"Blockhead" (Guardian 02/11/26)

Blockhead ***

Dir: Matt Harlock. With: Danny Horn, Joe Sims, Michele Moran, Hussina Raja. 80 mins. Cert: 15

Nothing to do with Ian Dury, rather a brisk, effective Brit indie thriller informed by the legend of Robert Louis Stevenson wrestling his shadow self while writing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The latter-day equivalent writer-director Matt Harlock proposes is effete BritLit posterboy Will Mercer (Danny Horn), much admired for his debut novel Random Act yet presently so mired in indecision over a follow-up it seems likely to cost him relationships, representation and reputation alike. Retreating to a friend’s Dalston garret, he’s woken by a builder, the bulletheaded, charismatic hulk Mikey (Joe Sims), who both merits and invites closer literary study. Mikey is unarguably an arresting character – a very handy golem in overalls – even if we worry which path he’s leading our guy down.

No prizes, then, for guessing which David Fincher enterprise provides another template here: Write Club might have served as an alternative, somewhat on-the-nose title. Typing to a soundtrack of his own best reviews (“the world needs to hear your story”), an emboldened Will is soon exploring grislier avenues, including home invasion and murder, while his increasingly unhinged rants to creative-writing students attract a rapt protégé headed only further into the void. Evoking a world where publishers push books with unequivocally positive pull-quotes like “confrontational” and “dangerous”, Harlock is clearly taking a red pencil to hackneyed notions of bad-boy writers: there is, he knows, only so much muscle one can wield while hunched over a laptop developing carpal tunnel syndrome.

Crucially, he matches his literary smarts with cinematic elan: suggestive use of masks and screens, a stark contrast between the blank-page sparseness of Will’s lodgings and the night he strays into, a final, symmetrical mise en abime tying everything together. (One nicely Hitchcockian touch: the string of fairylights following one victim over a balcony.) Horn nails the neophyte scribe’s tempestuous mix of bravado and insecurity, while Sims’ Mikey revels in skewering Will’s loftier pretensions, giving key scenes an energetic arsekick. A few first-feature wobbles aside – a mid-film drug trip is only partly justified by a Coleridge namedrop – we’re walking similar streets to Christopher Nolan’s microbudget breakthrough Following, this time in wittier, satirically minded company.

Blockhead opens in selected cinemas from Friday. 

In memoriam: Susan Saint James (Telegraph 01/11/26)

Susan Saint James, who has died aged 80, was an Emmy-winning American actress with a kooky air who made her name on television, charming viewers in twin title roles: first as Rock Hudson’s younger wife Sally in the lightly comic crime series McMillan & Wife (1971-76), then as free-spirited travel agent Kate McArdle on the sitcom Kate & Allie (1984-89). 

She struck big with her very first role. In the NBC TV movie Fame is the Name of the Game (1966), Saint James played Peggy Chan, an editorial assistant who served as girl Friday to star Tony Franciosa’s investigative reporter. The drama proved such a ratings winner that it inspired a spin-off series, The Name of the Game (1968-71), where Peggy (now renamed Maxwell) worked as a go-between for the series’ three male leads Franciosa, Gene Barry and Robert Stack.

The spin-off was notable as the most expensive series then produced for American television; its creative roster included the emergent prodigy Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Steven Bochco. For Saint James, it was an ideal launchpad: she won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 1969, the same year she began dating another small-screen graduate, Clint Eastwood.

Saint James made sporadic guest appearances – on NBC’s Ironside (in 1967) and McCloud (in 1970), on the pilot for ABC’s Alias Smith and Jones (1972) – before her next major TV part, as the plucky, intuitive Sally McMillan on McMillan & Wife, an often gaudily dressed procedural that saw Hudson assume the role of San Francisco’s police commissioner.

The leads’ affectionate chemistry was the major draw of a show that eventually earned Saint James three Emmy and three Golden Globes nominations. So foundational was the actress to the series that her eventual departure, following a contract dispute after the fifth season, necessitated a creative rethink: the show’s final run, with Hudson but without Saint James, brooded under the morose new title McMillan. 

