Double take: "The Naked Gun"

The new take on The Naked Gun is broadly fine: fast and more often funny than not, it adds a welcome note of levity to a movie summer that has so far been defined by megabudget retreads. (If the studios are looking back to the 1990s, as the F1 movie suggested, they'd do well to remember that blockbuster season was once generous enough to embrace action and comedy and teen pics and starry romances: something for everyone, on the grandest imaginable scale.) Viewed in isolation, Akiva Schaffer's film is also somewhat tentative, the work of a system testing the commercial waters (to see if post-Covid audiences can be tempted out for a brand they know and maybe love) and creatives caught between paying irreverent homage to their inspiration and going their own way entirely. Schaffer - who bubbled up with the Lonely Island troupe, made his big-screen debut with 2007's amusing Hot Rod and was most recently seen reviving Chip 'n' Dale for Disney+ with 2022's Rescue Rangers - brings a certain pop-cultural savvy to his task (riffs on the Black Eyed Peas and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the OJ Simpson gag you'll have seen in the trailer); with co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, he expands the cop-spoof remit via those tropes that have taken hold over the past three decades (the sudden prevalence of coffee cups in the procedural form, the no-nonsense Black station chief, played here not by S. Epatha Merkerson, but CCH Pounder). More generally, the writers have gone looking for analogues to the original's smart-dumb jokes ("Cigar?" "Looks like it to me"; Drebin's bad driving; an episode of pantslessness). Through to an endscroll that revives the lost ZAZ art of inserting spoof credits ("Fart Co-Ordinator", "Tennis Grips", "Ranch Dressing"), the aim is to make us laugh out of recognition - to give us something that sounds like something we laughed at first time around - rather than surprise or shock. This, too, is fan service, or a comedy equivalent of those live-action animations that have been doing the multiplex rounds: a faithful reproduction of that cartoon you've already enjoyed.

The new film is at its most 21st century in deciding who forms the butt of its jokes. The villain is a sneering tech bro (Danny Huston, channelling any number of suspects) with plans to deploy his expensive kit to reorder the world as he sees fit. And this year's Drebin, though notionally the son of the character who headed up TV's Police Squad and its three big-screen spinoffs, is somehow even more of a relic than his predecessor. Where the nimble Leslie Nielsen downplayed the bungling cop as a throwback to the 1950s B-movies he'd apprenticed in, deadpanning for comic gold, Liam Neeson's Drebin Jr. is a permanently baffled Neanderthal, a pale stale male furious about everything from Janet Jackson's infamous Superbowl appearance to the promotional ads that play before online videos. The growling figure Neeson cut in those lousy Taken films is here cranked a further notch towards ridiculous: entirely interchangeable with a cameoing action star come the finale, this Drebin takes a grim, thin-lipped pleasure from offing his foes, and ends the film by punching out the camera. Neeson slaps a laugh out of us, but I'll confess to missing Nielsen's subtler sleight-of-hand, his ability to conjure a chuckle out of even his unworthiest material. The star does, however, fit the new movie's wider reframing of the police squad as an innately preposterous, archaic, sometimes outright racist and brutish concept - before fending off any accusations of undue liberal-Hollywood wokery via an especially filthy sequence involving a heatcam. (Seth MacFarlane, of Family Guy and Ted fame, is among the producers here.) Appreciably daft with the odd moment of genuine comic inspiration (a car chase intersection with two glaziers carrying a windscreen across the road, some business with interlocking interview rooms), this is essentially Naked Gun karaoke, a cheap, raucous, enjoyable night out. The lesson Paramount will draw if the film hits big will presumably be to make another one; backing entirely original comedies, with budgets enough to spring their gags off the studio sets to which Schaffer's have been carefully confined, would be the real sign of progress.

The Naked Gun is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Magnum opus: "Amadeus"

All the right notes, in almost exactly the right order. It was just over forty years ago when Milos Forman's Amadeus landed among us as one of those fully formed masterpieces, and maybe it needed to be this complete in order to cut through: this was, after all, a film going against the grain of its junky, post-E.T., post-Raiders moment. It was literally classical, and yet it proved as crowdpleasing as any of the Mozart concertos that will draw standing ovations at the Proms in the weeks ahead. It was the handiwork of that Old Hollywood greybeard Saul Zaentz, one of several producers tapping the stageplays of Peter Shaffer for prestige purposes. Most loftily of all, it was about art, and the ways we come about it: some, like F. Murray Abraham's Salieri, grinding the gears, going through the motions, swearing off anything that resembles compromise to try and protect the modest skill they have, others - more flamboyant, instinctive creatives like Tom Hulce's Mozart, a tittering goofball seemingly ported over from one of the era's teen movies - pulling down inspiration from the heavens, making the complex seem easy, and using the time that frees to chase wine, women and anything else that catches their eye. Shaffer's generosity lay in showing how Mozart, too, had his issues, and in making the grudgeful, scheming, villainous antagonist more sympathetic than he might have been for those of us who will have many more days like Salieri than we ever will as Mozart: a dandified embodiment of imposter syndrome, someone who does everything asked of him in the pursuit of art and still can't pluck down anything to rival his lauded contemporary.

Forman, in turn, mounted a period piece that wasn't a stuffed shirt like Chariots of Fire or Gandhi, that found the life beneath these elaborate hats and hairpieces, and kept undercutting its own heady pomp and circumstance. In movie form, Amadeus remains largely a chamber piece, but those chambers become analogues for the busy hearts and minds of its characters, and the music brings everything to the surface anew; we're watching human beings, not well-posed mannequins. To some degree, Shaffer and Forman treat classical music like sport, as a pursuit you graft at day in day out, even on those days you aren't performing publicly. For Mozart-Salieri, read Borg-McEnroe, Senna-Prost or Pogačar-Vingegaard: the generational talent against the doughty tryhards left exasperated in their wake. We must pick a side to cheer, then, but even this proves pleasurably complicated. Abraham, in what was arguably the highpoint of a long and generally distinguished career, juggles two jobs with great skill. He's not just interpreting an understandably piqued soul, baffled as to why the same small handful of semibreves won't sit up for him the way they do for Mozart, but set to interpreting the very same music that irks him so; the best scenes are those in which the actor unpicks Mozart's genius, his layering of music, as well as any critic has done on the page. (If God speaks through Mozart, Shaffer surely speaks through Salieri.) Yet Hulce is too darned likable to be dismissed as a mere upstart or brat: here is an intruder from the New World set against the patrician Brits cast as courtiers, yes, but also someone who embodies new ways of thinking and doing, and the composer's gift for metabolising what more conventional ears hear as too many notes. The film's sole flaw is that it makes opera seem more fun than any real-world opera has ever been in the history of creation (we get four minutes of it, not four hours, which helps) but otherwise it stands up, and stands alone: all the film's success inspired, as far as I can tell, was Falco's Eurohit "Rock Me Amadeus", pink periwigs and all. (If not sport, then Forman was surely channelling the dress-me-up spirit of New Wave pop.) For almost three hours, Shaffer and Forman combined the best aspects of their antagonists' varied MOs: Amadeus is a film that worked very hard to seem as effortless as it does.

