The big bang: "How to Blow Up a Pipeline"

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves retooled for more immediate thrills, and the possibility of bigger, louder bangs yet. Falling in stride with a rainbow coalition of concerned young Americans as they descend on West Texas - oil country - with direct action in mind, Daniel Goldhaber's film initially comes off as a touch diffuse and withholding. We join the group in the middle of enacting their latest, ambitious counterattack, and only get flashes of backstory - how each of them got here, why they're doing this - at critical junctures in the operation. These are brisk and to the point; there's always a clock somewhere, ticking or counting down. One activist (American Honey's Sasha Lane, the most recognisable of these fresh faces) has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and so has arguably less to lose in making a mark or a stand. About the buzzcut-sporting, military-looking dude (Jake Weary), we learn even less, save that the oil company has been threatening to occupy his farmland, and that he really seems to enjoy expectorating into bottles. (His loaded holster, at least, betrays him as someone with access to the heavy-duty weaponry one might need to overturn the status quo.) A scattering of names across the screen; no pack drill. Yet the film has been shrewdly adapted, appearing to have internalised a non-fiction book (by the Swedish author Andreas Malm) that might in other hands have served as the basis for documentary. I wouldn't advise seeing How to Blow Up a Pipeline if you were looking for specific, step-by-step instruction on how to assemble a bomb. (It's false advertising, in that respect.) Yet the characters here all seem to have read, absorbed and clung to the information Malm was disseminating. It feels like the kind of well-thumbed tome the authorities might find among these kids' belongings, stuffed down in a badly charred backpack, should things not go according to plan.

The Reichardt film was finally defined by the characteristic ambivalence of its maker: she was sympathetic to her activists up to a point, but even then tended to regard them as muddled, overly suggestible, more than a little lost. Goldhaber, by contrast, never doubts his protagonists' motives; he takes them for given, which is one reason the new film is both more straightforward and more immediately involving. (Reichardt's film was surveillance; Goldhaber's is embedded reportage.) Several years further down the line, climate action is now a pressing enough concern that it can draw in not just the Trustafarian crusties of eco-warrior stereotype, but passing thrillseekers (represented here by Lukas Gage and Kristine Froseth as a post-Greta Bonnie and Clyde, so turned on by their task they make out at one extraction site), online malcontents, and even grown-ups as diverse as Weary's terse homesteader and Léa Seydoux's mum in the recent One Fine Morning; it may be the one issue on which bipartisan consensus remains possible. (Whether you want to plant seeds or a flag, you still need a planet.) Goldhaber's collective want to do the right thing, and have the energy, resources and willingness to do it, but they're up against a system that has long known how to minimise disruption, even as it maximises destruction. They also display an enforced restlessness that can only make us jittery whenever they're found mixing chemicals or transporting drumfuls of ammonia. The film around them is quietly efficient, establishing personalities and schisms in the ranks without undue showboating or speechifying, and gradually converting one small act of resistance into a matter of life and death. With each lurch towards the objective of the title, Goldhaber lays out his own carefully articulated position on activism. It can be haphazard, yes, and often as messy as loosing soup on a Van Gogh or powder paint on pristine Crucible baize. It may also be the most urgent thing any of us ever do as the world burns.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

Top ten films at the UK box office (for the weekend of April 21-23, 2023):

1 (1) The Super Mario Bros. Movie (PG)

2 (new) Evil Dead Rise (18) **

3 (2) Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (12A) **

4 (3) John Wick: Chapter 4 (15)

5 (4) Air (15)

6 (new) Missing (15)

7 (5) Renfield (15) **

8 (new) Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan (15) **

9 (7) The Pope's Exorcist (15) **

10 (new) The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Three Colours Red

2. Polite Society

3. Pacifiction

4. How to Blow Up a Pipeline

5. One Fine Morning

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Avatar: The Way of Water (12) ***

2 (new) Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (12)

3 (6) M3gan (15) ***

4 (new) Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend (12)

5 (new) Plane (15)

6 (2) Roald Dahl's Matilda: the Musical (PG)

7 (3) Elvis (12) **

8 (5) Top Gun: Maverick (12) ****

9 (10) Dune: Part One (12) **

10 (new) Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (18)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Saint Omer