 

Briefly, Saint James flirted with the cinema – and her leading men. She struck sparks with Peter Fonda in the enjoyable musical drama Outlaw Blues (1977) and enjoyed a major commercial hit with the George Hamilton spoof Love at First Bite (1979), going blonde as the fashion model who wins Dracula’s heart; less successful was the same producers’ heist comedy How to Beat the High Cost of Living (1980), pairing Saint James with Jessica Lange and Jane Curtin.

TV remained loyal – and besotted – throughout. Saint James’ war correspondent Aggie O’Shea turned heads on a 1980 episode of M*A*S*H; while hosting Saturday Night Live in October 1981, she met producer Dick Ebersol, who became her third husband after a whirlwind romance.

Kate & Allie, in which Saint James and Curtin played divorced mothers cohabiting in New York, started less than promisingly: Saint James described the pilot, shot under the original title “Two Mommies”, as “ghastly”. Yet the show debuted at #4 on the weekly Nielsen ratings list and lodged in America’s top 20 shows for four seasons; its alternative parenting model and liberal political slant made the series a good fit with the Channel 4 schedules here.

Primetime success elevated Saint James to a whole new level of stardom: in 1986, she served as a celebrity commentator for Wrestlemania II. But it also came with a heightened work rate and a degree of stress that left her with long-term kidney stone issues. It was only slightly surprising, then, when the 53-year-old announced her retirement from acting once Kate & Allie ended its run in 1989.

She had been born Susan Jane Miller in Los Angeles on August 14, 1946, one of four children to Charles Miller, an executive with the Mitchell Camera company, and his wife Constance (née Geiger), a teacher. The family relocated to Rockford, Illinois after her father was appointed president of the Testor Corporation, which specialised in scale model kits. 

There, she attended Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart and Connecticut College for Women; she began modelling in her teens and changed her surname aged twenty upon starting to act. That same year, Saint James signed a seven-year contract with Universal’s television division before starting on Fame is the Name of the Game.

Notional retirement freed her up to pursue an impressive range of interests. A longtime volunteer for and champion of the Special Olympics, she also helped found Litchfield, Connecticut’s WZBG Radio in 1991; she returned to school in her fifties, earning certification as a master gardener. In 1998, she founded Seedling and Pip, a company providing gift baskets to new mothers.

In 2004, tragedy struck when a private plane carrying Ebersol and two of the couple’s three sons crashed just after take-off from a Colorado airport; her youngest son, fourteen-year-old Teddy, died at the scene. During a 2006 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, a tearful Saint James revealed she’d since been unable to enter Teddy’s bedroom: “I’ve never touched his clothes… I’ve never been able to move his things.”

She was, however, sporadically tempted back to the medium in which she broke through, guesting as the mother of her real-life niece Christa Miller during 1996’s first season of The Drew Carey Show, a defence lawyer on a 2006 episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and a toy company CEO on a 2011 episode of Suits. Her final appearances came as a character billed as “Old Woman” in Prime Video’s sci-fi sitcom Upload (2020-22).

She is survived by Ebersol and four children: two of her three sons with Ebersol, and a daughter and a son by her second husband, the make-up artist Tom Lucas. Her first marriage, to the writer-director Richard Neubert, ended in divorce.

Susan Saint James, born August 14, 1946, died October 26, 2026.

On demand: "Minions & Monsters"

They cannot be stopped, and I still don't quite see the appeal of them. The latest Despicable Me offshoot, Minions & Monsters, has been conceived in large part as an alternative history of the seventh art, celebrating in passing the creativity of all those who've converted a scrappy handful of character sketches into a lasting and profitable cinematic empire. After clever opening credits - the highpoint here, retconning the Minions into flickering Muybridge and Méliès frames - we're met by a Universal Studios tour guide (with the voice of Allison Janney) who proceeds to regale her party of overexcitable children and accompanying adults with the legend of Henry and James, two Minion outcasts whose extracurricular doodling first brings them trouble, then formative roles in Hollywood's interwar golden era. In true Minion fashion, this transition is accomplished after they disrupt the shooting of a Western and ride a train off the tracks and into the very heart of Los Angeles; there, they will find gainful employment as rowdy background artists before being promoted as stars, exiled from the backlot and finally reborn as self-sustaining maverick imagemakers. They are, in this particular iteration, the Minions who saved Hollywood - which, given the mindboggling sums of money this series has made during an especially erratic period for today's Hollywood, would seem fair enough. The grand finale, however, sees the Minions being handed an Oscar ("after a long time") for their efforts; this, I think, can only come over as high-pitched dogwhistling to the Academy's voters.