A 4K restoration of Amadeus is currently playing in selected cinemas, and is available on Blu-ray via Warner Bros.

On demand: "The Bad Guys"

There's a conceptual joke underpinning DreamWorks' 2022 digimation The Bad Guys that nudges it one step beyond Disney's similar Zootropolis. In a L.A. where humans and animals exist side-by-side, the appearance of ambulant, talking sharks, spiders and piranhas sparks as much alarm as it would in our world. So these societal outcasts have bonded together and committed themselves to a criminal cause: the opening scene, a U-rated riff on all things Tarantino, has ringleader Wolf (voice of Sam Rockwell, styled after George Raft) and slithering sidekick Snake (Marc Maron) chewing the fat in a diner before robbing the bank across the road. Thereafter, The Bad Guys keeps reconfiguring itself along the lines of various types of crime picture: first a heist movie rendered in pixels, an Ocean's 8-bit during which Wolf's charm offensive is explicitly described as "the full Clooney", later a prison break drama, at every turn seeking where possible to swerve the firm moral instruction even the generally entertaining Zootropolis succumbed to at points. Everything here is far too topsy-turvy for that. The real villain isn't any of the Bad Guys themselves, depicted as Robin Hood types, prone to bouts of conscience about the paths they're on, but the nefarious Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade), a two-faced guinea pig introduced as the recipient of a humanitarian prize, but who is later unmasked as having recruited our anti-heroes to do the worst of his dirty work for him. This is yet another spot of chicanery, and The Bad Guys proves beholden to that manic kids-pic motion that trails decent gags in its wake - an e-Captcha for spiders ("I'm not a tarantula"), the sight of the Wolf in an ovine sleepsuit (sheep's clothing, geddit) - but almost always causes one of these things to pass through the eyeballs and out the ears at top speed; keeping matters light and staying mobile ensures it never remotely gathers the depth or weight of, say, one of those comparable Miller/Lord contraptions (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Mitchells vs. the Machines). Worse, it accelerates straight past its best comic ideas (Prof. Marmalade's efforts to raise an army of guinea pigs - pfft, gone in a flash) and never allows us to savour the artistry of its pleasing magic-hour design. Nothing is allowed to stick: it's all a smash-and-grab. As it morphs once more, this time into a superhero-type affair, and cues up the Chemical Brothers' no less hyper "Go", you can feel yourself being prodded towards the door of Screen Five to make way for the next crowd of suckers - and I was sat watching it on my sofa at home.

The Bad Guys is available to stream via ITVX and to rent via Prime Video, and on DVD via Universal; a sequel, The Bad Guys 2, is currently in cinemas nationwide.

From the archive: "Freaky Friday"

Freaky Friday forms a perky updating of the 1970s Jodie Foster flick, with Lindsay Lohan as the Avril Lavigne-alike teen who plays in a garage rock band and has, like, serious issues with the blonde high school president, and Jamie Lee Curtis as her stressed, overworked mother. One fortune cookie later, and the two have swapped bodies for the day, primarily to grasp vital life lessons, also so that these spoilt, materialistic Westerners can learn some kind of filial duty from the Chinese mother and daughter responsible for the swap. Overnight, Curtis becomes a spiteful ball of resentment making eyes at all the young boys; her daughter, meanwhile, is transformed into a neatfreak swearing off all physical contact. Out of all their live-action plots, this is the one most likely to get seasoned Disney execs in a flap unless handled with care and precision. The bodyswap premise is still disconcerting enough for the viewer to have to repeatedly remind themselves what exactly is going on, never more so than when Mark Harmon steps into the frame as Curtis's unwitting husband-to-be. Harmon plays the role as a blank dope, which only partially allays the film's underlying fear that a grown man is about to spend his wedding night with somebody with the mindset of an underage girl - or, even worse, with the underage girl herself.

As in the forthcoming family comedy School of Rock, though, shrewd scripting makes it possible to address all kinds of fears and other issues sparked by the presence of children in ways that are never tacky or patronising. Lohan is a more interesting screen presence than most Disney teens, and as for Curtis, well, if you are going to be limited to mother roles because of Hollywood's ongoing problems with the age of its actresses, this is the type of mother role you'd want to be offered: one that allows you to cut loose after a while. The great joy of this performance is that Curtis has realised the key to playing Lohan-in-Curtis's-body is not to approach the character as entirely distinct from her own, but as exactly the same character only with the difference of having shrugged off everything she's learnt over the past thirty years. It's funny stuff, seeing a formerly straitlaced shrink slumping in her chair or threatening violence against anybody who crosses her; the best scene in the entire movie is an unusually subversive Disney moment - a feminised version of Tyler Durden's speechifying in Fight Club - in which, while appearing on a primetime chatshow, this notionally responsible adult hymns the virtues of abandoning housework to eat takeout and listen to The Breeders. Mark Waters, director of the Parker Posey dysfunctional family comedy The House of Yes, milks this scene for everything it's worth: the calling card of another independently minded director moving effortlessly into the mainstream, if Freaky Friday inspires twelve-year-old girls to shun Westlife and Gareth Gates in favour of picking up a Ramones CD, it will all have been worthwhile.

