Back in time: "Back to the Future Part II"

There's a glitch in the reissue continuum. Rather than 1985's hardy perennial Back to the Future, this year we're getting its 1989 sequel, Back to the Future Part II, to mark what has been claimed as Back to the Future Day. (October 21, if you're being scientific, though the celebrations apparently continue in cinemas throughout this week.) Robert Zemeckis's first movie was the enduring what-if about a boy going back in time to encounter his own parents when they were his age, working from one of the most satisfying screenplays of its decade. Film two, the one with a Sharper Image catalogue where a finished script probably should have been, has hoverboards, power laces and a still remarkable amount of product-placement in its opening half-hour; it does that recognisably Hollywood thing of assuming, not entirely without logic or reason, that the future would have a lot more heavily branded stuff going on everywhere you look, some of which now strikes the eye as surprisingly far out for a mainstream studio endeavour of the late 1980s. A computerised Ronnie Reagan duelling with the Ayatollah Khomeini as greeters in an Eighties-themed restaurant; a big billboard inviting consumers to Surf Vietnam; a future-world Crispin Glover (Jeffrey Weissman) aged up and hanging from the ceiling. The first movie was identifiably Spielbergian in its emphasis on light, magic and the family unit. The second, for at least its opening half, owes a greater debt to the Tim Burton of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, its narrative seemingly secondary to or a pretext for offbeam spectacle. You have to dig some way beneath all the noodling and doodling to get to the piffling plot, which nobody remembers, about Marty McFly trying to save his deadbeat kids; the first film piloted in reverse, in other words, such that it eventually begins to cover the same ground from a marginally different angle. Part II ultimately proves to be less about the future than it is about the past, as flagged early on when the elder Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) notes "there's something very familiar about this". Postmodernism means never apologising for repeating yourself.

Still, lightning rarely strikes twice in the same place, especially in Tinseltown. The sequel has one major saving grace, the Michael J. Fox-Christopher Lloyd partnership, caught working overtime to sell us on the exposition required to get this machine up in the air again, and then keep it running. It also has a surfeit of ideas, some of which are worked through altogether better than others. These include the vaguely Voltairean notion of a growing philosophical split between our heroes, Fox's Marty wanting to use the time machine to get rich, Lloyd's Doc proposing a more comprehensive study of humanity, "perhaps even an answer to that universal question 'why?'" (What is a DeLorean for? What are sequels for?) There's a clear element of It's a Wonderful Life, that all-American touchstone, obliging Marty to negotiate multiple realities to get where he's headed; there's also far more evidence to support the argument that Biff is Trump, the bully who just won't go away, opening a casino on Hill Valley's main street and letting everywhere else go to hell. If nothing else, it's of historical note as one of the first studio movies to realise the development of string theory partly excuses any script or movie that takes the form of a big old jumble: Zemeckis throws in clips from Clint Eastwood films, a Michael Jackson cameo, flying cars, Hawaiian shirts, six different plots, five different delineations of each of the main characters, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a shaggy dog who represents the whole tale, and really just the thinnest connecting material. At 104 minutes, it certainly moves, even if it never fully coheres into anything as substantial as its predecessor, and amid all its chicanery, it may be damning that the best stuff here is the simplest: Biff throwing the kids' ball onto the roof, George throwing his punch (again), any time Alan Silvestri's score strikes up. The third film, heavily trailed in Part II's closing moments, would offer more consistent pleasures - being a better standalone film, and a better Back to the Future sequel - but this one's far weirder and livelier than this viewer recalled.

Back to the Future Part II is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

iMovie: "The Wild Robot"

DreamWorks Animation's The Wild Robot, released as the studio marks its thirtieth anniversary, has been conceived as a throwback to animated fantasias of yore. No egregious celebrity voice artist showboating; no revivals of half-forgotten Nineties Eurodance hits; not a single squeaking Minion to behold. Writer-director Chris Sanders goes back as far as 2002's Lilo & Stitch, and gave DreamWorks an enduring hit with the tangible old-school craft of 2010's How to Train Your Dragon: the look he oversees for this new film meshes digital innovation with the painterly, hand-rendered backdrops of golden-era Disney, and the messaging on parenting dates from around the same era. (The film is nominally set around 2050, but its roots and underlying belief systems predate the Eisenhower era.) In its story - reshaped from Peter Brown's 2016 book - Sanders' film recalls a more recent era, those digimation space-race days when DreamWorks and Pixar were scrapping over the same promising ideas. The pitch here must have been something like "What if WALL-E fell back to Earth?": instead of a boxy droid, we have a spherical helpmate, Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong'o), introduced crashlanding on a planet with a familiarly leafy look and abundant flora and fauna, but also elevated water levels that have left the Golden Gate Bridge semi-submerged. In her first days on the planet, Roz befriends an egg, after which the plot starts writing itself: the egg hatches, a gosling named Brightbill (Kit Connor) emerges, robot comes to care for bird, and eventually learns some creatures are destined to fly away. There is, however, something missing: any real sense of where you and I are in this picture, and with that, any reason to be especially moved or stirred.

In WALL-E, you'll recall, the human beings were slovenly creatures slumming in hyperspace, their planet done for by decades of mindless over-consumption. (Fifteen years on, you have to admit this was fair representation.) For all its pretty artistry, Sanders' film may rank among the bleakest movie visions of 2024: effectively it's describing what happens once Mother Nature finally turfs humanity out, leaving her to duel with the new pollution of AI for planetary supremacy. (It's Silent Running without Bruce Dern, just the droids and the plants.) Now: clearly Brown and Sanders intended for us to find ourselves anew in the nurturing relationship between protective robot and helpless chick, or perhaps in the sly fox (Pedro Pascal), wisecracking possum (Catherine O'Hara) or grumpy beaver (Matt Berry, on disappointingly well-behaved form). But as rendered here, they're merely agglomerations of chips and wires on one hand, and anthropomorphised pixels on the other. The animators can thus mirror certain impulses and instincts, emotions and processes - their most extensive art is reserved for rendering the changing of very extreme seasons - but they make only fleeting contact with anything that might resemble human truth, a failing underlined by the absence of a single distinctive authorial fingerprint. For that idiosyncrasy, you'd need the dirt and dust of WALL-E, the Hughesian rust with which Brad Bird speckled his adaptation of The Iron Giant or just the salty trash of a second-string DreamWorks endeavour like 2006's Over the Hedge - artefacts that weren't so relentlessly damp-eyed and pious, so determined to do all our sobbing for us. Overlook the conservatism of its message, and The Wild Robot plays harmlessly enough; there's nothing on screen you might object to, as parents did to the bit with the tumble dryer in Lilo & Stitch. That strikes me as the reason for the movie's box-office success - it's a safe bet - but it also feels like an artistic limitation: I rapidly developed a craving for the raw meat Jan Švankmajer jolts into life in his animated bedtime stories. By contrast, Sanders' film, forever sterile in its prettiness, presents as so much wipeclean product: another assembly-line pacifier turned out by button-pushing automatons. Is this the future?

