"Voidance" (Guardian 18/05/26)

Voidance **

Dir: Marianna Dean. With: Zoe Cunningham, James Cosmo, Eloise Lovell Anderson, Mim Shaikh. 86 mins. Cert: 15 (tbc)

Its eyes and aspirations eternally bigger than its budget and reach, this Brit sci-fi calling card provides the answer to an unlikely question: what if someone remade 2011’s Source Code in an especially rundown outpost of Wetherspoons? Amid reported unrest between neighbouring planets Atopia and Cho-Hacha, mumsy anti-terror agent Alana Toro (Zoe Cunningham) receives orders from a hologrammatic James Cosmo to track down and bring in a troublesome rebel group. Her mission stalls, however, when she walks into a bar for interstellar truckers, where the film’s horizons shrink and – thanks to a timeloop device – our heroine gets several goes at interrogating the same skeleton crew of patrons and trying to resolve a convoluted, stubbornly uninvolving murder-mystery.

Along the way, flickers of B-movie ingenuity and invention catch the eye. Jamie Foote’s grimy, greasy set design hides some of the monetary limitations and ensures this is a rare modern sci-fi that inhabits a palpably physical, non-pixellated space; costumier Ciéranne Kennedy Bell visibly had immense fun dressing this troupe in cyberpunk finery that suggests some crossover between Red Dwarf and Claire’s Accessories; and the score, by Christoph Allerstorfer and James Griffiths, is that of a far more expansive and assured production. Alana herself is a promising pulp creation – a leather-clad, purple-wigged Miss Marple who gets to pull out a space blaster every now and again – even if Cunningham, with her distinct air of a school secretary who’s just uncovered a tuckshop scam, seems more than faintly miscast. 

The torpedoing problems here can be traced back to Simon X. Frederick’s script – and it’s not just that title, with its unfortunate intestinal ring. The set-up entails a lot of deeply clunky expositional dialogue this ensemble struggles to sell, and the timeloop conceit just doesn’t work, reliant as it is on a repeated PA announcement that reaches ‘see it, say it, sorted’ levels of annoyance and a wristwatch that keeps having to spell out what soap alumna Marianna Dean’s direction, with its awkward bouts of action and sluggish pacing, doesn’t always make clear. A very British vision of the future, all told: cramped, impoverished and something of a drag.

Voidance is available to rent via Prime Video and other digital platforms from Monday 25.

Incognito: "The Christophers"

Steven Soderbergh's London period began with 2023's sketchy, feetfinding Magic Mike's Last Dance, but it clicked up another level entirely with last year's terrific Black Bag, a spy drama that ultimately proved less about spying per se than it was about the nature of all relationships. Soderbergh continues to move quickly while covering his own tracks: his new film, The Christophers, is a curious, minor-key heist movie trailing ideas about the processes of creation and the true value of art. Representing the downtrodden and penniless among us is Michaela Coel's Lori, the Magic Mike of Central St. Martins: a former art student turned occasional art restorer reduced to manning a Thames-side noodle truck to supplement her income. In a nearby pub, she's solicited by old college pal Sallie and Barnaby (Jessica Gunning and James Corden), the ingrate children of a celebrated painter, who want Lori to retrieve a box of unfinished works, the Christophers of the title, which their father has squirreled away among the many other items of bric-a-brac in the attic of his Bloomsbury townhouse. The painter is one Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), an eccentric old cove prone to rants, diatribes and monologues, who looks to have barricaded himself away to shut out the perceived wokery of the modern world. Lori nevertheless inveigles herself into Sklar's life by posing as a prospective personal assistant, only to find her employer is well aware of his own legacy and that he has tricks up his dressing-gown sleeves: one of the first tasks he sets his new PA is to have the Christophers shredded.

If Black Bag found Soderbergh operating somewhere close to the multiplex's cutting edge, the new film is cosier, even cramped; it takes a confoundingly long time for events and their repercussions to unfold. For much of that duration, we're confined among the fusty furnishings of Sklar's narrow bohemian outpost, watching two bristling characters rub up against or otherwise jostle one another. Where Black Bag was propulsive, The Christophers is characterised by a certain pokiness; instead of a Ferrari-tuned plot engine, it has a tub of Peak Freans biscuits. It's as if the challenge Soderbergh set himself was to make two very different kinds of British films: one that could be pitched squarely at the Friday or Saturday night audience, the other at the matinee crowd. (What The Christophers initially suggests, indeed, is a knockoff of Roger Michell's Venus, which offered Peter O'Toole in the McKellen role.) If the new film fits that matinee bill to a tee, it's apparently inspired Soderbergh to abandon any pretence of directorial style - any push for added value - and instead let his actors and Ed Solomon's perilously talky script do the heavy lifting. The pleasures here derive from watching two actors from different places - different worlds, even - meeting head-on somewhere in the middle, yet these characters are almost always more interesting and vivid than the film they're in; they're like figures drawing the eye in what's meant to be a landscape painting. (As if to back up this assertion, Soderbergh makes his backdrop damply nondescript: it screams London in October.)

Coel draws out Lori's wily codeswitching, how the PA's voice and bearing inside Sklar's home varies from her demeanour out in the wider world, but she's never quite as compelling here as she was in David Lowery's recent Mother Mary, a film that embraced and thereby came to take on some of this performer's neo-Cubist angles and edges. Mostly, The Christophers seems much more McKellenish: mildly mischievous, yes, but also windy in its sub-Mametish wrestling with artistic legacy, and more than a little weary from having to labour up and down all these stairs. (For a long while, the supporting cast is limited to a spiralling series of banisters; everyone could have done with a Stannah stairlift.) Both performers are good value, but there's no particular frame around them to speak of: this is one of those projects, much like that Magic Mike threequel, where the speed and economy for which Soderbergh is often feted seems to have precluded any kind of look. (The Christophers does, however, explain the flak this director is currently copping for his use of generative AI in his forthcoming John Lennon doc: that's right, Soderbergh has made another film before you've even had chance to see this one.) It's not entirely artless or worthless - I found myself weirdly gripped by the closing stretch, wanting to know what happens to these people and how the picture(s) would be finished - but for what's notionally a piece about creative individuals, the film is peculiarly indistinct. Perhaps the oddest thing about The Christophers is that anybody could have signed their name to it.