(December 2003)

Freaky Friday is streaming via Disney+, available to rent via Prime Video and on DVD via Buena Vista Home Entertainment; a sequel, Freakier Friday, opens in cinemas nationwide this Friday.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 25-27, 2025):

1 (new) The Fantastic Four: First Steps (12A) **

2 (1) Superman (12A)

3 (new) The Bad Guys 2 (PG) [above]

4 (2) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12A)

5 (3) F1 (12A) ***

6 (10) Saiyaara (12A) ***

7 (4) Smurfs (U)

8 (5) I Know What You Did Last Summer (15)

9 (6) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)

10 (7) 28 Years Later (15) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Amadeus

2. My Beautiful Laundrette

3. Friendship

4. Summer Wars

5. Bring Her Back

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Lilo & Stitch (U)

2 (4) Sinners (15) ****

3 (new) Ballerina (15)

4 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

5 (5) Wicked: Part One (PG) **

6 (2) The Amateur (12)

7 (3) Karate Kid: Legends (PG)

8 (6) Thunderbolts* (12)

9 (25) The Bad Guys (U) **

10 (re) Oppenheimer (15) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Misericordia

2. Sinners

3. Black Bag

4. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

5. The Surfer

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Point Break (Thursday, BBC One, 10.40pm)

2. The Shop Around the Corner (Sunday, BBC Two, 12.40pm)

3. Gladiator (Saturday, BBC One, 10.20pm)

4. The Two Faces of January (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)

5. Long Shot (Friday, BBC One, 11.20pm)

Virtuosity: "Summer Wars"

2008's The Girl Who Leapt Through Time suggested director Mamoru Hosoda might have mastered one form of Japanese animation: the kind that while soaringly high of concept and possessed of action enough to appeal to the traditional fanbase of teenagers, also preserves a breezy, lyrical, emotionally satisfying core that could equally be savoured by grown-ups. Hosoda's 2009 follow-up Summer Wars, reissued in UK cinemas this weekend, considers just one of the ways in which society might break down in coming decades, but it does so from a distance, unfolding around a country retreat reminiscent of Mizoguchi or Kurosawa movies; it touches grass, in other words, and gives itself space to think. Young hero Kenji jumps at the chance of a summer job that would bring him closer to his beloved Natsuki, only to discover it's a non-paying position: pretending to be her boyfriend at the birthday party her family are throwing for their 90-year-old matriarch. While prepared to play along, Kenji opens up a can of worms between appointments when he accidentally breaches the security of Oz, a vast online social network; the consequent cybercollapse has knock-on effects in the real world, first taking out satnavs and e-mail accounts, and eventually threatening to bring about full-scale nuclear holocaust. Oopsie.

As an end-of-the-world speculation, it has as much of a sense of multiple events going on at once - a developing space-probe crisis, a high-school baseball championship - as any Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster, yet Hosoda keeps turning his camera on lovely, evocative details: a soft drink can rattling on the ledge of a train window, a ferocious uncle's selection of faded motor-industry vests. In doing so, he anchors, keeps simple and makes surprisingly affecting a plot taking place in two realities at once. Oz is a busy, rainbow-coloured utopia, home to a staggering array of effects and possibilities - until it's taken over by a dark angel whose vast fist, made up of countless stolen avatars, snatches up the identities of online users. (AI fascism much?) But Hosoda delights in the real world, too: its history (much is made of the fact Natsuki's family are the descendants of samurai), its analogue diversions (a card game called Koi Koi becomes important during the finale), its messy human interactions (all the problems are caused by a black-sheep figure seeking the attention his nearest and dearest have thus far denied to him). A little more sedentary than its predecessor, it nevertheless confirms Hosoda as an animator with a rare feeling for character: the nervy hero, whose blushes seem to upload to his face, is very much in the lineage of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, making a mistake he then has to correct, but the movie's moral centre is Natsuki's grandmother, who hasn't been near a computer in her life, and knows how to get things done by, you know, actually talking to people in person.

Summer Wars opens in selected cinemas from Sunday.

Rinse and repeat: "My Beautiful Laundrette" at 40

Forty years ago, My Beautiful Laundrette would have been the jewel in the crown (or, as one character in the film puts it, "the jewel in the jacksie") of the annual Film on Four season: TV-adjacent but expansive, at once characterful and acutely alert to the ways of the wider world. This was a collision of worlds and sensibilities, both before and behind the camera. The screenwriter was the up-and-coming Hanif Kureishi, working towards a portrait of a close-knit Asian community in South London; at its centre, a genial second-generation loafer (Gordon Warnecke's Omar) drifting away from his alcoholic scold of a father (Roshan Seth) and falling under the influence of his garrulous entrepreneur uncle (Saeed Jaffrey), who entrusts the lad with overseeing the launch and running of his brand new laundrette. While so doing, Omar runs into an old crush, Johnny (a donkey-jacketed, Billy Idol-coiffed Daniel Day Lewis, pre-hyphen, pre-My Left Foot), who's spent the years since the pair last met running with a racist crowd. The director was Stephen Frears, who regards the London of 1985 as a location, a character, and just big enough to embrace all interested parties, even if those parties don't always get along. (It's not just the presence of the National Front; at one point, we get a Saeed Jaffrey-Ram John Holder dust-up.) The result was a film with quite a bit going on at the back and sides of its frames, too big, really, for telly: an opposites-attract romcom, but also a snapshot of the nation as it was in the middle of the Thatcher years, simultaneously booming and struggling. It was political to an extent, but it was mostly about muddle-headed people, and their complicated connection to the streets around them; there's an argument that Kureishi and Frears pre-empted Do the Right Thing by several years, putting Persil in the place of pizzas.

