The whale: "Werckmeister Harmonies"

From a distance, 2000's Werckmeister Harmonies - flagship film of Curzon's touring Béla Tarr retrospective, launching this week - might appear a two-and-a-half-hour footnote to the seven-hour Sátántangó: once more, the same close-knit creative team - director Tarr and co-writers Ágnes Hranitzky and the novelist László Krasznahorkai - are observed considering man's insignificance when set against the vastness of the universe. (It's not just the long, measured takes that make Tarr's films those most commonly set in opposition to superhero movies: their characters, weighed down by recognisably earthly fears and doubts, are too burdened to fly, and for all the false prophets circling them, no-one is going to swoop in and save them from their sorry fates.) Yet WH develops its makers' accursed-world theory in new and equally compelling directions. For starters, the film takes its title from a strain of music theory that insists that, somewhere in their passage to our ears, the notes passed down to us from the heavens were falsified and corrupted by man, such that there can no longer be anything like a true masterpiece or real harmonies - a gloomy line of thought that will nevertheless ring true to anyone who's had to listen to a lot of Westlife. 

The physical elements of this world aren't dissimilar to those of Sátántangó: lots of fog, a lot more trudging, several rounds of beer, as the characters seek to drown plentiful sorrows. Yet there have been developments here, too. Werckmeister actively dramatises the apocalypse that lay just over the horizon in its predecessor, cued here by the arrival of a travelling sideshow, with its centrepiece of a giant whale's carcass. Our protagonist, a student open-minded enough to try and replicate the rotations of the cosmos in a bar with spinning drunks as planets, greets the newcomers with excitement, but everyone else reacts on a scale ranging from abject indifference to outright loathing ("it'll only lead to trouble") in ways that would appear to mirror modern attitudes to immigration: it may be telling that this creative partnership was formed in the mid 1990s, when the question of how the New Europe might function was first being framed and posed. It's possible to see in the birth of the film's "Clean Town Movement" something of the resurgence of the far right; only a fragile alliance of the young and the town's womenfolk stands between civilisation and the darkness being brought about by men set in their ways. In Sátántangó, the townsfolk trudged in lonely ones, twos and threes; here, they march in mobs. Still, the film is too timeless to be entirely specific in its allegory: it dramatises the excesses and idiocies that have been with us since the year dot. Scene by scene, Tarr balances extraordinary widescreen spectacle with revealing trivia, affording as much weight to the whale's fate as he does the student's lunch preparations, and somehow making both gripping, partly because this director makes us genuinely fear what lies around the corner: more of the same, or the very end of the world. At the turn of the 21st century, nobody else on the planet - perhaps nobody else in the universe - was making movies like this.

Werckmeister Harmonies returns to selected cinemas from Friday; it is available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema.

On demand: "Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm"

Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm landed as an October surprise in that most turbulent of years 2020, engineered specifically as an intervention in what proved to be a fateful US election. Arriving almost fifteen years after the 2006 original, its candid-camera MO had had to change. Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat - a fresh-faced newcomer to American audiences in the first years of the new millennium - had now become so recognisable, both as a fancy-dress costume and out in public, that a new line of satirical attack had to be found. So it is we learn Borat has a daughter, the put-upon Tutar (Maria Bakalova), previously locked up in a barn back in Kazakhstan, now offered up as a gift from the Kazakh people first to Vice President Pence; after the latter frowns down on this offering from the podium of C-PAC, father and daughter have to make do with increasingly disgraced Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, in the sequence that became a headline grabber. There is more conventional story work than there was in the gleefully baggy, scattershot original, and a clearer throughline as Borat and Tutar discard the outrageously sexist, state-issued rule book that has previously governed their relationship, find common ground, and wind up singing "Just the Two of Us" over the closing credits. They are, in some way, a mirror image of Donald and Ivanka, an inversion of that ultra-conservative fairytale that insists girls be raised as princesses and then passed around as currency by our dealmakers. (The point is that even a clown like Borat realises he has to do better by his offspring.) Their targets - passing politicos, old money, a featherheaded trad-wife influencer - have been chosen with an eye to revealing the patrician privilege and sexist-misogynist attitudes Trump, his cohort and his entire political project represent.

Everything is political this time round, in other words, which has left Subsequent Moviefilm a pretty good document of where the world was heading into the 2020s: this is as much a single-issue comedy as The Great Dictator was in 1940, geared solely towards toppling Trump, as if the first film had been entirely about the kidnapping of Pamela Anderson. (It's one of those rare satires that sort of achieved its purpose, although we should recognise that, by November 2020, many other factors were in play.) There is copious evidence of frantic improvisation, both before and behind the camera, to achieve this goal; the project was some way into shooting when the world went into lockdown. There is also a measure of Machiavellian cheating, cutaways and ADR patch-ins designed to cover whenever these forced encounters didn't pan out as hoped, or where the point wasn't quite made on a first pass. Depending on your interpretation, Borat and Tutar's interactions with ordinary Americans - the shopkeepers and passers-by who serve as collateral damage in the push towards the Republican top brass - will either reveal jawdropping levels of casual prejudice, how deeply the nationalist poison had been swallowed, or most folks' desire to make (Borat voice) nice with the outsiders in their midst, however peculiar their worldview. 

What is inarguable is the crazed commitment to the bit, which elevates Borat 2 some way above the generally limp studio comedies of its era. Baron Cohen first emerged in the moment of Jackass, Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered and Dana Carvey's The Master of Disguise: you are reminded of this when he walks into C-PAC dressed as a Klansman, and into a synagogue dressed as the worst imaginings of anti-Semitic propaganda, and later when he spends some part of lockdown in a Big Brother-type scenario with two Pizzagate conspiracists. (At one point, he breaks the cabin's only flashlight so as to mistakenly-on-purpose order a box of Fleshlights: he's literally prepared to go round the houses in pursuit of a knob gag.) Bakalova not only matches but surpasses him, going way beyond the comic call of duty in a messy debutante-ball scene and, in that climactic confrontation with oleaginous big bad Giuliani, physically putting her body on the line. (You sense this encounter only went as far as it did because Rudy had been in Trump's orbit for so long the lines separating reality from fakery had been blurred: even if he'd clocked this was an obvious set-up, it was deemed no more of a set-up than the constructed reality shows he'd presumably been lining up in his head.) It isn't just big swings - Borat's scurrying walk and idiosyncratic pronunciation of "anus" still made me chuckle plenty - but the stakes have been raised: Trump would be seen off (for the time being), but we were only months away from January 6th, which Subsequent Moviefilm anticipates in its tense, edgy crowd scenes.

Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm is now streaming on Prime Video.

On demand: "20 Days in Mariupol"

You could think of it as sound professional judgement. In the opening moments of the documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, director (and AP journalist) Mstyslav Chernov reveals he and his team specifically chose the Ukrainian city of the title as a site of interest in early 2022, reckoning it would be one of the first entry points in the event of any Russian invasion. That decision earned him the inside story of the first days of that invasion: close-up views of tanks moving into position, buildings peppered with rockets and freezing, sobbing children being shepherded into horribly spare concrete bunkers. Yet you could only think of as sound professional judgement were you also to overlook the hellish misfortune of being in this place at this time, putting yourself, alongside many others, at the mercy of a sociopath and his loyal forces. Five minutes in, before the invasion proper has begun, Chernov encounters a local woman sobbing in despair over what seems likely to befall her city; he gently reassures her, telling her to return to her home, where she will be safe; the Russians, he insists, will not be targeting civilians. It's not long thereafter that we learn Russian rockets targeted the very same neighbourhood. While understandably fleeing their homes, other citizens accuse Chernov's cameramen of being "prostitutes", preying on their grief. Even in the 21st century, war photography proves to be ugly work, but perhaps Mariupol needed someone to stick around and show us - not just tell us, as the nightly news does, but vividly, bruisingly show us - how ugly it all got: the fear, the anger, the kids bleeding out onto makeshift operating tables. "Show Putin this," one stricken, furious surgeon yells at the camera, and that, you sense, is why Chernov stuck around as long as he did. To show Putin. And to show the rest of the world what Putin did (and does).

In as much as there is precedent here, it would be 2019's For Sama, about a citizen journalist documenting her experiences under siege in Syria. As in that extraordinary documentary, Western news footage is used to contextualise those tragedies and atrocities the filmmaker alights upon at ground level: here, an elderly woman blown clean across her apartment by an explosion in an adjacent building, say, or a separate rocket attack that removes a teenage footballer of his legs. For Sama (because initiated by a woman?) balanced its despair with more mollifying material: the courage of the medical staff, the growing love between the director and her surgeon husband, the hope they both retained for their young daughter. Chernov - whose murmured narration suggests a man still hiding out lest he be discovered by Putin's troops, or a form of shellshock explained by these images - appears far less inclined to wrap any of his experiences in blankets: the delivery under fire of a newborn baby, a sequence that explicitly parallels some of For Sama's most unforgettable cinema, arrives as cold comfort in the wake of an attack on a maternity hospital, in which we understand many other mothers and infants will have died. Again, so much for not targeting civilians. Already, you will have a sense of how much of this you can personally take: yes, it could be considered a privilege to look away, pause or walk away completely, but in this instance it does seem to me like a privilege you should exercise.

If there is anything in the way of respite, it comes in the way Chernov at least initially seems to be rattling through the titular days: twenty minutes in, and we're already on Day Eight. But then the Russian forces break Ukrainian resistance on the city's outskirts, and we begin to see and feel everything bogging down: wave after wave of airstrikes keeping those left behind firmly in place, no more so than the bodies in the streets and the mass graves on the edge of town. 20 Days of Mariupol may be the definitive cinematic account of what we mean when we say cities fall: the collapse of structures, morale, people. By Day 12, we really do seem to be tumbling deeper and deeper into the abyss where this civilisation used to be; the barbarians are no longer at the gates, but running loose on the streets, and every subsequent cut threatens to throw up, like vomit or bile, something else you don't want to see. By sticking around so, Chernov is showing Putin, and showing us, what the nightly news could not bear to, but he begins himself to seem bellicose and implacable in this task: he's so single-minded in fighting his fight - keeping Ukraine in the mind's eye - that I started to lament the dwindling humanity in this gaze. (It gets beaten out of him and Mariupol alike.) I understand why he's gone to this extreme: he's both having to combat the claims of fake news coming from the Russian state media, and attempting to cut through the platitudes of handwringing Western politicians. Yet the result can seem like one of those instances where the truth is just too much to endure, and perhaps where conventional criticism is rendered pointless: a film of five-star potency, made up of hideous, enraging, one-star images that compel you to flee the room altogether. Forgive me my ambivalence, and my overwhelming reluctance to recommend 20 Days in Mariupol without caution or caveat, but I don't believe I've ever seen a film that at once feels hugely significant and remains close to unwatchable in places.

20 Days in Mariupol is available to rent via Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, the BFI Player, YouTube and Dogwoof on Demand.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 19-21, 2024):

1 (1) Despicable Me 4 (U)

2 (new) Twisters (12A) ***

3 (2) Inside Out 2 (U) ****

4 (3) Longlegs (15) **

5 (5) A Quiet Place: Day One (15) ***

6 (4) Fly Me to the Moon (12A)

7 (new) Bad Newz (12A)

8 (new) To the End (15) ***

9 (7) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)

10 (new) Present Laughter - NT Live 2019 (PG)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Conversation

2. Hundreds of Beavers

3. Chariots of Fire [above]

4. To the End

5. Forrest Gump

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (12)

2 (new) IF (U)

3 (2) Civil War (15) ***

4 (13) Twister (PG) ***

5 (5) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12)

6 (11) Oppenheimer (15) ****

7 (7) Dune: Part Two (12) **

8 (4) Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (12)

9 (3) Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga (15) ****

10 (10) Abigail (18) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Abigail

2. Monkey Man

3. Love Lies Bleeding

4. Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry

5. La Chimera

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. High Society (Sunday, BBC2, 3.35pm)

2. Hell or High Water (Saturday, BBC1, 11.50pm)

3. The Invisible Man (Sunday, ITV1, 10.20pm)

4. County Lines (Saturday, BBC2, 12.30am)

5. Le Mans '66 (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.20pm)

In memoriam: Cheng Pei-Pei (Telegraph 23/07/24)

Cheng Pei-Pei, who has died aged 78, was a petite and punchy actress who made her biggest impact – in the West, at least – as the villainous Jade Fox in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Manipulating a charge into avenging her own heartbreaks, the Havisham-like Fox was central to that much-laurelled film’s enveloping historical sweep – and Cheng, then in her mid-fifties, went toe to dynamic toe with far younger, gym-honed performers. “It’s really not that hard if you have a strong dance foundation,” she shrugged.

Yet Eastern viewers – and genre specialists – knew that the role drew on Cheng’s comparably sprightly turns in a run of 1960s kung fu movies. Foremost among these was King Hu’s Come Drink with Me (1966), where she played Golden Swallow, a young woman who poses as a boy to resolve an impasse between her overreaching governor father and the bandits stalking her province. 