The Christophers is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Circle of friends: "Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft"

It is, all told, an unlikely partnership. Before the camera: Billie Eilish, the recessive songstrel with the million-dollar mumble. Behind it: James Cameron, the Hollywood alpha dog who should really be back in his shed getting going on the next Avatar movie. Well, maybe the live concert movie Hit Me Hard and Soft is Jim Cameron giving himself a day (or a night) off; maybe it's his way of bonding with his daughters after several long years at sea, or maybe his wife Suzy Amis has told him, in no uncertain terms, that he needed a hobby that doesn't involve blue people. (The movie has been conceived in 3D, so it's not a total break from recent endeavours.) The question cinephiles face is whether we can tell this is a concert movie assembled by one of the great motion picture technicians, and whether Cameron has more of an idea of what he wants to film and show than whoever it was who did the Taylor Swift concert movie, which emerged as all coverage and nothing but coverage. For starters, Cameron demonstrates an inevitable interest in the tech of a tour such as this: the rigging going up, the sea of phones capturing moments, the catapult that propels the singer on stage at a crucial moment. He also engineers several time shifts one might, at a push, describe as Terminator-like ("8 hours before the concert", "Forty minutes earlier", etc), the better to chronicle how this particular show came together at what feels like the last minute. This may just be Cameron, notionally playing second fiddle for the first time since he made 1982's Piranha II: The Spawning for Roger Corman, ceding a certain degree of his usual control. Some of that control is ceded to the crowd, who certainly weren't here to play extras in a Jim Cameron movie; their heads and arms pierce the frame (somewhat joltingly, an effect that tends to be elided from slicker 3D spectacles) while their screams and shouts frequently take over the soundtrack. Most of that control, however, is ceded to Eilish herself: Cameron has even left handheld 3D cameras around the stage for her to pick up and run with in the course of the concert. The results come to seem like a true collaboration, with caveats. "It's going to say 'Directed by Billie Eilish'," Cameron is heard to say backstage at one point, "and then - at the very bottom - 'with James Cameron'". As it happens, the closing credits actually read "Directed by James Cameron and Billie Eilish". Ah well.

In terms of the show itself, the Eilish mumble appears central to her relatability: she is, from the off, far more approachable than La Swift, the Business Barbie with the celebrity athlete husband and the preternatural gift for songwriting. Swift, certainly, wasn't likely to allow a director to film her having her ankles strapped up backstage, or going through a rehearsal session with her vocal coach, or chatting while applying her pre-gig contouring. ("It really reads from a distance," notes Cameron, in full 'cool dad' mode.) Her stage outfit - just the one, unlike Swift's six billion - is a lightly worn shrug: loose sports jersey, backward-turned baseball cap, Limp Bizkit shorts, glasses apparently sourced from the venue's lost-and-found box. It's not even smart casual, and yet over the course of this concert - liberated to move in any which direction, both physically and musically - Eilish becomes a recognisably Cameronian figure of interest: a woman who comes to command an army of diehard followers while reshaping the fabric of time and space. Non-diehards (and here your correspondent must include himself) might want a little more variation in the songcraft, gazillion-sellers though these tracks may be, beloved though they visibly are of this crowd, captured trilling along with tears in their eyes. (Cameron catches so much saltwater I wondered if Hit Me Hard and Soft was going to function as an Avatar origin story: this is how whole planets flood.) And the tropes of these all-new concert movies are now such one senses the Documentary Now! lads in the wings, preparing a bumper double episode: they could have a field day with the 'puppy room' Eilish insists on having backstage so as to reduce pre-gig stress ("everyone needs some dog love"). None of this matters, though, so long as Cameron films his subject with much the same awestruck gaze as he once did Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley. Part of the filmmaker's fascination, I think, is that Eilish has successfully accomplished something he hasn't: to downsize. When Eilish sits crosslegged on her comparatively no-frills stage ("I don't want anything between me and them", she tells her director) and hushes the crowd into total silence before one song, she shrinks a cavernous concert venue to a small, tight friendship circle, as safe a space for creation as her own teenage bedroom. Eilish gets Cameron to think small for the first time in decades: the result is a rare concert movie that converts the colossal spectacle of the internationally touring pop show into something personal, intimate and very charming.

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of May 8-10, 2026):

1 (1) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12A)

2 (2) Michael (12A)

3 (new) The Sheep Detectives (PG)

4 (new) Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft (12A) ****

5 (new) Mortal Kombat II (15)

6 (3) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

7 (5) Project Hail Mary (12A) ***

8 (4) Hokum (15) ***

9 (new) Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition (15) ***

10 (7) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Cronos

2. Top Gun: Maverick

3. Wake in Fright

4. The Christophers

5. Shrek

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Scream 7 (18)

2 (new) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (15)

3 (2) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

4 (4) Shelter (15)

5 (7) Send Help (15) ***

6 (new) Hoppers (U) ****

7 (6) G.O.A.T. (PG)

8 (5) The Devil Wears Prada (PG) ***

9 (8) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

10 (3) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Cold Storage

2. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

3. Nouvelle Vague

4. Soul to Soul

5. Send Help

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [above] (Sunday, BBC Two, 2.30pm)

2. And Now for Something Completely Different (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)

3. 10 Things I Hate About You (Saturday, Channel 4, 1.05pm)

4. How to Marry a Millionaire (Saturday, BBC Two, 10.25am)

5. Saving Private Ryan (Wednesday, BBC One, 10.40pm)

Swamp thing: "Shrek" at 25

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."

