Circle of friends: "Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft"

It is, all told, an unlikely partnership. Before the camera: Billie Eilish, the recessive songstrel with the million-dollar mumble. Behind it: James Cameron, the Hollywood alpha dog who should really be back in his shed getting going on the next Avatar movie. Well, maybe the live concert movie Hit Me Hard and Soft is Jim Cameron giving himself a day (or a night) off; maybe it's his way of bonding with his daughters after several long years at sea, or maybe his wife Suzy Amis has told him, in no uncertain terms, that he needed a hobby that doesn't involve blue people. (The movie has been conceived in 3D, so it's not a total break from recent endeavours.) The question cinephiles face is whether we can tell this is a concert movie assembled by one of the great motion picture technicians, and whether Cameron has more of an idea of what he wants to film and show than whoever it was who did the Taylor Swift concert movie, which emerged as all coverage and nothing but coverage. For starters, Cameron demonstrates an inevitable interest in the tech of a tour such as this: the rigging going up, the sea of phones capturing moments, the catapult that propels the singer on stage at a crucial moment. He also engineers several time shifts one might, at a push, describe as Terminator-like ("8 hours before the concert", "Forty minutes earlier", etc), the better to chronicle how this particular show came together at what feels like the last minute. This may just be Cameron, notionally playing second fiddle for the first time since he made 1982's Piranha II: The Spawning for Roger Corman, ceding a certain degree of his usual control. Some of that control is ceded to the crowd, who certainly weren't here to play extras in a Jim Cameron movie; their heads and arms pierce the frame (somewhat joltingly, an effect that tends to be elided from slicker 3D spectacles) while their screams and shouts frequently take over the soundtrack. Most of that control, however, is ceded to Eilish herself: Cameron has even left handheld 3D cameras around the stage for her to pick up and run with in the course of the concert. The results come to seem like a true collaboration, with caveats. "It's going to say 'Directed by Billie Eilish'," Cameron is heard to say backstage at one point, "and then - at the very bottom - 'with James Cameron'". As it happens, the closing credits actually read "Directed by James Cameron and Billie Eilish". Ah well.

In terms of the show itself, the Eilish mumble appears central to her relatability: she is, from the off, far more approachable than La Swift, the Business Barbie with the celebrity athlete husband and the preternatural gift for songwriting. Swift, certainly, wasn't likely to allow a director to film her having her ankles strapped up backstage, or going through a rehearsal session with her vocal coach, or chatting while applying her pre-gig contouring. ("It really reads from a distance," notes Cameron, in full 'cool dad' mode.) Her stage outfit - just the one, unlike Swift's six billion - is a lightly worn shrug: loose sports jersey, backward-turned baseball cap, Limp Bizkit shorts, glasses apparently sourced from the venue's lost-and-found box. It's not even smart casual, and yet over the course of this concert - liberated to move in any which direction, both physically and musically - Eilish becomes a recognisably Cameronian figure of interest: a woman who comes to command an army of diehard followers while reshaping the fabric of time and space. Non-diehards (and here your correspondent must include himself) might want a little more variation in the songcraft, gazillion-sellers though these tracks may be, beloved though they visibly are of this crowd, captured trilling along with tears in their eyes. (Cameron catches so much saltwater I wondered if Hit Me Hard and Soft was going to function as an Avatar origin story: this is how whole planets flood.) And the tropes of these all-new concert movies are now such one senses the Documentary Now! lads in the wings, preparing a bumper double episode: they could have a field day with the 'puppy room' Eilish insists on having backstage so as to reduce pre-gig stress ("everyone needs some dog love"). None of this matters, though, so long as Cameron films his subject with much the same awestruck gaze as he once did Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley. Part of the filmmaker's fascination, I think, is that Eilish has successfully accomplished something he hasn't: to downsize. When Eilish sits crosslegged on her comparatively no-frills stage ("I don't want anything between me and them", she tells her director) and hushes the crowd into total silence before one song, she shrinks a cavernous concert venue to a small, tight friendship circle, as safe a space for creation as her own teenage bedroom. Eilish gets Cameron to think small for the first time in decades: the result is a rare concert movie that converts the colossal spectacle of the internationally touring pop show into something personal, intimate and very charming.