There were few better showcases for Cheng’s delicacy of technique, her ability to pivot smoothly and persuasively from comic beats to the kind of dextrous action that earned her the soubriquet “The Queen of Swords”. “Swords are definitely my weapon of choice,” she told one interviewer in 2015. “You can be more agile with [them]… As I got older, I would fight more with a staff since it looked more appropriate for my age, but I found it to be awfully cumbersome.”

Come Drink with Me was a hit, propelling Cheng to stardom, yet she was ill-served by its sequel Golden Swallow (1966), which – belying its title – marginalised her character in favour of the two men duelling over her. The genre was still struggling to know what to do with its women, as Cheng explained: “Directors were overprotective of us. But I didn’t need any special treatment. I’m very proud, and competitive to a fault. I thought, ‘If a man can do it, so can I’.”

In later life, she broke out of genre films, lending her years of experience to, among other titles, Hong Khaou’s Lilting (2014), one of the great British debuts of this century. Playing a bereaved Chinese-Cambodian immigrant reluctantly reaching out to her late son’s boyfriend (Ben Whishaw), Cheng was fiercely unsentimental yet deeply moving, earning herself a British Independent Film Awards nomination for Best Actress.

As with many of her best roles, it depended heavily on body language, and what could be conveyed through gesture alone: “I have never considered myself a martial arts lady, I’m really a dancer… Fights are universal, but in drama you must know your culture and accept that; otherwise you won’t understand why something happens the way it does.”

Cheng Pei-Pei was born in Shanghai on January 6, 1946, the eldest of four siblings to Xuecheng Jiang, a businessman who opened China’s first ink factory, and his wife, a secretary. When she was six, her father was deemed counterrevolutionary and sent to a Mongolian labour camp; unbeknownst to his family, he died there a decade later. Her mother altered the children’s surnames to spare them any further repercussions.

She studied ballet at Shanghai No. 3 Girls’ School, and moved to Hong Kong in the early 1960s, where she attended actors’ training at the Shaw Brothers studio, turning heads with her fluent Mandarin and dancer’s flexibility. She landed her first lead in the Taiwanese drama Lovers’ Rock (1964), although the subsequently released The Lotus Lamp (1965) had been filmed a year earlier.

In 1970, Cheng married the Taiwanese businessman Yuan Wen-Tung and followed him to California. Though she gained a business degree there, the marriage eventually faltered: “My ex-husband didn’t like me to act and said I should study… I was pregnant eight times and […] only had three daughters and one son. Maybe I was doing too much, so had many miscarriages.” The pair divorced in 1987.

Returning home, she became a fixture of the Asian film and TV industries, making her comeback alongside Stephen Chow and Gong Li in the martial-arts parody Flirting Scholar (1993). She hosted a popular cookery-and-chat show, Pei-Pei’s Time, during which she interviewed and befriended Ang Lee, and even became a reality TV star after appearing in the first season of Chinese hit Divas Hit the Road (2014-15).

Occasionally, she ventured further afield, appearing in the arcade spin-off Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li (2009) and as a brothel madam in Aussie murder-mystery Goldstone (2016). Her final role was as the Matchmaker in Disney’s live-action Mulan (2020); she had previously appeared in two separate Chinese TV retellings of the same legend.

In 2019, Cheng was diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration, an acute form of Parkinson’s; four years earlier, she told Time Out Hong Kong: “There isn’t anything that I really want any more at this stage. I just want to help my children out in whatever way I can, so they can fulfil their own dreams.”

She is survived by those four children with Yuan, including the actress Eugenia Yuan, who starred in the Netflix sequel Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016).

Cheng Pei-Pei, born January 6, 1946, died July 17, 2024.

Supergran: "Thelma"

As faster fingers than mine have pointed out, Thelma - light comic folderol from writer-director Josh Margolin - runs in unexpected parallel with January's slam-bang actioner The Beekeeper. A scam is being perpetrated on the elderly; the protagonist sets out in pursuit of those responsible. One of several crucial deviations is that where The Beekeeper's Jason Statham was out for retribution, Thelma's June Squibb, ninetysomething mascot of a film industry that honours its elders by putting them out to work, is merely seeking restitution for the $10,000 of savings she's handed over. Another is that she's observed setting out on a customised mobility scooter belonging to pal Richard Rowntree, who's just been cast as Daddy Warbucks in his care home's production of Annie. Cue another episodic senior citizens' road trip, closer to the antics of Rita Moreno and co. in last year's 80 for Brady than to Richard Farnsworth in David Lynch's The Straight Story. Here, we're being offered a mix of the daft and the prescriptive. The attempt to frame Thelma's progress as akin to the action movies she watches from her sofa proves sputtering at best; this is all too clearly a middle-of-the-movie-road anecdote - reportedly drawn from Margolin family lore - stretched to feature length via a titteringly low-speed chase. Thelma and her rechargeable steed are pursued in turn across L.A. by her concerned family (daughter Parker Posey, son-in-law Clark Gregg and grandson Fred Hechinger) in scenes that, in large part because of Posey's presence, fleetingly reminded me of 1996's fun The Daytrippers. But every now and again matters grind to a halt for an interaction intended to make a serious point about how confusing the Internet can be for silver surfers, the dishevelment they can fall into if overlooked or the condescension with which certain sections of society still view the elderly. Fine, except splitting the action between the heroine and her loved ones feels like a tacit admission that Thelma as written here can't quite carry a feature in her own right: Squibb, recently heard as the voice of Nostalgia in Inside Out 2, is deployed as little more than a mascot for old age, a novelty gonk plonked on the film's dashboard as it meanders forward. The underemployed Rowntree is good alongside her, and your reward for staying the course is Malcolm McDowell effing-and-jeffing as the man behind the scam, but otherwise it's a matinee proposition that just doesn't have the comic or dramatic juice in the tank to prevent its target audience from dozing; when Thelma declares late on that "this whole thing has been ridiculous", you may find yourself nodding in agreement, if you aren't also nodding off.

