For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office 
for the weekend of September 28-30, 2018:

1 (new) Night School (12A)
2 (1) The House with the Clock in its Walls (12A)
3 (2) A Simple Favour (15)
4 (3) Crazy Rich Asians (12A) **
5 (5) The Nun (15)
6 (4) King of Thieves (15)
7 (new) The Wife (15) ****
8 (7) The Predator (15)
9 (8) Christopher Robin (PG) **
10 (6) Mile 22 (18)

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five: 
1. Blindspotting
2. The Wife
3. Child of Mine
4. Female Human Animal
5. Anchor and Hope


Top Ten DVD sales: 

1 (new) Solo: A Star Wars Story (12) ***
2 (1) Deadpool 2 (15) **
3 (2) Avengers: Infinity War (12) ***
4 (3) The Greatest Showman (PG)
5 (new) The Walking Dead: The Complete Eighth Season (18)
6 (40) Coco (PG) ***
7 (new) Gotti (15)
8 (66) Moana (PG) ****
9 (6) Peter Rabbit (PG)
10 (new) The Big Bang Theory: The Complete Eleventh Season (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Custody
2. Solo: a Star Wars Story
3. Apostasy
4. Mary and the Witch's Flower
5. Avengers: Infinity War


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Man in the White Suit [above] (Sunday, BBC2, 2.45pm)
2. Carmen Jones (Friday, BBC2, 12.20am)
3. The Producers (Tuesday, BBC1, 11.45pm)
4. Mr. Holmes (Saturday, BBC2, 6.20pm)
5. Department Q: The Absent One (Saturday, BBC2, 12.40am)

"Blindspotting" (Guardian 05/10/18)

Blindspotting ****

Dir: Carlos López Estrada. With: Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal, Janina Gavankar, Jasmine Cephas Jones. 95 mins. Cert: 15

The title of this disarming wildcard indie – a word-of-mouth U.S. sleeper hit – refers to the way the eye can become so settled on one aspect of any given image that it fails to register others. The film, a jolting showcase for writer-stars Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, refuses us any such complacency. True, it first bounds up to us as goofball knockabout, doing for Oakland what Ice Cube’s Friday movies did for L.A., metabolising chewy racial issues into peppy, crowdpleasing gags. Yet without wrenching gear shifts, it gradually drives its characters onto darker, meaner streets. That initial, appealing looseness proves to be latent instability; by the finale, we hardly know where we’re headed, only that bad things seem likely to happen there. Still, try and take your electrified eyes off it. It’s practically 2018: The Movie.

Blindspotting’s core steeliness can, in fact, be glimpsed early on, as Diggs’ man-with-van Collin – out beyond his curfew, two days before his probation ends – witnesses a cop shoot a fleeing suspect in the back. Report the incident, and potentially put himself back behind bars? Where a declamatory film would have made that quandary the whole show, director Carlos López Estrada pushes on. There’s hair that needs straightening, receptionists to be wooed, work for Collin to do alongside irascible white pal Miles (Casal), their moving business allowing close-up views of Oakland’s gentrification. Yet Collin’s internal tensions can only be sublimated for so long; defying normal cinematic physics, the movie around him grows bristlier with every frame, as if reacting to world events in real time.

When that anger is finally released, it transforms Blindspotting as it may yet transform that world, throwing up bold images – not least a Million Man March of the dead – and a finale that owes as much to performance poetry as it does to knife-edge thrillers. That we stay this tumultuous course is down to the leads’ ability to claw back sympathy for characters succumbing to their own worst instincts, and López Estrada’s assured direction. There may have been no easy or comforting way to end it, nor perhaps to sell it, save with reassurances that there’s nothing else like it on our screens right now. Yet the film’s insidious crawl away from comedy into sweaty waking nightmare is arresting indeed – as, finally, is its insistence that some elements of American life remain far too serious to joke about.

Blindspotting opens in selected cinemas from today. 

"Child of Mine" (Guardian 05/10/18)

Child of Mine ***

Dir: Katie Rice. Documentary with the voice of Amanda Holden. 71 mins. Cert: 12A

The UK’s high rate of stillbirth – one in 200 pregnancies, among the most elevated in the developed world – is generating a growing number of documentaries aiming to initiate a wider dialogue. Debbie Howard’s 2015 film Still Loved spoke to Midlands parents in the process of grieving or moving on; now director Katie Rice provides three case studies with varying outcomes, released – as was Howard’s film – to mark Baby Loss Awareness Week. The films share certain tropes: sobering first-person testimony, a poignant emphasis on artefacts that make such loss palpable (photos, condolence notes, those unworn booties), and understandably brief running times, both recognition this is a tough subject to talk about, and a small, precious offering of hope, intended to go partway towards replacing what has been lost.

