"Whistle" (Guardian 10/02/26)

Whistle ***

Dir: Corin Hardy. With: Dafne Keen, Sophie Nélisse, Percy Hynes White, Nick Frost. 99 mins. Cert: 15

The horror renaissance resumes. On the surface, this teen-courting, genre-savvy Irish-Canadian entry looks like one of those projects ushered towards a greenlight once the Philippou brothers’ cursed-artefact chiller Talk to Me cleared up at the international box office. Rather than suburban Australia, writer Owen Egerton and director Corin Hardy relocate us to an autumnal, Springsteen-ready North American steeltown, where artsy high-schooler Chris (Dafne Keen) inherits the locker of the star basketballer we’ve just seen flambeed in a prologue. The deadly doodad she finds there is a skull-shaped Aztec whistle with either “summon the dead” or “summon your dead” (there’s some linguistic quibbling) inscribed on the side. Naturally she puts it back, and everybody lives happily ever after.

I kid, of course. For a while, the horror element is less in-your-face than it was in that pummelling Antipodean predecessor, but whistleblowing soon makes literal everyone’s worst fears about dying. That development gives Hardy’s increasingly bloody kill scenes a Final Destination-like piquancy: your heart can only go out to the boy racer who perishes via car crash in his upstairs bedroom. One obvious holdover from the Philippous is the sympathy for insecure, troubled teens who couldn’t seem any less like the usual disposable jocks and prom queens. Egerton observes courtship rituals with tenderness, quietly foregrounding Chris’s struggles to come out to upright classmate Sophie Nélisse; beneath the looming shadow of death, an attempt to live one’s truest life.

Brit Hardy has far more fun with his budget than he did on 2018’s mechanical franchise entry The Nun: he runs with a solid Egerton in-joke – naming objects, places and Nick Frost’s doomed teacher Mr. Craven after noted horror directors – and pushes a sequence involving a labyrinthine straw maze, surely beyond the remit of a smalltown harvest festival, towards the pleasingly surreal. If neither he nor Egerton can successfully integrate a loose-end preacher-slash-drug dealer (Percy Hynes White), elsewhere they pull off the deft trick of being familiar without seeming derivative: it’s scenes you remember from films you like, occasionally with a novel twist. Enough for Friday or Saturday night enjoyment, certainly – and regular sleepover rotation beckons.

Whistle opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.

Dur dur d'être bébé: "Little Amélie"

A dearth of prominent animations in 2025 has led our various academies to consider one or two leftfield options, to their credit and our benefit. The Cannes-endorsed Francophone charmer Little Amélie - which has been picked up by the Vue chain to show in both dubbed and subtitled options - proves altogether more philosophically inclined than all those imported half-term screenfillers called something like Dogs on a Train. Adapted from the author Amélie Nothomb's somewhat fantastical memoir Métaphysique des Tubes - a 2003 work so highfalutin its translation bore the Faber imprint - this is a very French, distinctly literary project: a young girl's attempt to get her head around human consciousness within the first three years of her existence. The movie opens more or less as Marty Supreme did, which is to say at the moment of conception; thereafter it charts young Amélie's formative years in Japan at the end of the 1960s and her efforts to comprehend how and why the world is as strange and wondrous as it is. If it contains any element of biographical truth - and that has been debated in the French book pages - it's that its heroine is a writer, or at least possessed of the writer's restless, curious mindset, from the off; here, she even gets to narrate her enquiries herself, giving the film an air of a more cerebral Look Who's Talking.

Behind it all is the not unreasonable idea that human life is kind of trippy when you stop to think about it. First you don't know what you are, then you do; you have no idea how to stand or walk or talk, and then you figure it out. (It seems an awful lot of hard work, and maybe it's no surprise some humans decide to stop developing beyond a certain point.) Where a Dogs on a Train might compel you to wonder why it is you bother to go on at all, Little Amélie seeks active engagement with how it is one lives and moves through the world: it's Left Bank Disney, with Sartre as its Baloo. The directors, Liane-Cho Han and Maïlys Vallade, work up a contrast between the classical elegance of their images (big eyes, bright, pleasing picturebook colours, more than a dash of Ghibli in the material details of this household) and the state of existential crisis and flux they seek to depict. Yet they capture a lot in passing: the florid wonders of a girl's first springtime (a particular balm amid the dreariest winter in living memory); an early lesson in the gendering of this universe, why boys get to do (and get away with) that which is forbidden to girls; the death that becomes a part of life the moment we're born into it. In some respects, Han and Vallade go PG-rated gently, restaging WW2 in a rice cooker and framing a last-reel suicide attempt as reverie; you can feel the book being softened here and there for easier, wider consumption. (The young Nothomb later spent time in Coventry, and I'd like to see these directors try something similar with an animated ringroad as a backdrop.) Yet the 77-minute running time is unimprovable: like childhood, Little Amélie flies by, and as with childhood, it imprints cherishable images on the inside walls of your cranium.

