For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of November 22-24, 2024):

1 (new) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

2 (1) Gladiator II (15) ***

3 (2) Paddington in Peru (PG)

4 (3) Red One (12A)

5 (4) Heretic (15) ****

6 (6) The Wild Robot (U) **

7 (7) Small Things Like These (12A) ***

8 (new) Tosca - Met Opera 2024 (uncertificated)

9 (new) Listy do M. Pożegnania i powroty/Letters to Santa 6 (12A)

10 (5) Venom: The Last Dance (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Point Break

2. Conclave

3. Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection

4. Moana 2

5. Gladiator II

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (5) Gladiator (15) ****

2 (2) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

3 (new) The Wild Robot (U) **

4 (1) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

5 (6) The Grinch (U)

6 (new) The Terminator (15) *****

7 (3) Despicable Me 4 (U)

8 (10) Dune: Part Two (12) **

9 (4) The Substance (18) **

10 (14) The Polar Express (U)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Kneecap

2. Evil Does Not Exist

3. Alien: Romulus

4. Didi

5. Late Night with the Devil

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Cape Fear [above] (Sunday, BBC2, 11pm)

2. The Shop Around the Corner (Saturday, BBC2, 1.55pm)

3. Captain Phillips (Friday, BBC1, 12 midnight)

4. Drive My Car (Wednesday, Channel 4, 1am)

5. Sound of Metal (Thursday, BBC2, 11.05pm)

Knives out: "Conclave"

As the nights draw in and we push deeper into awards season, Conclave presents as the traditionalists' option. This is Edward Berger, the Austro-Swiss director who did the logistically impressive, dramatically overpraised All Quiet on the Western Front - four-time winner at Oscars 2023 - holing up inside the Vatican (or an exceptional replica thereof) for a couple of hours to chart the run-up to and fallout from a snap papal election. The source is literary: Robert Harris's 2016 novel, adapted here by Peter Straughan to suggest Dan Brown with O-levels or The Death of Stalin without the slapstick and socialism. The staging is theatrical: men sequestered in a tight spot for three days that correspond to three acts, duelling for power, while secrets and indiscretions come to light and allegiances are tested. The cast, quite frankly, is stacked. Ralph Fiennes is the caretaker-manager Cardinal Lawrence, hoping the election gets done smoothly so he can toddle off into a planned retirement from all things God; liberal reformist Stanley Tucci the hot favourite; John Lithgow the elder statesman praying for belated recognition (albeit with a not inconsiderable, non-angelic cloud hovering above his head); Lucian Msamati is Africa's preferred candidate, and the surprise early frontrunner; and Sergio Castellitto the gesticulating, garrulous Italian populist, established as the villain of the piece long before he appears to reach for a vape, sending up his own cloud of white smoke. Even the one prominent distaff role - foremost among the nuns who do all the catering and then have to sit outside while the Cardinals go about their business - is filled by Isabella Rossellini, scion of arthouse royalty. The credentials are nothing less than impeccable.

That the resulting film has landed squarely in the middle of the awards mix is down to how canny Harris, Straughan and Berger have been about covering as many bases as they can between them. If you're devout, then of course the outcome of this particular election can only ever seem a matter of life and death from the off. For curious atheists, this set-up is just silly enough to be entertaining, like an episode of Drag Race for centrist dads; the costumes are more buttoned down, but the competition proves similarly fierce. In a big year globally for elections, Conclave doesn't have to do much to hook us with the promise of watching one play out in near-total transparency, almost from a God's-eye view, every vote and each round of voting drawing us further into its drama, and into the sort of backrooms where the Kamala Harris faction convinced Joe Biden to step down and Keir Starmer struck whatever deal he did with the Murdochs. Yet somewhere on its route to the screen (and onto Academy screeners), Conclave has also assumed that element of self-reflexivity that often gives awards contenders the edge over their rivals. In all this relentless jockeying for position, in this frenzied image management, can we not also see reflected the process by which Oscars and BAFTAs are won and lost? One candidate's droll aside - "I understand the trick is to offend no-one" - could easily serve double duty as the watchwords of any creative gearing up for the next four months of campaigning.

I'll confess I was a touch sceptical going into Conclave, and even some way into Conclave. Given the considerable paperwork involved, all the writing, casting and burning of votes, there are points early on where it begins to resemble an especially drawn-out HR process, a series of meetings that could have been an email, such is the verbosity of this script. (English, Italian and Latin: mamma mia!) But it becomes weirdly, unexpectedly engrossing, and it becomes engrossing because Berger plainly loves actors. He loves his actors in groups of two and three, murmuring in hushed voices in darkened corridors; he loves huddling them in courtyards, like the figures in Jancsó movies; he loves them facing off over the breakfast table; he loves cutting between their expressions as those votes are cast and counted. Actors are all Berger has here, deprived of the obvious effects of his earlier war film, and he makes the best possible use of them. He makes Fiennes' Lawrence both his organising principle and onscreen representative, a man striving to shoulder sudden responsibility, avoid the mistakes of others and ensure the best possible outcome for all parties, including the audience; in doing so, Berger draws another parallel between acting in both the theological and thespian senses. One recurring idea in this script is that the worthiest candidates for the top job are those who don't appear to want it; conversely, the worst would be those who noisily do. This surely accounts for Berger's fondness for no-nonsense pros, folks who come in, do exactly what's required of them, and then leave their cassock hanging on the back of the trailer door. Any vote cast for Conclave in the coming months will be one for brisk professionalism, for guile, stealth and skill; but it may also be a demonstration of solidarity, mindful of the fact certain branches of the film industry were on strike not so long ago. Crafty in its procession of human faces and foibles, Conclave is not a film that could have been arrived at by AI - and, at the very last, miraculously, it proves altogether less trad than it first looks.