The Wild Robot is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Couplings: "Mittran Da Challeya Truck Ni"

Bickering has become a central component of the Punjabi cinema: men bickering with men, women bickering with men and one another, bickering between families, bickering within families. Where the Tamil and Telugu cinemas have typically brawled out their differences, the characters in Punjabi films - and Punjabi comedies in particular - delight in squabbling and sniping, convinced there's nothing that can be done with fists that can't be more wittily expressed with crossed words. The squabbles writer-director Rakesh Dhawan initiates in Mittran Da Challeya Truck Ni begin with those between a divorced dad (Hardip Gill) and his unmarried adult son (singer-turned-actor Amrinder Gill) who collectively run a trucking firm, which permits them to take their domestic disagreements out on the road every now and again. Sometimes they team up to lambast their lumbering vehicle, which spills almost as much grain as it delivers; the "All Over India" legend adorning its front becomes ever more ironic, as the truck barely seems capable of going a mile or so without stalling or otherwise breaking down. In such moments, deprived of a mutual enemy, the pair invariably default to longer-running arguments, centred on dad's slovenliness and uselessness around the house, and the son's inability to find the bride he's so desperate to marry. A little further up this road, however, two eminent contenders await: Jindi (Sunanda Sharma), herself living in a one-parent household on the truckers' route, and Moumita (Sayani Gupta), a waitress at a truck stop being pressured into marriage with her landlord's brother. The questions that hone into view are twofold: one, which of these dames will best hold their own in the inevitable marital disputes, and two, whether the boys' truck will hold out long enough to carry everybody in the right direction.

At this junction, I should insert a caveat, which is that the English subtitles only sporadically match the speed of these back-and-forths: they catch and convey an essence of each conflict, but - like that cargo - some of the spark goes missing in transit, and the subs vanished entirely five minutes before the conclusion of the public screening I attended. Still, the film's virtues are self-evident, and require only sporadic mitigation. The first half is sincerely engaged with grain truck driving as a world with its own routes and pressures, ups and downs, and Dhawan cares enough to feel out what it is to drive long hours through the night with only your belching father sat alongside you for company. (In doing so, he explains the son's yearning to settle down even before the ladies pass into view.) It's not The Wages of Fear exactly, puttering modestly around the same handful of rural backroads, and then, after a pump blows, parking up on one street in particular; a shrugging intermission block promises similarly gentle fun to come after the break. What it has is a credible understanding of transient blue-collar life, turning a sympathetic eye on folks with limited prospects trying to improve their lot, on their routines and rituals, and on what happens whenever these are disrupted. Conflict is so hardwired into this cinema's syntax that character has to be revealed though complication, wrinkles in destiny: sudden deaths and hastily engineered couplings, a woman appearing in the middle of a long-male household. Personality is revealed, too, although the film has plenty of this from point of departure: the larger-than-life Gill Sr. chuckling fondly at his son's romantic failings, Gill Jr. demonstrating some of that everyman charm Chris Pratt had before Marvel sucked the life out of him. Sharma is good casting in the girl-next-door role, with the kind of goofy laugh that can only ever endear us to a performer, and Gupta combines a touching wide-eyed vulnerability with an inner fierceness that suggests she'd have the upper hand in any subsequent argument. They're the polestars of an unusually unpredictable love triangle, obliging our hero to commute between a woman who's an obvious match and one who's arguably the more interesting character, and a challenge besides. You'd ride along with any of them, in any combination - Dhawan conjures visual pleasure from the recurring two-shot framing driver and passenger, separated by a novelty wooden moustache glued to the windshield - and the film proves more reliable than the truck in one respect: it's consistently transporting.

Mittran Da Challeya Truck Ni is now showing in selected cinemas.

Monsters inc.: "The Apprentice"

Everybody gets an origin story, even the foremost monsters of the moment. So it is, with less than a month to go before a defining election for American democracy, that we end up sat before a film that seeks to explain where exactly Donald J. Trump came from. Written by Gabriel Sherman and directed by Ali Abbasi, The Apprentice shapes up as a Batman Begins with real-world repercussions, or a latter-day variant of 2002's Young Adolf biopic Max, which memorably found John Cusack as a Jewish art dealer appraising the protagonist's early work and life: "You're a terribly hard man to like, Hitler." Sherman and Abbasi posit that amid the dereliction and attendant social tensions of post-Nixon New York, slum landlord's son Trump (Sebastian Stan) found a mentor of sorts in the notorious lawyer and right-wing bigot Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) who proceeded to school our protagonist in the ways of the strongman. This feels like a relatively new angle: Trump as callow, suggestible kid, already moneyed but still in awe of others, possessed of some idea of legality, and having to do actual work for a living rather than merely making deals, or making shit up. This Trump hasn't yet fully metabolised his privilege, and hasn't yet learnt how to hide his insecurities and weak spots, drilled into him by his bluffly indifferent father Fred (Martin Donovan): a signature image, early on, has Young Don checking his (still fulsome) hair in a cab's smeary window. He's in construction, yet under construction, the guard still sometimes down, the golden facade of faux-success yet to go up. Cohn, for his part in this process, sees in this Trump a way of securing his legacy - and ensuring we're all still arguing about matters you'd hoped had been settled for good in the mid-20th century. He plies the kid with bonhomie and flattery, then alcohol, then ideology. When Strong, commitedly dead behind the eyes, spits out an aphorism like "none of it matters except winning" or "everybody wants to suck a winner's cock", it's Cohn, but it's also almost audibly Trump and Tate and every other chump on the Internet. The Apprentice is pretty sharp on how this poison, this ideological Drano, has to be forced down the gullet, whereupon it hollows you and any residual humanity out. You need a more resilient constitution than that of the ever-consuming Trump to resist.