(Quote commonly misattributed to Antonio Gramsci.)

Hard to believe Shrek screened at Cannes this week in 2001, but then that was the moment: Pixar's Toy Story and Toy Story 2 had made computer animation both artful and universal, giving Hollywood a new box of tricks to play with, money to spend, and a renewed sense of creative confidence. Everyone was getting on the boat, or yacht. This was the fledgling DreamWorks studio (and more specifically its ex-Disney chief Jeffrey Katzenberg) scuzzing up the Mouse House's aesthetic, rubbing Mickey's nose in the mud; in Shrek's opening moments, the kind of picturebook that graced the prologues of Disney's post-War golden age animations is revealed to have been taken into the outhouse by the titular green ogre, its pages used as bog roll before Shrek marches cheerily out of the crapper to the strains of Smash Mouth's "All Star". Welcome back to the summer of 2001: everything was about to go down the pan. New century, new crudeness. Before the decade was out, these voice performers would gift the world The Love Guru, Norbit and The Sweetest Thing; on the road to toppling the tyrannical Lord Farquaad (voiced by John Lithgow), whose surname proves interchangeable with "fuckwad", Shrek (Mike Myers) and Donkey (Eddie Murphy) spend most of their time burping and farting. I'd forgotten just how relentlessly lowbrow the movie is. In the Farquaad-ruled kingdom of Duloc, a singing exhibit rhymes "keep your feet off the grass" with "wipe your... face"; an inexplicably French Robin Hood (Vincent Cassel, for some reason) inspires a song-and-dance number in which the Merry Men do something similar, rhyming "maid" with "he likes to get... paid". Schtick might have been a good alternative title. Stink might be another. If you can hear a low industrial rumbling while revisiting Shrek this weekend, that's surely Uncle Walt, the man who made Fantasia, being rotated in his cryogenic capsule.

If there's been any measure of critical debate over Shrek this past quarter-century, it hinges on just how ugly the film was always meant to be. The animation really is ugly, in the same way the first Toy Story now looks clunky. (Chief takehome: how rapidly processor chips and modelling tech improved over the course of the century's first decades.) Granted, the rough-and-readiness does set Shrek apart from, say, Pixar's comparatively verdant A Bug's Life, engineered only a couple of years before. But it's very rough, from the uncanny humanoid faces (Fiona and Farquaad especially) to the dragon whose firebreathing recalls a PS2 cut scene to the sequence where Shrek and Donkey traverse a field of sunflowers, the Klein-blue sky behind them entirely untroubled by sun, clouds, detail. Watching Shrek in 2026 is a little like watching one of those cheap Russian timewasters the major chains now import - somewhat against the spirit of any trade embargo - to fill Screen 6 during half-term. (It's also closer than you'd think to watching today's AI slop.) It's briskly told at 86 minutes; if you were feeling generous, its sarcastic approach to the fairytale qualifies as a kind of wit. (There are fun bits of comic writing, from Farquaad's interrogation of the Gingerbread Boy - "Do you know the Muffin Man?" - to the use of cue cards at Farquaad and Fiona's wedding.) And I guess it's novel (and very un-Disneyish) that all the characters should seem so fundamentally horny, though again here, we're not so far from those early Internet pages that did blasphemous things to beloved cartoon characters. We've had four of these things in the years since, plus spinoffs, and - one reason for this reissue - there's another to come next year. People apparently love Shrek: we have it (more specifically, a late-film John Cale cover version) to thank/blame for that Noughties revival of the song "Hallelujah", and even Al Pacino, for heaven's sake, has admitted to using a Shrek phone case. But then enough people bought that Crazy Frog record to get it to number one. Sometimes there really can be no accounting for popular taste.

Shrek returns to cinemas nationwide today.

"LifeHack" (Guardian 14/05/26)

LifeHack ***

Dir: Ronan Corrigan. With: Georgie Fowler, Yasmin Finney, Jessica Reynolds, Charlie Creed-Miles. 96 mins. Cert: 15

This debut feature from Irish web-and-zeitgeist-surfer Ronan Corrigan continues its producer Timur Bekmambetov’s interest in fashioning entire movies out of virtual space, collaging as it does the screens of phones, laptops and PCs. Narratively, it plays like a Web 2.0 update of Iain Softley’s cult Nineties fave Hackers: a quartet of heavily vaping, tech-savvy gamers who’ve cultivated an online friendship decide to take their nightly shitposting to the next level by robbing an obnoxious crypto billionaire (Charlie Creed-Miles), whose motto is “I’m CEO, c**t”. Corrigan’s secret weapon is that his plot points have already been beta-tested offline. What we’re watching is at source an old-school heist thriller with especially open coding.

Corrigan does, however, commit far more forcefully than any of his predecessors to this accelerationist digital aesthetic. He casts newish faces with the air of habitual phonecheckers; he establishes their innate restlessness and distractibility in frantically scrolling between tabs, connecting form to character; and he pumps the leads’ squabbling banter through the same headset-filter one might strap on to play Call of Duty. Though this script – co-written by the director with Hope Elliott Kemp – wisely renames a bluff podcaster Joe Brogan, these frames-within-frames otherwise resemble the real thing: the film’s meme game is strong, if that’s any kind of commendation for a motion picture, and there are none of those Google substitutes called ridiculous things like Search Rhino or InfoBuzz.

