Falling down: "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You"

Our various Academies, in their wisdom, have overlooked or disregarded Jennifer Lawrence's turn in Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love: too much - too messy, perhaps - in a film that didn't find the groundswell of popular support some critics hoped it would. It's left to Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, then, to represent the outer limits of female performance and endurance as the 2025-26 awards season enters its home straight: here is a familiar face being put through the ringer and otherwise pushed to her very limits in a dark indie comedy-drama from the folks who previously brought you the Safdies' Good Time and Uncut Gems. The face belongs to Rose Byrne, taking a stride or seven beyond her preliminary work on Apple TV's Physical in the role of Linda, a people-pleasing working mother trying to hold it together while running the gauntlet of modern life: a near-permanently absent husband, a daughter with an eating disorder and anxiety besides, domestic plumbing issues that result in her once-perfect Montauk home being flooded even before Bronstein has flashed her Evan Dando-sounding title on screen in horror-movie crimson. Certainly, there are horrific elements in play here: we're watching a potentially fatal existential crisis collide with something more literal. For Bronstein, modern life is a matter of treading water, while hoping the sky isn't also going to cave in on you; her film crystallises a moment where all our pre-existing structures and sureties have been undermined and nobody really seems to know what day it is, in large part because the majority of us have been forced to scrabble around like blue-arsed flies to keep ever more feral wolves from the door. The daughter's anxiety is understandable, to say the least.

In a typically Safdiean manoeuvre, Bronstein isn't trading in plot so much as pile-up, a process made literal in her antsy driving scenes (every time Linda gets behind a wheel, you fear someone's going to get hurt) and the fractious answerphone messages that accumulate as our newly displaced heroine is tugged this way and that. The droll fun here - if fun's the word - is that everybody Linda bumps into appears to be undergoing their own idea of their own worst day. Over the phone, Linda's husband is repeatedly short with her; he sounds like George Costanza - and the movie gains a dimension if you approach it as a treatise on what it might be like to find yourself married to George Costanza - but turns out to be Christian Slater. The doctor treating the daughter - played by Bronstein herself, the thinking person's Gal Gadot - is prone to nagging and fingerpointing; a jobsworth motel clerk (Ivy Wolk) won't serve Linda the alcohol that might at least take an edge or two off; her shrink (Conan O'Brien) veers between distractible and outright evasive. It's very funny when we discover, in one of the rare moments when the protagonist can return to her day job, that Linda is herself a therapist, obliged to spend her days listening to patients who fall on a spectrum between needy and sincerely troubled and who generally only confirm her in her harassed outlook. At best, she brings empathy to her task: she knows exactly what her clients are going through, partly because she too is processing some of it mid-session. But you can equally forgive her for seeming distracted or brusque or sharp, as she often is; it's the errors of personal and professional judgement that concern Bronstein, and therefore us. In cataloguing those errors, though, Bronstein succeeds in showcasing a performance that really does feel like an entire, complex universe. Until the closing moments, we don't see the daughter and husband, so fixated is the filmmaker's gaze on the agonised contours of Byrne's face; in some ways, it's a directorial compliment (she sees Linda in all her agitated and spiralling glory), but this camera also seems another of the pressures bearing down on this woman. 

Byrne's myriad acting nominations this season, then, are on one level a reflection of the degree of difficulty involved here. This is a role to keep an actor awake at night: for just shy of two hours, If I Had Legs is all about Linda, and a sensitive performer might well worry whether she was being heroic enough, or at all. (One semi-legit criticism - which the film obliquely addresses over the course of Linda's haphazard relationship with a motel handyman, played very capably by A$AP Rocky - would be that these are first-world, white-lady problems.) An attractive performer, meanwhile, might also fret about how zonked Bronstein wants to make her look in those mercilessly tight close-ups. Yet Byrne doesn't just withstand such scrutiny, she responds with a (characteristically Antipodean?) resilience and fortitude; she remains extremely relatable, even - especially, perhaps - as Linda takes to screaming into a pillow. Bronstein acted in her husband Ronald's Frownland, one of this century's most radically uncompromising indie propositions, in that it didn't want to be liked (or, really, sat through) at all. Some trace of that film persists into this one via the black hole in Linda's ceiling, which becomes increasingly fraught with meaning, some of it structural, some of it depressive, some of it maternal. If I Had Legs is, however, a product of a more emollient imagination, and a more commercially minded studio in A24: it knows the value of a star who might better sell us on all this stress, and of the mordant humour that helps to lighten the load. O'Brien's normie presence is expertly deployed as someone who has got it together but wants you to know it, and I feel I should also praise the hamster whose fate speaks - maybe squeaks - to bruising lived experience on the Bronsteins' part. It's a tough old world out there, and Linda's is not a crisis that could be eased much by any emotional support animal - but it's some feat for an indie film released this far into the 21st century to remind you of Jill Clayburgh's heyday and those old Cassavetes-Gena Rowlands collaborations.