As this suggests, The Apprentice is above all else an exercise in channelling, even ventriloquism, founded on the shoulders of skilful actors who've given themselves a lot to live up to. Strong, going toe-to-toe with the memories of Pacino's blowhard Cohn in HBO's Angels in America and the cadaverous James Woods in 1992's Citizen Cohn, recedes even further inside the character: no showboating, spittle-flecked ham here, just pure, unapologetic malevolence, tempered but slightly by a late-breaking battle with AIDS. (One peculiar yet effective physical tic, symptomatic of the consumption the movie describes: a gulping motion of the head and neck, that of a python swallowing in his latest victim, or a lifelong dyspeptic trying to keep down some of his bile. This stuff eats you up.) After his hilarious work in A Different Man, Stan sets himself the tougher challenge of accurately embodying arguably the most mediated figure of the century and getting us to listen to someone we might mute whenever he appears on the nightly news. Broken down, the performance is roughly 80% lips and hands (with a further 10% of superbly applied hairspray): the overemphatic gestures, forever promising more than can be delivered; the considered oral moues, threatening to do inappropriate things to every word, with or without their consent. If it's arguably more 21st century than 20th century Don, it's assuredly Trumpian in spirit, meshing who this guy was with who he was to become. (One reason Stan has skyrocketed over and above his leading-man contemporaries these past twelve months: a willingness to appear in less than heroic guises, to trade off his chiselled looks.) Around these two, we get Maria Bakalova, stalked by Baccara as Ivana, and lookalikes for Rupert Murdoch, Roger Stone and Andy Warhol: this New York, for all its disrepair, is also a petridish (or cesspool), a breeding ground for germs of ideas both good and bad. You need shit of some kind for these ideas to take root and flourish; and if all else fails, of course, you can always flood the zone with man-made BS. Is that why we emerge from The Apprentice feeling so unclean, in need of a long, hot shower? 

The main thrust of Abbasi's film - and it often does feel as brusque, possibly unwanted as a thrust - is an ugly business: at times, it plays like a buddy comedy between two men with no discernible sense of humour, and who thus have no idea how funny (most often: funny-strange) they are. One is a soulless husk as we find him; the other about to become far, far worse, perhaps the most insufferable man who's ever lived. (I mean, at least Hitler had his paintings to humanise him.) The Apprentice inarguably finds ways to immerse us in this world as it was at these times. Abbasi sticks his camera directly beneath his actors' chins, not so that we look up at them, rather to accentuate the dark hollows under Cohn's eyes and the soft, swelling paunch of the Trump jawline; he adopts a flat 1980s video look as we leave the disco era's shabby glamour behind, and tacks on slasher-movie synths. But the film is immersive in the same way slurry can be immersive, and not above the odd dirty trick of its own. We know this fumbling, bumbling Trump has reached the nadir he's heading towards when he subjects Ivana to sexual assault - here is the dominance Cohn has spent the movie drilling into him - so you can only grimace when Abbasi cuts away from the attack to the protagonist's latest erection, a phallic casino jutting out of the Nevada desert. Here, an otherwise shrewdly skeezy project succumbs to the Ryan Murphification of popular culture, in which even the most heinous behaviour is reframed as a sniggering joke, and our films and shows appear as shameless and sensation-hungry as the people they're documenting. There is, granted, both electoral and comic value in showing us Trump before he rebranded as The Don, when he was closer to Donald the Dork: socially awkward, mollycoddled, more than slightly weird. (One takehome: how those most hung up on winning are often sorely maladjusted losers.) Yet The Apprentice also feels like an origin story for the mire in which we're currently wallowing; a lot of the laughs here die on the lips, pursed or otherwise puckered, because we're all too aware what lies in wait for us in the real world once the house lights come up. Lots to admire, not least those performances, and you can't help but wonder what difference a film like this will make at the ballot box - but it is, finally, a terribly hard film to like.

The Apprentice is now showing in selected cinemas.

Cop out: "Vettaiyan"

This year's vehicle for Tamil cinema's self-billed "Superstar" Rajnikanth, Vettaiyan, opens with a state-of-the-nation address - given to a coterie of trainee cops by Hindi superstar Amitabh Bachchan, in his role as a human-rights scholar - on the broad theme of "what's wrong with India?" The lecture, which sometimes sounds indistinguishable from an old man's list of gripes, covers a fair amount of ground: post-colonial hang-ups, hangovers from the pre-colonial caste system, corrupt cops and administrators, failed children running amok on Tik-Tok. Some valid points are landed, but the two-and-a-half hours that follow suggest writer-director T.J. Gnanavel is using these observations to lend depth, scope and a degree of sociopolitical heft to what chiefly plays like standard-issue police procedural with a dash of copaganda. Rajnikanth's supercop Athiyan will, you sense, clear up some or all of the above, by hook or by crook, over the course of this professionally mounted tranche of escapism; the kind of supercool movie creation who employs a Horlicks-huffing trickster (Aavesham's Fahadh Faasil, continuing his mission to have more fun on screen than anyone in South Indian cinema) as his right-hand man, Athiyan lets a druglord escape from custody - and even shoot a uniformed officer - so as to make for a more propulsive recapture. It's all fun and games until the rape-murder of a schoolteacher framed as the bedrock of any enlightened state ties the movie's initially straggly strands together. Our brash hero shoots an innocent suspect dead in the aftermath and finds himself dogged by Bachchan's judge, whereby Gnanavel momentarily begins to complicate what appears to be his premise: Rajnikanth putting the country to rights.

That we're swept up in this process is mainly down to an admirable sense of pace. Rattling along to a terrific Anirudh Ravichander score whenever evidence has to be compiled in montage, Vettaiyan boasts the ambient pleasures of some Chennai-set CSI spin-off. It never lacks for character, either, even if that manifests in the often ridiculous syntax of the mass movie: Athiyan has the David Caruso-like habit of flipping on his clip-on sunglasses, typically to a rousing song cue underlining his general fanciness. The issue, evident even from said cues, is that the social critique set up by that opening is allowed to go only so far; whenever Athiyan starts to look especially reckless, Gnanavel timidly pulls back and defaults to the sight of a superstar kicking ne'er-do-well ass. "It's not haste, it's speed," Faasil's hypeman notes of the cop's methodology: yes, a few more bodies might have to be dropped along the way, but - hey, rest assured - this guy gets results. The sense is of an at least slightly tougher and grittier film that got compromised the minute Rajnikanth signed on; Vettaiyan is so determined to deliver the requisite hero moments it loses sight of the many more interesting directions this scenario could have been pushed in. For a while, it looks as if the character will be properly haunted by or challenged for his actions - or that he might challenge viewer complicity, as Dirty Harry and the Bad Lieutenant did. But no: the second half is altogether easy on its protagonist and too easy for Rajnikanth, who gets to strike much the same poses he must have done in at least a dozen previous star vehicles. It's a pity, because a more energised Bachchan might have been exactly the co-star to do the challenging; as it is, the judge is sidelined upon the introduction of a third star (Rana Daggubati as a tech bro exploring murderous measures to get teaching done online) and then recalled to pat our wayward hero on the back. The writing goes in circles: a case gets closed every twenty minutes, only for a few pages to fall out and create an even bigger mess, and after three or four passes at this, it's all contrivance. Entertaining contrivance, granted, and staged with a basic competency that nowadays presents as a luxury in the multiplex: Gnanavel somehow even gets us to suspend our disbelief that the stout septuagenarian Rajni might best the hulking Daggubati in hand-to-hand combat. Yet Vettaiyan probably won't go down as a Superstar classic for one simple reason: having set up so many potentially fascinating lines of inquiry, it picks the most conventional of all. It hears out those mountainous gripes, then spends two-and-a-half hours energetically patting down a molehill.

