as the movie insinuates - if you're not now crazy in some way, whether crazy-mad or crazy-sad, then you just haven't got your eyes open. Self-contained, heading towards a long-delayed conversation that repairs some small, fraying corner of this world, Little Sister might easily have been buried on streaming and forgotten about as just another indie reckoning with trauma. Yet Clark remains commendably sincere about this scar tissue, and ensures all his characters have layers besides: in a move that somehow typifies Little Sister, he reserves his wisest words for a passing stripper who threatens to suffocate Jacob with her breasts.

Little Sister is now streaming via Prime Video.

Still running: "Forrest Gump" at 30

Here is the most contentious American film of the late 20th century, and possibly even my lifetime. I first saw Forrest Gump as an empty-headed teenager in 1994, was broadly entertained by it, and would likely have forgotten all about it were it not for the fractious rows that kept breaking out around it - initially in the film press, then online - over whether it was really any good, whether it deserved to beat Pulp Fiction to the Best Picture Oscar, and what exactly the film has been trying to communicate to us. Revisiting the film this past weekend as it marks its 30th anniversary, I was struck by the fact that even its initial framing device is contentious. A middle-aged Black nurse (Rebecca Williams), whose uniform suggests she might be heading to or from a long day at work, takes a seat on a bus-stop bench, where she immediately has her ear bent by a fellow traveller: a down-home figure who insists on regaling her in a semi-ludicrous drawling accent with the story of his life, starting with notionally benign small talk about how his grandfather invented the Ku Klux Klan. While the woman quickly senses that she has arrived at very much The Wrong Bus Stop, and starts wishing that Uber would hurry up and invent themselves, we are left to reflect upon a scene that now looks and sounds like 20th century mainstream American cinema in a nutshell: a Caucasian lecturing a non-Caucasian at length, offering her the occasional sweet while refusing to allow her to get a single word in edgeways. (If you think that's off, wait until we get to the sequence where the drawler and his beloved break up what the former calls "a Black Panther party" with their eminently white bullshit.)

What everyone's been arguing about is politics, which makes Forrest Gump as pertinent to 2024 as it was to 1994. Back then, Robert Zemeckis's film may have appeared as cinema's lavishly budgeted equivalent of those fin de siècle TV clip shows, whizzing us through the hits and misses of recent decades: the Klan, the Kennedys, the space race, Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate and everything else that had just been listed in Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire". (This may have been all pop culture was at the end of the century: a clearing house for boomers to come to terms with the choices they'd made, the boxes they'd opened, and what they were going to leave behind for the rest of us.) Instead of a cultural commentator, we got Gump himself (Tom Hanks), often digitally inserted into newsreel footage - for this was Zemeckis's opportunity to show computers could manipulate the historical record in much the same way others were conjuring T-rexes and twisters. The level of commentary turns out to be far less profound than one hears from the rent-a-gobs on today's Channel 5 clip shows. "The good thing about Vietnam is that there was always somewhere to go and always something to do," Gump drawls, having been dispatched in that general direction. 

Perhaps the most contentious aspect of Forrest Gump is this insistence on history as either busy work, passing spectacle or One Damn Thing After Another, with no greater consequences than the ping-pong games Gump later triumphs in. Yet Zemeckis (b. 1952) and writer Eric Roth (b. 1945), adapting the novel by Winston Green (b. 1943), do succeed in raising one poignant question: can you believe we saw and survived all this? Whether on the battlefield or in the bedroom, this American life is a matter of dodging bullets and bombshells; if we choose to view Gump as philosophical text - a Hollywood Candide - then there is some truth in the assertion that navigating this world requires a measure of dumb luck. What may still rankle is the failure to develop and extend that argument beyond the bookending images of a feather floating through time and space, carried hither and yon on the breeze: what lands on the screen in between makes no effort to investigate why Forrest winds up a shrimp tycoon, while his equally good-natured comrade-in-arms Bubba (Mykelti Williamson), who had the original idea, comes back from Vietnam in a box. It's not just dumb luck, is it now? 

