Friday, 1 August 2025

For what it's worth...




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

2 (1) Superman (12A)
3 (new) The Bad Guys 2 (PG) [above]
4 (2Jurassic World: Rebirth (12A)
5 (3F1 (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 (728 Years Later (15) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:
1. Amadeus

  
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 (6Thunderbolts* (12)
9 (25) The Bad Guys (U) **
10 (re) Oppenheimer (15) ****


My top five: 
1. Misericordia


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.

Thursday, 31 July 2025

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.

Wednesday, 30 July 2025

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.

Friday, 25 July 2025

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 (3F1 (12A) ***
4 (new) Smurfs (U)
5 (new) I Know What You Did Last Summer (15)
6 (4) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)
7 (528 Years Later (15) ****
8 (6) Elio (PG) ***
9 (7Lilo & Stitch (U)
10 (new) Saiyaara (12A) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:
1. Amadeus [above]
2. Ran
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)
8 (5Jurassic World: Dominion (12)
9 (8) Jurassic Park (12) ****
10 (11) The Penguin Lessons (12)


My top five: 
1. Misericordia


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)

Wednesday, 23 July 2025

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.

Tuesday, 22 July 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.

Friday, 18 July 2025

For what it's worth...




UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 11-13, 2025):

1 (new) Superman (12A)
2 (1) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12A)
3 (2) F1 (12A) ***
4 (3) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)
5 (428 Years Later (15) ****
6 (5) Elio (PG) ***
7 (6Lilo & Stitch (U)
8 (9) Sardaar Ji 3 (12A)
10 (10) The Ballad of Wallis Island (12A) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:
4. Moon

  
DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)
2 (3) Wicked: Part One (PG) **
3 (2) Thunderbolts* (12)
5 (4) Jurassic World: Dominion (12)
6 (15) The Amateur (12)
8 (14) Jurassic Park (12) ****
9 (19) Jurassic World (12) **
10 (12) Sinners (15) ****


My top five: 
1. Sinners


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. The Searchers (Saturday, BBC Two, 1pm)
2. The Commitments [above] (Saturday, BBC Two, 10pm)
3. Mrs. Doubtfire (Sunday, ITV1, 12.45pm)
4. Gosford Park (Saturday, BBC One, 10.30pm)
5. The Night of the 12th (Tuesday, Channel 4, 1.55am)

Split: "The Other Way Around"


On the surface, Jonás Trueba's The Other Way Around would appear perfect summer counterprogramming: a romantic Spanish diversion premised on the reversal of two lovers breaking up. After fourteen years together, actor Álex (Vito Sanz) and filmmaker Alejandra (Itsaso Arana) have decided to go out with a bang, throwing a so-called "separation party": like a wedding, but the other way around, as she puts it. Obstacles, however, stand in the pair's way. For starters, their poky one-bedroom flat in Madrid's bohemian quarter isn't big enough to host a multitude of visitors; the couple's friends, who generally find the notion of a separation party somewhere between deeply odd and actively distasteful, don't know whether they're being entirely serious. The party becomes one more thing to have to organise, along with finding new digs and dividing up their combined belongings. And - most ominously of all - party planning is the kind of long-term project that demands lots of back-and-forth communication and tends to bond people together, not tear them conclusively apart. Around the halfway mark, you may begin to wonder if ghosting isn't a more efficient approach for everybody involved. 
By then, two obvious criticisms of Trueba's film have also become apparent: as a movie, The Other Way Around is perilously talky and drawn-out. Trueba's rebuttal would be that this talk is what bonds his lovers together, and that they draw matters out precisely because they're developing cold feet on splitting. They can't bear to move on, because who else would they talk to?

There are short-term gains from this approach. The windiness lets some air in on this plot: it's not some frantic romcom contrivance that needs rushing through lest we stop to think how nonsensical it all is, but two people working through some feelings with their mouths and all their windows open. (Trueba's idea of a big setpiece is to set Álex and Ale to talking while they wait for the kitchen sink to unblock.) A kind of amused and bemused life shambles into shot. It's striking that Trueba's leads aren't the ripe young things typically offered up for our delectation in a route-one romcom, but individuals old enough to have spent fourteen years together. Sanz is a dead ringer for Alex Karpovsky, the talismanic Ray of TV's Girls, and part of the gag here is that these folks should be seasoned enough to know better, to not be fooled by love. Instead, Ale turns out to be working on a film called - yup - The Other Way Around, a development that might suggest Trueba has taken a diversion right up his own fundament were it not also indicative of a character struggling to get her story straight in her own head. The movie that lands among us lapses frequently into repetition - old habits - but knows it full well; as one of the participants in a focus group for Ale's film puts it, "it's the same thing over and over". It helps the couple to tell every last one of their friends they're breaking up, because it allows them to spark the conversation that allows them to drag their feet: a stop-off at the home of Ale's father (Fernando Trueba, the storied Spanish filmmaker and Jonás's father) leaves everyone on screen chewing over whether cinema makes us better people, and leaves you and I newly impatient for something to be resolved either way. As infuriating as it is endearing - as trying as certain real-life couples among our acquaintance - The Other Way Around is destined to be an acquired taste, yet there's a mild charm in its shruggy shagginess; unhurried, resolutely human, taking cues from a Bergman-themed tarot pack, it's another world away from the summer's insistently linear, entirely mechanised blockbuster fare.