Vettaiyan is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 11-13, 2024):

1 (new) Transformers One (PG)

2 (1) Joker: Folie à Deux (15) **

3 (new) Terrifier 3 (18)

4 (2) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A)

5 (new) Vettaiyan (15) ***

6 (new) Salem's Lot (15)

7 (new) Buffalo Kids (U)

8 (4) The Substance (18) **

9 (3) Speak No Evil (15) ****

10 (5) The Outrun (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Carrie

2. Young Frankenstein 

3. Back to the Future Part II

4. Gladiator

5. Paddington 2

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

2 (re) Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (12)

3 (4) Inside Out 2 (U) ****

4 (14) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12)

5 (2) Despicable Me 4 (U)

6 (12) Joker (15) **

7 (new) The Hitcher (15) 

8 (5) Twisters (12) ***

9 (7) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)

10 (1) The Bikeriders (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Inside Out 2

2. Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

3. Hundreds of Beavers

4. Twisters

5. A Quiet Place: Day One

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Do the Right Thing [above] (Saturday, BBC2, 12.35am)

2. In Which We Serve (Saturday, BBC2, 9.40am)

3. The Blair Witch Project (Saturday, BBC1, 11.50pm)

4. C'mon C'mon (Thursday, Channel 4, 12.25am)

5. Logan (Tuesday, Channel 4, 2.05am)

A bucket of blood: "Carrie"

If last weekend's box-office figures are anything to go on, the latest Stephen King adaptation, a redo of Salem's Lot, will be gone from cinemas long before the 31st, so thank goodness 1976's Carrie is back to meet our collective Hallowe'en requirements. This was Brian De Palma, in the year of the Bicentennial, gleefully besmirching the all-American coming-of-age narrative - with audiences young and old lapping up the results. In part, that may have been down to a renewed appetite for new horror myths, already amply demonstrated by the success of 1973's The Exorcist; jolted out of their complacency by Vietnam and Watergate, the cinemagoers of the 1970s were ready for and receptive to more than the usual flags, banners, marching bands and the patriotic piety they represent. De Palma could thus dare to suggest high school as hellhole, site of teenage dreams and nightmares. The dream (fantasy, rather) is right there upfront, in the sneaky, steamed-up opening surveillance of shower-block nudity in the wake of volleyball practice: for some boys, the cinema is a train set, for others, the key to the girls' locker room. The nightmare soon follows in the form of other kids, locating a weak spot in Carrie White's ethereal otherness and going in for the kill. What's still really strange and striking about Carrie is that while the film acknowledges there are elements of tragedy in King's story, and occasionally gestures towards real tenderness, De Palma - a moviebrat then closer in age to the kids than the teachers - doesn't position himself much above the bad behaviour he seeks to describe. He goes visibly funny whenever he points his Arriflex in the direction of head mean girl (and future Mrs. De P) Nancy Allen, and generally devotes himself to watching the playing out of one practical joke we sense even he may find a wicked sort of fun - the sort of wicked fun that comes into its own as Hallowe'en nears. The film's emergence as a modern classic is in part due to how unabashedly down and dirty it remains: few American movies have brought us tangibly closer to both the horror and the horniness of adolescence. Honestly, it's a miracle any of us came through it alive.

Lawrence Cohen's brisk adaptation is ruthless in paring King down to 96 minutes, but also preserves some very unsettling undercurrents: gym teacher Betty Buckley's apparent jealousy of her charges' youth and beauty, say, and everything to do with John Travolta, soon to become America's favourite dimple-chinned strutter, but here cast as a charmless groper who thinks nothing of impersonating Stepin Fetchit while balancing the bucket of blood over the prom stage. Within a few years, the teenagers in American movies would be cleaned up, reduced to their essentials, put in clean-cut John Hughes boxes; De Palma regards them mostly as sociopaths-in-waiting, with one or two honourable exceptions. Crucially, however, they aren't just pieces of meat, no matter that they might treat one another like that. They all have something going on, whether plotting to get in somebody's pants or to humiliate Carrie at what should be the happiest moment of her entire youth. (A stray observation: that humiliation and its aftermath is only the second worst thing to happen at this prom, after the performance of the band: we're still some way off Cameron Crowe and the music supervisors teen movies hired in the 1980s.) The horror is as much psychological as visceral, in other words, and it reaches fever pitch in the film's domestic scenes, where Sissy Spacek's Carrie blossoms before our eyes from screecher to sweetheart and Piper Laurie's Margaret channels something of the intergenerational confusion and mistrust that characterised the 1970s. We know within minutes why Carrie's father has fled the scene, and why the neighbours' house is up for sale. In this context, De Palma's horniness starts to seem humanising, far healthier for us in the long run than taking up arms against "dirty pillows", or honour killing. It ends, as it always does, with a blaze of purely visual storytelling that confirms the film as De Palma's Carrie rather than King's Carrie. Yes, the split screen permits more carnage per square inch; De Palma frames the prom like an assassination attempt, nudging us to wonder why we don't protect our teenagers the way we do the President. But don't overlook the image of girl silhouetted against flames, so potent it's provided the poster and marketing material for decades. Question: has anyone watched the (respectable, if comparably tame) Julianne Moore/Chloë Grace Moretz remake since it opened in 2013?

Carrie returns to cinemas nationwide today.

On demand: "Emily the Criminal"

Aubrey Plaza has been so good in the background of so many things in the years since Parks & Recreation that she deserves a film that repositions her front and centre. Even so, the straight-to-streaming Emily the Criminal presents as an interesting career choice: an unpredictable, faintly Soderberghian run around the lower rungs of L.A.'s gig economy, written and directed by John Patton Ford, in which Plaza plays a caterer and aspirant illustrator drawn into credit-card fraud as a means of paying off her student debts. In the pre-streaming era, Ford's film might have been miscategorised as an action-thriller in your local videostore, but it's something different, underpinned at every turn by a surprisingly deep understanding of capital, labour and business practice. Emily shifts sideways, from an economy in which she has no rights to one in which she still has no rights but a far greater chance of making big money for her troubles. It's all just moving stuff around; it's just that certain products pay better than slinging salads, that's all. We can see her logic, which is why we're willing to go along with her as she transitions from legit business to the criminal underworld, yet we also spot the risks that follow from ripping folks off for a living. These, finally, may be all that stands between us and following Emily down much the same career path.