Thelma is now playing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Little Sister"

Sometimes it takes a musical interpretation of 9/11 for a movie to grab you. Zach Clark's 2016 film Little Sister appears to be heading towards Indie Plot 101: The Tumultuous Homecoming when its heroine Colleen (Addison Timlin), a novitiate in the New York of 2008, wanders into a Brooklyn artspace where hipster kids dressed as commercial jetliners are smashing into cardboard representations of the Twin Towers to a soundtrack of industrial crashes and bangs. Colleen's there to support a friend, wimpled angel that she is, but we sense she's also been drawn here by a pre-existing interest in confronting the recent past. Awaiting her back at her family's North Carolina retreat - to which she's due to return for the first time in a while, and where her teenage bedroom has been preserved exactly as it was when she fled - is her brother Jacob (Keith Poulson), a badly scarred Gulf War II veteran who's holed himself up in a guest annexe, taking his anger and frustration out on a drumkit morning, noon and night. The pair's manic-depressive mother Joani (Ally Sheedy) greets our girl with the scarcely reassuring "I'm on medicine now", a line that instantly communicates what she's been through, where she's at, and what drove Colleen to the nunnery in the first place. From the outset, Clark reveals himself as a filmmaker big on context and understanding. That the 9/11 performance art never feels like an edgelord's shock-and-awe tactic is down to the fact a) we're a further fifteen years on, b) it does seem exactly the kind of sophomoric anti-Dubya protest a Brooklyn art collective might have staged in 2008, and c) like Colleen and Jacob, that collective are themselves visibly struggling to process it all. One of the liberating joys of Little Sister is how it acknowledges the first years of this century have been, well, a lot.

It gets there by striking a distinctive, assured, persuasive tone. Between the opening Marilyn Manson quote (rendered, like the faintly ominous title, in a baroque font that nods to Colleen's past life as a Goth), the eerie theremin creeping onto the soundtrack, the presence of scream queen Barbara Crampton as Colleen's mother superior, the bandages Jacob wears about his head and the Hallowe'en party with which Clark brings matters to a close, it wouldn't be inaccurate to describe the film as horror-adjacent. But then Little Sister realises 21st century American life could itself be described as horror-adjacent, all guns and bombs and violent lurches to new extremes. (Time and again, this camera lands upon those consolations these characters use to take the edge off, be they prayer, beer, pot or porn.) If it never tips over into full-blown American nightmare, it's because Clark balances the offscreen carnage and chaos with onscreen compassion and connection: Colleen ordering a kebab for a homeless man (cuing a blink-and-you'll-miss-it Alex Karpovsky cameo), Colleen's schoolfriend Emily (Molly Plunk) sharing war stories from her time on the animal liberation front, family friends offering guided tours of their herb farm and encomiums to the adoption process. Once upon a time, around that pre-millennial golden age, indie films were predisposed to sneer at such obviously bourgeois concerns, but Clark frames his creations as people trying to do the right thing, to effectuate positive change, in a world where it's increasingly hard to know what that might look like.

What the film does discern is a clear generational faultline, separating those older liberals who assumed electing a Black Democrat to the highest office would fix everything from those who've seen and absorbed the full extent of the damage, and how bad things might still get. Little Sister proposes an alternative index of progress, slower and steadier: it grants Colleen seven days, as long as the Lord took to create the universe, to intervene in the lives of her nearest and dearest, and it recognises there will be as many problems she can't fix as can. In a weird way, it's another faith movie - albeit a faith movie that opens with the words of the Antichrist Superstar, and denies itself the get-out clause of miracles. These are forever people problems, and it helps that Clark has such excellent people on his side. Timlin certainly has the poise and gentle mien of a nun-to-be, but she also conveys someone who might readily blanch her face in anticipation of a GWAR gig - as, indeed, she does for some mid-film performance art of her own, which might also register as highly offensive were it not this sweet and charming, so touchingly well-intentioned. Sheedy's presence has an elevated extratextual resonance: if you've ever wondered how John Hughes and his characters might have fared had they endured into this century and been forced to confront the consequences of conservatism, this film's for you. Sheedy still has that appealing glint of crazy about her, especially in a scene that demands Joani wield a large kitchen knife, but then - as the movie insinuates - if you're not now crazy in some way, whether crazy-mad or crazy-sad, then you just haven't got your eyes open. Self-contained, heading towards a long-delayed conversation that repairs some small, fraying corner of this world, Little Sister might easily have been buried on streaming and forgotten about as just another indie reckoning with trauma. Yet Clark remains commendably sincere about this scar tissue, and ensures all his characters have layers besides: in a move that somehow typifies Little Sister, he reserves his wisest words for a passing stripper who threatens to suffocate Jacob with her breasts.

Little Sister is now streaming via Prime Video.

Still running: "Forrest Gump" at 30

Here is the most contentious American film of the late 20th century, and possibly even my lifetime. I first saw Forrest Gump as an empty-headed teenager in 1994, was broadly entertained by it, and would likely have forgotten all about it were it not for the fractious rows that kept breaking out around it - initially in the film press, then online - over whether it was really any good, whether it deserved to beat Pulp Fiction to the Best Picture Oscar, and what exactly the film has been trying to communicate to us. Revisiting the film this past weekend as it marks its 30th anniversary, I was struck by the fact that even its initial framing device is contentious. A middle-aged Black nurse (Rebecca Williams), whose uniform suggests she might be heading to or from a long day at work, takes a seat on a bus-stop bench, where she immediately has her ear bent by a fellow traveller: a down-home figure who insists on regaling her in a semi-ludicrous drawling accent with the story of his life, starting with notionally benign small talk about how his grandfather invented the Ku Klux Klan. While the woman quickly senses that she has arrived at very much The Wrong Bus Stop, and starts wishing that Uber would hurry up and invent themselves, we are left to reflect upon a scene that now looks and sounds like 20th century mainstream American cinema in a nutshell: a Caucasian lecturing a non-Caucasian at length, offering her the occasional sweet while refusing to allow her to get a single word in edgeways. (If you think that's off, wait until we get to the sequence where the drawler and his beloved break up what the former calls "a Black Panther party" with their eminently white bullshit.)

What everyone's been arguing about is politics, which makes Forrest Gump as pertinent to 2024 as it was to 1994. Back then, Robert Zemeckis's film may have appeared as cinema's lavishly budgeted equivalent of those fin de siècle TV clip shows, whizzing us through the hits and misses of recent decades: the Klan, the Kennedys, the space race, Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate and everything else that had just been listed in Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire". (This may have been all pop culture was at the end of the century: a clearing house for boomers to come to terms with the choices they'd made, the boxes they'd opened, and what they were going to leave behind for the rest of us.) Instead of a cultural commentator, we got Gump himself (Tom Hanks), often digitally inserted into newsreel footage - for this was Zemeckis's opportunity to show computers could manipulate the historical record in much the same way others were conjuring T-rexes and twisters. The level of commentary turns out to be far less profound than one hears from the rent-a-gobs on today's Channel 5 clip shows. "The good thing about Vietnam is that there was always somewhere to go and always something to do," Gump drawls, having been dispatched in that general direction. 

