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
4. Moon
5. F1

  
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.