Ford has a great sense of character, and a quiet, assured way of ramping up tensions. Everything here is headed towards one last job - genre business as usual - but we're not following the straight line of most actioners so much as a steep learning curve; we're left to walk in the footsteps of a heroine who visibly toughens up, trading in the pepper spray she nervily fingers upon first crossing the criminal threshold for a taser and some of Plaza's old April Ludgate attitude. Her progress is laid out, coolly but not dispassionately, as a balance sheet of gains and losses. Gains include a handsome, attentive suitor who also happens to be Scammer #1 (nice work from Theo Rossi, fleshing out the thumbnail Ford hands him with hopes and dreams of his own). They also include a newfound self-confidence: indeed, a big part of the quiet thrill of Emily the Criminal is watching Aubrey Plaza stand up for herself - going toe-to-toe with Gina Gershon, to cite one example - rather than slumping listlessly behind a desk. One more thing the movie understands: how capitalism makes more folks angry than it does rich. Losses include any residual taste for the conventional nine-to-five, be that am or pm, and some form of personal security, although - again - Ford's plotting is smart indeed in its suggestion that a gig worker like Emily may actually have very little in the way of personal security to lose. As a director, Ford is big on atmosphere, the ambient wash of Nathan Halpern's score recalling Elliot Goldenthal's hall-of-fame work on 1995's Heat in places - but unlike Michael Mann, whose work has always tended towards the grandiose, Ford gets us and his characters in and out within a tight ninety minutes. A stealthy, insinuating debut - distinctive in its adherence to a recognisably classical Hollywood style - from a filmmaker we should keep an eye on going forwards.

Emily the Criminal is available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.

In memoriam: Michel Blanc (Telegraph 14/10/24)

Michel Blanc, who has died aged 72, was a jovial, much-loved lynchpin of French stage and screen who numbers among a select group of creatives, having won prizes at the Cannes film festival for work both before and behind the camera. 

Blanc shared the festival’s Best Actor laurels for his hilarious turn as a mild-mannered husband nudged towards criminality and transvestism by a hulking Gérard Depardieu in Bertrand Blier’s brusque comedy Tenue de soirée/Evening Dress (1986). This was a banner year for short, balding performers proposing alternative models of masculinity: Blanc’s fellow honouree was Bob Hoskins, playing the lovelorn gangland chauffeur in Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa. 

Later, Blanc and Blier collected the Best Screenplay gong for the in-jokey Grosse fatigue/Dead Tired (1994), which saw Blanc both directing and playing (a version of) himself: a successful actor called Michel Blanc whose life unravels upon learning a doppelganger has been abusing his celebrity perks. Roger Ebert opened his review with an elevated form of praise: “Whenever I see Michel Blanc in a movie, I rejoice that he exists. He seems such an unlikely candidate for movie stardom.” 

If Blanc remained a French phenomenon – never breaking through internationally as Depardieu did – his films sporadically crossed the Channel to general acclaim, most memorably Monsieur Hire (1989), Patrice Leconte’s adaptation of the Georges Simenon novel. Here, Blanc excelled in a dramatic role as a lonely oddball accused of murder; Ebert noted the character “seems to have been sprouted in a basement”.

In actuality, Michel Jean François Blanc was born in Courbevoie in the Hauts-de-Seine region of France on April 16, 1952, the only child of removals man Marcel Blanc and his typist wife Jeanine (née Billon). His was, however, a sheltered childhood, a consequence of being diagnosed with a heart murmur: “I was constantly told that I was fragile, which is not reassuring.”

Blanc studied at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly-sur-Seine, where he and his friends made a quiet form of mischief: “I was shy and discreet, so I often slipped through the cracks. But it’s true that we liked to make fun of the teachers, especially the one who had stuck us in the front row and who, as a result, couldn't see our faces anymore, since his desk was on the stage. So we did stupid things to make the class laugh.”

Blanc made his screen debut in the fantasy Les filles de Malemort (1974) and his distinctive looks soon attracted notable directors: he was Louis XV’s valet in Bertrand Tavernier’s Que la fête commence/Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975) and one of the neighbours in Polanski’s The Tenant (1976). Yet his biggest success followed with his old school pals, with whom Blanc formed the theatrical collective Splendid. 

The group, which included fellow actor-directors Josiane Balasko and Gérard Jugnot, exploded onto the 1970s Parisian café-theatre scene, eventually taking up permanent residence at Le Splendid on the Rue du Faubourg. Their first film Les Bronzés (1978), set around a Club Med resort on the Ivory Coast, became a major local hit, fixing Blanc in the French imagination as the fumbling bachelor Jean-Claude Dusse (“I was afraid I would be associated with him for the rest of my life”).

Sequels followed in 1979 and 2006, but Blanc resisted typecasting. In the 1990s, he gravitated towards name directors: after reuniting with Blier for Merci la vie (1991), he played Alonso in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991), and the ineffectual Inspector Forget in Robert Altman’s fashion-world flop Prêt-à-Porter (1994).

In the new century, he worked with André Téchiné on The Witnesses (2008) and The Girl on the Train (2009), lent César-winning support as a ministerial aide in the procedural L’Exercice de l’État (2011), and was appreciably sly as the mayor moderating the gastronomic turf war between Michelin-starred Helen Mirren and Indian arrivistes in Lasse Hallström’s TheHundred-Foot Journey (2014).

The Splendid troupers reunited to receive an honorary César in 2021, after which Blanc returned to leavening popular comedy, playing a bluff sixtysomething belatedly registering for school in Les petites victoires (2023). His final screen appearance will be as the grandfather in an adaptation of Christophe Boltanski’s novel La cache (2025 tbc).

After striking box-office gold with his directorial debut, the buddy comedy Marche à l'ombre (1984), Blanc occasionally returned behind the camera: he cast Daniel Auteuil as a befuddled gigolo in the London-set The Escort (1999) and adapted the British novelist Joseph Connolly for Embrassez qui vous voudrez/Summer Things (2002) and Voyez comme on danse/Kiss & Tell (2018).

“I’m not a sad clown,” Blanc once joked, “I’m a worried clown.” In 2015, he told Paris-Match just what his worries were: “I am afraid of death. I do as many things as possible so as not to have time to think about it. And yet I think about it. When I get to the end of a shoot, I often say to myself: ‘Well, if I disappeared now, they could still edit the film.’ As if the idea of ​​a duty accomplished reassured me.”

He is survived by a long-term partner, the designer Ramatoulaye Diop.

Michel Blanc, born April 16, 1952, died October 4, 2024.