Little Amélie opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.

"Stitch Head" (Guardian 09/02/26)

Stitch Head **

Dir: Steve Hudson. With the voices of: Asa Butterfield, Joel Fry, Rob Brydon, Alison Steadman. 92 mins. Cert: U

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this middling Brit-headed, European-financed, Indian-manufactured digimation is the radical change of career trajectory it represents for its pinballing director Steve Hudson. Hudson broke through with 2006’s Loachian social drama True North, a well-received migrant movie starring Peter Mullan; having subsequently witnessed how the other half lives while helming episodes of primetime TV’s Cranford, he now pivots to pixels with a big-screen adaptation of Guy Bass’s kid-lit books. His latest does feel like a tentative first step into a heavily crowded field, sutured together from ideas and images previously encountered in far more confident and accomplished entertainments.

Bass’s eponymous hero is rendered here as a boy with Bowie-esque polychromatic eyes, a baseball-like head and the voice of Asa Butterfield; his home is a castle overlooking smalltown Grubbers Nubbin, where a mad professor (Rob Brydon) carries out Frankenstinian experiments. If the lead character design is solid – accompanying adults may wind up knitting replicas of Stitch Head’s onesie – the surrounding menagerie seems a bit too Pixar for comfort: Stitch’s furry cyclops pal Creature (Joel Fry) is so conspicuously a hybrid of Monsters, Inc.’s Mike and Sully you’re amazed legal letters haven’t been exchanged. Once this pair abscond to join a travelling freakshow, Stitch Head ventures a rather melancholy and misshapen showbiz story – that of a boy who, much like the film, sorely wants to be loved.

This viewer emerged feeling a little sorry for it: in cinemas, Stitch Head is being preceded by trailers for Pixar and Sony’s latest whizzbang endeavours, armed with the full box of audiovisual fireworks. By contrast, dead air swirls around Hudson’s minor-celebrity voicecast; his backgrounds are more detailed and persuasive than the script. With its free-floating, slightly macabre imagery, the whole suggests a watered-down Saturday morning kids’ club variant of 1993’s The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, undertaken by Bristol’s bolexbrothers in their guise as Aardman’s dark side. It’s one to test on your children rather than treat them to, certainly: sensitive youngsters may run screaming, while their elders may develop that glazed look that indicates they’ve sat through much of this before.

Stitch Head opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.

On demand: "Maiden"

You could see it as a sign of skewed cinematic priorities that that accursed mariner Donald Crowhurst has inspired three (very different) films - 2006's Deep Water, 2017's Crowhurst and 2018's The Mercy - despite failing to achieve whatever it was he was trying to do. By way of a counterpoint, we might well consider 2018's Maiden, Alex Holmes's documentary tribute to Tracy Edwards MBE, skipper of the first all-female crew to compete in the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race. Holmes's film takes a conventional form: its backbone is a long and frank interview with Edwards, supplemented by contributions from her crewmates and archive and race footage. Yet this is one of those stories that raises interesting questions and fascinating points (and, in passing, points up exactly where the solitary and morbidly self-sufficient Crowhurst took a wrong turn). It is, on some level, a more spectacular variant of the old yarn about a woman finding her place in the world; this woman has to circumnavigate it. Edwards, who by her own admission had been suspended from school no less than 26 times, entered her twenties as a dropout and a party girl. Pressganged by peers into stewardessing on holiday-resort charter boats, she began to learn the ropes, however, and eventually emerged as someone who might tackle the challenges involved in competitive sailing. Again, she got there the hard way: she completed her first Round the World race as a chef, catering for grizzled old seasalts who at best tolerated her presence, and at worst were openly condescending, often contemptuous. For her second go, in 1989, she was in charge - and, unlike Crowhurst, she wasn't alone.

