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. Top Gun: Maverick

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.

Foetal attraction: "Obsession"

So this is what you get when the studios hire a 25-year-old to direct a horror movie. Obsession, the breakthrough feature of erstwhile YouTuber Curry Barker, places the monkey's paw of innumerable movie nightmares in the sweaty palm of youth: its protagonist, Bear (Michael Johnston), is an overlooked sap pining after the girl of his dreams. The film's opening movement works from the assumption we'll be more compelled than we are by the sight of a twitchy doofus stumbling over his words, but fortunately for us, if not for Barker's young hero, Bear has something tucked away in his back pocket: a junkshop lucky charm on which he wishes that his sparky crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette) will love him more than anyone in the entire world. And whaddaya know: it works. Yes, it finally gets this whey-faced poltroon laid, so it's good for something, I guess, but soon Nikki's making Bear's life a living hell, whether via erratic behaviour, loud shrieks in the middle of the night (and not the fun kind), the worst packed lunch in Christendom, or the kind of suffocating clinginess that eventually generates a bodycount. Chicks, huh?, Barker gurgles with every new plot development; hey fellas, am I right? So the narrative develops in twisty, often grisly ways, but the underlying worldview never does - and can't, because it's fundamentally puerile. Barker is trying to make a big deal here - maybe even a career - out of a phase all swoony young men pass through and hopefully leave well behind them.

The triumph of the current horror renaissance is that it's been one of the few areas wherein the studios have succeeded in delivering something for everyone: light comedy-horror, full-on ordeals, big auteurist swings. Runaway box-office would suggest Obsession is itself meeting some need, but the demographic Barker's apparently targeting is altogether niche: young men - no, more specific yet: young American men - who've been so busy on Fortnite or Roblox that they haven't yet learnt to relate to the opposite sex. This plot proceeds from two adolescent contingencies, one dreamy, one nightmarish. What if you had a girl entirely at your beck and call? Wouldn't it be terrible if you had to deal with her all the freaking time? If Johnston, a duller Jeremy Davies, proves a dead loss in the lead, Navarrette at least makes a lively puppet on a string, jerked around and then jerking her puppetmaster around in turn. But Nikki isn't a playable character so much as an idea a 25-year-old has in his head about woman-as-nightmare: all the actress can resort to, over the long haul, is pulling exaggerated emoji faces. Nikki is happy. Nikki is angry. Nikki is never once a credible threat. Barker takes all these developments terribly seriously - he has to; you do at that age - but all he's really arrived at is a Weird Science with the underlying misogyny dialled up to 11 and precisely none of the laughs. The movie's sludgy visual sense, meanwhile, would indicate the YouTube generation aren't going to be the saviours of cinema some studio chiefs clearly hope. I'll give Obsession this: it is genuinely horrible, and it may carry us deeper into the young male psyche than even its maker realises. But this kind of thinking was no fun back when I was 25, it proves no more fun now, and no-one should be making a career or money off the back of it, however much we may raise our boys on a diet of podcasts and pornography. Curry Barker has just been set to working on a redo of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, so let's hope this is the last any of us see or hear from him. We had a good run while it lasted.

Obsession is now playing in selected cinemas.

A question of attribution: "Power Ballad"

The latest of director John Carney's Films About Music - striking up the band where 2006's Once, 2013's Begin Again and 2016's Sing Street left off - Power Ballad hinges on the ever-thorny matter of attribution. After one reception gig, Rick (Paul Rudd), the American lead singer of Dublin's most regrettably named wedding band The Bride and Groove, crosses paths with Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas), a former boybander recording tracks for an eagerly awaited solo project. The pair jam, drink, get stoned, jam some more - Carney has always been good on how songs get written - and eventually work up the basis of what becomes "How To Write A Song Without You", a soaring love song that is to this movie what the once-ubiquitous "Falling Slowly" was to Once. (Translation: you better like it, because you'll be hearing a lot of it, possibly even outside of the multiplex.) Coming under sudden pressure from his label, who want a big hit single with which to launch the album, Danny runs - and arguably runs off - with the riffs Rick gave him, something the latter party only becomes aware of after "How To Write A Song" tops the Billboard chart and becomes a global smash. Conspicuously absent from the song's Spotify listing: any co-writer credit. At the heart of the film, then, are questions that seem altogether more urgent in the era of AI-assisted chart breakers: what if a song you helped to write made no money for you and a lot of money for somebody else? Furthermore, what if that song began following you around like the ghost of your own musical career?