There are differences in approach. Howard’s personal, reflective tapestry found its subjects alone months or years after the event, and watched them organising themselves into a community of the bereaved. Rice’s is briskly structural and immediate, taking a sample group of couples either undergoing stillborn pregnancies or trying again in their wake, and showing us the safety nets placed around them by institutions such as UCLH and Rosie’s in Cambridge. Nothing swaddles the pain of an ultrasound discovering that one of expected twins no longer has a heartbeat – the most wrenching sequence here – but Rice also hears out midwives and obstetricians you’d want at your bedside, and who extend the field of inquiry into the political by pointing out serious shortfalls in funding and staff levels.

Bearing the C4 logo and an Amanda Holden voiceover, its essence is televisual, although there’s clearly no honest way to dress these tragedies up. Rice instead gathers fly-on-the-delivery-room-wall footage, and close-ups of her subjects summoning immense inner strength, because she knows what these images communicate: simply that this is what happens, and this is how people get through it – because they do get through it. We’re at the start of a long-overdue conversation, but Rice enters it with the same tact and compassion she witnesses in those medical professionals her film elevates to the status of everyday heroes, wise enough to know they can’t make that pain vanish entirely, yet able to reassure us, and provide us with the facts we need to try and move ahead. 

Child of Mine opens in selected cinemas from today.

"Strangeways Here We Come" (Guardian 05/10/18)

Strangeways Here We Come *

Dir: Chris Green. With: Elaine Cassidy, Michelle Keegan, Stephen Lord, Oliver Coopersmith. 86 mins. Cert: 15

A certain species of micro-budgeted British film can fill a critic with foreboding from their opening moments, seeming as they do to frontload awfulness as fair warning of the terrible time ahead. This abrasive Salford-set non-com – nothing to do with the Smiths, although roughly as funny as Morrissey is nowadays – charges out the gate pummelling all the wrong buttons. Sink-estate caricatures in thoroughly implausible situations! Larky GBH! Audibly male-authored girl talk! A middle-aged bloke masturbating over a teenager! Nothing causes the heart to sink quite so precipitously, however, as the realisation that these characters will be our heroes for the evening. At which point, the question becomes: well, how low can it go?

The answer: pretty low. Writer-director Chris Green has reheated the germ of an idea that spawned TV’s Shameless and Ideal, aiming to find something grimily irreverent in the sight of bruisers, oddbods, sex pests and pillheads taking murderously extreme measures to see off the rapacious loan shark circling their tower block. The tonal lurches that result are staggering to behold. An unforgivably mishandled blackmail by sex tape, milked for sniggering humour, is limboed under by an incident involving a drugged woman and two horny gamers that is neither amusing nor in any way on. Green, 50, often gives the impression of being a 15-year-old whose parents bought him a camera to prise his hands from his underpants.

The critic is therefore torn between highlighting those actors who make a few scenes tolerable – which is to say bearably woeful, in this context – or granting them the anonymity they surely longed for as they fled the cast-and-crew screening with head under blanket. Let’s at least give them credit for carefully removing the rejection letters from BBC3 commissioning editors that must have been stapled to their scripts, and indeed for having the patience not to have tossed the script itself into the recycling box after a minute’s browsing. One tried-and-tested gag – the one about the old dear who sees a flasher and has a stroke – but the rest isn’t so much a love letter to the people of Salford as a dreadful, perhaps even actionable slur. 

Strangeways Here We Come opens in selected cinemas from today.

The cat and the curator: "Female Human Animal"

Of all the cinematic curios 2018 provides, Female Human Animal will likely stand among the most unusual. The writer-director Josh Appignanesi has worked consistently across various forms and genres since his breakthrough in 2005 with Song of Songs, and had something close to a copper-bottomed hit with 2010's The Infidel. Here, he's taken the small amount of funding available to British filmmakers working outside the usual structures to make a hybrid film that could, at a push, be sold as a genre piece (it's theoretically a thriller, with horror elements) but also stands as a film about art, love and the place of a fortysomething creative woman in the modern world. As if the latter wasn't enough in itself to make distributors gulp, Appignanesi has, perhaps as a Dogme-style reset, shot it using the kind of camcorder you or I might have documented the kids' birthday party with circa 1992 - so the action unfolds within a square image, with a persistent tracking flicker at the bottom of the screen that suggests what we're watching may well be replaced, at any moment, by the episode of The Bill or Cadfael over which Appignanesi has apparently taped.