Conclave is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "Emilia Pérez"

The novelty item in this year's awards race - and a three-time prizewinner at Cannes 2024 - Emilia Pérez is a Netflix-backed musical crime drama in which the French writer-director Jacques Audiard takes the name of his production company (Why Not Productions) as his watchwords. Why not do a crime movie about a ruthless cartel boss who undergoes gender reassignment surgery so as to evade the authorities? (Not least as, in theory, it feminises a genre in which Audiard has long sought to puzzle out new directions and horizons.) Why not make a contemporary drama where a substantial percentage of the dialogue - from banalities like "hello, nice to meet you" to the already much-memed medical exposition "from penis to vaginaaa" - is trilled as it would have been in those old Jacques Demy musicals? Why not take the Netflix dollar, especially as any such pitch would likely have been laughed out of any meetings Audiard might have had within the risk-averse remains of the studio system? Why not cast prominent American faces (Zoe Saldana as the heroine's lawyer, Selena Gomez as her heartbroken former wife) to bolster its hopes of finding an audience? And in a year without an obvious Oscar frontrunner, why not take something this flagrantly sui generis under consideration as a serious Best Picture contender?

At risk of typecasting myself as Mr. Rational, there are reasons to answer all of the above in the negative, many helpfully provided by the film itself. For starters, the memory of Leos Carax's comparably batshit Annette, a film that clearly helped get Emilia Pérez over the finish line, hasn't long receded, and that curio had fully orchestrated songs by Sparks to sell it, where Audiard (working with the composers Camille and Clément Ducol) offers only musical doodles, asides, footnotes. Much of Emilia Pérez proves sketchy, when not merely slaphappy: it's one of those big swings where the bat itself flies off into the night sky, never to be retrieved. Both the writing and direction are blasé at exactly those points where precision was needed for the film to function on any level. The opening scenes demonstrate no real idea of Mexico, beyond narcos, mariachis and football, but then we get not much more of an idea of anywhere else this globetrotting plot meanders (Israel, Switzerland, London), either. Critically - and this really does seem like Emilia Pérez's fatal flaw - this script offers no clear sense of why its heroine (Karla Sofía Gascón) transitions in the first place, whether it's just a swerve or part of some greater masterplan to make the life she wants for herself. If it's meant as just a swerve - a means of going undercover or underground, after the fashion of many more generic entertainments - then I fear Audiard's film carries trace elements of that culture-war bullshit that seeks to portray trans folk as slippery and suspicious, hellbent on wreaking havoc on polite society.

Let's give Audiard, who's made some very smart and engrossing films in the not too distant past, the benefit of the doubt - let's say he's not just cynically co-opting the transgender theme to foster the festival-steps sensation even our more celebrated arthouse directors now have to court to make a splash in a stagnant marketplace. There are passages here where the aim appears no more contentious than aping Almodóvar, where the camera contents to gaze up adoringly at the actresses who give the movie whatever energy and verve it has. (One point in Emilia Pérez's favour: shot by the emergent Paul Guilhaume, who did Ava and The Five Devils, it's photogenic in a nocturnal way.) Yet Almodóvar's best films have found a way of finessing their contrivance, easing us past any implausibility while generating an emotional heft that Emilia Pérez really... doesn't? At all? And doesn't even gesture towards anything like a convincing central conflict? This, we are left to conclude, is what happens when a heroine makes a big decision for reasons of screenwriting, and when a director takes a punt for the purposes of facilitating an eyecatching red carpet premiere. I'm amazed the Cannes jury fell for this ruse, but in a year when The Substance won a screenplay prize, Deadpool & Wolverine - a non-film in which Ryan Reynolds tries repeatedly to show us something he thinks is funny on his phone for three hours - grossed a billion dollars, and a convicted sex offender was elected to the White House for the second time, all bets are clearly off. Nothing makes sense anymore; we probably shouldn't expect our movies, film festivals and awards ceremonies to correct or otherwise counter that. Harold and the Purple Crayon for Best Picture: fuck it, why not?

Emilia Pérez is now streaming via Netflix.

The witches: "Wicked: Part 1"

You've had the cuddly-cosy British festitainment (a third helping of Paddington that suggested the marmalade of inspiration was running thin), now here's the American theatre-kid equivalent. Anyone who hasn't been fully schooled in this particular idiom - those who never attended summer camp, say, or skipped Glee - may well find Jon M. Chu's new big-screen version of Wicked a semi-baffling and oddly punishing experience, but it's also instructive as to where Hollywood's head is at 85 years on from The Wizard of Oz. Because Harry Potter and Dune - because today's movie executives reneged on the deal their predecessors struck with cinemagoers a century ago - what you'll be paying for here is in fact half a movie, stretched like fairground taffy or candyfloss to 160 minutes, with sets the size of small European countries and scenes that go on for days. (One glaring flaw was apparently integral to the initial pitch, which had to have been something like: what if we approached the hit musical Wicked as seriously as Angels in America?) The idea is to build a world that might eventually provide the foundation for a popular theme-park ride (or, perhaps, theme park: as so often nowadays, a lumbering movie presents as the slenderest sliver of a corporate masterplan), while inverting the structures of a world long set in place. The set-up, certainly, gestures towards a postmodern overhaul of L. Frank Baum: the good witch (embodied here by Ariana Grande) reframed as a condescending liberal hairtosser who exists in a bubble, the bad witch (Cynthia Erivo) now an animal liberation activist dismissed for her skin colour, the two roomies shown as having far more in common than divides them. Both leads do their own singing, and sing perfectly well, but the voice that recurred in my head during Wicked: Part 1 was that of the decidedly non-postmodern (and wholly untheatrical) Karl Pilkington, asking the big question here: do we need it? Theatre kids would doubtless answer in the affirmative, but then that's what their training tells them to do. We moviebrats would, I think, do well to raise a more sceptical eyebrow, if not send in the flying monkeys.