Perhaps the most contentious aspect of Forrest Gump is this insistence on history as either busy work, passing spectacle or One Damn Thing After Another, with no greater consequences than the ping-pong games Gump later triumphs in. Yet Zemeckis (b. 1952) and writer Eric Roth (b. 1945), adapting the novel by Winston Green (b. 1943), do succeed in raising one poignant question: can you believe we saw and survived all this? Whether on the battlefield or in the bedroom, this American life is a matter of dodging bullets and bombshells; if we choose to view Gump as philosophical text - a Hollywood Candide - then there is some truth in the assertion that navigating this world requires a measure of dumb luck. What may still rankle is the failure to develop and extend that argument beyond the bookending images of a feather floating through time and space, carried hither and yon on the breeze: what lands on the screen in between makes no effort to investigate why Forrest winds up a shrimp tycoon, while his equally good-natured comrade-in-arms Bubba (Mykelti Williamson), who had the original idea, comes back from Vietnam in a box. It's not just dumb luck, is it now? 

Here as elsewhere, Gump seems in intriguingly close communication with a far more despairing film - the kind of film the studios might have allowed some young buck to get away with back in the 1970s, informed by the vagaries of the American experiment, and heading somewhere properly devastating rather than merely diverting. Zemeckis's version generally evinces an innocence - and a naivete - which couldn't ever last long in the new century: now we start to wonder how Forrest would react to 9/11, or the reemergence of Donald Trump. (That red baseball cap might have to go.) Even so, the film itself seems conflicted; certain frames and episodes seem to argue with those on either side of it. Zemeckis emerged from that generation of filmmakers who clung to the hope of making serious, grown-up films even as the American cinema took a decisive turn for the teeny and superficial, which is why even his best-known PG-13 blockbusters conceal tricky, awkward, often downright uncomfortable material. He got 1980's Used Cars in before everything changed, but 1985's Back to the Future had to persuade the mass audience it was fine that Marty McFly almost seduced his mother; Gump encompasses Momma Gump (Sally Field) fucking a headmaster to get her boy into school, the teenage Forrest's issues with premature ejaculation ("I think I ruined your roommate's bathrobe"), and everything to do with Jenny (Robin Wright), a throughline that is broadly as fun as seeing the Princess Bride passed around, rendered as centrefold (boomer blood runs cold) and finally torn to shreds. No-one can bring themselves to speak the acronym AIDS, which finally leaves Gump seeming more conservative, and with it more regressive, than the previous year's Philadelphia.

What's especially aggravating about the film now is that some of it still works. The business with Forrest becoming a superstar college athlete makes exactly the point a bunch of computer-obsessed movie nerds would want to make about the jocks who bullied them in high school: that superstar college athletes are often very dumb and very lucky. (They just run quick, and we cheer and pay them a pretty penny for the privilege.) Gary Sinise's unsmiling performance as Lieutenant Dan is possibly the closest the movie gets to, say, a Coming Home - while also yielding the sharp aside "someone from his family died in every single American war": actual irreverence, informed by a knowledge of the agonies America has continually inflicted on itself. And - much as any of us may want to razz the character, and what he does and doesn't stand for - Hanks makes Forrest both funny and a sweetheart. Even with all this skill in its favour, Gump still makes you gulp, shift uneasily or otherwise scratch your head: it's a film that sets a late, notionally uplifting montage to Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty", as if it liked the harmonies but didn't notice the title or lyrics. It remains a profoundly American text, in that it contains multitudes and contradicts itself as it goes; that it became a four-quadrant hit worldwide remains a baffler. Returning to Gump in 2024, I realised this was Not My Film, but my parents' generation trying to collectively work something out while their credit and faculties remained intact. Still, if you wanted to teach wide-eyed film students how even dumb-looking, dumb-sounding Hollywood product can stir up vastly different emotions and reactions, stick this one on. It'll certainly get them talking. As with Forrest's running, they may never stop.

Forrest Gump is now showing in cinemas nationwide, and streaming via Netflix.

A pelting: "Hundreds of Beavers"

Here's one of those curveballs so far removed from Recent Developments in Contemporary Cinema that critics have had to cast around in a bid to lay down some pointers and recover their bearings. So, yes, Hundreds of Beavers is as beholden to Buster Keaton as it is to Guy Maddin; it's bound to remind some onlookers of a live-action Looney Tune or the prologues of those Ice Age movies; those with more outré viewing tastes will be set to thinking about Trigger Happy TV's posh tiger and malevolent squirrel sketches, or Matt Stone and Trey Parker's Cannibal!: The Musical. Yet it seems equally inspired by the proliferation of Internet memes, and increasingly resembles a game you might observe somebody else playing on a phone while waiting for the arrival of a night bus. What is it, exactly? On a basic, nuts-and-bolts level: a near-silent yarn - shot for a pittance in grainy monochrome around the wilds of Wisconsin - about a beardy Davy Crockett type (co-writer Ryland Brickson Cole Tews) undergoing a trial by ice in an American wilderness beset by beavers, hundreds of beavers. A key twist: said critters are represented not by state-of-the-art computer effects, but fully grown men and women dressed up in mascot suits. More so than Twisters, maybe, here is a summer movie that delivers on everything its title promises - albeit on a fraction of the usual summer movie budget, divided up between regional costume hire shops and some especially willing extras, selflessly cramming themselves into the sweaty, furry movie equivalent of the old-school pantomime horse get-up.

