For the birds: "The Paradise"

As the world descends into bloody tribalism, so too do the movies. The title of Srikanth Odela's wackadoodle Telugu hit The Paradise is presumably ironic: much of its action takes place in a muddy, storm-lashed 1980s migrant camp populated by a tribe yet to be officially recognised by local and state government. Barefooted, starving, increasingly desperate, often seen cradling the bodies of their slain and fallen comrades, the Savari people are easy prey for local gangsters, who've seized upon these wanderers as a source of cheap, disposable labour, and used their women for sexual kicks. They are a people calling out for a hero, above all else, and he eventually arrives in an unlikely, feminised form. His name is Jadal, and he's first brought into this world after those same heavies attach a jeep's jumpleads to the belly of his pregnant mother in a bid to abort her lovechild. (Don't worry: we'll be circling back to this.) Jadal is one of two, actually: his twin sister doesn't survive this callousness, a loss Jadal's mother commemorates by routinely braiding the lad's flowing locks into twin, schoolgirly ponytails. He grows up to be local megastar Nani - whose name, certainly, has an apt ring - and an uncommonly huffy freedom fighter closely associated with the crows who persist in this area, largely by finding sustenance at a nearby rubbish dump. He's like a bird, see! He'll peck your eyes out as soon as look at you! His unlimited supply of childhood trauma - beloved dog tossed into a well! Relentless, savage beatings! Learning his mother sold her body, and running his own flesh across the camp's barbed wire in solidarity! - only fuels his push for recognition and restitution! He's doing it for his people! For the girls! For his own, dear mamma! Given the frenzied limb-lopping and hand-hammering that follows, however, we might usefully wonder how many mothers and daughters will still be left watching The Paradise by the time a second pregnant belly is offered up before us as a potential site of violence.

On one level, Odela's film is what has become profitable business as usual for the Telugu cinema: beardy men punching one another to a variably bloody pulp. It's 40% outlandish inspiration, 60% Monster energy drink, which has apparently become to this industry what cocaine was to 1970s Hollywood: the fuel that first allows directors to stay up all night thinking up new and extreme things to do with their region's superstars, and later endows them - on set and in post-production - with the blokey confidence to crank everything we see up by a factor of eleventy thousand. Certainly, this will be the loudest film your eardrums will have to endure in 2026: it is, at base, one long, giant roar of boysiness, testosterone to the max. (Anirudh Ravichander's score combines pummelling drums with endless hollers and insistent nu-metal guitar.) Some of this is pure front: a thick toplayer of baroque style, intending to conceal the fact the film's narrative basics are those of a mid-Nineties Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude van Damme vehicle. But its stronger sequences do have style and verve, and I suspect one reason for The Paradise's success is that some filmbros feel they're watching an emergent director attempting intriguing things within the limitations of the generic hero movie. If the hero is styled like a girl - as if to suggest he absorbed his late sister's spirit (?) - then our heroine (Kayadu Lohar) is explicitly characterised as "like a son", pragmatically turning out softcore so as to pay off her late father's debts. Amid the tumult, Odela lands on some great, striking images: a room crammed full of lawyers, pressganged into finding reasons to throw the book at our heroes; migrants ganging up in crow formation against the cops sent in to break up their camp. In 2026, there's also something pointed about a Telugu film centred on oppressed minorities where the villains (to a man) speak Hindi, identified here as the voice of the oppressor. Some folks, we gather, have to shout louder just to be heard. Still, it's a fine line between making an impressive noise - announcing yourself, as Odela has with his first two features - and going completely and irreversibly over the top. The most scathing review of The Paradise may be the one offered by the young woman who walked out of my matinee screening the minute those jump leads were attached to that belly, trailing an identifiable air of "oh, so this is one of those movies"; it may also be the ultimate judgement on the feminist credentials this plot strains so hard to wave in our faces.