For once the initial sucrose rush wears off, nothing about this Wicked proves as substantial or lasting as the 1939 film, a high bar, granted, but also - even with its multiple directors and lengthy lore - a logistically simpler studio production that permitted far more complex responses and interpretations. In this most Disneyish of Universal pictures, everything has been tuned to the key of feelgood, and a callow literalism holds sway, from the opening camera swoop over a CG rainbow to the climactic staging of "Defying Gravity" on a staircase fashioned from the song's own soaring chords. In place of imagination, we get VFX (many more talking animals than there can have been on stage) and production design as far as the eye can see, childproofed action within tightly guarded boundaries. I can rarely remember seeing a piece of (admittedly corporate) art that trusts so little in its creators, set to faithfully replicating and amplifying the original show's songs and cues, much as the Potter movies ploughed doggedly through every last line of JK Rowling's prose; I can't recall seeing a film that demonstrates less trust in its audience, put as we are here through nearly three hours of back-to-school moral instruction with no immediate payoff and nary a pause to think for ourselves. But then there may be no need for thought with this Wicked; it's a movie for the brainless scarecrows among us. Between the Oz-ness and the Potter-ness and the Wicked-ness and the High School Musical-ness, there's barely an original gesture for anyone to have to interpret: we know where all this is going narratively, up a long and winding yellow brick road, and the ever-amenable Chu (Step Up 2: The Streets, Step Up 3D, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Now You See Me 2) isn't one for surprises or deviations, good, bad, nasty or otherwise.

The strongest scenes here - the ones that succeed in getting something more than a varyingly faint echo going - throw Erivo and Grande together as a fantasyland odd couple, the former based, wary and quizzical, the latter as frothy, creamy and synthetic as strawberry Angel Delight. But even on sets as cavernous as these, there never seems to be much room for them to manoeuvre: their words and actions are largely bound by the same cautious mirroring as the prom dance that binds them to one another as good little freaks. A machine-movie such as this, made to roll over a willing audience, allows no scope for wildness or other forms of misbehaviour. Both witches only ever exist on the level of PG-rated cartoon characters - the effect heightened by Erivo's jade make-up and Grande's squeaky delivery - and never make the leap to perishable flesh-and-blood that Wicked needs to function as the social allegory it thinks it is. Cosseting us with lullabies and nursery rhymes, it is, then, another fundamentally childish proposition from the studios, one that invites and needs our indulgence. (The suits' rationale: so what if it's half of the world's most expensive rough cut? It's Christmas.) But what if we don't indulge it? What if we misbehave, or at least attempt to resist the roughly 1500 spoonfuls of sugar Chu strives to shovel down our throats with every passing frame? Writing as one who hadn't endured the musical, I can report the movie Wicked at least explains why no-one talks about the musical Wicked without reference to the sublime "Defying Gravity", a genuine modern showstopper repurposed here as a temporary film-and-storystopper. It is, plainly, because none of the other songs come within touching distance. (With typical perversity, Hollywood pushes for a musical revival at the exact moment Stephen Sondheim and Adam Schlesinger have taken their final bows: only the Lin-Manuel Miranda-less Moana 2 can save us now.) Opening weekend takings indicate Wicked has, indeed, defied box-office gravity. Yet this is a production that mistakes length and scale for weight and depth, and confuses the grand gesture with the empty one; that song might have resonated all the more if there were any real gravity here to defy, or anything beyond lip service paid to defiance.

Wicked is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger"

Some docs make life substantially easier for themselves. For Made in England, an overview of the work of the varyingly born, British-based yet internationally minded directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the filmmaker David Hinton has armed himself with clips from some of the golden age's most revered titles, notably The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp; he's also sought out extensive commentary on these titles from one Martin Scorsese, a man who needs scant cue to talk, and to talk, expertly, about the movies in particular. Filmed in his natural habitat (a screening room), visibly reading off cards or some other prompter (the documentary's one inelegant touch), Scorsese duly gives forth on the development of these careers and of a rich strain of poetic, romantic, broadly crowdpleasing cinema: Powell's early solo work, Pressburger's apprenticeship on the continent, the wartime endeavours that brought the pair together, the peacetime flops that tested their bond and eventually led to a fond parting of the ways. The clips, for their part, keep coming. Moira Shearer's feet. Kathleen Byron on the clifftop, a hyper-ventilating Ken Russell heroine before her time. A transition from monochrome to full, glorious Jack Cardiff Technicolor that is as giddying as anything in The Wizard of Oz. Lots and lots of Anton Walbrook. How, frankly, could any of us resist?