2. Alcarràs

3. Living

4. M3gan

5. Corsage

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Beetlejuice (Sunday, five, 4.05pm)

2. Shadowlands (Tuesday, BBC2, 11.15pm)

3. Moana (Sunday, BBC1, 3pm)

4. The Wife (Sunday, BBC2, 10.45pm)

5. Face/Off [above] (Friday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

The girl who leapt through time: "Suzume"

The anime nuts' persistence has paid off, judging by last weekend's box-office figures, giving the Japanese writer-director Makoto Shinkai the biggest UK opening of his career with his latest film Suzume. We're still playing catch-up, of course, and part of that process has been trying to establish whose footsteps Shinkai might be following in. Despite multiple nods and references dotted throughout the new film, it may not be Hayao Miyazaki, the industry legend to whom Shinkai was initially positioned as a worthy spiritual successor. Instead, he increasingly strikes me as one of those directors who makes their name and fortune by working subtle-to-negligible variations on a similar set of ideas and themes - a felt-tip equivalent of Hirokazu Kore-eda, maybe, or Hong Sang-soo, at a stretch. (I bring in Hong, because Shinkai's work to date has seemed a comparably niche concern, where Miyazaki's was always too imaginative not to cross over.) To those who caught the recent revivals of 2016's Your Name and 2019's Weathering with You, much of Suzume will seem familiar. Again, we have a snub-nosed teenage protagonist; again, they're caught up in a dire environmental crisis tethered to the realities of 21st century Japan, in this case a series of earthquakes caused by a rip in the space-time continuum. Again, the efforts to halt disaster are scored by late-period emo kids Radwimps, practically Shinkai's house band at this point. But the canvas has expanded: rather than a small town or city centre, our heroine Suzume (voiced by Nanoka Hara) and her companion, a time traveller magicked into the form of a three-legged children's chair, have to traverse the whole of Japan, pursuing a talking kitten who may also be the key to closing this loophole.

That mini-synopsis hopefully gives you a sense of how much AFS (Arbitrary Fantasy Shit) Suzume requires the non-adolescent viewer to swallow: its mechanics recall the Gozer-and-Zuul business of 1984's Ghostbusters, but here they're centralised and approached dead straight - or as straight as one can, given that two key components are an ambulant chair and a talking puddycat. (Sidebar: it seems apt that only Suzume can see the bristling red vapour trail that denotes the tear in the universe, or the evil it looses, or whatever it is; it corresponds to a new, green generation who are vastly more aware of the threat now facing the planet than their jaded elders, but also the way anime fans have traditionally seen more at stake and of interest in these films than the general viewer. Another difference between Shinkai and the essentially universal Miyazaki: the former knows exactly the demographic he's targeting.) You will certainly require a tolerance for an identifiably Japanese strain of cutesiness: the cat becomes a social media phenomenon, making it easier for Suzume to track its whereabouts, while the chair briefly becomes the plaything of two wide-eyed, helium-voiced toddlers. An early dream sequence establishes our heroine has abandonment issues that need working through - though these yield the most Miyazakian (and most moving) material in the film, when it becomes clear there is an adult at the helm, looking back fondly and not a little wistfully upon the vulnerability of youth. Viewed askance, as I seem fated forever to do when confronted by Shinkai's wispily inchoate, sixth-formish plots, it's also clear he gets his pacing absolutely right this time: Suzume romps along by train, car, pushbike and foot, each bounding leap forward both a nod to the anime form's serial roots and a gift to characters and viewer alike, reassuring us that the closure we seek will arrive sooner rather than later. I still think Miyazaki would frown at Shinkai's beautifully detailed studies of McDonald's hamburgers and Uber Eats couriers; this is an animator from another, more brazenly commercial universe. (Artistic purity may be a privilege nowadays; those pastels don't pay for themselves, you know.) Still, for the most part here, Shinkai does exactly what the eco-activists would have us do: tread lightly while moving urgently in the right direction.