There were, I must confess, places where I felt tempted to walk away myself, where the element of Monster in this film spills over and into your eyes, nose and throat. (C'mon fella, Odela seems to say: lap it up.) An early fight scene in a refectory sees Jadal eviscerate one taunting foe's face with an assist from a wall-mounted fan; he punches another so forcefully in the throat that the impact looses a CG molar. (Odela likes this effect so much he repeats it a few moments later.) The scene has one good visual idea: setting the camera to sway for a few beats with a concussed ne'er-do-well while the carnage unfolds either side of him. Yet the reason this sequence grabs us so is that, for much of The Paradise, we're in the exact same position as Mr. Wobbly: being boxed around the ears by a show-off filmmaker who's weaponising his ingenuity. (There's an echo of it in a later scene which finds Jadal sawing some unfortunate's head off and kicking the resultant barrel of blood into a baying crowd: this time, we're the crowd.) However much this script gestures towards saying something interesting about lineage and masculinity, the filmmaking is trapped in much the same vicious cycles as we've seen elsewhere in India's current sociopathic new wave. Just as Dhurandhar was gnarlier and snarlier than 2023's Animal, and Dhurandhar 2 was gnarlier and snarlier than that, The Paradise is trying - comically so, in places - to top all previous headsmashers; these filmmakers aren't really talking to us or to wider society, they're egging one another on to come up with even more lurid and leering fantasies. The exploitation described within this narrative is as nothing compared to the exploitative film itself: Odela has an eye and clear talent, but his judgement isn't fully formed, and isn't always what it should be. After dodging one last thrust in our direction - a closing credit that insists what we've just been watching was "A Srikanth Odela Cinema" (no, Srikanth! That's not how words work!) - we leave The Paradise with a sense of having seen a movie movie, yes, but also the pounding headache, ringing ears and long list of regrets and reservations that typically accompany the experience of being subjected to something suboptimal. It really is too much: I do think Indian cinema would be in a far healthier place right now if its young male directors could step away from the Internet and their Game of Thrones boxsets and put the Monster back in the closet.

The Paradise is now showing in selected cinemas.

From the archive: "The Man Who Would Be King"

One of the key English-language movies on colonial misadventure, 1975's The Man Who Would Be King pointedly opens with several unhurried, uninterrupted minutes of quasi-documentary marketplace footage that describes the everyday chaos (some would just say life) which our colonists have, for centuries, been trying in vain to control and/or purge. For a while, director John Huston treats the attempts of two unfailingly crass ex-Army opportunists (Sean Connery and Michael Caine) to lord it over the republic of Kafiristan as the pure sport the characters themselves take it to be: we watch fighting, swimming, mountaineering, the burning of gods and bridges alike, and Huston even goes so far as to recruit Kipling himself (as played by Christopher Plummer) to serve as a commentator-slash-analyst. There's some attempt to fashion an ironic comedy out of what history has forced more recent American filmmakers to look upon as outright tragedy. Yet once our heroes start to get bogged down in their pursuit of glory - with the Connery character appointing himself as divine ruler - we could really be watching some prelude to Apocalypse Now, dotted with traces of Huston's own, hubris-skewering The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; the crucial lines of dialogue here, as they would be in any military strategy meeting, are "You got us here. Now what?" It's one of those late studio-era enterprises where nearly every credit could be filled by an industry legend (costumes: Edith Head, production design: Alexandre Trauner, score: Maurice Jarre); Huston, for his part, fills every frame with a thousand and one extras and a salty good humour, and the stars prove very good company playing the kind of individuals guaranteed to bugger up your mission.

(October 2015)

The Man Who Would Be King screens on BBC Two tomorrow at 2.45pm and will be available on iPlayer thereafter.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of September 25-27, 2026):

1 (new) Avengers: Endgame Encore (12A)

2 (1) Resident Evil (15)

3 (new) Heart of the Beast (12A) ***

4 (new) Sense and Sensibility (U)

5 (3) Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (U) ****

6 (2) Practical Magic 2 (12A)

7 (4) Pressure (15) ***

8 (5) The Odyssey (15) ***

9 (6) Spider-Man: Brand New Day (12A) ***

10 (new) The Paradise (18) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Queen at Sea

2. Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom

3. La Femme Infidele/The Unfaithful Wife

4. Leviticus

5. Casino Royale

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (2) Disclosure Day (12) **

2 (1) Moana (PG)

3 (3) The End of Oak Street (12) ***

4 (4) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

5 (re) Scary Movie [2026] (15)

6 (14) Project Hail Mary (12) ***

7 (5) Obsession (18) *

8 (35) The Invite (15) ****

9 (6) Supergirl (12)

10 (7) Michael (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. The Secret Agent

2. The Invite

3. Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft

4. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

5. Power Ballad

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Passport to Pimlico [above] (Saturday, BBC Two, 10.35am)