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

"O' Romeo" (Guardian 16/02/26)

O’ Romeo **

Dir: Vishal Bhardwaj. With: Shahid Kapoor, Triptii Dimri, Avinash Tiwary, Nana Patekar. 178 mins. Cert: 18

It must be Misbegotten Adaptations Week. This Hindi gangland epic’s credentials are impeccable: director Vishal Bhardwaj previously wowed with textured, inventive variations on Macbeth (Maqbool, 2003), Othello (Omkara, 2006) and Hamlet (Haider, 2014). Rather than a straightforward modernisation of Romeo and Juliet, his latest instead revisits a grisly true-crime story ripped from Hussein Zaidi’s Mafia Queens of Mumbai, the compendium that also inspired Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2022 hit Gangubai Kathiawadi. The results align Bhardwaj’s cinema with the newly lurid turn mainstream Bollywood has taken via recent smashes Animal and Dhurandhar, but it’s jarring to witness, as if Kenneth Branagh had followed his turn-of-the-Nineties Shakespeare successes by making Natural Born Killers.

For Venice (or Baz Luhrmann’s Venice Beach), Bhardwaj swaps in the Mumbai underworld of the 1990s, ushering on the movies’ first Romeo to be a moral degenerate. Shahid Kapoor’s Hussein Ustara – nicknamed Romeo – is a heavily tattooed bellower employed as a hitman for a local godfather; his Juliet (Animal’s Triptii Dimri) an aggrieved widow clutching a sizeable hitlist. These two are star-crossed: he rescues her amid her bungled assassination attempt on the lawyer smearing her late husband, earning them both powerful foes. Yet they’re chiefly blood-splattered and otherwise begrimed: the fish tank through which Leo glimpsed Claire Danes here abuts the bed to which this Romeo takes two escorts while his Juliet listens in. Happy Valentine’s week, everybody.

Bold imagemaking and considered design persists through the murk, and the performances are strong. Kapoor and Dimri commit to this plot’s peculiar demands, while Nana Patekar is appreciably sly as our anti-hero’s wearied handler. Yet where Gangubai showcased Bhansali’s heightened tonal sensitivity, these gruelling three hours veer between crude and emotionally inert: a tale of obsession and abjection, with its dead-eyed lovers dragging one another towards the gutter and the grave. It’s the kind of distinctive misfire only an artist could make, typically when they’re so hung up on a story they swallow its poisons whole. Still, mildly heartbreaking to see such a thoughtful cineaste tossing his library card to play the leering tough guy: that title invites reading with a rueful shake of the head.

O' Romeo is now showing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Soundtrack to a Coup d'État"

The film essayist Johan Grimonprez last broached British cinemas all the way back in 2010 with Double Take, where the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the events of the Cold War criss-crossed in supremely entertaining and illuminating fashion. With Soundtrack to a Coup d'État, Grimonprez offers two histories for the price of one, on subjects which once more intertwine. The first is a history of what Billy Joel in "We Didn't Start The Fire" summarised as "Belgians in the Congo", that mid-20th century colonial misadventure that climaxed with the murder of the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba by forces keeping a beady eye on the country's vast rubber, copper and uranium deposits. The second film - lest the first appear a touch dry - concerns American jazz at the turn of the 1960s: Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone et al. The connection between the two - and it's not such an arbitrary one - is that, in the very same moment, jazz had begun to be weaponised by the powers-that-be in a bid to baffle and outwit Soviet leader Nikita Kruschchev (who wasn't a fan); key performers such as Armstrong were sent around the globe, missionary-like, so as to persuade other nations that Eisenhower's America had its house in order. (Even if its ongoing problems with race positioned the majority of its Black population as akin to house slaves.) As you'd maybe expect from an Oscar-nominated doc, Soundtrack proves clear-eyed and serious in its editorial line, yet Grimonprez folds in all that jazz to produce something more cinematic besides: it's Cold War: The Musical! With footnotes! Only the Congolese climate prevents me from adding: On ice!