Corrigan and co-editor Sasha Kletsov excel as pivotal passwords are sourced, accepted and rejected, then slow the tempo to establish a tender, geekily awkward romance between hackers-in-chief Kyle (Georgie Fowler) and Alex (Yasmin Finney). Only belatedly do we experience the usual limitation of these screenlife thrillers: after the initial excitement wears off, we’re faced with an ultra-mechanical entertainment, all pointing and clicking between spinning wheels. As social media enters its flop era, this subgenre’s shelf life is surely diminishing. (Corrigan’s security-cam footage indicates these events unfold between 2018 and 2020: it’s already a period piece.) Efficiently executed, though its relentless cursor-nudging will likely make older viewers want to unplug and retreat with an 18th century novel.

LifeHack screens in selected Vue cinemas today and Wednesday.

From fear to eternity: "Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition"

As they celebrate their fiftieth anniversary, those original monsters of rock Iron Maiden find themselves central to two feature-length documentaries. Di'Anno: Iron Maiden's Lost Singer (currently touring) is an independently mounted profile of the group's irascible early vocalist Paul Di'Anno in his final years; the studio-backed, starrier-eyed Burning Ambition (now in multiplexes) the officially sanctioned overview of ver Maiden's five decades in the business. They were never fashionable: emerging amid the winter of discontent as hard rockers, just as punk was becoming the next big thing, they weren't what the labels were initially looking for, nor what mainstream radio was looking for, nor indeed the revolutionary MTV. "We weren't as good looking as Eddie [the band's ghoulish mascot]," founder member and guitarist bedrock Steve "Harry" Harris cheerily admits early on. In subsequent years, they would be pushed to the physical limit by management who wanted them out on the road 24/7 to make up for the lack of promotional airplay; they would also be dissed by such young pretenders as Nirvana, who responded to a touring request by insisting Maiden were "too old". Yet sustained by a longhaired fanbase who knew exactly what they wanted - to rock out - and by the blazing self-confidence of replacement frontman Bruce Dickinson, they survived and prospered, becoming something like Status Quo with an edge. (Never fashionable, always there.) One of Burning Ambition's biggest revelations is the scope of that fanbase. You could probably have guessed that Anthrax's Scott Ian and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine were Maiden heads, as it were. But who knew Chuck D was an admirer? Who knew Javier Bardem was? Bardem proves effusive indeed in interview, unironically intoning the band's lyrics as if they were Coleridge. Do you think Penélope Cruz lets him put his records on in the front room of an evening, or would she shoo him away to his cueva de hombre?

As assembled by Malcolm Venville, a veteran pop-promo director who last entered cinemas with 2009's Sexy Beast-adjacent 44 Inch Chest, Burning Ambition otherwise assumes a broadly conventional form. The concert footage goes heavy on thunderous drumming and elaborate fretwork; unlike Quo, Maiden proceeded with a blokey virtuosity that marked them - again, unfashionably - as the children of prog. Often evocative, time-capsule archive - Bruce interviewed by Sally James on Tiswas, Nicko McBrain drumming up a storm on The Sooty Show (!) - is overlaid with the sound of the lads and close collaborators, enlisted as offscreen talking heads. Inevitably, certain anecdotes verge on the Spinal Tap, particularly those centring the swaggering Dickinson, a passable lookalike in his younger days for Christopher Guest's Nigel Tufnel. We learn the singer came to blows with Harris backstage at Newcastle City Hall; he brains himself with a guitar during the 1985 iteration of Rock in Rio, and furnishes a Hungarian press conference with an especially Tufnelian quote ("We prefer to write songs about things people don't do very often - like death"). Some of that archive describes the changing face (if that's the right word) of codpieces and tight Spandex slacks. Yet again, like Quo, Maiden persisted with a sense of humour, one that proved valuable amid the Satanic panic of the 1980s and whenever they were faced with the snobbery of the domestic music press. In a film as densely packed as some of those codpieces, Venville even begins to broach the politics of Maiden. As previously noted by Tarek Hodžić's 2017 doc Scream for Me Sarajevo, the group were greeted almost as liberators amid the Communist-controlled Eastern Bloc of the late 1980s and early 1990s. (They were at least as significant in the raising of the Iron Curtain as, say, David Hasselhoff.) Late on, reuniting with the band after his wayward solo career, Dickinson can be heard telling the crowd at one gig that "it doesn't matter if you're Muslim, Christian, Jewish... as long as you're a Maiden fan, we're one big fucking family", an idea that requires further parsing in light of the singer's role as a hypeman for Brexit, which proved a line in the sand for at least one sometime fan (my metalhead brother). In the closing moments, bringing us up to date, we see Maiden playing to another sellout crowd in the London Stadium last summer, grizzled and withered - that long hair now greying - and McBrainless, the drummer having retired on health grounds in 2024, yet undefeated by it all. Maybe Maiden only begin to make sense if we view them in terms of their own songs' protagonists: as men out of time, eternal rebels, some crucial part of them ever frozen in up-yours adolescence.

Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition is now showing in cinemas nationwide. 

From the archive: "Wake in Fright"

Some films are so ferocious they refuse to sit around getting dusty in the archives for too long; by sheer force of personality, they endure, and eventually go swaggering back out into the world, looking for trouble once again. After four decades in lock-up – possibly at the behest of the Australian Tourist Board – Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 horror-cum-national character study Wake in Fright returns to UK screens this weekend, off the back of a recent Cannes restoration, to offer its own unique and bloody-minded tour of the Outback.

The Canadian Kotcheff got here around the same time as Nic Roeg went Walkabout, yet where the latter recast this territory as another Eden, Kotcheff’s interest was more grounded (and, in some way, more comprehensible) yet: in a place where there’s nothing to do except get royally lashed, and a fellow is judged chiefly on his ability to neck a pint. (I drink, therefore I am: one of the reasons the film endures so is its resemblance to the aggressive dipsomania still prevalent in certain British backwaters.)