2. Till (Monday, BBC Two, 11pm)

3. The Order (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)

4. The Man Who Would Be King (Sunday, BBC Two, 2.45pm)

5. Shrek 2 (Sunday, BBC One, 2pm)

On demand: "Vernon, Florida"

Originally made for public television, 1981's Vernon, Florida was an early taster of Errol Morris: an hour-long survey of the eponymous community - notionally, a small, quiet all-American backwater - which helped pave the way for countless Carl Hiaasen novels and the 'Florida Man' memes that came to circulate in the early 21st century. Characters proliferate, and we sense Morris didn't have to wait long for them to appear: the turkey hunters waiting out their prey, a traffic cop doing likewise with speeding motorists, a latter-day trapper of some kind ("I've been bit by everything there is in this country") who proffers what he swears is a gopher - but is clearly a tortoise - and insists that it's good for the eatin', a godly builder who extols the power of prayer in finding a van at a heavenly price, a veteran garage owner whose conversational opener is "you ever seen a man's brains?". (It could have got weirder and bloodier still: Morris originally came this way, on a ticket paid for by his mentor Werner Herzog, to investigate claims Vernonians were lopping off their own limbs for insurance purposes.) So this, apparently, is how men - and Morris's subjects are almost exclusively men, because who else would disappear so enthusiastically down such vertiginous rabbit holes? - spent their days in an America leaving the tumult of the 1970s behind in order to enter into Reagan's more leisured and leisurely 1980s.

Still, what's noticeable is how determinedly Morris avoids sneering of any kind, possibly because he realises pointing a camera at people for any length of time and fashioning a documentary from the results is itself a perilously niche activity; from the off, this documentarist was sincerely interested in his fellow humanoids, however curious their concerns, and he set about drawing out their stories, methods and peccadillos so as to demonstrate there is no such thing as ordinary or typical American life. What Morris wound up filming here was both proof of existence - several thousand feet of richly textured celluloid that showed such folks were once living here among us, whether for decades or just a fleeting afternoon - and a fine advert for showing up in a place with an open mind and allowing the folks you encounter to start shooting their mouths off. At the back of it all is a tacit understanding that our fellow humans are fascinating and sometimes magic, because they can give you material that even the greatest writer would be hard-pushed to script. This town's unofficial historian even goes so far as to gift Morris a worldview and a way of looking that would come to sustain the filmmaker over what's so far been a near-fifty year career. Peering out over Vernon's unusually marshy swamps, this unassuming subject is minded to recount a joke he'd once heard about two sailors at sea. Sailor one observes "there's a lot of water out there". Sailor two replies: "Yeah, and that's just the top of it".

Vernon, Florida is currently streaming via NOW.

Distress signals: "Queen at Sea"

We can't be certain that the UK release of Queen at Sea has any direct correlation to Andy Burnham's plan to urgently reform social care, but this sure feels like the kind of film that would significantly shift a needle were someone with the right level of clout to see it. For what is his first feature in 18 years - and only his second in total, following 2008's notable Ballast - the American indie tyro Lance Hammer has holed up in Tufnell Park to monitor a situation that initially presents as awkward-slash-tricky, and then gets grimmer by the minute. The trickiness is this: university lecturer Amanda (Juliette Binoche) and her teenage daughter Sarah (Florence Hunt) show up one afternoon at the home Amanda's mother Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall) shares with her second husband - and Amanda's stepfather - Martin (Tom Courtenay), only to discover Leslie and Martin in the bedroom, engaged in an act of congress. This would merely be regrettably awkward, except that Leslie has been diagnosed with dementia, and so cannot give informed consent; furthermore, this apparently isn't the first time this has happened. A distressed Amanda calls the police, intending to do the right thing, yet - it turns out - making everybody's lives immediately worse. Now there are men in hazmat suits in a marital bedroom designated a crime scene; now Martin is being led away from the woman he cares for in handcuffs; now Leslie is having to undergo a vital rape examination; and now, with Amanda away dealing with the consequences of the above, young Sarah is left to her own devices. At first, it feels as if Hammer is trying to top Michael Haneke's notoriously bleak Amour by adding a prickly accusation of marital rape to the equation, yet there's a key difference. Haneke wanted us to suffer, because we are the unthinking Western bourgeois and we deserve to suffer. Hammer, to his considerable credit, just wants to keep his situation real.