Rather than proving secondary to this picture, the soundtrack serves as an organising principle. Grimonprez reframes history itself as jazz: sometimes harmonious, often improvised and bordering on unfathomable, occasionally murderously dissonant. But he also gives us film as jazz, too. If the thinking is broadly anti-colonial, so too the montage recognises no borders: this kind of archive footage rubs up against that kind of archive footage, sometimes to underline a point, sometimes to counterpoint, sometimes just to be mischievous. (Witness Eisenhower meeting Kruschchev while Louie sings "I'm confessing that I love you".) Elsewhere, macro and micro mesh. History carries us from the UN in New York to the households of Brazzaville, allowing Grimonprez and editor Rik Chaubet to stitch together a link between pipe-smoking CIA chief Allen Dulles, René Magritte and Colonel Mobutu, head of the armed forces massing against Lumumba. Elsewhere, they create odd little echoes and funny ripples within this history: Khrushchev's tendency to thump tables with his fists in moments of high drama comes to rhyme with Art Blakey's drumming. What becomes impressive is Grimonprez's own command of tempo: whenever the political toing-and-froing is getting too baroque or intense, he can cut away to a marvellous Duke Ellington or Miriam Makeba clip, allowing us to catch our collective breath. 

That back-and-forth movement brings us closer to the shifting allegiances - and mounting turbulence - of this historical moment, when Africa and Asia stood up on the floor of the UN in a push for a more powerful voting bloc. Lumumba and his right-hand woman/comrade-in-arms, the remarkable Andrée Blouin, were unifiers: at the UN, they became a cause others could rally around, while at home, they sought to centralise and consolidate Black power while repelling those liplickers lining up to exploit their homeland. Yet they would be undermined, both from within and without, by those who were prepared to permit Congolese independence - but only so much independence. Events get ugly in the closing stretch, as the historical record insists they must, but it's the most complete account of this crisis I've yet encountered, meticulous in its onscreen sourcing, and lent a further dimension by the material Grimonprez works in: fleeting cameos from Robin Day, Eva Gabor, Fidel Castro and sometime Eurotrash fave Eddy Wally as the singing face of colonial distraction; an ominous drumfill here, a honking, siren-like sax solo there, the wails of a blues singer lamenting yet another historical wrong. Some achievement, all told: you can't fail to come away better informed, but you also emerge wildly stirred and stimulated.

Soundtrack to a Coup d'État is available to rent via Prime Video, YouTube and the BFI Player, and on Blu-ray via Modern Films.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of February 6-8, 2026):

1 (new) Send Help (15)

2 (new) Stray Kids: The DominATE Experience (12A)

3 (2) The Housemaid (15)

4 (1) Hamnet (12A) **

5 (5) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

6 (3) Shelter (15)

7 (7) Marty Supreme (15) ***

8 (6) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A) ***

9 (4) Iron Lung (15) **

10 (9) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Nouvelle Vague

2. No Other Choice

3. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

4. Little Amélie

5. Whistle

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

2 (7) Predator: Badlands (12) **

3 (2) Sinners (15) ****

4 (36) Dogma (15)

5 (4) 28 Years Later (15) ****

6 (8) Dracula (15)

7 (5) Wicked: For Good (PG)

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

9 (new) Song Sung Blue (12)

10 (23) Now You See Me Now You Don't (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Sisu: Road to Revenge

2. Good Boy

3. Keeper

4. Anemone

5. F1: The Movie

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Bonnie and Clyde (Tuesday, BBC Two, 11pm)

2. Crimes of the Future (Sunday, BBC Two, 11.55pm)

3. Beetlejuice (Sunday, BBC Two, 10.30pm)

4. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (Saturday, BBC Two, 1pm)

5. The Damned United [above] (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)

"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 Chrys (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 Chrys’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.