There is also, I should say, plenty in Made in England that you won't have seen - or won't have seen recently. For starters, there are the P&P titles that aren't so readily and regularly recirculated: The Edge of the World, 49th Parallel, A Canterbury Tale, Gone to Earth, Oh... Rosalinda!!. There's some very touching footage - likely care of Melvyn Bragg's The South Bank Show - of Powell during his Californian exile at Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope studio at the turn of the 1980s, pottering around, checking his mail, drafting his memoirs but failing to get anything else made, his cutglass accent and physical resemblance to Clive Candy only intensified by the years. Hinton also turns up a reunion between the directors in their dotage, where they resemble a married couple who found in one another something bigger than themselves, and can now look back on a long and happy history together. Scorsese's textural analysis, meanwhile, returns us to the glory days of the directors' commentaries that used to come as standard on our DVDs. Made in England only sporadically broaches the context in which these films were made and received, but - steered by the Scorsesean eye - it's eternally alert to what these specific clips mean and represent, their inspired shifts of camera perspective, their sly, warm gags and asides. The entire film is a connoisseurial nudge, first in the direction of the Powell and Pressburger corpus, then towards individual titles and moments: look at this, it says, isn't this great, see how this rapturous two-minute extract speaks to the whole.

And - increasingly, as its thesis assumes shape and heft - see how these extracts speak to a very great love: that love between the filmmakers, between the characters, and between the filmmakers and their characters; finally and crucially that love for the infinite possibilities of the cinema. As those who've spent the dog days of 2024 revisiting these films in BBC2's Saturday matinee slot could testify, this body of work now seems to bear out a radical-to-miraculous optimism. Even in the dark days of war, amid the crises of the British film industry and the hardships suffered by the wider populace, these two men from very different backgrounds found it in their hearts to embark upon a project like this. As Scorsese admits, he first saw these films on a tiny black-and-white TV set in the 1950s and 60s, and still fell head over heels for them. After a decade or so of docs reliant on fuzzily pixellated YouTube footage - often replicated in the wrong aspect ratio - it's stirring to encounter one where the archive looks pristine, shimmering, as if it had been filmed last week and its Technicolor were still wet paint. Made in England has been made with a comparable love, Hinton's generosity of sourcing and handling extending all the way back to the Rex Ingram silents Powell worked on in the 1920s. I first saw Powell and Pressburger's films on TV in the 1990s, coincidentally the last time those silents were being routinely broadcast, when the love affair between the cinema and television was still impassioned and cultural commentary such as this became a means of connecting our restless, curious minds to something bigger. Might this not be the moment to extend the project of Hinton's excellent film and seek a more considered curation of films on TV, so that the next generation of Scorseses can discover them and likewise take them to heart?

Made in England is currently streaming via the BBC iPlayer, and is available to rent via Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, YouTube and the BFI Player.

In memoriam: Tony Todd (Telegraph 22/11/24)

Tony Todd, who has died from cancer aged 69, was a character actor who became a noted horror star as the mythical hook-handed killer in Candyman (1992), a much-praised Clive Barker adaptation by the British filmmaker Bernard Rose that was as much disquisition on gentrification as it was superior sleepover fare.

An imposing 6’5”, Todd beat out Eddie Murphy to become the film’s titular focal point, luring blonde academic Virginia Madsen into examining the murkier corners of American race relations. Yet like many of the most memorable movie boogeymen, Todd cut a courtly, even romantic figure as one both sinning and sinned against: the leads took ballroom dancing classes together to strengthen their bond. 

Such an unsettling role was not without its hardships, not least the bees that at points could be seen emerging from the Candyman’s mouth and chest cavity; demonstrating admirable foresight, Todd negotiated a $1,000 bonus for every bee sting incurred. Although young bees, generally considered unlikely to sting, were used on set, Todd eventually found himself stung some twenty-odd times. “I had a great lawyer,” he later chuckled. “A thousand dollars a pop.”

His performance earned him a nomination for Best Actor at horror magazine Fangoria’s Chainsaw Awards; the film also earned a Golden Chainsaw Award for Best Death. Todd duly reprised the role in the theatrically released sequel Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995), the straight-to-video Candyman: Day of the Dead (1999) and the recent reboot Candyman (2021).

For thirty years, Todd found the role opening doors that might otherwise have stayed firmly shut: “I’ve walked into redneck bars where there might have been a problem and somebody would say ‘Candyman!’” At conventions, he received an even warmer reception, though as he keenly pointed out, any resemblance between himself and his best-known role was purely incidental: “I’m actually a very well-adjusted man… I guess there are some dark shadows somewhere in there, but I’m a big kid.”

Anthony Tiran Todd was born in Washington on December 4, 1954, the only child of Evetta Lyons Gaither, though he was raised from the age of three by an aunt, Clara Elliston, who worked as a domestic: “My mother was going through some issues. So the family intervened… [Aunt Clara] would bring me to some of her places, and I would stay in the library while she cleaned the house. I loved books at an early age, so I was content.”

An enthusiastic Boy Scout (“it literally moulded me and set me in the direction of public speaking, which led to acting”), Todd attended Hartford Public High School and won scholarships to the University of Connecticut and the Eugene O’Neill National Theatre Institute. The stage seemed one likely destination: he trained at Providence’s Trinity Rep Conservatory, and later won raves in the title role of August Wilson’s play King Hedley II.

Yet Todd made his biggest impression in the movies. Debuting in indie fantasy Sleepwalk (1986), he essayed a soldier in Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and a workman in 86 Charing Cross Road (1987) before landing the role of doomed hero Ben in a full-colour 1990 remake of George Romero’s black-and-white landmark Night of the Living Dead (1968), of which the actor was a lifelong fan: “I ran into the office – I found the production office – and I grabbed [director] Tom Savini by his lapels, literally, and said, ‘You got to read me. You got to read me.’”

Post-Candyman, he could be seen in such prominent multiplex horror as the Gothic-skewing The Crow (1994) and the Wes Craven-presented Wishmaster (1997); he recurred as the deathly William Bludworth in the joshing Final Destination films (2000-2011); and appeared in a slew of straight-to-DVD and direct-to-streaming titles that capitalised on his name and presence.