That intense realism is what first strikes you about Queen at Sea, and it is, finally, what keeps Hammer's film on course. It extends to the casting of actual health professionals in literal supporting roles, hopefully earning more per diem than they would in the NHS while patiently, compassionately talking the leads through what they would in the course of their usual day jobs. This isn't some wild stab in the dark as to what the consequences of Martin's actions and Amanda's 999 call would be; throughout, Hammer strives to nail his drama down agonisingly close to the painful truth of such matters. TV's The Pitt received plaudits for a number of episodes that assiduously detailed how a rape kit should be gathered by a trained medical professional caring for a victim in full compos mentis; Queen at Sea's victim, by stark contrast, can't know why someone in latex gloves is prodding at her with unfamiliar instruments, and wouldn't likely understand even if a nurse attempted to explain. One reason Hammer has taken so long between projects is surely that he's seeking such an exacting level of realism you might come away never wanting to make films again - or simply not want to associate yourself with a medium that more generally peddles comforting lies. I started the film vaguely unhappy with the idea that wobbly seniors Martin and Leslie's bedroom should be on the very top floor of a North London townhouse, arrived at by perilous staircases - but Hammer even comes to connect that to the stubbornness of some elders: this pair won't leave this house, nor will they leave one another's side. It is, all told, a thoroughly unhappy situation - and yet at the same time a dramatist's ideal: a situation where everybody on screen appears to be in the right and in the wrong simultaneously. (You be the ref.) Hammer complicates matters further by casting universal grandad-of-choice Courtenay as an accused who is in all other respects a loving, devoted caregiver. Where it gets trickier still is that Martin sees sex both as a marital duty and a potential source of comfort for his befuddled partner: to have and to hold, in sickness and in health. Does a husband necessarily know better than anyone else what his wife wants? Would he know better than trained health care professionals? Again, Hammer hands us the gavel and lets us be the judge.

The conditions for studying these characters could scarcely be any better. Hammer pens them all into small, sparsely appointed frames under flat autumnal light, correctly reasoning these people are enough in themselves to hold the attention, and that they'll soon have problems enough to fill an IMAX screen. Just dramatically, nothing will top Queen at Sea this year: it's a whole series' worth of The Moral Maze, squeezed into two gripping hours. We see that Amanda's giving her everything to protect a vulnerable woman, but also that, in this instance, she may have overreacted (and Binoche, the doyenne of doubt, lets us know this). We see that Leslie is helpless and child-like, but also compulsively needy (such that you have to keep telling yourself that the astonishing Calder-Marshall is simply inhabiting a role to the hilt). We see that Martin is harried and shaken, but also defiantly old-school and possessive with regard to Leslie, carrying a swelling martyr complex that may or may not be justified. And we see that Sarah is away living an existence of her own, albeit without close parental guidance. These latter scenes present as somewhat less compelling, because the sight of two kids filming TikTok videos is automatically less compelling than that of conflicted grown-ups being pushed and pulled every which way. Yet they, too, have a purpose, letting some fresh (if reefer-tinged) air in on a largely domestic story, highlighting crucial generational differences and freedoms, conveying some sense of life going on regardless, for better and worse. Somewhere in here is an actors' ideal, too: every performer gets to fight their character's corner, however tough, shitty or bloody it gets. You very quickly sense this was a film that demanded elevated levels of care and attention offscreen: it's not just that Hammer pushes his veteran leads to go way beyond the boundaries of the average Silver Screen matinee, it's that provision also has to be made for those non-professionals who find themselves on the sharp end of a foul-mouthed Courtenay diatribe or that intense Binoche glare. So consummately good is the acting and direction on a scene-by-scene basis that, towards the end, Hammer almost gets away with finding an easy way out of his initial set-up: he lets himself off the hook, even as the rest of us are set to considering the messy outcome of a heinously messy situation. (Part of the film's honesty lies in its recognition there can be no neat and tidy resolution.) Queen at Sea is not a film anyone will want to watch over and over again: you may be too busy, as Andy Burnham has been, living a comparable situation in reality to want to see it reflected so sharply in your nightly entertainments. But then this is also one film you're not going to forget in a hurry.