Suzume is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Trouble in paradise: "Pacifiction"

One way of approaching Albert Serra's Pacifiction - perhaps the most useful way of approaching Albert Serra's Pacifiction - is to imagine what Apocalypse Now would have been like had it spent the entirety of its 160 minutes upriver with Kurtz. We find ourselves in latter-day Tahiti, under skies the colour of dubious tiki bar cocktails, as guests of one Monsieur De Roller (a High seems to have gone missing in transit), French High Commissioner of Polynesia. This is a role in which you instinctively feel Gerard Depardieu would have excelled, before the actor became too problematic to work with; in his place, we have Benoît Magimel, a little more filled out than usual as the robust image of neo-colonial privilege, lording around the island in a Del Monte suit and floral shirts, looking for all the world like someone who was big (or maybe just acceptable) in the 1980s and was asked to leave town in a hurry shortly thereafter. Instead of a plot, Serra initially lays on a series of official engagements, floating a persuasive sense of an idyll heading towards stagnation, a paradise despoiled: De Roller spends his spare time backstage, hitting on the staff or redirecting ceremonial dances, at a nightclub that operates somewhere between Rick's in Casablanca and Studio 54, allowing visiting dignitaries and passing sailors to rub up against the locals' exposed flesh. The ambient beats therein help cover up other rumblings: rumours the French are to resume nuclear testing in the area, a slow-burning kerfuffle involving a Portuguese diplomat who claims to have had his documents stolen. In both cases, we are invited to wonder how much De Roller knows about these things. At all points, you wonder how long it will be before bodies start washing up on these golden sands.

We have a fair bit of time to wonder, all told. Pacifiction proceeds at the pace of a resort caught in the off-season and falling lazily into disrepair, as cliffs do into the sea; even when it becomes apparent that the Portuguese diplomat, found spark out on a sunbed, requires medical attention, five or ten minutes pass before De Roller deigns to summon the doctor. Life and death go on here, side-by-side, mostly indifferently. As in 2016's The Death of Louis XIV and 2019's semi-notorious 18th century dogging saga Liberty, Serra is apparently engaged in a form of widescreen portraiture, using this extra time to take in the full extent of the scenery, the crime scene within it, and the rot and decay within that. The funny thing is - and I should underline that Pacifiction is a funny old film, in many respects - he's a portraitist who allows his subjects an unusual degree of freedom. It most often seems to be the actors who are organising what any given scene is about, determining among themselves where the characters go and what they say; it may not have been the case on set, but in the film Serra appears more interested in the shadowy figures lurking at the margins of his frame, while his delegation of responsibilities to the performers yields surprising turns of conversation. Consider the character referred to throughout only as "the Admiral" - an old soak (Marc Susini) connected in some way to the submarines that pop up in the bay like alligators sensing weakness - suddenly confiding to the shirtless young man next to him that he's a big fan of recreational substances. Loose lips may or may not sink ships; either way, it's clear that in De Roller's Tahiti, as in the film, anything goes.

What's truly unexpected - confounding, even - is that, despite its hefty running time and deliberate air of listlessness, Pacifiction is riven with tension and intrigue. In its idiosyncratic way, it's actually more involving than recent commercial endeavours in this field (The White Lotus, Triangle of Sadness) because from a very early stage Serra establishes the threat facing Tahiti comes from every direction: you don't feel you can let your guard down and relax into the scenery, because you sense something dreadful could happen at any moment. (Doubly so after relations between De Roller and the understandably anxious locals take a turn for the chilly.) Diffuse as that threat might sometimes seem, the film benefits not inconsiderably from retaining Magimel as a focal point, albeit a more than faintly elusive and slippery one. Bloviating and mansplaining, scattering pocketfuls of empty promises where'er he goes, wasting vast amounts of time and resources doing anything but the job of protection he's been put here to do, his De Roller is a mightily accurate sketch of power gone to seed; he reacts to the mildest complaint against him as if - you've guessed it - he's the real victim here. Serra knows he can always cut away to that scenery whenever the rot threatens to get too sickly (as the infamously nocturnal and squalid Liberty couldn't): his overviews of the island's rolling hills and waves speak not just to great natural beauty, but to the powerhouse this Tahiti could be under stronger leadership, or just left to its own devices. Elsewhere, the film's vision of a political class drifting entirely out of touch with the needs of a people begins to feel almost needling in its familiarity. Make the skies greyer, and Pacifiction could easily be set on an island far closer to home.