It's not really art in itself, you see; it is, instead, more of the same colourful distraction, cursed with a manic skittishness that remains resistible. Creative prime mover Pierre Coffin is less concerned with telling a coherent or memorable story than with making peculiar noises and finding variably amusing things for his yellow pets to do. As the fond satire of the first half yields to the gloopy spectacle of the second, sequence after sequence whizzes between your ears, leaving scant trace behind. You could claim the Minions are here representing that army of migrant labourers (and European dreamers) who helped make Southern California the movie capital of the Western world, but it would seem a reach; more representative, I fear, is the passing reference to the line of Minions merchandise Henry and James start up, which Coffin fails to transform into anything like a joke. (That's the serious business here - and what we're meant to take away, along with our tie-in Minions popcorn bucket.) Doing right by its Tinseltown setting - it has to; it has its eye on an Oscar - Minions & Monsters is the most lavish-looking of these digimations to date, and certain of its skits are funny: I liked the radio broadcast that announces the economy of 1927 is "booming" and "shows no signs of slowing down whatsoever", and the Minion rehash of Citizen Kane, where the Rosebud line is replaced by a squeaky "oh, poop". Still, it just feels slightly sad to me that these are the only comedies the studios are consistently greenlighting nowadays. Maybe - just maybe - Minions & Monsters will come to serve a secondary purpose: with its allusions to Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, this matinee fodder could be a Trojan horse for cineaste parents keen to get their offspring into silent film. Amaze your kids with Safety Last! or Sherlock, Jr., and they'll likely see why those foundational artworks have endured for a hundred years - in a way one senses the Minions movies, for all their scattershot pixels and giggles, almost certainly won't.

Minions & Monsters is now available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube, and on DVD through Universal.

Wild wood: "Wicker"

There are, it transpires, major advantages to farming out material that would otherwise have provided the basis for a cosy Britfilm to unlikely and unusual suspects. Adapted from Ursula Wills' story The Wicker Husband by the married American indie tyros Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson (who did 2020's shuffingly reviewed comedy Save Yourselves!), the new period romance Wicker lands on the screen trailing an earthiness you suspect the clean-cut folks of Working Title would have turned their noses right up at. We're transported back to an abstraction of the Middle Ages - Peter Strickland's beloved Hungary, recast as rural Britain - where we meet Olivia Colman as a filthy-faced fisherwoman who reeks of tench and gudgeon (pointedly the least sexy of fish), pisses in a bucket, and spends her nights nodding off alone by her hovel's fireplace, thereby avoiding the metal collars with which the village's brides are symbolically fitted on their wedding day. Still, the lady has her needs. To this end, Fisherwoman (as she's known) commissions the local basketmaker (Peter Dinklage) to fashion her a husband out of whatever's to hand; he comes back to her, as you'll no doubt be aware, with a wicker Alexander Skarsgård, which is to say an Alexander Skarsgård under one of those make-up jobs that leave you wondering how many hours an actor had to spend in the chair each morning. We're left in little doubt that this artisan sex doll comes with functioning genitalia, even if we're given renewed cause to worry about splinters; crucially, though, this other wicker man doesn't just break the bed (repeatedly), he's also a dab hand when it comes to repairing it, which may be the closest definition of what women (and doubtless some men) want that the mainstream cinema has arrived at all year. Behold: self-erecting IKEA furniture.