When I first saw My Beautiful Laundrette in my teens, it struck me as an ultra-modern love story; this time, I saw it much more as about the immigrant's tricky relationship with their adopted country, which means it speaks to the Britain of 2025 as much as it would have done to the Britain of 1985. (The laundrette was formerly called Churchill's, and though Omar replaces the sign, that name continues to hang heavy over everything that follows.) Jaffrey describes Britain as "this country which we love and hate"; the wounded Seth tells Omar "this country hates us, and all you can think of is to kiss their arses". This London is contested territory, both an extension and consequence of post-Partition India. The fresh-faced, homo-meets-Omo love story, processing from underpass to none-more-Eighties club to high street bricks-and-mortar, is engaging enough, though certain aspects struck me as sketchy this time round: how these lads met, whether Johnny's sick roommate (and maybe even a cough Day Lewis develops towards the end) is a closeted reference to AIDS, just how deeply Johnny is in with the far right. But the film is deceptively scaled and proves spacious in its generosity; you find yourself shifting its constituent elements around in your mind, like fixtures in a shop, and still alighting on pockets of life and interest. The relationship between the estranged brothers seemed to me more intriguing (and moving) this time, partly because Seth and Jaffrey are by far the most assured of the actors milling around here: one principled but lonely, bedridden and drinking himself into oblivion, the other morally compromised yet upwardly mobile. (Compare and contrast the women in their life.) In its rougher edges, My Beautiful Laundrette preserves the tensions of its moment - tensions that have scarcely dissipated in the intervening years - even if Frears strives to defuse them with a few laughs and smiles, the odd note of tenderness, and a tentative happy ending. It scrubs up nicely.

My Beautiful Laundrette returns to selected cinemas from today.

Suffer the children: "Bring Her Back"

2022's Talk to Me was distinguished by the emergent Philippou brothers' readiness to push a fairly stock multiplex-horror set-up (mummified paw leads its teenage bearers to rack and ruin) towards extremes of behaviour: much like its bashed about young leads, survivors of homes so broken you could cut yourself on the pieces, you felt the film could turn properly horrible if it wanted to. Recognisably Australian in its rejection of the slickly polished surface for something rougher-edged, it bore few traces of the childproofing common to so much studio horror, and was therefore liberated to grab the audience by the throat. The directors' follow-up Bring Her Back, which arrives bearing the red flag of an 18 certificate, pushes yet further into the darkness: it's only a few minutes old when partially sighted pre-teen Piper (Sora Wong) and her older, tousle-haired stepbrother Andy (Billy Barratt) return home from school to find their father lying dead in the shower. The pair are quickly reshuffled into a foster home, where our sense of a fire/frying pan scenario is only heightened by the sight of Sally Hawkins (as the kids' new guardian Laura) at her most bohemian-scatty and manic, proposing drinking games as a bonding ritual and sneaking into her charges' bedrooms after lights-out to anoint them with her own bodily fluids. (After Hugh Grant's pivot-to-malevolence in Heretic, we are once more reminded of the lengths British performers are taking to shake off the genial stank of Paddington.) Yet these aren't the only elements that unnerve us. The stepsiblings gain a disconcerting new playmate in Laura's other foster child, a mute, shaven-headed tyke called Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) whose wild eyes suggest he's seen heinous things. And then there is the insinuation, slipped inside the opening credits, that this cluttered, colourful, lived-in foster home, with its ominous void of a swimming pool, was at some point in the none too distant past the site of a murderous cult.

What's truly transgressive about the Philippou approach is that they can't bring themselves to kill off their young leads, which might at least offer some cathartic release, but they think nothing of repeatedly shaking or beating them up. Neither of their films can claim a particularly high bodycount (certainly not by comparison to the I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot in the screen next door), but they go big on bruising and scarring, sustained physical and psychological violence, the kind of trauma sparked by such everyday phenomena as a rainstorm. The brothers aren't constructing mechanised slaughterhouses so much as suffocating pressure cookers. Even here, their Australianness shows through: the boys would appear to have spent their formative sleepovers studying the domestic horrors of Animal Kingdom and Snowtown, forbidden texts operating closer to home than any larkier Nightmare on Elm Street fantasy. Bring Her Back works hard to summon the dread one would associate with hearing an abusive parent coming up the stairs, and knowing that worse still awaits you at the bottom of the garden. There's still a measure of fun and games in watching this lopsided family drunkenly bouncing to Timmy Trumpet and Savage's "Freaks", and the brothers remain firmly committed to their actors: you don't hire Hawkins, and then hand her a monologue on what it feels like to lose a daughter, if you aren't. (They also demonstrate a fondness for resilient, non-cutesy juvenile leads who can take what's being thrown at them and thereby suggest the foster home more than they do stage school.) But - boy - do these guys know how to turn the dial and the screw: the new film is all intense naturalism until the moment someone takes a carving knife to their own mouth and starts tearing off strips of their own flesh.

Here's where Bring Her Back gets truly grisly, and I could well understand if you chose to recoil. I've seen multiple early responders who felt the film is too much, too dreadful; that it goes beyond being a film about exploitation to become an exploitation film (or an exploitative film) in itself. (I couldn't honestly recommend it if you have any of the following: sensitivities around cats in horror films, scheduled dental surgery, any connection - however tenuous - to this kind of material or news story.) You will find your own tolerances and red lines being tested, even if you emerge satisfied that no real or lasting harm has been done. I consciously held off assessing the final scenes of 28 Years Later because I'm intrigued to see how that plotline is developed (maybe even justified) in January's follow-up. I can, however, see how and why you might find that artistic choice glib, doubly so in a moment where the Epstein files have become a political football, and we risk having terrible abuses reframed for us as a game played by cartoon bogeymen. Yet I felt the Philippous were sincere in broaching this subject, and they again demonstrate a boundless sympathy for their put-upon kids; they're not going there for a laugh, rather out of a deep-seated concern for these youngsters, and the worst of what happens to them is framed, responsibly, as a tragedy rather than a snickeringly tasteless joke. (The thought did cross my mind that the Philippous may have intended to subvert a quintessentially Aussie image - that of Pippa and Tom Fletcher, the heroically perfect foster parents who were a foundation stone of much-exported TV soap Home & Away - but the filmmakers would have only been six when the characters were written out. I'm just old.)