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of May 8-10, 2026):

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

2 (2) Michael (12A)

3 (new) The Sheep Detectives (PG)

4 (new) Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft (12A) ****

5 (new) Mortal Kombat II (15)

6 (3) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

7 (5) Project Hail Mary (12A) ***

8 (4) Hokum (15) ***

9 (new) Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition (15) ***

10 (7) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Cronos

2. Top Gun: Maverick

3. Wake in Fright

4. Shrek

5. Space Jam

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Scream 7 (18)

2 (new) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (15)

3 (2) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

4 (4) Shelter (15)

5 (7) Send Help (15) ***

6 (new) Hoppers (U) ****

7 (6) G.O.A.T. (PG)

8 (5) The Devil Wears Prada (PG) ***

9 (8) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

10 (3) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Cold Storage

2. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

3. Nouvelle Vague

4. Soul to Soul

5. Send Help

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [above] (Sunday, BBC Two, 2.30pm)

2. And Now for Something Completely Different (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)

3. 10 Things I Hate About You (Saturday, Channel 4, 1.05pm)

4. How to Marry a Millionaire (Saturday, BBC Two, 10.25am)

5. Saving Private Ryan (Wednesday, BBC One, 10.40pm)

Swamp thing: "Shrek" at 25

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."

(Quote commonly misattributed to Antonio Gramsci.)

Hard to believe Shrek screened at Cannes this week in 2001, but then that was the moment: Pixar's Toy Story and Toy Story 2 had made computer animation both artful and universal, giving Hollywood a new box of tricks to play with, money to spend, and a renewed sense of creative confidence. Everyone was getting on the boat, or yacht. This was the fledgling DreamWorks studio (and more specifically its ex-Disney chief Jeffrey Katzenberg) scuzzing up the Mouse House's aesthetic, rubbing Mickey's nose in the mud; in Shrek's opening moments, the kind of picturebook that graced the prologues of Disney's post-War golden age animations is revealed to have been taken into the outhouse by the titular green ogre, its pages used as bog roll before Shrek marches cheerily out of the crapper to the strains of Smash Mouth's "All Star". Welcome back to the summer of 2001: everything was about to go down the pan. New century, new crudeness. Before the decade was out, these voice performers would gift the world The Love Guru, Norbit and The Sweetest Thing; on the road to toppling the tyrannical Lord Farquaad (voiced by John Lithgow), whose surname proves interchangeable with "fuckwad", Shrek (Mike Myers) and Donkey (Eddie Murphy) spend most of their time burping and farting. I'd forgotten just how relentlessly lowbrow the movie is. In the Farquaad-ruled kingdom of Duloc, a singing exhibit rhymes "keep your feet off the grass" with "wipe your... face"; an inexplicably French Robin Hood (Vincent Cassel, for some reason) inspires a song-and-dance number in which the Merry Men do something similar, rhyming "maid" with "he likes to get... paid". Schtick might have been a good alternative title. Stink might be another. If you can hear a low industrial rumbling while revisiting Shrek this weekend, that's surely Uncle Walt, the man who made Fantasia, being rotated in his cryogenic capsule.