Instead of the usual literal-minded historical realism, then, we're being offered something a good deal more imaginative: a post-feminist fable that falls to Earth somewhere between lost Chaucerian text and an Angela Carter rewrite of Frankenstein. (Before the closing credits roll, we will also witness a) a wicker baby, b) a wicker woman, and c) a very angry mob.) Fischer and Huston keep destabilising this material, making this story multiple degrees stranger than even the early Internet buzz made it sound. A montage of nocturnal time passing is cut in such a sharp way as to suggest someone taking large chomps out of the moon; a wedding celebration involves both a bizarre, staccato, made-up dance and Phil Daniels being fitted with a penis-carrot that is then bitten off by a goat. Hamnet this is not. The unexpected pleasures keep coming. Going in, I had wondered whether it was the wicker man's otherness that might be the source of conflict here - but no: too familiar, too obvious. In actual fact, it's the way this sturdy non-human shows up his reedy fellow villagers - and more specifically, his fellow husbands, who've tended to treat their wives like possessions or livestock. Fischer and Huston are interested in relationships, but they go after these relationships in the most roundabout fashion, continually locating curious ways into and out of scenes: Dinklage's idiosyncratically florid narration, the actor weaving words as the Basketmaker does wicker; ominous chapter headings (seemingly lifted directly from Wills's pages); a sequence of impromptu tavern surgery where disgraced doctor Richard E. Grant appears more concerned with eating his lunch. Wicker proves at least as funny-peculiar as it is funny-haha, staffed as it is by eccentric Brits and impish imports (Dinklage, Elizabeth Debicki) who similarly got the joke. Yet its handsome worldbuilding doesn't for a moment obscure the hearts and emotions in play here. A quivering Colman makes the Fisherwoman more representative than any sketch-show creation; while Skarsgard, wisely, doesn't try and play through the make-up as, for example, Tom Cruise did in the recent Digger. Instead, he just sits there, steady, constant, his baffled blue eyes seeming to ask both how he's got here and why all men can't be made this way. (I was quite pleased to hear the crunching noise the Wicker Husband makes when he moves: it's the exact sound my right shoulder makes first thing in the morning.) Like a thoughtfully designed wet room, the movie backs up its kinks with craft and an all too rare understanding of human wants and desires: it's not just an oddly enchanting adult fairytale, but one that's been built to last.

Wicker is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Boys behind bars: "Animol"

Ashley Walters has used the money and clout he gained from appearing in Netflix's Adolescence to produce and direct the kind of project he himself might have starred in some twenty-odd years ago upon leaving the So Solid Crew behind. Animol returns us to a site that has been a source of fascination for the British film and television industry since the days of Alan Clarke, when it was known as borstal; in dramatising the day-to-day workings of what is now referred to as a young offenders' institute, Walters and screenwriter Nick Love are basically updating Clarke's landmark Scum for a generation with neck tattoos, access to rec-yard drone drops and smartphones concealed about their person. (Probably best not to ask where about their person, nor how on earth they got them up there in the first place.) Tut Nyuot's Troy is that archetypal prison-movie figure, the essentially decent yet conflicted lad attempting to keep his head down and serve his time without getting into trouble. He lands an ally, a smoke partner and perhaps even something more besides in likable young Polish burglar Krystian (Vladyslav Baliuk), although we're led to question how much back-up the latter can provide, given that he spends his first days in chokey being beaten black and blue. For these two, it transpires, are merely fresh-faced pawns in a mounting turf war between the sleepy-eyed Dion (Sekou Diaby), who's asked Troy to smuggle in his phone as a means of controlling the (apparently voluminous) flow of drugs through the facility, and Troy's heavily tatted, livewire cellmate Mason (Ryan Dean), whose first act is to stage a one-man recreation of the Grange Hill credits in the refectory by kicking off over a stray breakfast sausage. We wonder (and worry) whether even Stephen Graham, strolling on in the comfiest of cardigans as the prison's emotional welfare officer Claypole, can really do much to open up a path forwards and a way out: for one thing, Graham has never seemed smaller on screen than he does here, obliged to share confined spaces with often rampaging hotheads 25 years his junior.