If there are shortcomings with the new film - and I found it slightly less persuasive overall than I did its predecessor - they're not ethical but authorial. Talk to Me proceeded from what was a straightforward, (literally) easily grasped conceit: here's a mummified hand, watch as it brings about bad things. Bring Her Back is murkier and more complicated in most respects, and what it gains in shuddering impact, it loses in precision: for much of the running time, we're left in much the same position as Andy and Piper, unsure what's going on save that something's very badly up, and wrestling with the swelling unease in the pit of our stomachs. (I'm not sure everything is fully clarified by the time the closing credits run, though again that may well be a conscious choice.) I found Bring Her Back effective without for a minute thinking it would be a fun one to revisit (as a comparable ordeal like Heretic probably would be); it's effective at the same time as being intensely horrible. One can only hope the Philippous' relationship with their own parents or guardians is nothing but sweetness and light, that they're round there every weekend for a barbie that triggers nothing but laughter and ends with a loving and wholly consensual family hug. But anyone watching Bring Her Back this weekend will be given considerable cause to worry.

Bring Her Back opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.

Toys: "The Fantastic Four: First Steps"

Third time's the charm, or is it just that the two previous attempts to push the Fantastic Four as a cinematic proposition (2005, with Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba and a pre-Captain America Chris Evans; 2015, with Miles Teller, Jamie Bell and a pre-Black Panther Michael B. Jordan) set such a dismally low bar that First Steps is getting an easy ride? From the new movie's opening act, you take away a sense of how much of a struggle it must be to launch or relaunch these characters, given the baggage the IP has accrued and the crushing weight of fanboy expectation. The choice Marvel's producers make this time isn't to rehash the origin story, but to approach the Four, like their studio's heyday, as a thing of the past. Cue 1960s styling, fonts and production design; cue a TV prologue, hosted by Mark Gatiss's Ted Gilbert and shown on a period variant of Disney affiliate ABC, which marks the Four's fourth anniversary as a team and montages together several event movies' worth of Earth-saving action. It's not the worst idea, allowing First Steps to cut to the chase and get one more franchise up and running without unnecessarily laborious exposition. Yet the centralisation of television in this process seems a giveaway: this is, essentially, the sitcom version of the Fantastic Four (replete with laboured running gag about the Thing's catchphrase), composed along much the same lines as those shows Marvel fell back on as their movies began to stutter and stall. The director is Matt Shakman, who cut his teeth on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia before cleaning up with WandaVision; the general vibe is The Gang Goes Retro, or Back to Superhero Basics.

Possibly these characters only work within a Sixties setting, as cheery relics of an era before America and its comics got neurotic. Even in this milieu, however, they verge on the bland: astronauts who've made peace with the bad thing that happened to them up in space, and now shrug onwards with the business of intergalactic troubleshooting and problem-solving. (No prizes for guessing why Marvel's executive class consider them an ongoing concern.) They are headed, in this latest iteration, by stretchy scientist Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), whose defining characteristic is a rakish matinee-idol moustache; also along for the ride is his other half Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), whose defining characteristic is being pregnant with the couple's first child; Sue's flying, flame-retardant brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn), the one out of Stranger Things who's become an improbable heartthrob; and the clan's pebbledashed pet the Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who has rocks for a head. As underlined by Sue's big midfilm speech about the importance of family, it's all very basic and heteronormative, ideal for a Trump 2.0 summer release; even its Thing is relatively average-sized. (A token subplot - all but a one-scene, felt-tip outline in this script, left to be coloured in by future instalments - finds Moss-Bachrach romancing schoolmarm Natasha Lyonne, who's had her hair straightened and all her quirks surgically removed.)

Yet these supernormies tend to get lost when set against a typically busy CG backdrop of rockets, wormholes and other galaxies; in their matching spacesuits, they could be anyone, and in one shot that pitches them at the feet of towering big bad Galactus, the Destroyer of Worlds, they come over as not so much fantastic as four teeny-tiny pixels at the very bottom of the frame. (The actors, inevitably, appear far happier unhelmeted on the lab-playroom-studio set where the characters all live together, like the Monkees or Banana Splits.) Every other shot in this way bears witness to the marked scaling-down of ambition at Marvel after several chastening failures; if First Steps holds any real interest, it lies in watching creatives trying to find a happy halfway house between the summer blockbusters the company used to turn out in their sleep and the season finales to which the Marvel diehards have long since gravitated. Shakman shakes out one half-decent, semi-resonant image - Galactus stretching Reed Richards between his fingers with the smile of a malevolent child - but even that speaks mostly to the way a TV show has been stretched into a feature, and the comparatively limited elasticity of the Marvel Studios imagination. The finale is, once again, Thanos in an Iron Man suit smashing up Manhattan to the strains of a Michael Giacchino score, and a fakeout death that doesn't matter because there's no such thing as an end in the Marvel universe. (The coda is a fifth anniversary TV special in which Gatiss-as-Gilbert explicitly tells the viewer you've seen it all before, and you'll see it all again: same time same channel, suckers.) Again, the experience is like watching someone playing with plastic action figures; the only novelty is that Shakman keeps his toys in a facsimile of the original packaging. They're certainly very shiny for that - but couldn't somebody have thought of something more involving to do with them?

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

No small affair: "Saiyaara"

A sensation in its homeland and a sizeable word-of-mouth hit here, Saiyaara is the Hindi cinema trying to wipe the slate clean after its recent turbulence and initiate a complete reset. No overt flagwaving, no rapacious Universe building; just a girl and a boy standing in front of one another, as they used to back in your parents' day, and then being torn apart by forces beyond the pair's control, as they used to back in your grandparents' day. The wise and monied elders at Yash Raj Films have cast as their leads two untested newcomers (Aneet Padda and Ahaan Panday) whose youthful blankness is integral to the project entire: rather than craggy stars being handsomely rewarded for playing themselves or replaying the hits, these are fresh-out-the-box screens on which the target audience can project their innermost desires. Behind the camera: Mohit Suri, invited to revisit the kind of modern melodramas he was making (and having hits with) ten years ago before things got complicated and politicised, and which the wider industry has been making (and succeeding with) since more or less the year dot. The hope is that this might prove a return to innocence, and a purge of that cynicism and commercial calculation that has sent audiences fleeing to their sofas in droves. What Saiyaara commits to and goes all in on is getting the cinemagoer to forget what's gone before - even if it leaves us in the same vulnerable position as the film's Alzheimer's-stricken young heroine, eyes wide, damp and uncomprehending.