Pacifiction is now showing in selected cinemas, and available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema and the BFI Player. 

Repossessed: "Evil Dead Rise"

Call it the luck of the Dead, if you will, but here's a franchise that appears to have been especially well-managed, in the main. Since Sam Raimi's original trilogy concluded in the early 1990s, the Evil Dead series has given us a solid 2013 reboot, running through a similar neck of the woods with fresh faces and an improved budget, and - better yet - the gloriously splattery Ash vs. Evil Dead for cable TV, catching us up with Bruce Campbell's series talisman. Evil Dead Rise, which presents as a further reboot, hews closer to the former than the latter (it's not really going for laughs, which is both its strength and a limitation/flaw), but what it actually suggests above all else is what an Evil Dead movie might have looked like had the series been initiated within the studio system in that window of time separating The Exorcist from Poltergeist. It's some way slicker than anything Raimi signed his name to, the money it saves on actors having been spent elsewhere on sets and state-of-the-art sound design, but it's also more of an ordeal, in a way I fear is likely to scare newcomers (and possibly even some long-term fans) off. The lakeside opening is but mere feint, frontloaded action; the bulk of the movie takes place indoors, around an expensive-looking recreation of a tumbledown apartment block marked for imminent demolition. The focus is now on a tight but lopsided family unit: two sisters (Alyssa Sutherland, who could pass for Olivia Wilde, and Lily Sullivan, who could pass for Parker Posey), three kids, one of whom stumbles across that book with the Ed Gein cover and the outré illustrations (and, in this iteration, Venus flytrap-like binding, a del Toro-ish organic flourish) while exploring the basement in the wake of an earthquake. Of course opening it proves ill-advised: the wind redoubles, the camera does that low charge across the ground that Raimi encoded in the series' DNA, and we wind up with an Evil Dead movie in a setting just different enough from what's gone before to get at least the suits interested.

The writer-director is the Irishman Lee Cronin, and the film is at its strongest early on, when demonstrating what Cronin learnt on his impressive 2019 breakthrough The Hole in the Ground. The opening half-hour sets up a promisingly gnarly, fraying set of relationships - and that earthquake generates another, literal rupture - while pulling the franchise in the direction of a new dynamic. Instead of Raimi's solitary, indomitable, overburdened and underqualified hero - and don't forget Campbell was just about all the series could afford back then - we now have a group of concerned women of various ages attempting to pull one another out of the void. Pity, then, that the second half only makes one wonder what the point of this extended set-up was. The film doesn't get any deeper for it; the women are allowed flickers of personality, but mostly remain empty vessels, to be possessed, bashed about and finally reduced to offal. Carnage takes priority over character development. If you're showing up purely for that, you'll be fine, but even here, it's clear there's been some kind of trade-off. Bringing the Evil Deads indoors ups the intensity, while losing the wildness and fun. Cronin evidently has the technical clout, keeping his widescreen frames busy, and his details (flies on eyeballs, cheesegraters on legs) suggest very precise storyboarding. Yet he hasn't as yet got Raimi's flair and showmanship. Instead, Evil Dead Rise finds itself possessed by a deadening fanboy seriousness that expects to elicit applause for having the characters chant "dead by dawn" at a pivotal juncture, and for engineering the kind of slavishly obvious Kubrick homage for which critics used to deduct stars back in the day. Points for spraying multiplex screens with more grue than they've witnessed for many years; points off for being so grimly mechanical about it.