The choice isn't entirely unsuited to a tale where the heroine feels in some ways temporary, and that the gallery walls may be closing in on her. She's played - to all external appearances as a troubled variant of herself - by the intense-seeming Chloe Aridjis, introduced as co-curator of a Tate exhibition on the surrealist British painter Leonora Carrington, and thereafter seen busy doing the rounds of publisher meetings and well-catered book launches. (There's a nicely observed encounter at one such soiree, where neither party can hear the other properly over the rumble of small talk and schmoozing - a moment that perhaps explains some of the deals struck and careers forged as a consequence of these events.) While she puts the exhibition together, we're offered a behind-the-scenes-at-the-museum psychodrama in which Chloe appears to be haunted not just by Carrington's spirit, but in the real world by a tall dark stranger with an eccentric demeanour and an unplaceable accent (Marc Hosemann). Is he a suitor? A stalker? And who's looking after the heroine's cat?

In the week of a new-gloss A Star is Born, the results make for decidedly rough-edged counterprogramming: we are reminded of how jolting video edits can be, and the smeariness of the format's images. Yet Appignanesi appears to have factored some of this in; what's fascinating about the film is its sense of a director scratching something out using primitive, long-left-for-dead technology. (Its closest equivalent would be the restless experimentalist Michael Almereyda's Another Girl Another Planet and Nadja, unnerving indie artefacts turned out on Fisher Price's Pixelvision camera.) Chloe's progress involves four or five properly Lynchian sequences that are all the more disconcerting for coming at the viewer in a format we won't have encountered for several decades. It builds towards a big date that starts out promisingly before taking a turn, yet Appignanesi lays a lot of the thematic groundwork in those early scenes that realise, as few movies have, that galleries are incredibly spooky places: too quiet, almost invariably empty, full of dead people communicating either the secrets of the universe, or in signs we can't fully understand. You could find the key to eternal happiness, or even true love, in there. You could equally lose your mind, and your life.

Female Human Animal opens at selected cinemas from today.

Reptilian charms: "Blue Iguana"

Here is a very bizarre film, and a very bizarre career. The name of writer-director Hadi Hajaig first appeared on your correspondent's radar around the time of 2002's The Late Twentieth, one of the more comically slipshod crime movies scattered by British filmmakers in the wake of Guy Ritchie's rise to prominence. I honestly thought I'd never hear from him again, but Hajaig went away, had a rethink, then returned with 2005's Puritan, a not unstylish, halfway interesting mystery featuring Ritchie lynchpin Nick Moran as a phoney medium. That plucky indie endeavour landed him a studio gig, making 2012's Taken-influenced thriller Cleanskin for Warner Bros. with a post-Game of Thrones Sean Bean in the Liam Neeson role, yet its swift commercial nosedive seemed to have left Hajaig adrift and casting around for ideas. How he ended up securing the funding for Blue Iguana, of all the possible ideas, may be a story more compelling than anything the resultant feature puts up on screen. This is an Atlantic-hopping caper that carries a strong air of contrivance from its opening diner scene, all too visibly shot no further West than Wembley, then artlessly patched in to explain why American guest stars Sam Rockwell and Ben Schwartz find themselves heading to your actual London to involve themselves in a nonsensical who's-got-the-loot runaround involving several dodgy geezers and a passing Simon Callow.

That plot is so hard to pin down in terms of motivation - apparently rewriting itself minute-by-minute - that you might wonder whether this was a deliberate, Beat the Devil-style choice. Yet nothing else on show quite backs up that bold conceptual leap: it just doesn't have a script so much as a tattered and stained envelope covered with haphazard and half-formed ideas. That the whole is far from a total write-off is largely down to the actors, who - when not having to burn through the reams of exposition this plot requires - fall into funny rhythms and patterns that get the film past the hour mark, if not much further. Eccentric affection blossoms between Rockwell's greasy Danny Ocean wannabe Eddie and Phoebe Fox as the handler who spends most of her scenes eating, and submits at one point to a weird Ally Sheedy-in-The Breakfast Club makeover that renders her far less striking than she was in the "before" phase; a subplot pairs Schwartz, whose yammering line delivery is almost as great a joy here as it was in the immortal role of Parks & Rec's Jean-Ralphio, with a leopardprint-adorned Amanda Donohoe as a maneating landlady. (Told you it was bizarre.) As Puritan demonstrated, Hajaig has an eye for warm, colourful images: the bulk of the crims' stakeout activities takes place in a loft that rivals the set in New Girl for leftfield soft furnishings, and a sequence in which Rockwell devours a bowl of raspberry ripple ice cream somehow pops with far more dynamism than all the bluntly cut, perfunctorily staged action. After four films and sixteen years, I'm still not sure Hajaig entirely knows what he's doing or where his strengths lie - he might just be a painter and decorator who took a strange turn - but as utterly inessential, fly-by-night digital content goes, Blue Iguana succeeds in being oddly watchable, even likable.