A strong element of Bollywood formula persists, nevertheless. The girl (Padda's Vaani Batra) is a delicate flower in her early twenties, jilted before the opening credits by her parents' preferred suitor, and adjusting to life in an intern role for the Mumbai news-and-gossip site Buzzlist (lol). The boy (Panday's Krish Kapoor) is a bad boy of sorts, a musician in possession of a motorcycle and five, six, seven, even eight o'clock shadow, introduced trashing Vaani's office before performing on a rainlashed stage in what seems a mighty health-and-safety risk. (A headstrong rebel such as Krish Kapoor cares nothing for your pettifogging red tape.) Already, you'll have a sense of how Saiyaara is operating out towards the remotest frontiers of plausibility, but the songs - keening, lavishly orchestrated numbers farmed out to a clutch of contemporary composers - really do matter, because they fill the gaps left by the film's resolute purging of ideology from the mainstream Hindi crowdpleaser; each number in turn insists, underlines and restates the prevailing idea that the firing of shells is as nothing compared to the beat of the human heart and the tabla drum. I suspect the soundtrack album (and attendant social-media clips) will have done the heavy promotional lifting here; Saiyaara is the film equivalent of the song that blows up on TikTok. Again, that has the ring of a backhanded compliment, but after a decade or more of Hindi films where the writing and composition have been all but an afterthought, there's something cherishable and semi-stirring about, say, the intense close-ups Suri shoots of Vaani journalling, and the way true love blossoms once boy and girl are set to collaborating on a song (music: him, lyrics: her) which eventually assumes a life of its own. Part of the movie's success surely lies in how deeply it leans - nay, swoons - into its characters' feelings: it takes those feelings as seriously as any Taylor Swift ballad, and more seriously, perhaps, than any movie since the Twilight saga. In scene after scene and track after track, Saiyaara tells us that the feelings you feel in your early twenties are the most important feelings you or anybody else is ever going to feel.

Does the film risk taking those feelings too seriously? The box-office receipts would provide a counterargument, but this did feel to me like one of those blockbusters with a very narrowly defined target audience; the further removed in years you are from your early-to-mid twenties, the less wowed and overwhelmed you're likely to be by it. These dry and weary peepers spotted at least a couple of imbalances and shortfalls in the material from the outset. It's not enough for Krish to be a canny musician, he has to be a gifted sportsman, single-minded thinker and catwalk-ready pin-up to boot; Suri's notionally going for Bollywood naturalism (or as close to Bollywood gets to naturalism) with his performers, but Krish at almost every stage seems less a playable character than an ideal someone's retrospectively built up in their head. (His only flaw is an alcoholic father, and even then, this Devdad functions as a plot device, used to explain away his boy's sporadic hotheadedness.) As Vaani, Padda - gorgeous by real-world standards, merely approachable by Hindi-heroine standards - has a lovely, dreamy gaze you're glad Suri committed to celluloid. But gaze is almost all Vaani does in Saiyaara: she gazes, she longs and she yearns. (I know there's already a musician on staff, but could they not have engineered one song for her to sing? As it is, she's never more than Krish's ideal audience, and the film's, too, soaking everything up with her eyes.) For all this production's purported innocence, Suri and his screenwriters are caught courting a particular strain of Gen Z narcissism, filming a demographic's best selves in what's both figuratively and literally the most flattering light. Vaani and Krish's big love scene takes place in a room full of screens and surfaces; the Jumbotron at Wembley Stadium cues a moment of recognition (and transcendent kitsch). The one real villain is the older guy who dumped poor Vaani before going on to make a bundle as the CEO of a dating app. Why bother with the bounders of Bumble, the film posits, when you could just as easily meet your forever-love over pen and paper?

The smallness and intensity remain selling points; it's as much a return to human intimacies as it is a return to zero, and that's clearly distinguished Saiyaara from all those clanking machine-movies with Part One bolted onto their titles. What the film most often resembles is Love Story (the 1970 film, not the Swift song) updated for a world its characters (and audience?) fear is beginning to spin too fast, getting away from them and scattering their marbles, cursing him with viral notoriety and her with the same affliction as the oldsters got in The Notebook. (I feel obliged to note: as dramatised, Vaani's Alzheimer's is less early-onset than exclusive pre-release, the Instagrammable kind you might become eligible for as a perk after twelve months on a rolling JioPhone contract.) The trouble is that in building this small affair into a Very Big Thing Indeed, Suri leaves everything beyond the lovers to fade into insignificance: the parents are naggy footnotes, Krish's band all but forgotten about. I became rapidly aware that Saiyaara may be less interesting as a film than as a swelling multiplex phenomenon, a curious state borne out by a full house on its second Monday night on release: half young women who snickered, sniffled and swooned, half young men intrigued enough to show up (or not miss out), but who weren't shy about performatively heckling the screen, as if we were collectively watching some wild mash-up of Titanic, Rocky Horror and The Room. Whatever has happened with Saiyaara, it appears to have sped up the usual process by which movies are seen, evaluated, discussed, embraced as art or rejected and re-embraced as trash. The movie itself is a funny little fluke in the middle of all this noise, as the Twilight films were, and while it's going some to get the lovers and the haters in the same room in 2025, I think if you keep your eyes on the screen, you can already see Padda and Panday looking around - in her case, gazing dreamily around - for the Hindi equivalents of Olivier Assayas and David Cronenberg they'll likely need to scuzz up or otherwise reclaim their image in a few years' time. Everything's accelerated nowadays.

Saiyaara is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 18-20, 2025):

1 (1) Superman (12A)

2 (2) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12A)

3 (3) F1 (12A) ***

4 (new) Smurfs (U)

5 (new) I Know What You Did Last Summer (15)

6 (4) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)

7 (5) 28 Years Later (15) ****

8 (6) Elio (PG) ***

9 (7) Lilo & Stitch (U)

10 (new) Saiyaara (12A) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Amadeus [above]

2. Ran

3. Friendship

4. Saiyaara

5. Moon

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

2 (6) The Amateur (12)

3 (new) Karate Kid: Legends (PG)

4 (10) Sinners (15) ****

5 (2) Wicked: Part One (PG) **

6 (3) Thunderbolts* (12)

7 (4) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15) **

8 (5) Jurassic World: Dominion (12)

9 (8) Jurassic Park (12) ****

10 (11) The Penguin Lessons (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Misericordia

2. Sinners

3. Black Bag

4. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

5. The Surfer

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Pan's Labyrinth (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.10am)

2. Back to the Future (Saturday, BBC One, 4.10pm)

3. All the President's Men (Tuesday, BBC Two, 12midnight)

4. Spellbound (Saturday, BBC Two, 2.25pm)

5. What's Up, Doc? (Sunday, BBC Two, 1.05pm)

In memoriam: Frances Doel (Telegraph 22/07/25)

Frances Doel, who has died aged 83, was a British screenwriter and production executive who earned her spurs in America as the right-hand woman of legendary independent producer Roger Corman; in her later studio roles, she was crucial to the development of James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) and a producer on Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997).