On trial here is one John Grant (Gary Bond), an Englishman who’s wound up, somewhat resentfully, in a middle-of-nowhere town on a teaching secondment. Of course this educated man believes himself above the locals, with their gruff militarism, arcane gambling rituals and steaks for a dollar. And of course, this certainty will be removed from him when he tries to get away from it all over the Christmas holidays, eroded by a combination of alcohol, bad luck and that familiar 70s harbinger of insanity Donald Pleasance.

During its absence from general circulation, the film has found itself lumped in with that Ozploitation cycle documented in 2008’s enjoyably rowdy Not Quite Hollywood, yet in itself Wake in Fright is far more lingering than any of those movies turned out for a quick buck. Kotcheff seems determined to hold his camera on every strange, unsettling, telling gesture and each loaded exchange, and the result is almost abstract: a portrait of a figure slowly dissolving into his surrounds, as though he were no more than a temporary heat haze.

Or some other haze, for it isn’t blood that flows through these frames, but the amber nectar. The sound of tinnies being opened becomes a prelude to gunfire, and you can sense the film developing a bad head before you – a fogginess of a kind a breakfast of kangaroo stew only worsens, through which only a bullet might really pierce. The action, however, remains joltingly vivid: a game of coinflipping that becomes as much a self-abusing ritual as the Russian roulette in The Deer Hunter, a brutal kangaroo hunt in which everybody starts blasting away at the thin tissue of civilities separating John Grant from his true nature.

In between, Kotcheff does something haunting and critical with the film’s women, who’ve long learnt to keep their mouths shut and shrug off every horny-handed slap on the arse. Yet, clearly, we’re mired firmly in man’s territory: the film keeps weighing some of the most believable drunken-destructive scraps ever recorded outside of provincial nightclub CCTV footage against those mornings-after when its characters awaken, in puddles of their own drool, sweat and filth, surrounded by strange bodies, and wondering what the XXXX just happened.

Punctuated at regular intervals by editor Anthony Buckley’s choice, suggestive blackouts, Wake in Fright re-emerges as a real hangover-movie, one that can’t easily be slept off; however physical Kotcheff got in his later, more scattershot work – which took in the agonised chest-thumping of First Blood and the knockabout of Weekend at Bernie’s – he never quite matched this one for potency.

(MovieMail, March 2014)

A 4K restoration of Wake in Fright opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of May 1-3, 2026):

1 (new) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12A)

2 (1) Michael (12A)

3 (2) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

4 (new) Hokum (15) ***

5 (3) Project Hail Mary (12A) ***

6 (new) Patriot (15) **

7 (6) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

8 (4) The Drama (15) **

9 (5) Lee Cronin's The Mummy (18)

10 (new) Eugene Onegin - Met Opera 2026 (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Slither

2. Rose of Nevada

3. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence [above]

4. Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition

5. Hokum

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Scream 7 (18)

2 (1) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

3 (2) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

4 (3) Shelter (15)

5 (8) The Devil Wears Prada (PG) ***

6 (15) G.O.A.T. (PG)

7 (5) Send Help (15) ***

8 (6) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

9 (4) The Super Mario Bros Movie (PG)

10 (14) Hamnet (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Cold Storage

2. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

3. Nouvelle Vague

4. Soul to Soul

5. Send Help

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Producers (Saturday, BBC Two, 11.45pm)

2. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (Saturday, ITV1, 6am)

3. Surge (Sunday, BBC Two, 12.05am)

4. A Bigger Splash (Monday, BBC Two, 11pm)

5. Moon (Sunday, Channel 4, 11pm)

Hotel hell: "Hokum"

Damian McCarthy's Hokum marks an altogether eccentric revival of horror cinema's "stranger in a strange place" subgenre. The stranger is Adam Scott's Ohm Bauman (strange name, even), an obnoxious, barely functioning alcoholic horror writer who, one Hallowe'en, repairs to a hotel in rural Ireland where his late parents honeymooned so as to scatter their ashes in the nearby woods. That task, at least, is easily achieved; far trickier is extricating himself from the deeply dysfunctional hostelry, plagued as it is by tripping mountain goats, a no less cranky, wheelchair-using owner (Brendan Conroy) and a rumour said honeymoon suite has since been sealed off so as to contain a witch. Belatedly, and only after pissing off everyone around him in some way, Bauman comes to realise he's wandered into a missing-woman mystery with a twist on every other page; also that he'll have to ditch the booze and work extra hard if he's to arrive at a happier outcome than the generally doomy conclusions of his own hack novels. By naming his film as he has, McCarthy has afforded himself a get-out clause: sure enough, Hokum's penny-dreadful plotting does feel rattly, outright arbitrary in places, and never meant to be taken too seriously. The tension here, whether dramatic or comic, stems from the contrast between the upright, arrogant Yank - Scott doing just enough to suggest Bauman might be less of an asshole if he weren't navigating such a rough period - and the kooky Irish character actors looming up over our hero as he descends into darkness: Peter Coonan as the hotel's desk clerk, Will O'Connell as a dullard bellhop and David Wilmot as a local itinerant. McCarthy demonstrates an eye for unsettling symbolism (handsaws and crossbows, clay figurines that pre-empt the plot, a haunted-seeming carriage clock with a hidden, secondary purpose, half-glimpsed images on poorly tuned TV sets), while production designer Til Frohlich works overtime converting a shabby provincial hotel into a combination of escape room, puzzle to be solved and Dante's Inferno. I suspect this is one of those scripts that got the greenlight the moment 2024's Heretic went past a certain number at the box office: if it's neither as cunning nor as engrossing as that film, instead relying overly on the sight of Scott squirrelling around in the dark, it delivers a measure of baroque fun all the same. Primary takehome: some men would rather undergo supernatural trial-by-fire in remote Irish hotels than book themselves into therapy.

Hokum is now playing in selected cinemas.