The backdrop would have seemed familiar even without the recent spoiler of Lionsgate's heavily marketed, more overtly commercial thriller Wasteman. But Walters and Love change up the dynamic occupying the foreground. Where Wasteman boiled down to a one-on-one cat-and-mouse game, Animol is two-versus-two, Walters seeking out young actors who, in squaring up to one another, describe subtly distinct ideas of troubled masculinity. The genre these characters are pitched into is less thriller than drama: an onscreen counter ticks off long afternoons of positioning or aimless dope-smoking, and Walters, who himself served seven months in one such facility upon turning twenty, clearly wants us to feel the days either skipping by or dragging their feet. That we willingly stay the course is down to these kids, who prove very nearly as assured and compelling as the seasoned pros in this cast: Nyuot's nervy, darting eyes at once convey a deep-seated vulnerability, a growing institutional intelligence, and an acute awareness of the myriad threats awaiting Troy beyond the frame. Graham is as dependable as ever as the one person on this wing who might actually be looking out for Troy's interests, but he also proves central to the film's most unexpected scene late on; Sharon Duncan-Brewster, as Troy's addict mother, gets a remarkable amount of backstory - and hurt - across in her semi-occasional appearances in the visiting room. When Love does finally reach for anything so contrived as plotting - plucking some clandestine video footage of Troy and Kristian in the lavs out of the air - it's not wholly convincing; there's also at least one stone-cold correctional cliche in the closing reels that Walters and his ensemble have to work hard to finesse in any way. Still, Animol is technically sharp, pursuing a look that goes distinctively against the generic grain. Rather than the washed-out frames that have become a feature of the starkly naturalistic institutional drama (including Wasteman), Walters and emergent cinematographer Tasha Back are forever alert to colour and texture, most prominently in one expressionistic dream sequence, but also in a very choice tableau of the facility's exterior at night - the inmates seen illuminated or silhouetted in their cells, like windows in an advent calendar - which strikes the eye as more cinematic yet. It's a more than respectable directorial debut - but Walters has served enough time in the British film industry to know it's your second film where a director really makes their bones: as in lock-up, only the strongest survive.

Animol is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 23-25, 2026):

1 (new) Ghosts: The Possession of Button House (PG) ***

2 (new) Clayface (18)

3 (new) Ali G: Who Iz I? (15)

4 (new) Wildwood (12A) ***

5 (1) Street Fighter (12A)

6 (2) Forgotten Island (PG) **

7 (4) Verity (15)

8 (5) Other Mommy (15)

9 (new) Fatherland (12A) ****

10 (12) Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (U) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Pan's Labyrinth [above]

2. Donnie Darko

3. Wicker

4. Animol

5. Primetime

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Spider-Man: Brand New Day (12) ***

2 (new) Masters of the Universe (12)

3 (2) Practical Magic 2 (12)

4 (8) Obsession (18) *

5 (6) Minions & Monsters (U) **

6 (5) Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie (U)

7 (9) Disclosure Day (12) **

8 (4) Rise of the Footsoldier: Retribution (15)

9 (new) The Death of Robin Hood (15)

10 (3) Evil Dead Burn (18)

(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. No Bears (Saturday, BBC Two, 12.45am)

2. Sexy Beast (Friday, Channel 4, 12.10am)

3. Planes, Trains and Automobiles (Friday, BBC Two, 10pm)

4. Fallen Leaves (Monday, BBC Two, 12 midnight)

5. Grease (Saturday, ITV1, 4pm)

Trial by television: "Primetime"

Here is the first of two talking-point movies headed our way from the filmmaker Lance Oppenheim. In a few weeks, we'll finally get to see Oppenheim's much-heralded doc You Can See Everything, in which the director and Nathan Fielder apply a pincer movement to the household of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. All-American sociopathy - ultra-mediated sociopathy - similarly sits at the heart of Primetime, a dramatised study of the tarnished journalist Chris Hansen, best known as the polished host of NBC's post-millennial reality-TV ratings grabber To Catch a Predator. To my knowledge, that show never aired on UK TV, where a different set of standards and practices applied, and thus it never had to be pulled from the schedules, as it was in America, after one of the show's more illustrious targets killed himself on camera. Some of the context and backstory was covered in last year's documentary Predators, with its suggestively pluralised title; Oppenheim, for his part, commits to exploring the show's more performative aspects. Predator's (actually not un-Fielder-like) set-up involved hired actors luring actual and potential sex offenders to a given location and then exposing the latter - sometimes literally - at the heart of primetime before they were carted off by waiting cops; the designer suited, carefully coiffed Hansen (played here by Robert Pattinson) assumed the multiple roles of presenter, producer, judge, jury and (in the end) executioner. As a premise for an hour-long television show building on the success of Cops and priming viewers for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, it has a ghoulishly obvious appeal, yet what Oppenheim and screenwriter Ajon Singh are interested in is how this iron horse of the NBC evening schedules went dramatically off the rails, if ever it had guidelines to begin with.