Born Frances Margaret Doel in London on April 15, 1942, to Francis Doel, a sergeant in the Royal Armoured Corps and his wife Iris, she landed her big break after responding to a job ad Corman had placed on the jobs board at her alma mater St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. Decamping to Los Angeles and initially staying at the Hollywood YMCA, she gained her first credit as an associate producer on the LSD-infused The Trip (1967), written by Jack Nicholson and directed by Corman himself.

The sandy-haired Doel rapidly ingratiated herself with a gift for grabby storytelling that synched with her employer’s need to turn out fast, cheap, eyecatching product. The producer Jon Davison, a colleague at Corman’s New World Pictures, has claimed Doel “wrote just about every first draft of every picture” the company released in the 1970s.

Billed as script supervisor on The Young Nurses (1973) and Cockfighter (1974), Doel earned her first official writing credit on Big Bad Mama (1974), a drive-in favourite starring Angie Dickinson as a single mother-turned-outlaw; written over a single weekend, shot in twenty days and produced for $750,000, it wound up making $4m at the box office. Doel, however, was paid a mere $100 for her contribution.

Few of these films found their way into the pantheon. Crazy Mama (1975), with Cloris Leachman in the lead and future Oscar winner Jonathan Demme behind the camera, was shot in just fifteen days, and still somehow lost money; critics and audiences alike sniffed at the futuristic biker opus Deathsport (1978) and the flailing disaster movie Avalanche (1978).

Yet part of Doel’s remit, as head of New World’s script department, was to nurture new writing talent, such as John Sayles, the Esquire contributor she hired to pen the witty Jaws knock-off Piranha (1978), a surprise success: “Once these writers get screen credit with us,” Doel said in a 1982 interview, “they are able to get more money from another studio.”

No less upwardly mobile herself, Doel left New World to take a creative executive gig at Orion Pictures, where The Terminator landed on her desk. Ironically, its Canadian writer-director Cameron was then known only for Piranha II: The Spawning (1982), an ill-fated sequel Corman had wisely passed on, and was seeking friends in high places to help get his convoluted time-travel script greenlit.

Doel turned out to be just such an ally: “I defended it as a very good story and a very good script, which I definitely thought would have an audience… It did not seem to be the kind of movie Orion was likely to be interested in. But I was interested in having a female character who was active, not simply somebody’s girlfriend.”

Shot for $6m, the film made $78.3m on its first run, launching one of modern Hollywood’s most profitable franchises (and directorial careers). Doel oversaw several other successes at Orion – including Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) and RoboCop (1987) – before joining Disney as a development executive, working on Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Dead Poets Society (both 1989).

After reuniting with Davison to produce Starship Troopers, Doel returned to Corman’s orbit, writing a run of direct-to-DVD creature features that started with Raptor (2001) and proceeded through Supergator (2007) to Dinoshark (2010). She was now paid $5000 per title, though she told friends Corman still grumbled if she turned out fewer than ten pages a day. Her final writing credit was on the horror flick Palace of the Damned (2013), a Corman-produced attempt to crack the growing Chinese market.

Sometime protégé Sayles – now a revered writer-director, responsible for such enduring indie dramas as Matewan (1987) and Lone Star (1996) – was among those who recalled Doel as a shrewd, kindly, cultured presence: “I always thought of Frances as the opposite of the kid who’s supposed to be reading Chaucer, but inside the book he’s got a comic book. She had the comic book on the outside and was actually reading The Atlantic.”

Her marriage to the American actor Clint Kimbrough, who starred in The Young Nurses and Crazy Mama, ended in divorce; she is survived by her longtime partner Harrison Reiner.

Frances Doel, born April 15, 1942, died May 26, 2025.

Regimes: "Moon"

Not the Sam Rockwell space vehicle directed by David Bowie's son, but the latest Austrian thriller - produced, somewhat ominously, by Ulrich Seidl - in which we find a domestic space isn't quite what it first appears. With her Moon, the Iraqi-born writer-director Kurdwin Ayub has however arrived at what feels like a fresh story, or at least a new variation on a familiar-sounding arthouse theme. Her heroine Sarah (Florentina Holzinger) is a former MMA fighter who's carved out a new career as an instructor, finding herself much in demand. Early scenes suggest modern life is characterised by degrees of conflict: Sarah's younger students, who take to the gym largely as a means of generating Instagram content, complain that she's punching into their safe space, while her bourgeois sister doesn't understand her career choices and wishes she'd put a coaster under her coffee cup. She lands an even bigger fight after being hired by a worryingly slick Jordanian businessman (Omar AlMajali) to come out to the kingdom and coach his teenage sisters. What we subsequently observe is female empowerment within the tightest strictures. Sarah thinks nothing of signing an NDA upon arriving at the family's palatial residence, but she's given cause to wonder why she has to be chaperoned at every stage of the working day, why some areas of the house are deemed off-limits, and why one of the sisters, Nour (Andria Tayeh), is so keen to borrow her phone after every session. As instruction becomes secondary to investigation, Moon - presumably so named because its moneyed backdrop seems like another planet - shapes up into something like Rebecca with WiFi and homemade Botox.