Evil Dead Rise is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

Top ten films at the UK box office (for the weekend of April 14-16, 2023):

1 (1) The Super Mario Bros. Movie (PG)

2 (2) Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (12A) **

3 (3) John Wick: Chapter 4 (15)

4 (4) Air (15)

5 (new) Renfield (15) **

6 (new) Suzume (PG) ***

7 (5) The Pope's Exorcist (15) **

8 (6) Mummies (U)

9 (7) Shazam! Fury of the Gods (12A)

10 (new) Der Rosenkavalier - Met Opera 2023 (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Three Colours Red

2. Pacifiction

3. One Fine Morning

4. Raging Bull

5. Suzume

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Avatar: The Way of Water (12) ***

2 (2) Roald Dahl's Matilda: the Musical (PG)

3 (3) Elvis (12) **

4 (6) Hop (U)

5 (5) Top Gun: Maverick (12) ****

6 (4) M3gan (15) ***

7 (16) Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (PG) ***

8 (10) Puss in Boots: the Last Wish (PG) ***

9 (28) Ticket to Paradise (12)

10 (14) Dune: Part One (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Saint Omer

2. Alcarràs

3. Living

4. M3gan

5. Corsage

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Back to the Future (Sunday, ITV1, 3.30pm)

2. Stand by Me (Saturday, five, 12.35pm)

3. The Secret Garden (Saturday, five, 4.10pm)

4. Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.30am)

5. The Personal History of David Copperfield [above] (Sunday, Channel 4, 12.05am)

The lost boys: "Renfield"

Renfield has one very sound, pretty funny idea close to its centre, which is to redo Bram Stoker's Dracula as a workplace comedy. Its Robert Renfield - the realtor the vampire turned into a bug-munching familiar, memorably embodied by Tom Waits in the '92 version, and here by Nicholas Hoult in the gap between seasons of The Great - is now fully cognisant of the abuses rained down on him by his murderous employer, and seeking some form of redress. This Dracula, repositioned as literature's oldest Horrible Boss, is played by Nicolas Cage under varyingly elaborate layers of latex as the character recovers from an early immolation that doesn't seem to humble him any: still the Count treats Renfield like crap, before reeling him back into the corpse-snatching fold with the odd insincere compliment. The disappointment with the altogether hectic film that follows is that, at a crucial point in its genesis, someone clearly decided this promising idea wasn't in itself enough to sustain the movie. Instead, Cage and Hoult find themselves dropped in the middle of a non-canonical gang war, initiated by Mob boss Shohreh Aghdashloo and her useless, posturing offspring Ben Schwartz against a trio of ska-fanatic coke dealers, with Awkwafina waving her arms around in the middle as the traffic cop attempting to restore public order. Only in the closing reel does the movie start to work through the Renfield-Dracula dynamic; most often here, the two leads resemble bystanders caught in somebody else's crossfire. Did everyone involved go into this expecting sequels that might develop the central relationship (and which now look unlikely to appear)?

By all accounts, Renfield flopped last weekend, which is understandable, but it's a funny sort of fuck-up: a major studio comedy that troubles to find its own visual aesthetic (shoutout to Rob Renfield's multicoloured comeback sweater, early frontrunner as 2023's Most Desirable Wardrobe Item), but also labours through far too many competing ideas than is healthy for a 93-minute picture. Director Chris McKay adopts much the same approach as he did in 2017's The Lego Batman Movie, spitballing frantically and lobbing whatever's to hand at the screen, only to a point where the new film quickly begins overwriting itself, and losing sight of what's funniest. The A, B and C plots in Ryan Ridley's script are at least semi-diverting, but they don't criss-cross gracefully, as they would on TV, so much as stumble repeatedly over one another, jamming up any hope one might have of getting on this precise wavelength. Granted, McKay's live-action animation approach pays off in the stunt sequences: here, you feel the film cracking its knuckles, and having the fun it wants us to have. (It also allows us to witness Hoult doing extraordinary things with a man's severed arms.) But what's in between can't fully work itself out: it's like some awkward crossover episode involving characters from The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine and What We Do in the Shadows. (And it's too busy rushing through its multiple narrative pile-ups to allow its actors to be properly funny, as Awkwafina is on Nora from Queens and Hoult really is on The Great.) It gives good, imaginative splatter, but the issue isn't with arterial spray as with the chaotic framework it's been hosed over. You come away with a renewed appreciation for the brisk clarity of plotting and hyper-efficient gag delivery of our best sitcoms; set against those, Renfield seems... well, clotted.

Renfield is now playing in cinemas nationwide.