If there's been any measure of critical debate over Shrek this past quarter-century, it hinges on just how ugly the film was always meant to be. The animation really is ugly, in the same way the first Toy Story now looks clunky. (Chief takehome: how rapidly processor chips and modelling tech improved over the course of the century's first decades.) Granted, the rough-and-readiness does set Shrek apart from, say, Pixar's comparatively verdant A Bug's Life, engineered only a couple of years before. But it's very rough, from the uncanny humanoid faces (Fiona and Farquaad especially) to the dragon whose firebreathing recalls a PS2 cut scene to the sequence where Shrek and Donkey traverse a field of sunflowers, the Klein-blue sky behind them entirely untroubled by sun, clouds, detail. Watching Shrek in 2026 is a little like watching one of those cheap Russian timewasters the major chains now import - somewhat against the spirit of any trade embargo - to fill Screen 6 during half-term. (It's also closer than you'd think to watching today's AI slop.) It's briskly told at 86 minutes; if you were feeling generous, its sarcastic approach to the fairytale qualifies as a kind of wit. (There are fun bits of comic writing, from Farquaad's interrogation of the Gingerbread Boy - "Do you know the Muffin Man?" - to the use of cue cards at Farquaad and Fiona's wedding.) And I guess it's novel (and very un-Disneyish) that all the characters should seem so fundamentally horny, though again here, we're not so far from those early Internet pages that did blasphemous things to beloved cartoon characters. We've had four of these things in the years since, plus spinoffs, and - one reason for this reissue - there's another to come next year. People apparently love Shrek: we have it (more specifically, a late-film John Cale cover version) to thank/blame for that Noughties revival of the song "Hallelujah", and even Al Pacino, for heaven's sake, has admitted to using a Shrek phone case. But then enough people bought that Crazy Frog record to get it to number one. Sometimes there really can be no accounting for popular taste.

Shrek returns to cinemas nationwide today.

"LifeHack" (Guardian 14/05/26)

LifeHack ***

Dir: Ronan Corrigan. With: Georgie Fowler, Yasmin Finney, Jessica Reynolds, Charlie Creed-Miles. 96 mins. Cert: 15

This debut feature from Irish web-and-zeitgeist-surfer Ronan Corrigan continues its producer Timur Bekmambetov’s interest in fashioning entire movies out of virtual space, collaging as it does the screens of phones, laptops and PCs. Narratively, it plays like a Web 2.0 update of Iain Softley’s cult Nineties fave Hackers: a quartet of heavily vaping, tech-savvy gamers who’ve cultivated an online friendship decide to take their nightly shitposting to the next level by robbing an obnoxious crypto billionaire (Charlie Creed-Miles), whose motto is “I’m CEO, c**t”. Corrigan’s secret weapon is that his plot points have already been beta-tested offline. What we’re watching is at source an old-school heist thriller with especially open coding.

Corrigan does, however, commit far more forcefully than any of his predecessors to this accelerationist digital aesthetic. He casts newish faces with the air of habitual phonecheckers; he establishes their innate restlessness and distractibility in frantically scrolling between tabs, connecting form to character; and he pumps the leads’ squabbling banter through the same headset-filter one might strap on to play Call of Duty. Though this script – co-written by the director with Hope Elliott Kemp – wisely renames a bluff podcaster Joe Brogan, these frames-within-frames otherwise resemble the real thing: the film’s meme game is strong, if that’s any kind of commendation for a motion picture, and there are none of those Google substitutes called ridiculous things like Search Rhino or InfoBuzz.

Corrigan and co-editor Sasha Kletsov excel as pivotal passwords are sourced, accepted and rejected, then slow the tempo to establish a tender, geekily awkward romance between hackers-in-chief Kyle (Georgie Fowler) and Alex (Yasmin Finney). Only belatedly do we experience the usual limitation of these screenlife thrillers: after the initial excitement wears off, we’re faced with an ultra-mechanical entertainment, all pointing and clicking between spinning wheels. As social media enters its flop era, this subgenre’s shelf life is surely diminishing. (Corrigan’s security-cam footage indicates these events unfold between 2018 and 2020: it’s already a period piece.) Efficiently executed, though its relentless cursor-nudging will likely make older viewers want to unplug and retreat with an 18th century novel.

LifeHack screens in selected Vue cinemas today and Wednesday.