On demand: "Attica"

You'll remember the title from the chant Al Pacino launches into outside the bank in 1975's Dog Day Afternoon. Stanley Nelson and Traci A. Curry's quietly furious doc Attica revisits the reasons that name held such potency in the first place. In September 1971, inmates took over the correctional facility at Attica in New York in what was the largest prison uprising in American history. It was a stand against conditions within the jail, and a not unprincipled stand at that, steered by the prison's significant roster of Black Panthers. The Muslim brotherhood, for their part, intervened to ensure those guards taken hostage on site would be safe from harm; a white inmate with medical training attended to those injured in the course of taking control of the prison; those with prior legal experience advised the democratically elected committee leading the revolt on how to proceed from there. The uprising, which lasted four days, the span of one weekend, was an attempt to remodel a community towards some form of self-governance; as one ex-con recalls of the initial gatherings in the rec yard referred to as Times Square, it was like "a big picnic", at least three days of peace, love and time out. As reframed by Nelson and Curry, it was also a vision of how a prison - and the wider justice system beyond that - might be improved for everyone: among the prisoners' demands were the provision of basics like toothpaste and toilet paper, and access to education. But it couldn't last, or rather it wasn't permitted to last. Sold out by the political aspirations of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, with his joltingly symbolic family name, the men's quest for a fairer world ran up, as such quests often do, against an unyielding (and heavily armed) wall of authority. The prisoners were fish in a barrel when push came to shove on day four; among the many aspects explained by Nelson and Curry's film, you can see exactly why a bank robber trying to raise funds for his transgender lover might have reached for a reference like Attica once placed under his own form of duress.

As a film, Attica hews to a tried-and-tested documentary framework, cutting between talking-head testimony and corroborating archive footage, yet it demonstrates the old ways can still generate power when that testimony and footage is this compelling. The former prisoners Nelson and Curry interviews speak on two levels simultaneously, recounting their own experiences of the uprising while also apparently speaking to the present moment. (A striking rhetorical quirk: how comfortable these seasoned-to-grizzled ex-cons are with such 21st century terminology as "privilege" and "safe space".) As Nelson and Curry see it, Attica was just one of several forks in the road where the American dream of justice for all was up for review and renewal, only for the initially promising conversations to break down with bloody consequences. The film benefits from the fact most of this particular stand-off was mediated extensively as part of US TV's live and uninterrupted coverage of the turmoil of the 1970s. We see with our own eyes the processes of negotiation by which the prisoners reaffirmed their status as individuals and citizens, rather than the cattle they'd been treated as; we hear the blatantly prejudiced rhetoric of the cops sat like hawks or vultures on the rooftops overlooking Times Square; and, finally, we witness the compromise of the prisoners' demands and the violent crushing of their hopes. The final reel is a real gutpunch: we seem to be walking further and further away from anything like an ideal, and more than one of Nelson and Curry's subjects notes how the violence visited upon them as the status quo was reasserted was far worse than anything they'd seen and experienced behind bars or in their previous life on the streets. Every now and again, our collective attention is drawn to an institution that stands for wider society, and how we treat one another in this world. (For Attica, British viewers could swap in The Maze, Grenfell or the Bibby Stockholm.) The filmmakers succeed in setting us down in the middle of that rec yard as the gas descends and the bullets pop off, and there set us to considering just how much society has learnt from Attica in the intervening half-century - particularly with regard to the boundless, disproportionate and demonstrably indiscriminate violence of the state, being both better funded and more scarring than anything individual convicts could achieve with a makeshift shiv. As one of these convicts puts it in Attica's closing moments: "It didn't have to be this way."

Attica is now streaming via the BBC iPlayer.

On demand: "Tangerine"

2015's Tangerine was one of the writer-director Sean Baker's first studies of figures on the fringes of contemporary American life, in this case two transgender sex workers dealing with a spiralling situation. It's Christmas Eve in North Hollywood, and for Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), there's none of the usual pre-festive winding down. Instead, we bear witness to a sudden and dramatic winding-up: Sin-Dee learns her beloved has been cheating on her while she's been serving a 30-day sentence for soliciting, and - adding insult to injury - cheating on her with a cisgender white girl. Off she tears to extract confessions from (and possibly exact revenge on) all parties, her pal in tow whenever Alexandra can keep up, pursued by the ingenious and resourceful Baker, shooting the action on an iPhone (with certain image-correcting lenses) so as to keep costs down and generate greater immediacy. (Some scenes accordingly resemble those shopfront confrontations that occasionally go viral on social media.) What follows proceeds not along the straight lines of the Hollywood mainstream - ain't nothin' straight here, hun - but in a frenetic zigzag under an unseasonal sun, heading late into the night. Along the way, we're even offered something of a narrative puzzle, invited to consider what our heroines' haphazard progress has to do with an Armenian cab driver (Karren Karagulian) - a more conventional portrait of an L.A. working stiff - to whom Baker sporadically cuts.

The thrill of Tangerine is tied up with that iPhone, and how it seems to liberate the action: you feel Baker and his excellently named cinematographer Radium Cheung could go anywhere and shoot anything, could veer off down any one of the side streets they pass and alight upon a comparable brouhaha. (As for the taxi driver business: well, why not? Easier to sit in the backseat for a few blocks than hare after the female leads on foot - and such mobile focus worked for Jafar Panahi in his time, though Panahi never went as far, and was never allowed to go as far, as Baker does here. One quietly funny running gag: how delighted all the working girls are to see the cabbie. You'll see why.) This does seem a production governed by the girls' mantra-like cry of "fuck it": it does what it does for the story, or for shits and giggles, and that spontaneity is a large part of its charm. Tangerine has a freshness beyond bigger American movies, busy tying themselves in knots to no good end. With no budget for effects or chases, Baker is obliged to fall back on that old favourite human interest, and both Rodriguez and Taylor light up the screen, trash-talking whirlwinds who were never going to hit their marks and often seem more inclined to hit one another, thereby laying waste to several city blocks. Baker has proven especially adept at sourcing such personalities and then allowing them to be, flourish, shine, but here he also demonstrates a marked sympathy for those around them, most notably the Chinese woman stuck doing a solo shift at the donut shop where the film's primary troublemakers gather to thrash out their differences. The subsequent The Florida Project would refine the technique and massage in a little more of the emotional subtlety that arrives late here, but Tangerine retains the forceful impact of citrus to the face: it's a movie that grabs you by the weave, whether you like it rough or not.

Tangerine is available to stream via Prime Video and MUBI, and to rent via the BFI Player and YouTube.