Much like the recent streaming docs The Swan: Behind the Mirror and Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model, Primetime may be most interesting as part of a process whereby consumers of old media grow up and begin questioning what on earth they were being raised on. As a feature, it's really doing no more than heavily underlining what some of us saw in reality TV from the off: that its cheap salaciousness made it irresistible for executives and thus deadly for scripted drama and comedy, that its default position was making dupes, fools and monsters of ordinary people. (These shows seemed like the fall of Western civilisation even before they gave a platform to Donald Trump and Andrew Tate.) Singh's critique, granted, extends along multiple lines: that To Catch a Predator was haphazardly produced, forever skimping on care provision while chasing its next victims ("we shoot the rehearsal"); that it, too, lured in and jeopardised innocents (represented here by Skyler Gisondo as a jobbing actor hired to pose as a fresh-faced child); that it fed into the conspiratorial thinking behind, say, Pizzagate; and that Hansen was less the saint and saviour he presented himself as than a toxic combination of male ego and white knight syndrome. (Pattinson, adding another strange little guy to his showreel, makes the character slick to the point of being actively slippery: even off the clock, pursuing an extramarital affair on his travels, he resembles the grubbiest imaginable idea of a vigilante, a Bruce Wayne who's strayed badly off-course.) Cinematically, we're back in the territory of 2014's Nightcrawler, although Oppenheim - who first broke through with the heavily stylised doc Some Kind of Heaven - pushes his image even further: unnerving full-face close-ups catching every last bead of flop sweat, everything and everyone lit like the cover of a lurid Fifties paperback. The encounter sequences are shot and cut in a way that makes Primetime something of a generational landmark, as the first A24 film to have been visibly influenced by the work of Paul Thomas Anderson: no conventional exposition, a steady flow of images, allowing the viewer to feel their way into this milieu, in as much as we want to get close to anybody here.

And that, finally, is Primetime's big problem: editorially, the movie is both judgier and doomier than Anderson, flipping the exploitation of a Boogie Nights on its belly and bearing witness only to the damage and harm caused by this particular media circus. (Oddly, Primetime retains something of Anderson's interest in warped, makeshift family units: Hansen is framed as an absent and wayward father, Merritt Wever's pill-popping producer Andie Bender a stressy mother, Gisondo as the Wahlberg-like kid who needs protection. At one point, the latter can even be seen tossing a baseball around with Hansen.) There may now be no other way of approaching To Catch a Predator, yet as a film, Primetime lacks any thrilling wildness. Singh is telling a small and squalid story, mostly played out in chatrooms, motels and kitchens; the behaviour Oppenheim's camera is left to document constitutes nobody's finest hour exactly. It does feel a limitation that this particular flow of images was instigated by gutter journalism: in the absence of having anywhere new or unexpected to go, the movie mostly leaves us circling the plughole, along with some especially grimy backwash. (You may well come away feeling an urgent need for a warm shower.) The closing scenes, granted, gain a welcome kick of comic energy from Bokeem Woodbine as the gung-ho, good-ol'-boy sheriff who helped precipitate the final mise en abîme ("paedos are not allowed in Texas"), but there's simply not all that much one can take away from this sordid affair, save that the ethics of the Bush II era were questionable in the extreme (duh), and that those who shout the loudest about Protecting Our Children are often those from whom we have most to fear. You can see everything with hindsight, it transpires, but it doesn't always make for the most edifying spectacle.

Primetime is now showing in cinemas nationwide.