He worked until his death, reuniting with Candyman director Rose for a thoughtful latter-day Frankenstein (2015) and the pandemic-shot Traveling Light (2021); he won a BAFTA nomination earlier this year for his voicework as Venom in the Sony Interactive game Spider-Man 2 (2023), while William Bludworth is set to return in the forthcoming Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025 tbc).

Yet it was the seductive Candyman that haunted the popular imagination, as he recalled in 2010: “My first time in Chicago, we went to the Kingston Mines, me and Bernard [Rose], listening to some great blues. Keith Richards stopped by that night, and he was just saying, ‘This role is going to change your life.’ And at the time, I’m going ‘Okay, I’ve heard this before. I’ve done some things. I’ve had some life interruptions, but change my life?” […] But in fact, he was right, because not a day goes by without people, I mean multiple people, coming up and saying ‘Candyman!’”

He is survived by a wife, Fatima, and two children, Ariana and Alexander.

Tony Todd, born December 4, 1954, died November 6, 2024.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of November 15-17, 2024):

1 (new) Gladiator II (15) ***

2 (1) Paddington in Peru (PG)

3 (2) Red One (12A)

4 (3) Heretic (15) ****

5 (4) Venom: The Last Dance (15)

6 (5) The Wild Robot (U) **

7 (6) Small Things Like These (12A) ***

8 (new) Kiss Me Kate: The Musical (12A)

9 (new) The Last Dance (12A)

10 (new) Andrea Bocelli 30: The Celebration (PG)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Blitz

2. Point Break

3. Dahomey

4. Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection

5. Juror #2

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

2 (7) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

3 (4) Despicable Me 4 (U)

4 (5) The Substance (18) **

5 (16) Gladiator (15) ****

6 (19) The Grinch (U)

7 (2) It Ends with Us (15)

8 (re) The Fall Guy (12) **

9 (3) Joker: Folie à Deux (15) **

10 (12) Dune: Part Two (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Kneecap

2. Evil Does Not Exist

3. Didi

4. Late Night with the Devil

5. Twisters

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. A Matter of Life and Death (Saturday, BBC2, 12.35pm)

2. Manhunter [above] (Wednesday, BBC1, 12 midnight)

3. Knives Out (Saturday, Channel 4, 10.25pm)

4. Raging Bull (Sunday, BBC2, 10pm)

5. The Red Shoes (Saturday, BBC2, 2.20pm)

On demand: "Sleep"

Sleep is a Korean chiller conceived after the fashion of the Japanese genre master Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Writer-director Jason Yu presents us with an aspirational couple - he (Parasite's Lee Sun-kyun, in his penultimate role before his death last year) a jobbing actor, she (Jung Yu-mi) a pregnant executive of some kind - who share one of those ultra-cosy movie apartments that typically signal trouble to come. The trouble here transpires to be a not so little matter of insomnia. He wakes her up with a nasty start, then begins sleepwalking and clawing at his own face; soon, he's spending the wee small hours threatening to propel himself out of the window and doing for the pair's pet Pomeranian. (And all this before the baby arrives.) Very quickly, it becomes apparent that sleep deprivation, in this extreme case, stands for all those other niggles that prevent the brain from shutting down at night: her pre-emptive concerns about bringing new life into an uncertain world, his insecurities pertaining to his looks and career. Yu shows us the image of a perfect life in a dream home, and then begins to fill it with weakspots that threaten to undermine its very foundations.

The movie that results is as self-contained as that flat - those looking for another Parasite will likely be underwhelmed - but it allows Yu to maintain a tight focus and push here and there towards a heightened idea of interiority. If Kurosawa forms one influence, the Polanski of Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant looks to have been another, as evidenced in streaks of varyingly black humour: the new father seeking alternative locations to catch a few stray zeds, the cutaways to a wall-mounted platitude ("Together We Can Overcome Anything"), the blue-haired mystic whose presence suggests this might in fact be a supernatural snafu. It's drolly funny that the couple's sleep vacillates, as if they've been set to competing against one another for the same seven hours of shuteye, though Yu isn't much interested in tormenting his characters: these actors are too likable, and we want them to work this thing out. Still, Sleep gets dreamier and more discombobulating as it goes on, with sequences that count as waking nightmares. The chi-chi projector the couple use to watch TV on in the first reel gets repurposed in the last for an infernal PowerPoint presentation given by one driven out of their mind; the electric drill used to secure the flat's fittings is eventually reached for as a threat. Mostly, Yu proceeds with a spare style and quiet intelligence that proves all the more compelling for being so lightly worn.

Sleep is currently available to rent via Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, YouTube and the BFI Player.

House of the devil: "Heretic"

A24 have done some radical things within the horror space, some more successful than others artistically, others undeniable hits. Yet Heretic feels to me like the most radical undertaking of the lot: they've lured in the multiplex crowd to sit through a movie on free will and doctrinal deviation, the big sickos. This example of New Horror from the lawyerly-sounding partnership of (Scott) Beck and (Bryan) Woods (who came to prominence with their script for 2018's A Quiet Place and subsequently directed last year's 65) opens with a scene that recalls the horrors of yore: young actresses (Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher) cast as debatably plausible Mormon missionaries, discussing penis size and pornography in a manner that really suggests joshing bro screenwriters hunting a grabby opening for a stealthier, more insinuating script. The latter's rawest material actually has far less to do with the flesh than it does with the spirit. The last stop on the girls' rounds, this ominously dingy night, is the isolated home of one Mr. Reed, played by Hugh Grant with a terse smile and both the wardrobe and unsettling mien of a pass-agg religious studies teacher. Though Reed almost literally turns cartwheels to ease his guests' initial fears - around crossing an unfamiliar threshold with only one another and a pocketful of pamphlets to protect them - we know where the film is heading in some respects: young women at the mercy of a creepy guy. Yet the scriptural debate that comprises the bulk of the film's first forty minutes would also seem to indicate our heroines' chosen path has some significance. What we've been gathered here to witness is as much test of faith as it is a test of mettle and nerve, and even the fact these characters wind up fumbling around in the dark invites allegorical reading: this, too, will be an ecumenical matter.