Left to their own devices: "Patriot"

From a commercial perspective, it's little surprise Mahesh Narayanan's Malayalam film Patriot made the UK Top Ten this past weekend: it marks a reunion of sorts for stars Mammootty and Mohanlal, the grand old men of South Indian cinema. Critical eyes might, however, be drawn this way by the prospect of a South Indian response to the North's recent, thunderous Dhurandhar diptych. This, too, is a spy thriller, albeit one that starts in appropriately stealthy fashion before tailing away into maximalist silliness; if it's similarly paranoid, it's not about India's neighbours, but threats from within, specifically big tech. At the film's centre - much remarked upon, never seen - is Periscope, an item of spyware we learn has been slipped onto citizens' smartphones and laptops so as to monitor online interactions and crush dissent. Fahadh Faasil, with shady-ass stubble, is the erratic, Musky tech bro whose Shakti Corp has engineered the program; Rajiv Menon his father, a compromised Government minister who signed the surveillance into law. Over on the side of the angels, Revathi is the opposition leader who vows to expose this scandal and clear up the mess before expiring in mysterious circumstances; Mammootty plays Dr. Daniel James, the heavy-drinking analyst she entrusts to investigate. Obliged to flee India after his employer's death, pronounced a traitor to the national cause, Danny - as he's known - heads into exile in London, where he adopts the YouTube handle Vimathan (or "Dissident") and starts to uncover the various ways consumer items have been weaponised against their users. These early scenes lend Patriot an air of Slow Horses-ish shabbiness that should play well with British audiences, who'll get to enjoy watching this fabled leading man putting the bins out and driving past a Spar. You didn't get that with Dhurandhar.

Yet if the Dhurandhars were a weapon wielded with sporadic skill but most often blunt propagandistic force, Patriot proves a more conventional entertainment. Running just shy of three hours, it's basically a more expansive update of those US techno-thrillers (The Lawnmower Man, Disclosure, The Net, Hackers) that lit up multiplexes in the first days of Web 1.0. In the strongest, most propulsive stretches here, Narayanan succeeds in fusing the old and the new, or in using the tried-and-tested to push back against the aggressive novelties of Shakti Corp and their ilk. It's rather fun to watch the now-seventysomething Mammootty, with his air of a retired university professor, donning a baseball cap to go undercover at a YouTubers' weekend symposium; in a week in which we learnt Google has been eating up storage on everybody's devices by installing AI tech without prior consent, this plot does feel timely, and there's something very much on the money about the way the Palantir-like Shakti, who we learn started as an IT consultancy firm, has rapidly remodelled itself as a major tech player with plans to operate as a private security force. (It wouldn't surprise me if we saw a thick-eared Western variant of this particular plot, probably involving Liam Neeson, within the next one-to-three years.) For some part of its running time - roughly as long as it takes our hero to parse discarded devices for the data that will make a conclusive case against the enemy - Patriot's narrative coding presents as sound, and Narayanan backs it up with solid, involving analogue setpieces: the pulse does quicken around the intermission block, when a YouTuber's prank provides the opening act of a convoluted kidnap attempt in a crowded airport. 

Other elements, alas, just don't scan. Come the second half, we once more bear witness to the spectacle of a pensionable leading man overpowering goons half his age; Narayanan has to deploy a slice-and-dice strategy in the action scenes, frenetically cutting around so as to distract from the unignorable fact his star is neither as mobile nor as dynamic as he once was. Yet beyond this aging star issue, Patriot also has a Big Movie Problem. This is, at heart, a taut two-hour thriller that has been expanded to three to fit some dubious post-pandemic idea of a cinematic event (and thereby get everybody off their sofas and phones). Tightly controlled stretches move the plot on and ratchet up the tension, but there's also a growing level of filler and waffle that relegates the whole to mixed-bag status. The movie enshittifies itself; heading into its final half-hour, Patriot has started to feel almost as exhausting as dealing with actual technology in 2026. Within this ever more sprawling superstructure, the actors are mostly left to themselves, with - again - mixed results. Mohanlal capably shoulders a long stretch at the point Daniel goes AWOL from the plot, playing a one-legged Signal Corps veteran who reconnects with our hero via streetlight Morse code (fuck you, Elon) and conceals a blade in his crutch; and Zarin Shihab is quietly forceful under a headscarf as Daniel's relentless partner Ayisha. Yet local luminary Nayanthara is stuck with a sorely underdetermined part as the hero's first wife and occasional helpmate, and though Faasil - the stealth genius of recent South cinema - brings his usual wiry intensity to the Shakti command centre, he also seems wildly overqualified for such a stock Lex Luthor role. It's still hard not to thrill when the second half pulls a narrative judo move, turning Periscope against those who engineered it - like I said, there is good stuff in here - but Narayanan also wants us to swallow down a lot of generic thriller nonsense between fat handfuls of popcorn. A bit of a tin foil hat movie, all told - and I sensed the hat being worn so as to keep the battiness and bad ideas in.

Patriot is now screening in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of April 24-26, 2026):

1 (new) Michael (12A)

2 (1) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

3 (2) Project Hail Mary (12A) ***

4 (3) The Drama (15) **

5 (4) Lee Cronin's The Mummy (18)

6 (6) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

7 (new) Rose of Nevada (15) ****

8 (new) Exit 8 (15)

9 (re) Fight Club (15) ****

10 (new) The Magic Flute - ROH London 2026 (U)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Slither [above]

2. Rose of Nevada

3. Hokum

4. Mother Mary

5. Akira

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

2 (12) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

3 (29) Shelter (15)

4 (6) The Super Mario Bros Movie (PG)

5 (re) Send Help (15) ***

6 (4) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

7 (new) The Killer (15) ****

8 (34) The Devil Wears Prada (PG) ***

9 (re) Primate (18)

