"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.