It was a challenge nevertheless, as Holmes makes abundantly clear. Edwards had to seek out comparably experienced female sailors; their first task was patching up a fairly shonky-looking vessel, quite possibly the last ship in the shop; then she had to overcome both last-minute crewing issues and her own internalised reluctance to lead. That archive flags up Edwards' determination, her entrepreneurship (which included striking a sponsorship deal with King Hussein of Jordan) and her need to overturn the expectations of onlookers. (Intriguingly, her younger self appears militant in rejecting any attempt to dub the crew's efforts as feminist. More internalisation?) It also paints a fairly damning picture of the attitudes displayed by fellow competitors and the media covering this boat's progress. (The Guardian was among the sniggerers, its sailing correspondent Bob Fisher notoriously billing the boat as "the tinful of tarts".) Then there is the footage of the race itself, all the more spectacular for not being the sort of sporting event one sees much of outside of the Olympic cycle. We watch as the boats leave each port, landmasses disappearing in favour of all-enveloping ocean; reference points seem to disappear altogether once the flotilla reaches Antarctica; blurry onboard footage captures the ladies standing at crazy angles, being strafed by huge plumes of spray while trying to tack sails. Gradually, this story gathers in momentum and import: you see it most obviously in the swelling crowds gathering in every harbour to cheer this crew home. And by Maiden's final stretch, we number among those multitudes. They did it, we tell ourselves. Whatever the hardships they encountered, whether this achievement was feminist or not: they actually did it.

Maiden is now available to rent via Prime Video, YouTube and the BFI Player, and on DVD through Dogwoof.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of January 30-February 1, 2025):

1 (2) Hamnet (12A) **

2 (1) The Housemaid (15)

3 (new) Shelter (15)

4 (new) Iron Lung (15) **

5 (5) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

6 (4) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A) ***

7 (6) Marty Supreme (15) ***

8 (new) Primate (18)

9 (3) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

10 (new) Is This Thing On? (15) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. R.E.M x Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr

2. Nouvelle Vague

3. No Other Choice

4. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

5. The History of Sound

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

2 (1) Sinners (15) ****

3 (7) One Battle After Another (15) ****

4 (2) 28 Years Later (15) ****

5 (3) Wicked: For Good (PG)

6 (9) Bugonia (15) **

7 (5) Predator: Badlands (12) **

8 (6) Dracula (15)

9 (13) Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (PG)

10 (4) The Running Man (15) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. One Battle After Another

2. Roofman

3. Sketch

4. Keeper

5. Anemone

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Producers [above] (Saturday, BBC Two, 12.45am)

2. Deliverance (Monday, BBC Two, 11.50pm)

3. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Sunday, BBC Two, 6.05am)

4. Woman at War (Thursday, Channel 4, 2.20am)

5. The Woman King (Saturday, Channel 4, 9.30pm)

"The Strangers: Chapter 3" (Guardian 06/02/26)

The Strangers: Chapter 3 **

Dir: Renny Harlin. With: Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, Richard Brake, Rachel Shenton. 91 mins. Cert: 15

If you’re wondering how this shrug-along horror series has got this far, Renny Harlin shot all three instalments back-to-back in Bratislava in late 2022; reshoots followed the indifferent response to 2024’s first chapter, which didn’t much alleviate the even more indifferent response to last year’s second. We were getting them whether we wanted them or not: the modest resources had been spent, one and two were cheap enough to make some sort of money, and so we now arrive at the last knockings and the year’s most dutiful carnage. The mistake was to expand a morally gloomy universe that was better off self-contained; the more light Harlin and collaborators let in, the more their set-up presented as generic runaround, hopelessly out of place amid the recent horror renaissance.

We’re deep into Strangers lore now, but last girl standing Maya (Riverdale graduate Madelaine Petsch, who surely hoped this was her Neve Campbell moment) continues to scurry about a devout woodland community like a bloodied fieldmouse with resting iPhone face; those masked thrill-killers – previously three, now two – have gained ulterior motives for pursuing her. Also present: tatted survivor Gregory (Gabriel Basso, who must have been hoping for more to do) and the ever-shifty Sheriff Rotter (Richard Brake), whose link to the killers is finally made explicit here. New blood arrives in the form of Maya’s sister Debbie (Hollyoaks alumna and recent short-film Oscar-winner Rachel Shenton) who comes to town seeking answers, only to be drawn into another round of humdrum stalk-and-slash.