10 (5) The Housemaid (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

2. Nouvelle Vague

3. Soul to Soul

4. Send Help

5. The History of Sound

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (Sunday, ITV1, 4pm)

2. The Silence of the Lambs (Tuesday, BBC One, 11.40pm)

3. Point Break (Saturday, BBC One, 11.50pm)

4. The Titfield Thunderbolt (Holiday Monday, BBC Two, 9am)

5. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Holiday Monday, ITV1, 10.15pm)

On demand: "Love Means Zero"

From Showtime's documentary arm, a portrait of a tricky subject. 2017's Love Means Zero sees filmmaker Jason Kohn profiling Nick Bollettieri, founding father of the Nick Bollettieri Academy, the institution that came to exert an iron grip on the pro tennis circuit in the late Eighties and Nineties, thanks to such stars as Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Mary Pierce, Maria Sharapova and, as Bollettieri puts it, "my Serena and Venus" (which will come as news to Richard Williams). He's not a monster, but from an early stage in Kohn's film, it becomes apparent that Bollettieri was an exacting taskmaster, possessed of the ruthless singlemindedness that tends to identify and make champions in pro sports. Kohn speaks to a clutch of the name players, but also those who were left to drift away and forgotten about, like tennis balls knocked over a fence or hedge; several of these players are heard to testify that they were made to feel special, like a son or daughter, then abandoned at a formative moment once Bollettieri and his coaches determined they weren't quite what the Academy was seeking. The selection process comes over as tough, perhaps necessary, but above all else poorly handled, from an interpersonal perspective: the most damning evidence Kohn introduces into the record is that even Agassi - the Academy's erratic golden boy, to the extent that Bollettieri was seen and heard to take his side when he faced fellow Academy find Courier in the French Open quarterfinals of 1989 - refused the filmmaker's request for an interview. (He will be amply represented nonetheless, both in evocative archive footage - awful late Eighties mullets and all - and, more poignantly, in the form of a letter he wrote to Bollettieri in his 2009 memoir Open.)

What follows is one of the few sports docs that owes a pronounced rhetorical debt to the combative Errol Morris; you start to feel the camera itself becoming a net. Kohn isolates Bollettieri among the ruins of one of the resorts that were left to crumble after his declaration of bankruptcy; the director lobs up a probing question or three; and Bollettieri - weathered, RFK raspy, prone to alternating between the first and third person and overusing the dated hipster slang "baby" - insistently smashes answers back. This was all in the past, Jason; I don't dwell on such things; I move on, as you should. It's presumably what he told his charges whenever they lost their serve, but around about the point Bollettieri lets slip he's been married eight times, or when one of his erstwhile prodigies opens up about an eating disorder she developed, you start to wonder just how much collateral damage one man can bring about in his quest for success. Certainly Agassi, a player made in his coach's image - a flamboyant, devil-may-care hustler, burning through endorsement deal after endorsement deal - kept getting found out at the highest level, whether by the focused, matter-of-fact Courier, the machine-like Pete Sampras, or the shithousery of Boris Becker in his sleaze era. (Becker gets ushered on to recall how he once psyched out his opponent by openly flirting with Agassi's then-wife Brooke Shields from the very centre of Wimbledon's Centre Court.) We might even question the Bollettieri definition of success. The business model here seems hazy if not outright dubious, framing players not as individuals but ambassadors for the Academy, and recycling prize money to provide scholarships for aspirant champions; late on, Kohn reveals that Bollettieri was eventually outmanoeuvred behind the scenes by one of his savvier employees. The film's subject, who died in 2022, remains defiant to the last, blurting out "I just react! Nick just does it!", like some Nike-swooshed embodiment of the American id. You conclude Bollettieri would have been great to watch as a player, forever on the attack. His flaw as a businessman, and as a human being, is that he simply had no B game.

Love Means Zero is now streaming via NOW TV.

On DVD: "The Chronology of Water"

Kristen Stewart has acted for so many distinctive auteurs in the decade since the Twilight wrap-up that perhaps it was inevitable she would herself step behind the camera at some point. Her directorial debut The Chronology of Water is exactly the kind of project that might once have tempted her as a performer: an adaptation of a literary memoir (by Lidia Yuknavitch) centred on a muddled, self-harming young woman in desperate search of some purpose and affirmation. We meet this Lidia first as a child, within the framework of a 1960s household made tense by domestic violence; as a teenager, she takes to swimming, thereby internalising all the pressures of a solo competitive sport. When she finally reaches womanhood, embodied by Imogen Poots, she finds her mastery in the pool doesn't apply to dry land, lorded over as it is by the tyrannical men around her. The bulk of this story will outline how Lidia Yuknavitch navigated towards a place of acceptance, happiness and tranquility, a process that proves far from straightforward, and indeed far less straightahead than the average swimming lane. For much of that duration, she's having to outswim - or simply drown out - the negative voices inside her own head. The Chronology of Water will eventually run to a full two hours and eight minutes, which instinctively feels at least a reel too long, but in some ways it needs to be, because what it's detailing isn't an easy fix; like its heroine, the movie can seem tough and hard work.

For starters, you'll simply have to sit with Olivia Neergaard-Holm's free-associative editing, with its (achronological) premonitions of events to come: it's possible Stewart was seeking to emulate Nic Roeg while also intending to conjure a deeply mixed-up headspace. (We're waiting for both film and protagonist to settle down somehow.) Expect sudden swells of turbulence, then, but Stewart also affords us two constants we can cling to whenever matters get especially choppy. The first is the water of the title: the pools Lidia passes through ("how many miles does it take to swim to a self?"), the sweat and sexual effluvia, the ice in the drinks of her (alcoholic?) mother, the spit Lidia contemptuously deposits on the men she hoped might degrade her, the piss stain on one passed-out boyfriend's trousers, the condensation into which our heroine draws smiley faces (for a long time, the only happy faces in the film), the ocean into which she tosses the ashes of a stillborn baby with a muted, quietly devastating "sorry". The water raises up the film's largely floating imagery; it's both running motif and artistic self-justification. And within these emotional high tides, Stewart pins down another, adjacent image: that of the rocks Lidia habitually slips into her pockets on her travels, although it's initially unclear whether she means to ground herself - rocks as markers of time and place - or use them to drown herself à la Virginia Woolf.

