Save it for later: "The Fall Guy"

The Fall Guy sees Hollywood going postmodern again, much as it did with 1995's The Brady Bunch Movie, 2012's 21 Jump Street and - yes - last year's wildly successful Barbie. It takes the core premise of Glen A. Larson's early Eighties teatime telly favourite (genial stuntman gets into scrapes), then tarts it up with latter-day faces, non-stop winks to the audience that they're watching a silly little (big) movie based on a thin sliver of a show, and endless stunts that somehow looked far more exciting in the trailers we've spent the best part of the last six months sitting through. Nothing else matters, as signalled by the way David Leitch's film shrugs blithely and artlessly past a career-threatening injury its hero suffers inside the opening ten minutes: "no big deal" seems to have been everybody's watchwords here. Drew Pearce's script shambles towards a plot reversal of sorts - Ryan Gosling's Cole Seavers steps off set and into a real-world intrigue involving missing movie star Aaron Taylor-Johnson - then chops back-and-forth between plots A (Hollywood cover-up) and B (Seavers' courtship of director Emily Blunt) with no particular elegance, rhythm or reason. Look, the film pleads with its audience from a very early stage, it's a film based on a show you've most likely forgotten about, so cut us some slack, OK? You'll get to hang out with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt for a couple of hours, so that's something, right? What more do you want from a project like this: rigour, thought and wit? Narrative coherence and character continuity? Basic directorial competence?

Let's give The Fall Guy this: it's amiable, which is no small commodity in the modern blockbuster space. It's even sort of striking to see a $130m summer event movie that looks so conspicuously slung together in the minutes before the cameras started rolling. Yet the mutterings you've heard this long weekend as the film limped to #1 at the box office - that it's not quite funny enough, be that not as funny as it should have been, not as funny as Barbie, or not as funny as it would have been had it been made five years either side of the millennium - aren't in any way inaccurate. Leitch, who's spun a co-director credit on the first John Wick into a licence to make meh (Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Hobbs & Shaw, Bullet Train), is primarily on board for the stunts, and appears to have left his performers to work through the dialogue scenes themselves. That may explain why Blunt (as the blondest movie character ever to bear the surname Moreno) sounds decidedly under-miked for her first few scenes, and why she pulls on a latex monster mitt in a bid to enliven a midfilm telephone call (something to do, innit); it also allows Teresa Palmer to grab an early laugh by hurling the distinctively Aussie epithet "povvo" at Gosling, before her character disappears in the edit. Indeed, The Fall Guy is so loose for so much of its running time I wondered whether some critical connecting tissue had been yanked from it, perhaps to convert a punchier, adult-leaning thriller into family-friendly knockabout. With its meandering plotting and apparently randomised cutting strategy, it will likely finish as the least directed-seeming studio movie of summer 2024; Leitch believes his role entails no more than emptying vast binbags full of stuff out onto the screen. Taylor Swift songs! A Miami Vice jacket! Lee Majors! Doggos! The Ted Lasso lady! A surprise cameo from an actor who's been in so many indifferent movies and ad campaigns it really counts as no coup whatsoever! This may be all our bigger movies are nowadays: a waiflike barrow boy's increasingly optimistic call of "Stuff! Come and get your stuff!"

They've kept the stunts, at least, although the Leitch idea of stunts is heavily pixellated, punches fixed in post, and he has an unfortunate habit of cutting away from analogue activity just at the point where it starts to get interesting - as a car approaches the end of a ramp, say - so as to patch in visibly reshot material. Much of this Fall Guy has the look of a missed or botched opportunity, if truth be told. You could well imagine a Fall Guy that shot its protagonist out of a cannon from one set to another, and riffed on different kinds of movies and stunts, much as Barbie riffed on differing ideas of femininity. Yet the romance subplot means the one we've ended up with must return doggedly to the one set, where Blunt's Jody is shooting a duff-looking, Rebel Moon-style sand-and-sci-fi actioner. The idea of the movies Pearce is sending up doesn't really need spoofing, and the action that follows from it gets no more dynamic for sticking The Darkness over the top. There are jokes about Thelma & Louise and autocorrect that are so old I think my dad might have workshopped them; and even the mocked-up movie posters on the walls of Cole's trailer (for the likes of "Bad Cop Good Dog" and "The Puncher 2") look secondhand, as if they'd been used before in an episode of 30 Rock or Arrested Development. Well - hey, look - no big deal, as the film grins and shrugs in its very Goslingesque way. Yet after a trend-bucking 2023, Hollywood would appear to be going backwards again so far in 2024, the dream factory becoming a meme machine that demonstrates no real need for anything so antiquated as scripts or directors. You could watch The Fall Guy on a long-haul flight and not feel unduly huffy or ripped off - but absolutely nothing here is forceful or inspired enough to push back against the online commonplace that insists Gosling (and the rest of us) would do better lobbying for a Nice Guys sequel instead.