Blue Iguana opens in selected cinemas today, ahead of its DVD release on Monday.

On demand: "Landscape in the Mist"

Landscape in the Mist opens with two pre-teens - a girl and a boy; sister and brother - stepping out of the Greek night and into a railway station to which, we're told, they've come many times before. Clearly, the pair are seekers. But what is it that they seek? The question confounds those they encounter in the course of this nightly homage - and those they cross paths with once they actually take the final step of boarding a train. We know they think their father might be living and working in Germany; we also know, as they don't at first, that this might just be a consoling lie their mother has told them. It is just possible, then, that the children's search is a wild goose chase, and it is one of the film's many understated tragedies that it will take these youngsters practically the entire two-hour running time merely to leave their own country. Still, they go on searching, all the same. So does the camera. So do we.

Over the decade that followed Theo Angelopoulos's 1988 film, arthouse cinema - and the Oscar Foreign Film category, and the Miramax acquisition portfolio - would come to be overrun by cute kids deployed by directors as a means of getting at the 20th century's big themes. The shameless sappiness of Cinema Paradiso, the safe bet of Kolya, the somewhat more astringent The Thief: in these films, the camera adopts a kneehigh-to-a-grasshopper perspective to suggest we are all, to some extent, little ones, naive and/or vulnerable before the sometimes crushing forces of destiny. The central quest in Angelopoulos's film grants its maker access to the back roads of emotion, history and myth; these siblings are as the brother and sister in the same year's Grave of the Fireflies, or those in The Night of the Hunter (particularly when seen drifting upriver), or even Hansel and Gretel, at the mercy of predators, before that. Impossible to underplay the extent to which these characters feel like a continuation: when a troupe of actors appear out of the titular fog, they look very similar to the players of Angelopoulos's 1975 masterpiece The Travelling Players, still wandering, still looking for places to stage Golfo the Shepherdess. (No director in history has ever been more touchingly devoted to the revival of a specific text.)

The quest also proves a means to a picturesque end, allowing the filmmaker to deliver on the first word of that title. Angelopoulos was one of the cinema's greatest location scouts and shooters, and the kids' peregrinations allow him to take in - and show us - the unexpected futurism of Greek railway stations, highways that vary from the spectacularly incomplete to the impossibly lonely, and a procession of small, out-of-the-way, never-before-filmed towns and villages, some frozen in time by snow, as Pompeii was by volcanic ash, others as abandoned as the bergs in Bela Tarr films. (Look closely, and you may be able to spy a sign hanging in every window: gone walking.) This camera gravitates towards beaches that resemble limbos between this world and the next; yet Angelopoulos is just at home in a roadside cafe where two truckers are squaring off over a waitress. He could do profound, but he also understood the fundamental pettiness of this universe, and the people within it.

That landscape increasingly darkens, saddens, as if grey clouds were moving in over the film. The children seem to get no closer to finding their pa, and after an hour of merrily hopping into the backs of strangers' trucks and buses, the runaways' luck is seen to run out in one crushing shot of the girl being dragged into the back of a lorry parked in Greece's drizzliest lay-by. (Maybe it's the suspicious way in which the world now turns, but even a kindly twentysomething actor's interest in the girl seems somehow curious.) Yet we, too, come to feel the need for what the protagonists are setting out for in the first place: protection, some shelter, both from those who would exploit them, and from the rain lashing down on their heads. It is as the actor asks, channelling Rilke: "If I were to shout, who would hear me out of the armies of angels?" (Angelopoulos dangles that question's profoundly humanist corollary: that on this Earth, all we really have is one another.) Suffice to say, the film's seriousness and sincerity shames a lot of what passes for cinema today; think for even an instant of all those children who've set out across Europe in the decades since, in fragile hope of making a better life, and this Landscape becomes extraordinarily moving.

Landscape in the Mist is now streaming via MUBI.