From fear to eternity: "Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition"

As they celebrate their fiftieth anniversary, those original monsters of rock Iron Maiden find themselves central to two feature-length documentaries. Di'Anno: Iron Maiden's Lost Singer (currently touring) is an independently mounted profile of the group's irascible early vocalist Paul Di'Anno in his final years; the studio-backed, starrier-eyed Burning Ambition (now in multiplexes) the officially sanctioned overview of ver Maiden's five decades in the business. They were never fashionable: emerging amid the winter of discontent as hard rockers, just as punk was becoming the next big thing, they weren't what the labels were initially looking for, nor what mainstream radio was looking for, nor indeed the revolutionary MTV. "We weren't as good looking as Eddie [the band's ghoulish mascot]," founder member and guitarist bedrock Steve "Harry" Harris cheerily admits early on. In subsequent years, they would be pushed to the physical limit by management who wanted them out on the road 24/7 to make up for the lack of promotional airplay; they would also be dissed by such young pretenders as Nirvana, who responded to a touring request by insisting Maiden were "too old". Yet sustained by a longhaired fanbase who knew exactly what they wanted - to rock out - and by the blazing self-confidence of replacement frontman Bruce Dickinson, they survived and prospered, becoming something like Status Quo with an edge. (Never fashionable, always there.) One of Burning Ambition's biggest revelations is the scope of that fanbase. You could probably have guessed that Anthrax's Scott Ian and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine were Maiden heads, as it were. But who knew Chuck D was an admirer? Who knew Javier Bardem was? Bardem proves effusive indeed in interview, unironically intoning the band's lyrics as if they were Coleridge. Do you think Penélope Cruz lets him put his records on in the front room of an evening, or would she shoo him away to his cueva de hombre?

As assembled by Malcolm Venville, a veteran pop-promo director who last entered cinemas with 2009's Sexy Beast-adjacent 44 Inch Chest, Burning Ambition otherwise assumes a broadly conventional form. The concert footage goes heavy on thunderous drumming and elaborate fretwork; unlike Quo, Maiden proceeded with a blokey virtuosity that marked them - again, unfashionably - as the children of prog. Often evocative, time-capsule archive - Bruce interviewed by Sally James on Tiswas, Nicko McBrain drumming up a storm on The Sooty Show (!) - is overlaid with the sound of the lads and close collaborators, enlisted as offscreen talking heads. Inevitably, certain anecdotes verge on the Spinal Tap, particularly those centring the swaggering Dickinson, a passable lookalike in his younger days for Christopher Guest's Nigel Tufnel. We learn the singer came to blows with Harris backstage at Newcastle City Hall; he brains himself with a guitar during the 1985 iteration of Rock in Rio, and furnishes a Hungarian press conference with an especially Tufnelian quote ("We prefer to write songs about things people don't do very often - like death"). Some of that archive describes the changing face (if that's the right word) of codpieces and tight Spandex slacks. Yet again, like Quo, Maiden persisted with a sense of humour, one that proved valuable amid the Satanic panic of the 1980s and whenever they were faced with the snobbery of the domestic music press. In a film as densely packed as some of those codpieces, Venville even begins to broach the politics of Maiden. As previously noted by Tarek Hodžić's 2017 doc Scream for Me Sarajevo, the group were greeted almost as liberators amid the Communist-controlled Eastern Bloc of the late 1980s and early 1990s. (They were at least as significant in the raising of the Iron Curtain as, say, David Hasselhoff.) Late on, reuniting with the band after his wayward solo career, Dickinson can be heard telling the crowd at one gig that "it doesn't matter if you're Muslim, Christian, Jewish... as long as you're a Maiden fan, we're one big fucking family", an idea that requires further parsing in light of the singer's role as a hypeman for Brexit, which proved a line in the sand for at least one sometime fan (my metalhead brother). In the closing moments, bringing us up to date, we see Maiden playing to another sellout crowd in the London Stadium last summer, grizzled and withered - that long hair now greying - and McBrainless, the drummer having retired on health grounds in 2024, yet undefeated by it all. Maybe Maiden only begin to make sense if we view them in terms of their own songs' protagonists: as men out of time, eternal rebels, some crucial part of them ever frozen in up-yours adolescence.

Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition is now showing in cinemas nationwide. 

From the archive: "Wake in Fright"

Some films are so ferocious they refuse to sit around getting dusty in the archives for too long; by sheer force of personality, they endure, and eventually go swaggering back out into the world, looking for trouble once again. After four decades in lock-up – possibly at the behest of the Australian Tourist Board – Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 horror-cum-national character study Wake in Fright returns to UK screens this weekend, off the back of a recent Cannes restoration, to offer its own unique and bloody-minded tour of the Outback.