As a film, it's fairly athletic in its own right, offering a workout for the mind, body and central nervous system. The structure is taut enough: beyond the mystery of this household, Ayub sets out her heroine's initially regimented, increasingly unravelling routine, pausing only to observe the prayer times in this part of the world. Yet she keeps individual scenes loose and limber, the better to describe the push-me-pull-you between the protagonist and the men she's outnumbered by out this way, then the improvised-seeming back-and-forths, often conducted in a hesitant second tongue, between Sarah and the girls. These sequences are Moon's most intriguing, because they permit the stern-seeming Holzinger to let both her hair and her guard down, and allow Ayub to contrast radically different ideas of the feminine. In one corner, a gymbunny who displays no interest whatsoever in traditional femininity; in the others, three mallrats confined to a deeply conservative milieu governed by rules and restrictions that go back centuries, if not millennia. The wrinkle Ayub introduces is to suggest the girls aren't entirely damsels in distress, rather willing participants in their own oppression; furthermore, that Sarah might be abetting their oppressors by taking the money and keeping schtum. (It's more than faintly ironic that the film is being platformed by MUBI, whose own financial arrangements have come under heightened scrutiny in recent weeks.) One late excursion to a hellish nightclub struck me as rather sluggish, Gaspar Noé-influenced footwork, but Ayub rallies for a tense final reel, and an uneasy coda that brings everything under discussion back home. Are things really much better in the West? This filmmaker could well be a contender yet.

Moon is now streaming via MUBI.

Stranger things: "Friendship"

These are heady days for fans of the "men are such idiots" subgenre. Possibly the success of 2022's The Banshees of Inisherin opened some chequebooks up, but it's also not as if there's been any shortage of inspiration and material doing the rounds. Last year gave us the choice Malayalam comedy Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil, and now we have Friendship, an American indie that serves as the first big-screen vehicle for Tim Robinson, the creative prime mover and principal agent of chaos behind Netflix's I Think You Should Leave. Anyone who feared Robinson might have to dial down his trademark manic energy to crossover can rest easy; the film, written and directed by fellow TV alumnus Andrew DeYoung, is funny-strange from the off, before multiple plot turns render it stranger still. Robinson's Craig is a married corporate drone, living in a nondescript suburbia with his wife Tami (Kate Mara) and son Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer), who presents to us as something of a big kid. When he's not burbling on enthusiastically about Marvel movies, he parrots office speak uncritically (his job involves getting people addicted to phone apps); he suffers from sudden nosebleeds framed as a kind of premature ejaculation brought on by too much excitement; his beigecore wardrobe is restaurant merch. He believes he's made a cool new friend in next-door neighbour Austin (Paul Rudd), but even Austin exerts a very odd idea of cool: a local TV weatherman accessorised with a Seventies moustache and a Stone Age hand axe, he claims not to own a phone (but does) and to know stuff about the mushrooms these boys encounter in the woods. Austin is cosplaying self-sufficiency, and the movie presents normal American life as mostly a matter of putting on a front: ordering the Seal Team Six meal deal at Craig's fave eaterie, taking out the Hero mobile phone plan. You could drive yourself mad trying to keep up such ruggedly masculine appearances, a point proven when Craig subsequently does exactly that.

In making that point, Friendship takes a step or two beyond those Judd Apatow-produced or inspired comedies with which the American cinema saw in this century. While maintaining a comparably high laugh rate, DeYoung has no intention of being as charming or reassuring as his predecessors, who may have felt there was nothing especially wrong with grown men acting like crotch-grabbing, chest-beating college juniors; where the characters in 2009's Rudd-starring I Love You, Man were - bless 'em - trying to make things right, Craig only ever succeeds in making things substantially worse. Robinson is very good at describing a particular (and not exclusively American) type: the agitated beta male who's settled down as society insists and now resents, on some viscerally felt subconscious level, the grown-up stuff everybody's forcing him to do; the type of malcontent prone to haphazardly (and here, straight-up disastrously) pursuing any opportunity he glimpses to recapture his doubtless misremembered glory days. This isn't an easy role to play: unsympathetic to the point of pitiful, obliging the performer to leave any vanity behind in the locker room so as to sink helplessly into a bog. Here is an actor making himself look bad even before Craig swallows a mouthful of poisonous mushroom and is then obliged to empty his guts into a Big Gulp receptacle. (At the very least, it's a useful counterpoint to all Brad Pitt's star-polishing in F1.) Robinson is hardly helped by DeYoung and Sophie Corra's editing strategy, which strives to cut Craig down at every turn, and insists on following his grandest claims ("we'll tear it up on Friday night!") with, say, the sight of five men shivering in a garage, making awkward stabs at conversation. (Matters don't improve any after Craig treats the boys to an impromptu drum solo.)

Rather than defanging or otherwise childproofing Robinson, DeYoung seems to have taken heed from his lead, and been encouraged to push Friendship far beyond the shuffling mumblecoreisms the premise might have generated: this is not a film that holds back in any way. To Chekhov's gun, DeYoung adds Chekhov's book about ayahuasca; his emboldened plotting becomes more surreal with every scene. The hibernal mists of the early scenes thicken into an abstract haze, pulling us deeper inside this guy's head and nightmare; both the writing and playing drift further and further away from naturalism. Craig is so negligent to the essentials that he literally loses his wife, is hypnotised by a flower arrangement, launches his own one-man marching parade, wanders into the single weirdest instance of product placement I think I've ever seen. (Though even this latter deviation connects back to character: Craig is so unimaginative that even his bad trip can only transport him as far as a branch of Subway.) The approach yields at least one surprising reveal, and a genuine sense of instability: the film, you feel, could go anywhere, and end anyhow. (It could even go dark: this waywardness is why restraining orders get served, and why men die alone.) I suppose you could argue the film does nothing more than put the essence of that show you like on a bigger screen, sustaining its puckish spirit for 100 minutes rather than the twenty of the average episode - but even that's an achievement, harder than one might think to pull off. And DeYoung goes further than I Think You Should Leave in introducing nods and references that tie this story to wider American misadventures initiated by men. Psychologists might well find something in the film's thesis that an entire generation of men aren't learning from their mistakes because they're too busy trying to style them out or cover them up. Here again, DeYoung goes a step beyond: Friendship is the first comedy I've seen for a while that operates at a diagnostic level, almost as a case study. In a better, saner, less belligerent world, men might just leave convinced they've witnessed an unusually funny cautionary tale.

Friendship is now playing in selected cinemas.