Beck and Woods pursue it with craft, conviction and a giant scoop of crazy, all the things you thought had gone missing from American movies. The craft becomes evident with each pirouette this camera makes around a house designed like a boobytrap, one in which features glimpsed in passing will prove lifesaving or damning. The talky script sets up a debate and commits to it; the theological aspect isn't mere window-dressing, but as integral to the structure and action as it was to the William Peter Blatty-derived The Exorcist and The Ninth Configuration. Yet the film's secret weapon is that element of absurdity one finds in some religions and the best popcorn cinema. We may just have to swallow the notion that this cosy, chuckling old duffer owns multiple editions of Monopoly, can tell us what Radiohead's "Creep" owes to The Hollies, and knows who Jar Jar Binks is. But we do, because Grant is on exceptional, possibly even career-best form, playing a character who is at once Richard Dawkins, a carnival barker for this script's wilder swings, and a figure recognisable as part of a British comic tradition: the pedant going to extreme lengths to prove an arguably arcane point. Grant has become increasingly adept at sniffing out roles that might also serve as showcases (cf. his rogues in recent Guy Ritchies, and the dastardly Phoenix Buchanan in Paddington 2); here, he brings a rare precision of charm and gesture to that conversion process. It's the mockingly slight downturn of his mouth as he introduces an idea "that might make you want to die"; it's the pitch of his voice as he offers an otherwise humdrum "sorry for the cold". He casually tosses a piece of chalk from one hand to the other, and transforms it into a mini-metaphor for the girls' short, fragile lives. Even if you don't buy all of Heretic's ideas, even if you don't consider yourself as having a dog in this fight, such quasi-miraculous work and godly attention to detail can't help but win you round somehow. I became aware I was grinning around the halfway point, and that grin only broadened in the second as the proposition Beck and Woods make their viewers became ever more dazzlingly clear: what if the Saw movies were as fun to watch as the average episode of Taskmaster?

Heretic is currently playing in cinemas nationwide.

Dark habits: "Small Things Like These"

Cillian Murphy has now reached such a level of stardom that his first venture post-Oppenheimer, an independently produced drama on the subject of the Magdalene laundries run by the Catholic Church in Ireland, is presently outperforming awards season heavy-hitters like this year's Palme d'Or winner Anora and Steve McQueen's Blitz. I'm reviewing Small Things Like These later than expected, in part because two earlier public screenings I'd aimed to attend sold out, suggesting widespread fascination with either the subject matter or the source material (Claire Keegan's Booker-nominated 2021 novel, here adapted for the screen by Enda Walsh). Or - more likely - it was some combination of these and the growing draw of Murphy, again found burrowing assiduously yet unflashily beneath a character's skin. A coalman in rural Wexford in the last years when coalman was still a viable profession (the early-to-mid 1980s), Murphy's Bill Furlong is a generous, loving husband and father and responsible, hard-working citizen, one of the little people who keep a nation going. Yet as Tim Mielants' film joins Bill, it's also clear that something's not right. The guy can't sleep at night; he's distracted at the dinner table; and his tendency to disconnect and drift off indicates he has something weighty and urgent on his mind, the kind of concerns cameras and flashbacks were invented to reveal. Keegan previously authored the novel The Quiet Girl, source of one of the biggest sleeper hits in recent Irish cinema. Small Things Like These, which bears out a similar methodology, would invite rechristening as The Quiet Man, were that title not already taken.

What's been set around Bill Furlong is in itself the definition of muted. Mielants, the Belgian who made the terrific nudist-camp character study Patrick and worked with Murphy on Peaky Blinders, makes choices that forever point towards the titular diminutions. A narrow frame, the better to describe narrow, penned-in lives; the fast-fading light of November, December and January; lots of peering through windows at rooms that sorely need coal to sustain any brightness or warmth. Two decades ago, the actor-turned-director Peter Mullan enjoyed a crossover hit with The Magdalene Sisters, a period drama on the same topic that was never less than grabby, often punchy, and in places bordered on exploitation. Mielants' film, by contrast, is insistently recessive; its primary sites of interest and conflict aren't the laundries but the hollows under Murphy's eyes and cheekbones. Crucially, we follow the actor into these dark places: as we see and hear what Bill does, we come to know what he does, and thus better understand the OCD-level handwashing and panic attacks. We, too, feel the chill as the dead of winter blows in. The box-office success comes as an even greater surprise once you've seen the film, which is a far tougher proposition than the sunny, genial The Quiet Girl: the distributors have had to prioritise stars over quotes on the poster because, as critical recommendations go, "bleak and unsparing" doesn't sell tickets, even prefixed with a mitigating "admirably". Looking round at the pensioners cramming into my Saturday matinee, I was struck by one more thing, which may be no small thing indeed: has the Church done so much damage over the years that folks gravitate to a film like this to help them navigate their own traumas?