The Fall Guy is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "Damnation"

Six years before Sátántangó, and just before the lifting of the Iron Curtain, the Hungarian director Béla Tarr and novelist-turned-screenwriter László Krasznahorkai collaborated on 1988's magnificently doomy Damnation, effectively a Postman Always Rings Twice for the Mitteleuropan flatlands. It begins with the end of an affair. With the woman, billed only as The Singer (Vali Kerekes), calling time on this extramarital fling, her spurned lover Karrer (Miklós Székely B.) hops from bar to bar (one ominously called the Titanik), and inveigles himself in criminal activity - setting up his beloved's husband - as a means of filling the spare time he has on his hands. This slow creep into the shadows is shot in what would later be identified and labelled as the Tarr style: the camera seemingly on casters, proceeding at the pace of a funeral procession past a cast of beat-up or otherwise worndown sadsacks counting the flies in their lukewarm beer. (An early musical number, if that's not too energetic a phrase for it, features the singer lamenting "It's over/All over" like a Dietrich who's never known happiness in her life.) Damnation, exhaustion and frustration are hereby inscribed as fundamental to the human condition - or, at least, simply more central to the human condition than the exhilaration and elevation the American movies of the same period were trading in. In short: we are well and truly down among the dead men.

On the surface - if you caught five minutes on TV in the early hours - Damnation would appear pure arthouse self-parody: black and white and bleak as fuck, moving like molasses, full of glum-faced people pronouncing lines like "I like the rain" while staring numbly into the middle distance. Yet Tarr gives this aesthetic a new vigour. His roving peeping-Tom of a camera drills into the very depths of these scenes and relationships; his players are so drained they go round the back of lifelessness and become as compelling as zombies again. They're doomed, of course - you don't call a film that if your lovers are going to skip arm-in-arm into the sunset - but this is a universe where perdition comes in a thousand and one forms, re-introducing an element of narrative uncertainty. Will one of these wraiths summon up the passion to commit a crime of passion? Drink themselves to death? Drown in the relentless downpours? Be ripped to shreds by the stray dogs roaming these streets? Drop dead from inertia, lethargy, anomie? Or will they merely be brained by a lump of coal loosed from one of the mining carts passing overhead? Being archly modernist creations, Krasznahorkai's damned bang on about being characters in a story, but they're equally suckers and patsies in a conspiracy the movie invites us to participate in. That camera circles these bombsite locales as if sensing this is what will be left behind, like a jilted lover, once these people finally disappear from sight, as is their fate: rarely can a film's signs of life (the distant sounds of pick on rock, a concluding piss-up) have registered more like signs of death foretold. In a way, it's no more than brilliant pastiche: a postmortem of the movies its makers watched through jaundiced eyes on flickering monochrome sets. (There's noir here, yes, but also a lot of Antonioni, who I hadn't previously thought of as a Tarr influence.) This team's masterpieces were still ahead of them, and would be entirely their own thing - but Damnation retains a potent kick and hold, like watching the water drain out of the filthiest bathtub you ever did see.

Damnation is currently available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema and YouTube.

In memoriam: Margaret Lee (Telegraph 03/05/24)

Margaret Lee, who has died aged 80, was a West Midlands-born actress who won fame overseas as a knowing, Monroe-like blonde in a series of European genre movies cranked out in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the UK, however, Lee remained largely uncelebrated – although her story could have played out very differently had a pivotal early-career audition gone in her favour.

Aged barely twenty, a fresh-faced graduate of the Italia Conti theatre school, Lee found herself in the running to play Tatiana Romanova, the KGB agent who seduces (and subsequently falls for) James Bond in From Russia with Love (1963). She lost out to the Italian newcomer Daniela Bianchi – which made it only more ironic when Lee eclipsed Bianchi to become one of Italy’s biggest female stars, chiefly by playing the love interest in 007 knockoffs and parodies.

In a series of popular comedies featuring the Italian duo Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia – including Two Jokers at the Moulin Rouge (1964) and General Custer’s Two Sergeants (1965) – Lee served as Dorothy Lamour had done in Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s Road movies, cutting through the boys’ bluff badinage with flashes of leg and wit. “It was not the career in theatre I had dreamed of,” Lee told one interviewer. “But it was acting.” 

She became a major Italian cover girl thanks to the rash of slapdash spy pastiches occasioned by the opportunistic producer Harry Alan Towers, positioning himself as a cut-price Cubby Broccoli. Our Man in Marrakesh (1966) paired Lee with Tony Randall, Herbert Lom and Wilfrid Hyde-White; in Five Golden Dragons (1967), which spliced espionage capers with the newly voguish kung fu, Lee gave a breathy rendition of the John Barry-aping theme song.