So it's a goofy, readymade cult movie, sure, but Mike Cheslik's film also represents a valuable rediscovery of the art of the running joke. HoB wrings regular laughs from all of the following: the dazzling diversity of snowpersons our hero constructs to lure the beavers to their doom; holes that open up in the snow, seemingly at random, always with a pleasing, cork-out-the-bottle sound effect; a whistle that attracts the unwanted attentions of a low-flying, sharp-beaked bird, in a weird way becoming the film's own jingle; and fly-bys from a squadron of blackly pooping geese. It's platespinning on ice: Cheslik and Tews set all these gags up, keep coming back to them, and - in the film's most inspired stretches - get everything to interact with everything else around it. The iceholes are wormholes: you fall down here, and pop up there. The trapper allows the geese to poop on him to use as ink in the making of a map. A strain of schtick involving gobs of chewing tobacco, rerouting Laurel and Hardy via Reeves and Mortimer, builds to a sublime payoff. With its relentless, somewhat exhausting joke construction, the movie operates at an ultra-high frequency: it's something like an emission from the cinema of another planet, possibly one where the looming non-jokes of Deadpool & Wolverine aren't such a big thing. I could understand if you find yourself tuning in and out of it, or if you emerge equally amused and bemused: I did, too. But the funny stuff is very funny: the revelation of the beavers' innards (polystyrene packing peanuts and hand-knitted offal), the steaming husky poop that looks exactly as it should, one hall-of-fame gag, recommended for all ages, involving a telescope that isn't. Amid the frantic huffing-and-puffing in pursuit of laughs, there are even odd flickers of the frontier poetry one finds in those Keaton films completed fully a century before Hundreds of Beavers. This snow is as a blank sheet of paper that invites doodles, a site of unspoilt imaginative potential. (By pure coincidence, Cheslik sporadically interpolates Vision On's gallery tune, library music that has far greater resonance in the UK than it ever would in Wisconsin.) For a hundred minutes, anything seems possible again: if the American cinema insists on going backwards, there would be many worse ideas than returning to 1924 and rebuilding the industry from scratch.

Hundreds of Beavers is now showing in selected cinemas.

Getting on: "To the End"

The previous Blur documentary, 2010's No Distance Left to Run, was a surprisingly emotive record of the reunion necessary after the Albarn-Coxon tiff threatened to draw a line under the band's discography for good. The group had outlasted their erstwhile Britpop rivals Oasis, but now what? Fortunately for all parties, the success of the reunion gigs assured both a happy ending and Blur's status as an ongoing musical proposition. To the End picks up with the band in the course of last year's unofficial "Summer of Blur", a sunny, fruitful period in which the fourpiece chased the release of the critically acclaimed and chart-topping album "The Ballad of Darren" with the biggest gigs of their entire three-decade career at Wembley Stadium. We'll be getting what appears a traditional concert movie, Blur at Wembley Stadium, in September; this teaser, directed by mysteriously monickered friend-of-the-band Toby L, effectively serves as Blur: The Road to Wembley. It reintroduces four very different personalities - singer Damon Albarn and bassist Alex James extroverted, even clownish; guitarist Graham Coxon and drummer Dave Rowntree more introverted, shuffling, sober - then watches on as they hole up, first at Albarn's grand coastal retreat, then in a studio in North London, to thrash out a set list worthy of the occasion. 

An element of jeopardy is introduced, in that everyone's getting old; in purely Blur terms, the quartet are now closer in age to the much-mocked Tracy Jacks than they are to Dan Abnormal. For starters, Damon has a divorce and a dodgy knee to show for himself heading into middle age, and his thick specs lend him a passing resemblance to Shooting Stars scorekeeper Angelos Epithemiou. Alex can't metabolise the Jägerbombs as he once did, yet wearily admits to his director-confessor "there's always a really good reason not to go to bed". Dave duly puts his knee out in the most nouveau riche manner imaginable. Crucially, they all have other things going on - be that kids, cheesemaking or local politics - in a way they didn't when they were Lads About Camden in the early 1990s. (Clips from the VHS tour video Starshaped serve as flashbacks: look at the little cherubs.) As Damon flags early on, aging brings its own challenges for the musician, chief among them creating something new, rather than settling for being "a bunch of old cunts reliving the past". Yet the narrative stakes here remain moderate to low. The album is in the bag, and a certified success; the creative differences that were a source of contention last time out have been resolved, such that Alex can blithely chuckle about Damon's workaholic tendencies ("If you don't keep him focused on the job in hand, he'll literally write another opera"). Furthermore, as seasoned, intelligent, emotionally literate souls, they're better placed to talk us through the band's creative and interpersonal processes than, say, the Gallaghers proved in 2016's Oasis film Supersonic. The result is not unenjoyable, but also a distinctly cosy music doc. Everyone gets distracted by a gorgeous-looking Victoria sponge, the way they might once have done by drink, drugs or groupies. Damon and Graham revisit their old school, and unsettle its new headmaster by calling for a big bowl of pot to be placed in the middle of the music room that bears their name. The pre-Wembley warm-up gigs are booked in former haunts and small seaside towns. Age is really no more than an abstract, background noise sporadically raised in the mix via bleary-headed testimony; there's none of the painfully angular grief Nick Cave had to address in 2022's This Much I Know To Be True. To the End thus presents as a consolidation of last year's triumphs, and it features as much hugging as any other business - though it's still stirring to witness these former art students embrace one another and a creative second wind, and to see them embraced by the crowd in return.

To the End is now playing in selected cinemas; Blur: Live at Wembley Stadium opens September 6. 

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 12-14, 2024):

1 (new) Despicable Me 4 (U)

2 (1) Inside Out 2 (U) ****

3 (new) Longlegs (15) **

4 (new) Fly Me to the Moon (12A)

5 (2) A Quiet Place: Day One (15) ***

6 (new) Indian 2 (15)

7 (3) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)

8 (5) The Bikeriders (15)

9 (4) MaXXXine (18) **

10 (new) In a Violent Nature (18)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Hundreds of Beavers

2. Inside Out 2

3. To the End

4. Forrest Gump

5. Twisters

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (12)

2 (3) Civil War (15) ***

3 (2) Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga (15) ****

4 (1) Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (12)

5 (5) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12)

6 (7) Anyone but You (15)

7 (8) Dune: Part Two (12) **

8 (6) Kung Fu Panda 4 (PG)

9 (4) Back to Black (15)

10 (re) Abigail (18) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Abigail

2. Monkey Man

3. Love Lies Bleeding

4. Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry

5. La Chimera

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Fugitive [above] (Friday, Channel 5, 10pm)

2. Photograph (Saturday, BBC2, 1.25am)

3. Chariots of Fire (Sunday, BBC2, 1pm) 

4. The Wooden Horse (Saturday, BBC2, 10.20am)

5. The Hurt Locker (Sunday, BBC2, 10.55pm)

In memoriam: Bill Cobbs (Telegraph 16/07/24)

Bill Cobbs, who has died aged 90, was an American character actor whose fifty-year career encompassed blaxploitation, major hits like The Bodyguard (1992), primetime sitcoms and HBO drama, chancy independent features, and – in the case of Moses in the Coens’ fantasia The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) – playing a custodian of the universe, ensuring everything within his jurisdiction ran like clockwork.

Such symbolic roles came frequently to Cobbs, as an upright six-footer blessed with a reflective mien and rich, mellifluous voice. Moses introduces himself with the line “I ‘spect Moses knows just about everything”, and the Coens weren’t the only filmmakers who sensed in Cobbs a deep reservoir of wisdom.