Small Things Like These is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of November 8-10, 2024):

1 (new) Paddington in Peru (PG)

2 (new) Red One (12A)

3 (3) Heretic (15) ****

4 (2) Venom: The Last Dance (15)

5 (1) The Wild Robot (U) **

6 (4) Small Things Like These (12A) ***

7 (5) Smile 2 (18)

8 (new) Blitz (12A) *****

9 (6) Anora (18) ***

10 (new) Piece by Piece (PG)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Blitz

2. Point Break

3. Dahomey

4. Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection

5. Juror #2

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

2 (2) It Ends with Us (15)

3 (new) Joker: Folie à Deux (15) **

4 (4) Despicable Me 4 (U)

5 (new) The Substance (18) **

6 (3) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12)

7 (re) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

8 (12) Borderlands (12)

9 (5) Twisters (12) ***

10 (new) Deadpool: Triple Pack (15) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Evil Does Not Exist

2. Didi

3. Late Night with the Devil

4. Twisters

5. A Quiet Place: Day One

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Saturday, BBC2, 1.30pm)

2. 48HRS. [above] (Friday, Channel 4, 1.05am)

3. Mission: Impossible (Saturday, ITV1, 4pm and Friday, ITV1, 11pm)

4. X+Y (Saturday, BBC2, 12.30am)

5. I Know Where I'm Going! (Saturday, BBC2, 4.10pm)

The Empire strikes back: "Gladiator II"

Unlike the 94-year-old Clint Eastwood, the 86-year-old Sir Ridley Scott seems to have no trouble getting his films into cinemas, promoted and seen. As much businessman as creative, Scott clearly speaks modern boardroom lingo fluently; moreover, and this may best explain his popularity among today's studio executives, he's demonstrated no qualms whatsoever about regarding his own back catalogue as endlessly recyclable IP, as borne out by recent developments in the Alien and Blade Runner franchises, and now by Gladiator II, or GladIIator, as the onscreen title rather awkwardly has it. A bellicose film for bellicose times, the sequel could as easily trade under the title Son of Gladiator: it opens with a hand sifting grain rather than stalks in a cornfield, centralises lineage in its narrative, and continually returns to spectacle that shares its visual DNA with that of the 2000 original. Yet unlike the Alien and Blade Runner follow-ups and footnotes, which often laboured overtime to arrive at novel conceptual twists, Gladiator II is relatively straightforward blockbuster fare, determining to replicate the character arcs and thunderous strengths of its massively successful predecessor; scenes you recall from the first movie land in much the same place as you remember them landing almost a quarter of a century ago. One notable piece of team news: for the no longer battle-hardened Russell Crowe, we instead have rapidly promoted Covid holdover Paul Mescal upfront in the role of Lucius, a loving husband who sees his archer wife offed by a Roman arrow in the opening naval set-to. Captured and sold into slavery, Lucius must thereafter channel the rage and nobility of those of us watching on from the cheap seats, ourselves obliged to spend our waking hours fighting for our lives within a society and a system that shows scant mercy.

Much as even a buffed-and-bearded Mescal doesn't quite map onto the contours of Crowe in his starmaking role, GladIIator can feel callow in comparison with Gladiator. That latter was produced at a time when it was still possible for a director to cast grizzled veterans of mid-20th century stage and screen (Oliver Reed, David Hemmings, Richard Harris) who seemed to have internalised decades of big, brawny character acting. As with modern Hollywood, this Rome is being run by kids (Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger), although Scott's saving grace remains his fondness for seasoned performers, here used to bulk out the prevailing palace intrigue. In a role that overlaps with both the Reed and Joaquin Phoenix characters from the original, Denzel Washington is all brisk, chuckling, notionally bisexual authority, working up an unlikely but fun double-act with Tim McInnerny as a weak-willed senator. Scott gets this movie into the arena earlier - he knows full well what he's selling - but the brutal hand-to-hand combat of the Crowe era has been trumped by more pixellated forms of activity: men vs. feral monkeys, men vs. rhinos, men vs. sharks, the sort of setpieces that might have featured in a direct-to-DVD Gladiator knock-off from The Asylum in 2001. If you're anything like me, you may begin to wonder how much of this script (by David Scarpa) is formed of ideas rejected first time around on the grounds of being more silly than mythic. It's watchable enough - unlike Scott's ill-judged Napoleon, there's never a dull moment - and delivers the scale and spectacle one might expect from a Gladiator movie, but increasingly it begins to feel like an echo of the original. 24 years on, we're even further away from what these movies once meant to Hollywood, travelling in the direction of pastiche.

Gladiator II is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "Aattam/The Play"

2024 was the year in which the Malayalam cinema belatedly underwent its #MeToo moment, with the publication in August of the Hema Committee report into abuses of power within the industry. Writer-director Anand Ekarshi's slowburn drama Aattam/The Play, which opened in India at the end of 2023 and worldwide this January, now appears to pre-empt the report's line of thinking and interrogation. Ekarshi's raw materials here are the tensions that ripple through a successful touring theatre troupe after leading lady Anjali (Zarin Shihab) accuses a recent recruit, a married film actor renowned for his portrayal of villains, of having groped her at an afterparty. The conversations that break out among the ensemble begin to echo those being had in wider society: some of Anjali's fellow performers don't believe her, quibbling with or casting doubts on her story; others threaten to have the accused beaten up; others still point the finger at a heavy drinking culture within the group, insisting everyone needs to clean up their act. What's immediately notable is that the decision of how best to proceed will be taken in-house, and almost exclusively by the troupe's men, assuming the new roles of judge, jury and potential executioner.