Here as elsewhere, Gump seems in intriguingly close communication with a far more despairing film - the kind of film the studios might have allowed some young buck to get away with back in the 1970s, informed by the vagaries of the American experiment, and heading somewhere properly devastating rather than merely diverting. Zemeckis's version generally evinces an innocence - and a naivete - which couldn't ever last long in the new century: now we start to wonder how Forrest would react to 9/11, or the reemergence of Donald Trump. (That red baseball cap might have to go.) Even so, the film itself seems conflicted; certain frames and episodes seem to argue with those on either side of it. Zemeckis emerged from that generation of filmmakers who clung to the hope of making serious, grown-up films even as the American cinema took a decisive turn for the teeny and superficial, which is why even his best-known PG-13 blockbusters conceal tricky, awkward, often downright uncomfortable material. He got 1980's Used Cars in before everything changed, but 1985's Back to the Future had to persuade the mass audience it was fine that Marty McFly almost seduced his mother; Gump encompasses Momma Gump (Sally Field) fucking a headmaster to get her boy into school, the teenage Forrest's issues with premature ejaculation ("I think I ruined your roommate's bathrobe"), and everything to do with Jenny (Robin Wright), a throughline that is broadly as fun as seeing the Princess Bride passed around, rendered as centrefold (boomer blood runs cold) and finally torn to shreds. No-one can bring themselves to speak the acronym AIDS, which finally leaves Gump seeming more conservative, and with it more regressive, than the previous year's Philadelphia.

What's especially aggravating about the film now is that some of it still works. The business with Forrest becoming a superstar college athlete makes exactly the point a bunch of computer-obsessed movie nerds would want to make about the jocks who bullied them in high school: that superstar college athletes are often very dumb and very lucky. (They just run quick, and we cheer and pay them a pretty penny for the privilege.) Gary Sinise's unsmiling performance as Lieutenant Dan is possibly the closest the movie gets to, say, a Coming Home - while also yielding the sharp aside "someone from his family died in every single American war": actual irreverence, informed by a knowledge of the agonies America has continually inflicted on itself. And - much as any of us may want to razz the character, and what he does and doesn't stand for - Hanks makes Forrest both funny and a sweetheart. Even with all this skill in its favour, Gump still makes you gulp, shift uneasily or otherwise scratch your head: it's a film that sets a late, notionally uplifting montage to Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty", as if it liked the harmonies but didn't notice the title or lyrics. It remains a profoundly American text, in that it contains multitudes and contradicts itself as it goes; that it became a four-quadrant hit worldwide remains a baffler. Returning to Gump in 2024, I realised this was Not My Film, but my parents' generation trying to collectively work something out while their credit and faculties remained intact. Still, if you wanted to teach wide-eyed film students how even dumb-looking, dumb-sounding Hollywood product can stir up vastly different emotions and reactions, stick this one on. It'll certainly get them talking. As with Forrest's running, they may never stop.

Forrest Gump is now showing in cinemas nationwide, and streaming via Netflix.

A pelting: "Hundreds of Beavers"

Here's one of those curveballs so far removed from Recent Developments in Contemporary Cinema that critics have had to cast around in a bid to lay down some pointers and recover their bearings. So, yes, Hundreds of Beavers is as beholden to Buster Keaton as it is to Guy Maddin; it's bound to remind some onlookers of a live-action Looney Tune or the prologues of those Ice Age movies; those with more outré viewing tastes will be set to thinking about Trigger Happy TV's posh tiger and malevolent squirrel sketches, or Matt Stone and Trey Parker's Cannibal!: The Musical. Yet it seems equally inspired by the proliferation of Internet memes, and increasingly resembles a game you might observe somebody else playing on a phone while waiting for the arrival of a night bus. What is it, exactly? On a basic, nuts-and-bolts level: a near-silent yarn - shot for a pittance in grainy monochrome around the wilds of Wisconsin - about a beardy Davy Crockett type (co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) undergoing a trial by ice in an American wilderness beset by beavers, hundreds of beavers. A key twist: said critters are represented not by state-of-the-art computer effects, but fully grown men and women dressed up in mascot suits. More so than Twisters, maybe, here is a summer movie that delivers on everything its title promises - albeit on a fraction of the usual summer movie budget, divided up between regional costume hire shops and some especially willing extras, selflessly cramming themselves into the sweaty, furry movie equivalent of the old-school pantomime horse get-up.