Back in the ring: "Gladiator"

At the turn of the millennium, Gladiator was a seductive conjunction of the old and the new, of craft and flash. The fledgling DreamWorks studio had witnessed Hollywood raise the Titanic with dazzling visual effects, and now wondered whether it couldn't resurrect the Roman epics of fifty years before with a comparable creative guile and muscle. Ridley Scott was duly appointed to return us to and around the Colosseum, the backdrop of an earlier era's multiplex cinema, here reframed as the multiplex of an earlier era. And we were returned there in the company of the kind of heavyweight cast it was still possible to gather in the year 2000 A.D. The newly crowned Russell Crowe, the erstwhile soap star who'd just outpunched the A-listers in 1997's L.A. Confidential, made for a convincing bruiser in a way you worry even a gym-honed Paul Mescal, himself altogether rapidly promoted to serve as the star of this autumn's belated sequel, may not be. The then-emergent talent Joaquin Phoenix, scion of an acting dynasty, was pitted against him as Commodus, the louche, lisping Emperor we all love to hate. And they would be surrounded and supported by veterans who seemed almost to date from that earlier era, now taking the applause of the crowd for one last time: Oliver Reed (d. 1999, prompting some post-production jiggery-pokery), Richard Harris (d. 2002), David Hemmings (d. 2003), his eyebrows pointing towards the infinite as a ring announcer whose unmiked voice surely couldn't have carried to all corners of this especially colossal Colosseum. It would be one of those logistically grand and tricky projects you still thrill to see Hollywood make, and make this well, studio money spent wisely: Scott could show the carnage Cecil B. DeMille couldn't, fully stir our bloodlust and satiate our desire for catharsis, and there was human and historical interest to ground the technological wizardry. Audiences, and the Academy, could hardly resist. Are you not entertained?, as the cry went up.

In retrospect, we might in fact have Gladiator's success to blame for one or two things - Mel Gibson's subsequent The Passion of the Christ and the Star Wars prequels' over-reliance on CGI, to cite the most immediate and dire consequences. Yet in and of itself it continues to work handsomely: you will see no more thumping entertainment in the Odeon or Cineworld this week. What I hadn't grasped at the time, yet what's become more apparent with the years, is the extent to which the movie also functions as a golden-glowing self-portrait of Scott himself - or at least a portrait of someone you sense Scott would easily identify with: the self-made proletarian scrapper, adrift in a world of nepo babies and scheming, snivelling functionaries deemed unworthy of a man's time, handshake and mercy. (Beyond historical verisimilitude, there has to be a reason for naming your antagonist after a toilet.) Maximus Decimus Meridius is from the off an obvious commander of men - someone you'd follow into the breach, if called upon - but Scott and Crowe equally conspire to make him a details guy, smiling ruefully at a robin who drifts into the opening battle, rubbing dirt onto his hands to get a better feel for the terrain that lies ahead of him, only then leading a vast army into battle. "At my command, unleash hell" is just a long-winded way of shouting "action"; Maximus's vow "I will win the crowd... I will give them something they have never seen before" is straight from a pitch meeting, no translation from the Latin required. Yet this storied commander is caught at a transitional moment, forever yearning for the tranquillity of home, even as circumstances conspire to loose him from the safety of empire (for which we might read the perks, privileges and protections of the studio system) and force him to fight his own battles, huffily, grumpily, dourly.

Certain elements here date very much from the late 20th century, which is where Scott seems to have got stuck creatively: there are naggingly negligible roles for Djimon Hounsou as the slave who nurses our white hero back to health and Omid Djalili as the trader who sold Reed his "queer giraffes". (Hounsou, at least, recurs amid the stirring coda, involving one of many small details this script troubles to pay off.) As a filmmaker, Scott remains a singular mix of insensitivity and insecurity: a born entertainer - Robbie Williams, say - doesn't need to ask whether we're entertained or not, nor so bluntly state their methods. Commodus's observation of his sister's dozing child ("He sleeps so well because he's loved") meshes intriguingly here with Maximus's battle to earn the crowd's respect. (That he does is down to a mix of potent backstory, resilience, skill and flair, all transferrable skills for the modern creative.) Were Scott's battles to come worth fighting? In the new century, the veteran would get increasingly prolific and increasingly unreliable; he's that rare director who's made more films the older he's got, proof of his ability to talk a good game in the boardroom. Gladiator found the director, aged 63, turning his thoughts towards legacy and how a man is remembered - it was the beginning of late-period Scott - but were A Good Year (again: Crowe as Scott surrogate, this time furrowing his brow over bottles of wine), the various Alien footnotes and last year's Napoleon (with Phoenix as the anti-Scott) worth remembering? Wouldn't Scott have been better staying at home with the missus and kids, touching grass? At what point does the fight become a wearying compulsion? Born of Hollywood's ongoing inability to imagine a viable future - the auguries are not good - Gladiator II is almost upon us: the fear, shared by Crowe himself, is that Scott will overwrite this Champions League entertainment with something more akin to the Nations League, falling somewhere on a scale between timekilling and timewasting. Maybe there's some fight in the old dog yet. But the Elysian fields are calling.

Gladiator is now showing in cinemas nationwide, and available to stream via ITVX; Gladiator 2 opens November 15.

On demand: "Meantime"

From the early days of the Mike Leigh Film Project, an often riotous comedy about deeply dissatisfied people. Fashioned (believe it or not) for Central Television, home of darts-based Sunday teatime favourite Bullseye, 1983's Meantime feels like Leigh's update of the old Tolstoy dictum that insisted each family is unhappy in their own way. It opens with a directorial feint: a check-in with upwardly mobile suburban couple Alfred Molina and Marion Bailey, caught doing up their two-bed semi as a means of filling what otherwise seems a terribly empty petit-bourgeois existence. Yet for the most part, we're embedded - bogged down may be the better phrase - with the couple's pungently named relatives the Pollocks: unemployed dad Jeff Robert, mum Pam Ferris trying to keep the household afloat on bingo winnings, and two late-teenage sons (perma-aggro Steve Wright-alike Phil Daniels and gormless mouthbreather Tim Roth), neither of whom forms the greatest argument for procreation. Even if you disagree vehemently, you can see how the argument Leigh doesn't much care for his characters came about. (One early exchange between Daniels and skinhead mate Gary Oldman goes as follows: "You're really thick, you are." "I ain't as thick as you." "No-one's as thick as me.") Yet as embodied by a forceful new generation and style of actors, these characters remain enormously fun to watch and listen to, drilled into sulky, sarky, slangy rhythms that suggested Leigh had kept his ears open during his years of apprenticeship, and was now attempting something as revolutionary in film acting as the Method had been thirty years before. You can still feel how thrilling Meantime must have been in 1983: no Merchant-Ivory, this, no Chariots of Fire. Adios stuffed shirts and stiff upper lips, hello thick ears and lashings of tongue and cheek.