What follows, over two-and-a-bit hours, is a model of movie naturalism: actors you've probably never seen before suggesting very distinct personalities while engaging in conversation that sounds, from first scene to last, like real-world conversation. This may be an even stronger ensemble, all told, than that which powered the spring crossover hit Manjummel Boys. We are, after all, watching less heralded actors playing less heralded actors, the alleged villain of the piece demonstrating a charm and clubbability that has evidently carried his character a rung or two higher up the showbiz ladder, but then every face appears right for the role. While it's still mostly men - Anjali is shuttled offstage for much of the middle stretch - a) that's the industry, and b) the tactic allows Ekarshi to get to how men work these things out together: how they justify, excuse, downplay and enable aberrant behaviour, how quick they are to anger, how often they shirk their responsibilities. (One potential pitch: it's Oleanna done as Glengarry Glen Ross.) Ekarshi sees and dramatises how tricky it is to hold firm in these situations when there are professional benefits (sizeable cheques, European tours) to turning a blind eye; crucially, he understands how essential it is that these men do hold firm. Above all else, Aattam demonstrates how fascinating conversation in itself can be on screen when it's this urgent and necessary; when the speaking parts are invested with depth and cast to perfection, and directed to a rare level of precision. Quietly brilliant and insinuating, and right up there with the best films in the world on this especially fraught moment in male-female relations.

Aattam is now streaming via Prime Video.

In memoriam: Jordan Klein Sr. (Telegraph 12/11/24)

Jordan Klein Sr., who has died aged 98, was an Oscar-winning cinematographer who eased James Bond’s passage into a wetsuit with his underwater photography on Thunderball (1965), Live and Let Die (1973) and Never Say Never Again (1983).

With the first of these, the newly minted spy franchise expanded its horizons, plunging headfirst into the waves from which Ursula Andress had emerged in Dr. No (1962) and thereby assimilating the subaquatic spectacle of Jacques Cousteau’s immersive nature documentaries. Schemer-in-chief Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi) had a floating lair, a boat called the Disco Volante; the Vulcan bomber he'd hijacked was buried on the ocean floor.

Klein, a diver and engineer who had built protective camera housings for MGM’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and a reliable reputation with work on TV’s Sea Hunt (1958-61) and Flipper (1964-67), was deputised to oversee the underwater sequences. As Director of Underwater Engineering, his duties extended from ensuring performer safety to building fully functional props, including the underwater jetpack worn by Sean Connery’s 007.

“I remember I said to [production supervisor] David Middlemas, ‘What is he going to have that was like the briefcase from From Russia with Love [1963] and the rest of that stuff?’,” Klein recalled in 2009. “He said if I could build it and have it there for Monday morning, they would pay what I was asking […] So I jumped on a plane on Friday afternoon and worked steady all weekend and [got] back Monday at 8.45 and gave [the jetpack] to them… I wish I had kept one of them.”

Connery, Klein revealed, “really didn’t like diving all that much”, but there were other reasons for showing up: “The best part of the day was heading back to the dock after a day working with the girls. They would change out on deck as if they were one of the guys!” More perks followed: making $141m off a $9m budget, Thunderball outstripped its predecessors at the box office, and won a Visual Effects Oscar.

Jordan Klein was born December 1, 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, yet at an early age, his family relocated to Miami, where he began diving as a teenager: “We built our own breathing equipment. We used five-gallon steel milk cans for our diving helmet, soldering on a port… [we] cut a donut out of an inner tube and made a little copper ring that would hold a piece of glass in the front and put that on for a facemask.”

A mischievous child, Klein was sent to military school and served in the Navy during WW2. After the War, he opened a surf shop in Florida and invested in a former PT boat, the Arbalete, to take tourists out on dives. Even with the illustrious patronage of Cary Grant and Errol Flynn, however, Klein realised “it would be tough to earn any serious money running a dive boat for the rest of my life.”

Alternative revenue streams were sought, with some success. Klein’s waterproof housing for stills cameras sold 19,000 units in branches of Woolworths; in 1967, Klein teamed with Cousteau to patent the CryoLung, a liquid-oxygen breathing device that sustained divers three times longer than was then the norm.

Once Hollywood came calling, Klein oversaw the wetter work on The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and Night Moves (1975), as well as Live and Let Die’s shark sequences: “We understood the psychology of a specific shark after working with him for just a few minutes. The psychology was different for almost every one of them. Fortunately, we could outthink them.”

On Never Say Never Again, an unofficial reworking of Thunderball, he was promoted following early production blunders: “We almost got thrown out of the park in Freeport Bahamas when the pilot hit some stalagmites and stalactites in a cave and broke them. The whole world came to an end as far as the ecologically minded people were concerned. So they told me, ‘You run the thing!’”

Later projects included Jaws 3-D (1983), Splash (1983) and Cocoon (1985); in 2002, Klein received a Technical Achievement Oscar for “his pioneering efforts in the development and application of underwater camera housings for motion pictures”. His final credit was The Celestine Prophecy (2006), a Dan Brown-inspired indie filmed in Florida, Costa Rica and Puerto Rico, passing for the Peruvian rainforest.

By then, cheap, flexible digital filmmaking was replacing the expensive business of shooting on film, though Klein professed a fondness for the latter: “In the old days, I’ve had my camera fill almost all the way up with saltwater and… by two o’clock in the morning, the camera is back running. As long as the optics hadn’t gotten screwed up, I was a happy camper; I knew I could get it to run the next morning.”

He is survived by Lori, his wife of 35 years; by a son, Jordan Klein Jr., himself a specialist in underwater photography; and by three stepchildren.

Jordan Klein Sr., born December 1, 1925, died October 1, 2024.