That was partly attributable to years in the wilderness. Cobbs made his screen debut well into his thirties, having worked as an Air Force radar technician and car salesman. Only in 1970, aged 36, did he leave his native Cleveland for New York; even then, he found himself having to support his theatrical aspirations by driving cabs and selling toys.

This palpable inner history informed terrific supporting turns as the jazz pianist Del Paxton in Tom Hanks’ genial directorial debut That Thing You Do! (1996), and as a bluesman expressing a distaste for folk in A Mighty Wind (2003); it also bolstered Star Trek lore once Cobbs was cast as Dr. Emory Erickson, creator of the transporter that beamed up Kirk and co., in the TV spin-off Enterprise (2001-05).

Yet his specialty was altogether earthbound, working men: a bartender sassing the newly flush Eddie Murphy in Trading Places (1983), the disgruntled security guard Reginald in Night at the Museum (2006) and its sequels. “I liked entertaining,” Cobbs told one interviewer, “but I was always drawn to some kind of technical work, some kind of honest labour.”

He was born Wilbert Francisco Cobbs on June 16, 1934, one of two sons to Cleveland construction worker David Cobbs and his wife Vera (née Foster). An early encounter with The Wizard of Oz (1939) set him on his course: “It impressed me with the idea that you already have the things in life that you are looking for. You have great capabilities within yourself, and you just need to be made aware of that."

After graduating from East Tech High School and leaving the Air Force, he began acting at Cleveland’s Karamu House Theater, a bedrock of Black theatre – in a broadly unsegregated city – which had nurtured Langston Hughes in the 1930s. Yet Cobbs admitted he was drawn there by pure chance: “I was doing a favour for a customer. I had sold this guy a car, and he asked me if I’d like to be in a play.” 

He joined New York’s Negro Ensemble Company in 1971, before making a fleeting screen debut (as “Man on Platform”) in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). There were only just more lines in poolhall drama The Color of Money (1986) and Clint Eastwood’s Charlie Parker biopic Bird (1988). That same year, he played the serene chauffeur Hoke on stage in Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy – and then watched Morgan Freeman motor off with the role in the Oscar-winning movie.

Yet in the Nineties, Cobbs landed roles with greater impact: toppling Wesley Snipes’ kingpin Nino Brown in New Jack City (1991), reframing gentrification as a horror story in Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs (1991). He was Whitney Houston’s manager Delaney in The Bodyguard; an LAPD elder, again tailing Snipes, in Demolition Man (1993); and Coach Chaney in Air Bud (1997), a Disney flick about a basketball-playing golden retriever that spawned an unlikely franchise.

A stroke in 1998 briefly stalled this late-career progress, but Cobbs resurfaced in quality TV, his credentials ever more impeccable: as a pastor in The Sopranos (2000), guesting on Six Feet Under (2001) and The West Wing (2002). He was another priest in Robert Duvall’s Get Low (2009), and – bringing his artistic life full circle – a Resistance leader in Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful (2013).

In the streaming era, Cobbs earned a belated Emmy nomination as friendly neighbour Mr. Hendrickson in Dino Dana (2017-20); seemingly tireless, he also appeared in the finale of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (2020) as “Old Man”, a veteran of the ongoing intergalactic struggle between good and evil.

It was a long way from one of his earliest stage roles, in a 1969 revival of Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious: “That play taught me there were a lot of things I could say […] that were very important, that were meaningful things in addition to entertaining… Art is somewhat of a prayer, isn’t it?”

He is survived by his brother Thomas.

Bill Cobbs, born June 16, 1934, died June 25, 2024.

The wind rises: "Twisters"

Hollywood's blowback summer continues. Twisters is a sequel we might have expected to see some time between 1997 and 1999, in the immediate wake of the $500m success of 1996's original Twister. That film - co-written by Michael Crichton, exec-produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Speed's Jan de Bont - was one of Amblin's post-Jurassic blockbusters, designed to wow us anew with the growing sophistication of digital technology. (We can do T-rex scaled weather now.) It's been a while, then, but if there's one thing the studios know and know what to do with, it's hot air, and Twisters duly gives full, destructive physical shape and heft to what a film like the Fall Guy movie was constructed from and sold on. This being a 2024 variation, there is no inclination to pander to those adults who've abandoned the cinema in favour of the couch: the new film's stormchasers aren't the down-home grown-ups who populated the original (Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Alan Ruck, Jami Gertz), rather perky kids who barely look qualified to be operating a Bunsen burner. Representing Team Science (Magnus Pyke voice: science!): meteorologists Daisy Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos, striving to scan tornadoes using new, military-grade equipment, so as to predict their movements and mitigate against future destruction. Representing the thrillseekers among us: Glen Powell (a.k.a. Pin-Up Limmy) and his shit-eating grin, who rocks up in Storm Alley blasting "Ghost Riders in the Sky", aiming for hits on his YouTube channel much as the movie wants bums on seats.

Right through to the country-inflected Hot 100 contender plastered over the closing credits, that movie is a blockbuster built the way blockbusters used to be: pure formula, in its essence, but an abiding, pleasurable one, confidently executed and delivered. (If Twisters whips up a storm at the box office in the days ahead, we'll know why.) There's a high chance of town-trashing CGI, yes, but it never entirely wipes out the human interest; the script, credited to Mark L. Smith, has almost audibly been through multiple rewrites, and yet someone has preserved exactly the right level of workable summer-season nonsense. The headline news is the long-overdue return of expository science (science!), dumbing things down a little for the layperson in the cheap seats. Nothing here reaches the Dadaist heights of Aaron Eckhart in 2003's The Core, blowing a trumpet into a lump of granite to illustrate Some Principle or Another, but Ramos seizes upon the chance to teach Tornado Tracking 101 in a coffee shop using a glass of water and three pats of butter. It's maybe pushing it to then parallel tornado triangulation with developments among the central trio (sensible Daisy, cocky Glen, conflicted Anthony), no matter how much talk is thrown up about rising pressure and moisture in the air. But there's something quietly stirring in the vision of rival schools of American thought - the pros, clinging to their equipment, and the vibesurfers, going on intuition - coming to learn from one another. Carrying us beyond Kansas, and far from the political storm raging outside the multiplex door, here is a big studio movie that (doubtless with one eye on profit margins) seeks in its own small, goofy way to bridge the divisions in our society, to present good old boys and college-educated elite in an equally heroic light. That, surely, is the reason the phrase "climate change" is never once spoken: too contentious for some. Instead, Twisters takes a turn for the politically abstract, engineering a series of problems, bound at high velocity for red and blue states alike, which demand fixing through close cooperation.