Somewhere in the background is the unnerving (and not untimely) idea of an all-American community that tolerates killers in its midst so long as they prey on outsiders, protecting their own. Yet Harlin ties up his loose ends in characteristically leaden, workmanlike fashion. His scene pacing might have seemed antiquated circa Wes Craven’s Scream; a full thirty minutes of pregnant pauses hardly shake the suspicion there wasn’t enough plot in play for a trilogy. The 2008 original will probably endure as a solid, sleepover-ready example of American ordeal cinema – but this final chapter, like its immediate predecessors, falls somewhere between footnote and outright detritus, a plastic bag being propelled through the multiplex by a stiff breeze.

The Strangers: Chapter 3 is now showing in selected cinemas.

King of comedy: "R.E.M x Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr"

In the coming days, cinemas across the UK will bear witness to the second stage in an ongoing experiment with the presentation of silent films. Last Hallowe'en, Silents Synced [sic] - an Austin, Texas-based outfit rescoring and rereleasing classic silents paired with noteworthy modern albums - gave us Radiohead x Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors; this time round, it's R.E.M x Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr, where the Athens, Georgia band are represented by songs from 1994's Monster and 1996's New Adventures in Hi-Fi. We are not a million miles away here from the outrage provoked by Giorgio Moroder's pop-promo Metropolis, all told: before the main feature, Synced's resident DJ/director Josh Frank offers a version of Keaton's 1923 short The Balloonatic remixed to Amon Tobin, complete with superimposed ravey visuals and bass-bin pulses, during which you begin to understand why the BFI, for one, hasn't booked these titles. (The bagmen would have a collective coronary, trailing decades of screening notes in their wake.) Not too far, also, from that head at the social gathering who still insists on putting Dark Side of the Moon on at the same time as The Wizard of Oz; nor, indeed, from the visuals projected onto the walls of your nearest hipster drinking establishment. Here are disparate works of art, made in very different eras, pulling your attention in two separate directions; the Silents Synced experience can seem like a movie screening and a listening party happening simultaneously, inviting patrons to try rubbing their stomachs in circles while also patting their heads. In this Balloonatic, you begin to feel Tobin's pounding techno overpowering Buster's deft delicacy: only a few choice sight gags survive the barrage.

The main feature, thankfully, is happier: it serves up a good new print with inventive tinting, and R.E.M's dreamy Americana, even amid this grungier period of their discography, meshes more agreeably with Keaton's vision of life on and adjacent to Main Street. (Frank may have taken the film's epigraph to heart: "Don't try to do two things at once and expect to do justice to both".) It makes sense to lay "How The West Was Won and Where It Got Us" over the opening scenes of Buster's daily graft, and (duh) "I Don't Sleep, I Dream" over our hero's projection-box reveries. Less literal, but no less effective: when Buster first enters the film-within-the-film - only to be almost immediately turfed out again - it's to the squalling, feedback-heavy first minute of "Star 69", and the siren-like guitar effects of "Leave" add an extra dimension to the exploding pool ball business. (A further serendipity, or big break: UK viewers can use this sequence, with its tremendous trick shots, to pay tribute of sorts to the recently deceased John Virgo.) It's canny playlisting above all else: silent cinema brought to you in association with Spotify, heading towards an inspired musical cheat come the final reel. (By which I mean a song that features on neither of the billed albums: you'll know it when you hear it.) The truth is it's another opportunity to sit before - and marvel at - one of the most inventive film comedies of all time; you could probably even play an Olly Murs or Bruno Mars album over the top of Sherlock Jr, and it wouldn't lose any of its vim, vigour or lustre. At the public screening I attended this past Thursday night, it was clear this approach had drawn people out to their local independent cinema - in appalling weather, to boot - to chuckle en masse at a movie made over a century ago. Purists may cavil, but in this economy, that's not nothing.

R.E.M. x Sherlock Jr is now playing in selected cinemas.