It's quite the hook, but then Carney has thus far succeeded in turning riffs on song into a noteworthy directorial career: Once's Oscar-winning pavement poetry was followed by the starrier record-business chicanery of Begin Again, the teenage kicks of Sing Street and the lo-fi DIY charms of the post-lockdown Flora and Son. Hitting the road once more - with a film that hops between Dublin, where Rick resides with his wife and teenage daughter, and L.A., where Danny is based - Carney here reteams with Gary Clark, the singer-songwriter who's provided the (very credible) songs for this director's last few films, and who Eighties pop kids may remember as the behatted frontman of the band called Danny Wilson. (Appropriately, for a film centred on due credit, Carney cues up that group's biggest hit "Mary's Prayer" in one bar scene.) The story being told here has enough granular specificity to make one wonder if it was inspired by something Clark imparted to Carney, whether something that happened to him directly or to a musician he knows - though the script credit, as it turns out, goes to co-stars Rudd and Peter McDonald. Possibly Power Ballad was inspired by a broader truth: that there are now a lot of songs streaming around us, and a lot of songs streaming around us that sound naggingly like other songs, an obvious source of tension and aggravation if you feel your big musical idea has provided the crucial leg-up for a million-selling megahit. (Ask Ed Sheeran and the Marvin Gaye estate.) What particularly hurts here is that Rick feels he had to give up his rockstar dreams in order to settle down: everybody finally knows a song that he's written - but not that he's written it, so it also becomes a matter of bruised ego and wounded pride.

What's crucial is that, between them, Carney, Rudd and McDonald succeed in breaking this idea down into amusing scenes and characters: Power Ballad is that too-rare thing, a genuinely funny live-action comedy. Carney gets a lot from his equivalent of session singers, ushered up to the microphone from the supporting cast: McDonald is good value as Rick's rough-edged bachelor bandmate, and Beth Fallon is a lot of fun as Rick's droll daughter Aja (lol), who insists modern women don't want love songs so much as they want revenge. The direction, however, is at its surest around the two leads. It would be very easy to imagine some version of Power Ballad where Rick turns curdled and resentful - he already appears more than faintly obsessive in pursuing Danny back to L.A. - but no, he remains recognisably Rudd-like: sweet, funny, boyish. Jonas's Danny, too, could have easily been reframed as a strutting Timberlake, but this performance knows this character has got something wrong; Jonas plays the entire second half as a kid who's got his hand caught in the showbusiness cookie jar. We're left, then, with two men who, rather than sit down and talk something out between them, elect to take the circuitous route - and who eventually find themselves nitpicking this song's meaning, rather than addressing the more pressing slight and hurt. This is quite a funny idea in itself: antagonists who, even when riled up, still quite like one another, and may even indeed admire one another. Only the final reels betray the one limitation here: it's all a bit middle of the road, an ode to accepting your lot in life. (Call it the Danny Wilson effect.) But Carney gives us a stirring rendition of that particular song, nevertheless - and the kind of peppy, buoying crowdpleaser that, in the context of the modern multiplex, presents as something of a lost artform.

Power Ballad opens in cinemas nationwide Friday.

From the archive: "Bullet in the Head"

Although reputationally overshadowed by 1989's The Killer and 1992's Hard Boiled, 1990's Bullet in the Head remains the most ambitious film made by John Woo before the director's turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood relocation. Starting out as an American Graffiti/Big Wednesday-like teen reminiscence, it gradually segues into a large-scale, widescreen period piece before concluding as homecoming drama: The Deer Hunter would be the obvious Western reference point, although Bullet proves a far less problematic landmark. After killing a gang boss, three boyhood friends (Tony Leung, Jackie Cheung and Waise Lee) are forced to swap the frying pan of Hong Kong's 1967 riots for the fire of Vietnam, where they find the independence movement blowing up. Realising that lawlessness is the norm, the trio turn their hands to profiteering, taking up with a mercenary in a white suit (Simon Yam) only to eventually find themselves caught behind enemy lines, their friendships fraying under pressure. The gear changes that result aren't as smooth as those in Woo's 'straight' action movies, and the brothers-in-arms homoeroticism is absurdly overstated in places: two of the boys share a pregnant moment in a nightclub toilet, played out to the strains of "I'm a Believer". But of all Woo's Hong Kong films, this is the one that most suggested he wanted to work for an American paymaster, or at least move in the same circles as his American contemporaries: there are varyingly subtle nods towards Rebel Without A Cause, Mean Streets and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, to spot but three. It's sincere in that desire, at least: however knowing and referential the filmmaking gets, and however much one prison-camp sequence borders on revisionist wish fulfilment, the movie is performed without a single flicker of irony - it pre-dates Tarantino - and Woo stages the gunplay and pyrotechnics with his customary elan.

(November 2008)

Bullet in the Head returns to selected cinemas from Friday, ahead of a limited edition Blu-ray release on June 22.