Your director for the occasion is Lee Isaac Chung, who ports over much the same eye for the natural wonders of the American Midwest as he displayed in 2020's Oscar-nominated Minari. Twisters isn't a venture that cries out for an acclaimed humanist filmmaker, if truth be told, but Chung rolls up his sleeves, and plants his feet firmly in this territory, as if they were the retractible screws Powell uses to keep his ute upright in the middle of a Category 4 hurricane. He displays a fondness for every last player in his expansive ensemble (another golden-age blockbuster trait: there are fun one- or two-scene contributions from the likes of Maura Tierney, as Daisy's mom, and Paul Scheer as an airport parking jobsworth), and a Spielbergian way of amusing himself amid the maelstrom, and thereby amusing us. Clock the early scene that concludes with a pullback to reveal the ceiling fan rotating over our heroine: a domestic twister, a premonition of tumults to come. (I also enjoyed the super-cute Joe 90 glasses everybody now dons to combat flying debris, where Hunt, Paxton and co. presumably got through several million dollars' worth of Optrex.) Elements of repetition, at least early on, explain why we didn't get a sequel 25 years ago: there really are only so many ways anyone can shoot an off-road vehicle driving up to/away from an extreme weather front and keep it interesting. Like one of M. Night Shyamalan's infamous airbenders, Chung has to reroute his storms through a rodeo, a petrochemical plant, a little-league baseball fixture and finally the most evocative location of all so as to expand his field study and collect fresh data. In the end, it's still chiefly hot air, whistling at a high rate of knots between the ears, but it's been carefully shaped: it flows as it should for maximum viewer enjoyment. This is one of those projects you could well imagine the Hollywood of 2024 fumbling terribly. It feels a minor accomplishment that Twisters blows literally and frequently, but never figuratively.

Twisters is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

Mama, we're all crazee now: "Longlegs"

Longlegs' box-office success comes as a surprise for at least two reasons. Firstly, from a distance - and, in fact, fairly close-up - it has the look of yet more of that VOD-bound serial-killer filler Nicolas Cage has been addending of late to his bran tub of a CV. Secondly, this is a horror film that intends to be horrific, offering none of the playful winking and gleeful splatter of the recent Abigail; its insistent coolness of tone serves as a contrast to the overt emotionality of A Quiet Place: Day One. (One reason for American horror cinema's current commercial hot streak may be that its creatives have figured out what's gone missing from the multiplex in recent decades: the element of choice.) We're transported back to the Clinton years - some time post-Silence of the Lambs and pre-Se7en, two likely (and sound) reference points - to observe a cat-and-mouse game between characters who don't quite fit the usual description. Our heroine (Maika Monroe, from It Follows and Watcher) is a hypersensitive young FBI agent classified in the opening reel as part-psychic. Cage's sociopath - who's been taunting his pursuers for thirty years with missives penned in Zodiac-killer code - deploys an unusual MO: turning the patriarchs of innocent families against their own wives and children (and eventually themselves), essentially delegating the butchery. This shift away from procedural norms has two effects. First, it makes us shift uneasily when our gal's boss (Blair Underwood) invites her home early on to meet his wife and child. (Introducing... Chekhov's nuclear family!) Second, it establishes Longlegs as a contender in the field of messing-with-your-head horror, more cerebral than visceral, dependent for its ultimate success on the suggestibility of characters and audience alike. Maybe the crowds have come out for it knowing that, however fucked up things get, they can always sneak into an adjacent screen and have any scattered mind marbles reset by the chiropractic Inside Out 2.

Our mindmangler-in-chief is writer-director Osgood Perkins, son of Anthony, and yes, that must have been some childhood. ("That messes a kid up," the detective is told after confessing her younger self's dreams of becoming an actress.) Perkins Jr. has a real facility with screen space and architecture, immediately setting about conjuring dread from shots seemingly purged of human life: an anonymous suburban retreat, a library corridor, an abandoned farmhouse at twilight. More generally, he opens up his frames by blocking his actors front and centre, as if they were bugs trapped under the glass of the camera: the depths of the frame, with their sudden, shadowy intrusions, equate to the dark recesses of the imagination and the depths of humanity. Who knows what's lurking back there? Some of this is effective, but elsewhere Longlegs betrays a flatness that suggests a jaded soul taking a black marker pen to back editions of Homes & Gardens. The film's strengths are atmospheric rather than narrative: if you were feeling in any way generous, you could call the pacing considered, but this is a frustratingly stop-start investigation that permits its heroine time to go home and unpick her own past family trauma. Here, Longlegs begins to suffer terribly in comparison with the looming memory of the fully dimensional, palpably felt Lambs: where Jonathan Demme and Ted Tally took care to humanise their characters, even making a figure as monstrous as Hannibal Lecter such a franchisable joy to be around, Perkins looks on askance, all too aware of the carnage he has planned.

Monroe gives an especially terse and unhappy sketch of someone messed up beyond easy recognition from the word go; the performance is never allowed to extend past an eternally twitching, clenching jaw. Cage, meanwhile, in what seems likely to prove the most divisive (because ripest) turn of his mid-career renaissance, is busy making a mockery of the plot: not for a single minute do we buy that someone who looks this way (like Jim Morrison pulled from the Thames after thirty years) and acts this way (shouty glam-rock flourishes) would have escaped police attention for the best part of three decades. The trouble with Longlegs is that for all its unsettling ambience, its characters feel like a weird kid's doodles rather than convincingly perishable flesh-and-blood. The reason the teens at my public screening gathered in the foyer afterwards to list the ways in which the film wasn't scary is that none of the deaths in the final half-hour seem to matter; like the killer's familiars, these people are hollow dolls filled with sugar syrup, posed in place and bashed around, and their eventual passing is but the inevitably grim icing on a generally sorry, desperately thin cake. Clearly, in our post-Ari Aster universe, there's a demographic hungry for this type of sour-patch confection - and, crucially, ways of marketing it to them. I'll concede that in its stronger stretches - the first hour in particular - Longlegs is distinctively odd in its depiction of everyday, back-garden American madness. But it proves an awful slog towards a far from rewarding payoff, and a movie that gets monumentally less assured and convincing once Cage's monster is drawn out into the spotlight: here, at the last, is nothing so terrifying as a big old ham who's been let loose on the propbox.

Longlegs is now showing in cinemas nationwide.