The other constant here is Poots, an actress who seems to have been on the fringes of a Winslet-like movie stardom for a decade or more without really getting there. In hauling Poots front and centre, Stewart empowers her star to try things she hasn't before: to play brittle and unsympathetic, to frig herself and flash her boobs, to drink too much and drive too fast, to be as unpretty as this story demands at any given moment. In embracing these tasks, Poots creates the conditions where we cannot ignore this character, hard to be around though Lidia is, liable though she is to hurt herself and those who love her. In passing, Stewart also hands Thora Birch a gentle comeback role as Lidia's understandably concerned sister, and gifts Jim Belushi his best role in decades as the author Ken Kesey, who served as some sort of mentor for Lidia Yuknavitch's creative undertakings. (A sly comment on how fucked-up this moment was in general: we used to let someone as dishevelled as Ken Kesey mentor our young folk.) This is not, on the whole, a movie that wants or solicits the audience's approval, which likely explains why Chronology evaporated without trace within days of its UK theatrical release. (I suspect its maker had her fill of making nice during her teen franchise days.) Yet it demonstrates more than enough steel, a wilfulness its prime mover doubtless absorbed from her more adventurous directors, to be both admirable and promising indeed. Stewart has the makings of a proper filmmaker, just as the past few years have confirmed her as a formidable performer.

The Chronology of Water is now available to rent via the BFI Player and Prime Video, and on DVD via the BFI.

The chronology of water: "Rose of Nevada"

Oddities Week continues with Rose of Nevada, Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin's distinctive take on the ghost-ship subgenre. Jenkin's previous films Bait and Enys Men were set in workaday South West coastal communities beset by social division and supernatural anomalies; collectively, they formed a heartening revival of both a rudimentary film technique (hand-developed film, post-synched sound) and the kind of regional filmmaking that fell out of fashion and favour once everybody else determined they had to go and seek their fortune in London. But now, armed with a BAFTA and an all-access festival pass, Jenkin is himself going places. His latest, shot in vibrant Nic Roeg Technicolor, introduces emergent, adventurous faces (George Mackay, Callum Turner) into this director's familiar milieu: a well-worn fishing village, here one where the trawler of the title, previously involved in a tragedy thirty years ago, has found its way back into harbour with zero hands on deck. Still, the approach remains so distinct from what's around it in the contemporary cinema that it takes a good fifteen-to-twenty minutes to resettle into the Jenkin way; the opening section has to teach us anew how to watch a film removed of all the usual fuss and clutter. What's noticeable - and surprising, even to those of us who saw Jenkin's previous films - is how much Jenkin conveys via his generally taciturn, square-framed, rough-edged close-ups. We sense, for starters, just how this community has split along generational lines, the chatty younger folk itching to talk about the tragedies befalling the local fishermen, even as their elders clam up. (One exception: a lank-haired dementia patient/seer, prone to confusing present and past, as this plot will eventually.) More striking yet: how these shots come to establish a loaded, ominous mood, borne out when a new three-man crew - grizzled captain Francis Magee and hired hands Mackay and Turner - cast off in this same cursed vessel. Etched into the wooden frame of one of the bunks the lads sleep in: a stark warning to "Get Off The Boat Now".

At which point, a fierce local knowledge - or muscle memory - kicks in. This is a trawlerman movie made by someone who's studied how these boats actually work; with its documentary-like coverage of the gulls above and the ropes and pulleys below, the film Rose most closely resembles, for long stretches at sea, is 2012's immersive experiment Leviathan. The old ways become new, pertinent and urgent again - especially once our boys return home and realise they've docked in the recent past. Something's gone adrift; bearings start to be lost. If the narrative is far from plain sailing, Jenkin's shot selection - comprising four weatherbeaten or otherwise textured close-ups to every one suggestive, Deren-like sliver of dream imagery - begins to feel like necessary ballast, exactly what this director needed to tell this particular story. (Here are shots that appear the results of several weeks' beachcombing, visual information laid out as plainly as it would be on the sands; every image is its own seashell or fossil.) And the actors put in a real shift. Few films have made better use of - and more closely relied on - Mackay's open-faced legibility, the actor set to looking ever more aghast at developments. That quality becomes doubly effective when set against the vague air of fecklessness given off by the squintier, shiftier Turner - the market-stall Richard Gere - as a young man only too prepared to go along with this new arrangement, which is to say the old arrangement, if it means sleeping with a dead man's wife. (Arguably, these youngsters are overshadowed by another cherishably characterful turn from Magee, the Bob Mitchum of the cream tea set.) If Rose of Nevada turns out to be a hit, as my packed first-weekend screening would indicate, that may partly be down to star names, and partly down to being horror/fantasy-adjacent: on some basic level, we're dealing with a brinier Brigadoon here. Yet it's also surely attributable to Jenkin attempting what few others have of late: his is a cinema that continues to speak, on some sublimated, unconscious level, to the choppy waters and backwash we're all passing through. Some of the new film's tensions are regional: you do come away with a sense of those pressures felt by the young in crumbling coastal communities to stay in place and knuckle down. But it also strikes me as significant that Jenkin has been a post-Brexit discovery. Steered by a crew of queasy and uneasy shipmates, Rose of Nevada proves unusually attuned to what it means - and how it feels - for a people to be living in the present and the past simultaneously.

Rose of Nevada is now playing in selected cinemas.