The Canadian Kotcheff got here around the same time as Nic Roeg went Walkabout, yet where the latter recast this territory as another Eden, Kotcheff’s interest was more grounded (and, in some way, more comprehensible) yet: in a place where there’s nothing to do except get royally lashed, and a fellow is judged chiefly on his ability to neck a pint. (I drink, therefore I am: one of the reasons the film endures so is its resemblance to the aggressive dipsomania still prevalent in certain British backwaters.)

On trial here is one John Grant (Gary Bond), an Englishman who’s wound up, somewhat resentfully, in a middle-of-nowhere town on a teaching secondment. Of course this educated man believes himself above the locals, with their gruff militarism, arcane gambling rituals and steaks for a dollar. And of course, this certainty will be removed from him when he tries to get away from it all over the Christmas holidays, eroded by a combination of alcohol, bad luck and that familiar 70s harbinger of insanity Donald Pleasance.

During its absence from general circulation, the film has found itself lumped in with that Ozploitation cycle documented in 2008’s enjoyably rowdy Not Quite Hollywood, yet in itself Wake in Fright is far more lingering than any of those movies turned out for a quick buck. Kotcheff seems determined to hold his camera on every strange, unsettling, telling gesture and each loaded exchange, and the result is almost abstract: a portrait of a figure slowly dissolving into his surrounds, as though he were no more than a temporary heat haze.

Or some other haze, for it isn’t blood that flows through these frames, but the amber nectar. The sound of tinnies being opened becomes a prelude to gunfire, and you can sense the film developing a bad head before you – a fogginess of a kind a breakfast of kangaroo stew only worsens, through which only a bullet might really pierce. The action, however, remains joltingly vivid: a game of coinflipping that becomes as much a self-abusing ritual as the Russian roulette in The Deer Hunter, a brutal kangaroo hunt in which everybody starts blasting away at the thin tissue of civilities separating John Grant from his true nature.

In between, Kotcheff does something haunting and critical with the film’s women, who’ve long learnt to keep their mouths shut and shrug off every horny-handed slap on the arse. Yet, clearly, we’re mired firmly in man’s territory: the film keeps weighing some of the most believable drunken-destructive scraps ever recorded outside of provincial nightclub CCTV footage against those mornings-after when its characters awaken, in puddles of their own drool, sweat and filth, surrounded by strange bodies, and wondering what the XXXX just happened.

Punctuated at regular intervals by editor Anthony Buckley’s choice, suggestive blackouts, Wake in Fright re-emerges as a real hangover-movie, one that can’t easily be slept off; however physical Kotcheff got in his later, more scattershot work – which took in the agonised chest-thumping of First Blood and the knockabout of Weekend at Bernie’s – he never quite matched this one for potency.

(MovieMail, March 2014)

A 4K restoration of Wake in Fright opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of May 1-3, 2026):

1 (new) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12A)

2 (1) Michael (12A)

3 (2) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

4 (new) Hokum (15) ***

5 (3) Project Hail Mary (12A) ***

6 (new) Patriot (15) **

7 (6) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

8 (4) The Drama (15) **

9 (5) Lee Cronin's The Mummy (18)

10 (new) Eugene Onegin - Met Opera 2026 (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Slither

2. Rose of Nevada

3. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence [above]

4. Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition

5. Hokum

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Scream 7 (18)

2 (1) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

3 (2) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

4 (3) Shelter (15)

5 (8) The Devil Wears Prada (PG) ***

6 (15) G.O.A.T. (PG)

7 (5) Send Help (15) ***

8 (6) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

9 (4) The Super Mario Bros Movie (PG)

10 (14) Hamnet (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Cold Storage

2. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

3. Nouvelle Vague

4. Soul to Soul

5. Send Help

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Producers (Saturday, BBC Two, 11.45pm)

2. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Saturday, ITV1, 6am)

3. Surge (Sunday, BBC Two, 12.05am)

4. A Bigger Splash (Monday, BBC Two, 11pm)

5. Moon (Sunday, Channel 4, 11pm)