If Leigh really loathed the Pollocks, he a) wouldn't have turned these 100 minutes over to them in the way he does, b) wouldn't so closely hang on their every spit and cough, and c) wouldn't so clearly be making a case that their wayward meanderings - linked in passing to the inertia then being fostered within the working classes by Thatcherism - merited the most attentive study. Meantime remains political only in passing: though Roth's Colin is unexpectedly, nay miraculously offered a chance to improve his lot (and blows it), practically everyone else on screen has nothing to do and little to hope for. So they bicker with and snipe at one another, the rumbling getting nasty whenever a character of colour walks on, though arguably no nastier than it would have been on the streets of the real Britain circa 1983. Leigh isn't interested in pointmaking or point-scoring, however, instead diligently observing who these people are and why they've turned out like this: petty, sad, bored, depressive or passive-aggressive. Rather than dismissing these grumps and muppets out of hand, the director demonstrates a commendable generosity of spirit in centralising small lives and spotting within them the potential for at least a narrow form of growth. It's loudly, even rudely British, bristling with familiar faces, locations (pissy towerblock lifts, concrete precincts overrun with plastic bags, Chigwell Tube station), insults ("he's a jammy bastard", "Kojak", "nosy bloody Parker", "oi, prat!"), ad jingles, and lines that come out of nowhere to summarise the British experience ("I just had a really horrible hamburger", "Of course I'm not sure"). Better still, Leigh was starting to develop a sly visual sense: the whole movie seems to exist just to showcase the image of an anoraked Roth shambling past a statue of Churchill, but also don't overlook the (frankly hilarious) late revelation that Oldman's prize dunderhead Coxy has somehow started a fight with himself in an overturned bin. The core of the Leigh filmography - dating back to 1971's Bleak Moments and passing through High Hopes and Life is Sweet to Naked, Happy-Go-Lucky and points beyond - would be variations on the theme of daily drudgery. Some would be more engaging and successful than others, but Meantime now looks like the first time Leigh realised this technique could not only sustain a feature but prove wholly enveloping in its description of phrases, routines and textures. We ought to quote it just as often as people quote from Abigail's Party and Nuts in May.

Meantime is available on a Special Edition DVD through ITV Studios Home Entertainment, to stream via YouTube, and to rent via the BFI Player.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 4-6, 2024):

1 (new) Joker: Folie à Deux (15) **

2 (1) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A)

3 (2) Speak No Evil (15) ****

4 (5) The Substance (18) **

5 (3) The Outrun (15)

6 (8) Despicable Me 4 (U)

7 (6) Lee (15)

8 (11) 200% Wolf (U)

9 (re) Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (PG) ***

10 (new) A Different Man (15) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Gladiator

2. Young Frankenstein 

3. Paddington 2

4. Paddington 

5. A Different Man

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

2 (re) Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (12)

3 (4) Inside Out 2 (U) ****

4 (14) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12)

5 (2) Despicable Me 4 (U)

6 (12) Joker (15) **

7 (new) The Hitcher (15) 

8 (5) Twisters (12) ***

9 (7) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)

10 (1) The Bikeriders (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Inside Out 2

2. Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

3. Hundreds of Beavers

4. Twisters

5. A Quiet Place: Day One

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Wicker Man [above] (Sunday, BBC2, 11.55pm)

2. Us (Saturday, BBC1, 10.30pm)

3. Hope (Sunday, Channel 4, 1.45am)

4. Zootropolis (Sunday, BBC1, 2.15pm)

5. The Square (Tuesday, Channel 4, 1.45am)

In memoriam: John Amos (Telegraph 09/10/24)

John Amos, who has died aged 84, was a versatile stage and screen actor revered for his roles in two major US TV hits: James Evans, the proud yet put-upon father in the groundbreaking sitcom Good Times (1974-79), and the adult incarnation of Kunta Kinte, the enslaved hero in ABC’s adaptation of Alex Haley’s novel Roots (1977).

Spun off from progressively minded writer-producer Norman Lear’s earlier successes All in the Family (1971-79) and Maude (1972-78), Good Times – the first network show overseen by Black creatives, centred on a family getting by in Chicago’s housing projects – blended social themes with crowdpleasing comedy, paving the way for such later hits as The Jeffersons (1975-85) and The Cosby Show (1984-92).

Years after the show passed into television history, Amos discovered the eternally job-seeking James had been a demographic-spanning model of fatherhood: “Young men in their thirties and forties, of every ethnicity imaginable, come up to me and say, ‘You’re the dad I never had’.” Yet behind the scenes, there had been unrest. 

Over the show’s first three seasons, the comedy grew ever broader, prompting Amos to object to what he deemed stereotypical writing: “I wasn’t the most diplomatic guy in those days, and [the producers] got tired of having their lives threatened over jokes. So they said, ‘Tell you what, why don’t we kill him off? We can get on with our lives!’ That taught me a lesson – I wasn’t as important as I thought I was to the show.”

James Evans was duly dispatched – in an offscreen car accident after the character finally landed employment – as Good Times’ fourth season began. Yet Amos’s popularity with the viewing public proved crucial to his casting in Roots, a cannily packaged confrontation of slavery and its legacy that became appointment television – and then something of a small-screen phenomenon – as the Seventies played out.

An estimated 130 million people, half the US population in 1977, tuned in on the miniseries’ initial run; the concluding instalment remains the second most watched series finale in US TV history, after M*A*S*H’s 1983 signoff. For Amos, who spent months in Liberia researching the role, the show’s success was “a revelation… because I saw my country [had] finally reached a point where it’s ready to look at its past and say, yes, we did this, and some of these things were terrible.”

Roots went on to win a Peabody Award, a Golden Globe, and nine Emmys from a total of 37 nominations, including a reaffirming nomination for Amos himself: “It was just what I needed. It took the bad taste of Good Times out of my mouth… I realise that a lot of it I brought on myself. I was not the easiest guy in the world to get along with, or to direct. I challenged any and everybody. [But Roots] was a vindication, a tremendous feeling of satisfaction.”

John Allen Amos Jr. was born in Newark, New Jersey on December 27, 1939 to mechanic John Amos Sr. and his housekeeper wife Annabelle. As a boy, he attended East Orange High School; he subsequently studied sociology at Colorado State University. A keen athlete, he boxed to Golden Gloves level and signed a contract with gridiron’s Kansas City Chiefs before pivoting to entertainment.

After trying stand-up in L.A., Amos got his first break as a writer for The Leslie Uggams Show (1969) before landing a recurring onscreen role as the weatherman Gordy in The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77). Early movie credits included cult classics Vanishing Point (1971) and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).

Further film work followed, most memorably Cleo McDowell, the renegade burger shack manager in Coming to America (1988). Yet Amos’s strongest roles were on stage and TV: he won an NAACP Award for his role as a retired cop in Dennis McIntyre’s play Split Second and was alternately genial and combative as Percy Fitzwallace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in The West Wing (1999-2006).

He spoofed Good Times – with a talking dog – in a 2010 episode of 30 Rock and continued working until his death: one of his final appearances will be in the upcoming legal spin-off Suits: L.A. (2024-). Yet he remained level-headed about the actor’s life, telling one journalist: “There are three stages in an actor’s career: ‘who is John Amos?’, ‘get me John Amos’ [and] ‘get me a young John Amos.’”

He married three times, to Noel Mickelson, Lillian Lehman and Elisabete de Sousa; all three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his two children with Mickelson.

John Amos, born December 27, 1939, died August 21, 2024.