Queen at Sea is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of September 18-20, 2026):

1 (new) Resident Evil (15)

2 (1) Practical Magic 2 (12A)

3 (new) Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (U) ****

4 (3) Pressure (15) ***

5 (4) The Odyssey (15) ***

6 (5) Spider-Man: Brand New Day (12A) ***

7 (2) Don't Look Back in Anger (15) ****

8 (new) Bad Apples (15) **

9 (new) Transformers: the Movie (PG) *

10 (7) Insidious: Out of the Further (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Queen at Sea

2. Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom

3. Leviticus

4. Heart of the Beast

5. Matilda

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Moana (PG)

2 (24) Disclosure Day (12) **

3 (new) The End of Oak Street (12) ***

4 (4) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

5 (3) Obsession (18) *

6 (2) Supergirl (12)

7 (5) Michael (12)

8 (6) Practical Magic (12)

9 (7) Minions & Monsters (U)

10 (re) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. The Secret Agent

2. Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft

3. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

4. Power Ballad

5. Tuner

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Lady Vanishes (Sunday, BBC Two, 2.05pm)

2. The Wicker Man (Friday, BBC Two, 12.15am)

3. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Saturday, BBC Two, 10.35am)

4. Malcolm X [above] (Tuesday, BBC One, 10.40pm)

5. The 39 Steps (Sunday, BBC Two, 12.40pm)

A tonic: "Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom"

Finally, some good news this week: some small part of the British film industry is doing exactly the job expected of it. It may not be insignificant that this sector is as close as we now have to a cottage industry, the work of West Country artisans - Bristol's Aardman - making merry magic with vast balls of modelling clay. Where 2019's Farmageddon was the Shaun the Sheep franchise's bucolic alien-invasion movie, The Beast of Mossy Bottom - emerging in cinemas ahead of Hallowe'en - is more conventional mad science, being a cautionary tale on a subject these animators surely know all too well: the need to correctly label the containers in which you store your gloopy fluids. Our friend the farmer - part Eric Morecambe, part Robert Lloyd of The Nightingales; as voiced by John Sparkes, possibly the single funniest character in the British cinema right now - runs out of hair tonic ahead of a potential date with the local vet (Nina Sosanya). At the same time, young Shaun, in mad scientist mode, refills an empty tonic bottle with the formula he's concocted to revive the pumpkin patch he and his ovine pals have been secretly cultivating. On the plus side, the formula yields the biggest pumpkins known to man, or sheep; on a less positive note, Farmer mistakenly applies said formula to his own pumpkin (his baldy head), immediately transforming him into a hirsute glam rocker (massive ginger mullet, free-flowing 'tache), then some furry combination of Bigfoot, the Honey Monster and the Kukeri costume from Toni Erdmann, a look that prompts not the admiration for which he was hoping, but a combination of terror and chuckles wherever he stumbles.

The initial script meeting had to have been as short and sweet as Shaun himself: what's the set-up that could generate the most sight gags over the course of 80 minutes? This is it, or cheeringly close to it. So we get big sight gags: a transformation sequence straight out of a classic horror B-movie (only, you know, rendered in plasticine), a rollicking setpiece involving two tethered vehicles barrelling through a built-up area. We get smaller, blink-of-an-eye sight gags, too: throwaway observations about the behavioural patterns of delivery drivers, phone-obsessed youths, cats and angry mobs (topical); the farmer, attempting an impromptu body wax with electrical tape, lets loose a scream so loud and far-reaching it curls a shop's "NOW OPEN" banner so it simply reads "OW". And it squeezes all of the above in while remaining miraculously wordless - great for pre-verbal youngsters, even better for international markets; these filmmakers have built upon - and refined - what Richard Curtis and Rowan Atkinson were doing back in the day with Mr. Bean. Mossy Bottom yields some of Aardman's most gorgeous cinematography (care of Charles Copping): the autumnal forest 'the Beast' escapes into, a tableau of foggy desolation on the docks. Throughout - in the absence of spoken words - the sound designers work expressive wonders with gasps of wonder and terror, exasperated sighs and at one point even a sea shanty the sheep cobble together as part of their masterplan. Faced with further evidence of Aardman's collective fondness for Heath Robinson-like contraptions, you realise these films are themselves machines: they go like the clappers, emitting strange noises, while finding fixes or swerves for looming story obstacles. (There's a lovely moment towards the end here, as the creatives realise they've backed themselves into a corner with their 'no talking' rule and hit upon an ancient solution: hieroglyphs. Hey, if it worked for the Egyptians...) Carefully calibrated, lovingly maintained, its every ratchet falling in the right place, Mossy Bottom is a machine designed to throw endless custard pies and slap a smile on your face; it's too good, and too joyful, just to be left to kids.

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is now playing in cinemas nationwide.