So it's a goofy, readymade cult movie, sure, but Mike Cheslik's film also represents a valuable rediscovery of the art of the running joke. HoB wrings regular laughs from all of the following: the dazzling diversity of snowpersons our hero constructs to lure the beavers to their doom; holes that open up in the snow, seemingly at random, always with a pleasing, cork-out-the-bottle sound effect; a whistle that attracts the unwanted attentions of a low-flying, sharp-beaked bird, in a weird way becoming the film's own jingle; and fly-bys from a squadron of blackly pooping geese. It's platespinning on ice: Cheslik and Tews set all these gags up, keep coming back to them, and - in the film's most inspired stretches - get everything to interact with everything else around it. The iceholes are wormholes: you fall down here, and pop up there. The trapper allows the geese to poop on him to use as ink in the making of a map. A strain of schtick involving gobs of chewing tobacco, rerouting Laurel and Hardy via Reeves and Mortimer, builds to a sublime payoff. With its relentless, somewhat exhausting joke construction, the movie operates at an ultra-high frequency: it's something like an emission from the cinema of another planet, possibly one where the looming non-jokes of Deadpool & Wolverine aren't such a big thing. I could understand if you find yourself tuning in and out of it, or if you emerge equally amused and bemused: I did, too. But the funny stuff is very funny: the revelation of the beavers' innards (polystyrene packing peanuts and hand-knitted offal), the steaming husky poop that looks exactly as it should, one hall-of-fame gag, recommended for all ages, involving a telescope that isn't. Amid the frantic huffing-and-puffing in pursuit of laughs, there are even odd flickers of the frontier poetry one finds in those Keaton films completed fully a century before Hundreds of Beavers. This snow is as a blank sheet of paper that invites doodles, a site of unspoilt imaginative potential. (By pure coincidence, Cheslik sporadically interpolates Vision On's gallery tune, library music that has far greater resonance in the UK than it ever would in Wisconsin.) For a hundred minutes, anything seems possible again: if the American cinema insists on going backwards, there would be many worse ideas than returning to 1924 and rebuilding the industry from scratch.

Hundreds of Beavers is now showing in selected cinemas.

Getting on: "To the End"

The previous Blur documentary, 2010's No Distance Left to Run, was a surprisingly emotive record of the reunion necessary after the Albarn-Coxon tiff threatened to draw a line under the band's discography for good. The group had outlasted their erstwhile Britpop rivals Oasis, but now what? Fortunately for all parties, the success of the reunion gigs assured both a happy ending and Blur's status as an ongoing musical proposition. To the End picks up with the band in the course of last year's unofficial "Summer of Blur", a sunny, fruitful period in which the fourpiece chased the release of the critically acclaimed and chart-topping album "The Ballad of Darren" with the biggest gigs of their entire three-decade career at Wembley Stadium. We'll be getting what appears a traditional concert movie, Blur at Wembley Stadium, in September; this teaser, directed by mysteriously monickered friend-of-the-band Toby L, effectively serves as Blur: The Road to Wembley. It reintroduces four very different personalities - singer Damon Albarn and bassist Alex James extroverted, even clownish; guitarist Graham Coxon and drummer Dave Rowntree more introverted, shuffling, sober - then watches on as they hole up, first at Albarn's grand coastal retreat, then in a studio in North London, to thrash out a set list worthy of the occasion. 

An element of jeopardy is introduced, in that everyone's getting old; in purely Blur terms, the quartet are now closer in age to the much-mocked Tracy Jacks than they are to Dan Abnormal. For starters, Damon has a divorce and a dodgy knee to show for himself heading into middle age, and his thick specs lend him a passing resemblance to Shooting Stars scorekeeper Angelos Epithemiou. Alex can't metabolise the Jägerbombs as he once did, yet wearily admits to his director-confessor "there's always a really good reason not to go to bed". Dave duly puts his knee out in the most nouveau riche manner imaginable. Crucially, they all have other things going on - be that kids, cheesemaking or local politics - in a way they didn't when they were Lads About Camden in the early 1990s. (Clips from the VHS tour video Starshaped serve as flashbacks: look at the little cherubs.) As Damon flags early on, aging brings its own challenges for the musician, chief among them creating something new, rather than settling for being "a bunch of old cunts reliving the past". Yet the narrative stakes here remain moderate to low. The album is in the bag, and a certified success; the creative differences that were a source of contention last time out have been resolved, such that Alex can blithely chuckle about Damon's workaholic tendencies ("If you don't keep him focused on the job in hand, he'll literally write another opera"). Furthermore, as seasoned, intelligent, emotionally literate souls, they're better placed to talk us through the band's creative and interpersonal processes than, say, the Gallaghers proved in 2016's Oasis film Supersonic. The result is not unenjoyable, but also a distinctly cosy music doc. Everyone gets distracted by a gorgeous-looking Victoria sponge, the way they might once have done by drink, drugs or groupies. Damon and Graham revisit their old school, and unsettle its new headmaster by calling for a big bowl of pot to be placed in the middle of the music room that bears their name. The pre-Wembley warm-up gigs are booked in former haunts and small seaside towns. Age is really no more than an abstract, background noise sporadically raised in the mix via bleary-headed testimony; there's none of the painfully angular grief Nick Cave had to address in 2022's This Much I Know To Be True. To the End thus presents as a consolidation of last year's triumphs, and it features as much hugging as any other business - though it's still stirring to witness these former art students embrace one another and a creative second wind, and to see them embraced by the crowd in return.

To the End is now playing in selected cinemas; Blur: Live at Wembley Stadium opens September 6.