The Other Way Around is now showing in selected cinemas.

Thursday, 17 July 2025

Love and death: "The Shrouds"


David Cronenberg's second completed feature since the death in 2017 of Carolyn Zeifman, his wife of 38 years,
The Shrouds is steered by a brace of questions asked early on by its upright, white-haired, naggingly familiar protagonist: "What do I do about the grief thing?" and "How dark are you willing to go?" In response to the first of these, Cronenberg has decided to make a film about grief. In response to the second, the filmmaker's answer is: pretty dark, though not nearly as dark as you may now be expecting. Vincent Cassel, dressed from top-to-toe in Saint Laurent black and piloting a self-driving Tesla that gradually assumes the air of a top-of-the-line coffin-on-wheels, plays Karsh Relikh, the recently widowed owner of a chichi restaurant overlooking a graveyard that becomes contested territory. The graveyard is significant to Karsh, because it contains the mortal remains of his late wife Becca (Diane Kruger); like the other graves, hers is watched over by a hi-tech headstone, accessed by an app, which allows the especially devoted mourner to observe a loved one's body decay in real-time 4K. "Of course, everything's encrypted," Karsh puns to the morbidly interested party with whom he's been set up on a blind date, not the last indication of how even at its most funny-peculiar, The Shrouds is oddly, potently funny-haha. At its blackest, some comedy; among the dead, a light scattering of dad gags.

The narrative that develops sees Cronenberg setting out his own stages of grief. There is mourning, of course: Cassel, at his craggiest, can't ever fully shake an air of ruefulness and regret at what's been lost. But there is also dawning obsession and paranoia - sending that blind date running for the hills - and a lapse into conspiratorial thinking after unknown parties trash the graveyard one night. (Here, Karsh's Judaism comes into play - and this feels like the first time the generally forensic Cronenberg has been compelled to dramatise his spiritual side.) For a while, the character resembles a more stylish analogue to The Conversation's Harry Caul, dwelling on and mulling over a videofeed that would seem to indicate someone wanted his wife in the ground, and possibly him, too. A diverse array of suspects is set before us: ecoterrorists who'd rather we cremated our bodies than connect them to the WiFi; a stragglehaired Hungarian CEO (Vieslav Krystyan) seen Photoshopped into pics with Bill Clinton; the Russians and Chinese, keen to exploit this technology for wider surveillance purposes; and the errant doctor who took Becca's virginity in her youth and wound up providing her end-of-life care. Yet everybody's mourning garb keeps being thrown off, in such a way you begin to wonder whether seize-the-day horniness is being prescribed as grief's ultimate expression. Karsh develops a growing intimacy with the CEO's wife (Sandrine Holt), a blind femme fatale who lets her hands do the talking, then with Becca's dog-grooming twin sister Terry (Kruger again), and then with his own Alexa-style digital assistant (voiced by Kruger). Grief assumes many forms, some more pleasurable than others; as a movie, The Shrouds gives the viewer a lot to work through.

Even by the ears-along-the-backbone standards of recent Cronenberg, the new film is very odd, perhaps even singularly so: it would be almost impossible to envision anybody else in world cinema coming up with this story, getting it greenlit, and then filming it in quite this way. Even as we walk in the shadow of the valley of the creative death predicted by artificial intelligence, here is proof of idiosyncratic imaginative life - and the kind of skilfully modulated weirdness Yorgos Lanthimos could only dream of. That weirdness permeates a flashback sex scene between Karsh and a mutilated Becca that is a) the latest mutation of the kink present in Videodrome and Crash, b) spared from terminal tawdriness by the depth of feeling directed into it (it's about the way we express ourselves physically even as our bodies start to fail us; weirdness upon weirdness, it's oddly moving) and c) possessed of what will almost certainly be the year's most sickening Foley effect. Elsewhere, however, Cronenberg's staging retains a crisp serenity: autumnal exteriors, illuminated by lots of magic-hour sunshine, interspersed with Japanese-styled interiors that connect the film to the elegant ideas about grief proposed in 1998's After Life and 2008's Departures while indicating Karsh has found ways of turning the space Becca left behind to his advantage. (It's grief as fusui, a simple matter of reorganisation.) It's never depressing; it's visibly a film made by someone who's made his peace with what's come to pass in his own life. It's still very talky, a plot that feels a constant need to explain itself, and its weakness as a thriller is that it's clangingly obvious who the weak link in the hero's entourage is going to be. (You could lay a winning bet as early as the opening credits.) Yet The Shrouds really is an example of a movie that is more than just the sum total of its plotting; its piquancy lies in the prevailing mood, several jolting images, and the intense hit of minimalist late-period style. One of the many matters you will come away thinking about: how David Cronenberg himself wants to be buried.

The Shrouds is now showing in selected cinemas.