She had a dancer’s pep, appearing in twelve films in 1965 alone: “I adored it. I felt so at home on the movie set that I often would stay behind to watch filming even when I had finished for the day. We often worked very long hours but it seemed to actually give me energy rather than tire me.” Even so, she later confessed to a measure of Marilynesque regret as to how those energies had been applied: “I imagined myself in more dramatic roles, but I guess that is not how others saw me.”

Lee was born Margaret Gwendolyn Box on August 4, 1943 to a mother who’d been relocated to Wolverhampton during the Blitz. At the end of the war the family returned to London, where the young Margaret studied at Greenwich’s Roan School for Girls. (According to one contemporary, the pair spent their teenage years chasing a pre-fame Mick Jagger around the South London rail network.)

After graduating from Italia Conte, Lee successfully answered an advert in The Stage seeking dancers for the Moulin Rouge; once installed on the continent, she won a role opposite Elizabeth Taylor in the Cinecitta-shot Cleopatra (1963), but her scenes were cut from the finished film. Instead, she made her screen debut in lowlier circumstances, appearing alongside 1957’s Mr. Universe Reg Lewis in Fire Monsters Against the Son of Hercules (1962), a routine sword-and-sandals programmer.

Her sensuality was a gift for a newly permissive cinema: in Casanova 70 (1965), she was manhandled by Marcello Mastroianni, whom she described as “sweet”. Yet – like many – she endured a fraught working relationship with Klaus Kinski, the emergent wild man of European cinema, with whom Lee made a total of eleven increasingly lurid thrillers between 1966 and 1971.

Lee felt obliged to correct the record of Kinski’s characteristically unreliable, self-glorifying 1975 memoir All I Need is Love, in which the actor claimed he enjoyed threesomes with his co-star and fellow actress Maria Rohm: “This is totally untrue, and I am sorry he abased himself this way. Klaus and I were chums and he was a close friend of my husband Gino, too; there was never any sexual side to our friendship… ever. I was angry for a while, but now I forgive him.”

Returning home upon the birth of her second child in 1973, Lee booked one episode of the Gerry Anderson-produced ITV caper The Protectors (1972-74), but saw her visibility dwindle due to industry indifference: “I guess because I was known in Italy and to some extent France, but not in England. I did not think seriously of trying to work there.” Her final screen credit, at the age of forty, came with the crime comedy Neapolitan Sting (1983) opposite Treat Williams.

Lee moved decisively to Northern California in the mid-1980s, studying Stanislavski in San Francisco and working thereafter in local theatre: “I mostly thought of myself as an Italian movie actress and had never aspired to be known internationally… In retrospect, this might have been a limitation and a mistake.”

She married three times, to the producer Gino Malerba, Patrick Anderson and Walter Creighton. She is survived by two sons: the production manager Damian Anderson and Roberto Malerba, a producer on the Bond film SPECTRE (2015).

Margaret Lee, born August 4, 1943, died April 24, 2024.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of April 26-28, 2024):

1 (new) Challengers (15) **

2 (1) Back to Black (15)

3 (3) Kung Fu Panda 4 (PG)

4 (2) Civil War (15) ***

5 (4) Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (12A)

6 (5) Abigail (18) ****

7 (6) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12A)

8 (new) Spy x Family Code: White (12A)

9 (7) Dune: Part Two (12A) **

10 (8) Monkey Man (18) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Abigail

2. Love Lies Bleeding

3. Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry

4. Varshangalkku Shesham

5. Aavesham

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Dune: Part Two (12) **

2 (new) Bob Marley: One Love (12)

3 (new) Aliens (15) [above] *****

4 (18) Migration (U)

5 (7) The Holdovers (15) ***

6 (2) Dune: Part One (12) **

7 (3) Oppenheimer (15) ****

8 (new) Late Night with the Devil (15) ***

9 (14) The Equalizer 3 (15)

10 (6) Wonka (PG) ***

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Fallen Leaves

2. The Iron Claw

3. The Holdovers

4. The Three Musketeers: Part II - Milady

5. The Taste of Things

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Silence of the Lambs (Thursday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

2. Name Me Lawand (Holiday Monday, Channel 4, 1.10am)

3. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Friday, Channel 4, 12.10am)

4. Senna (Sunday, Channel 4, 11.20pm)

5. By the Grace of God (Saturday, BBC2, 1.45am)

A late comeback: "Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry"

Like life, it's almost all over before it's even begun. The heroine of Georgian director Elene Naveriani's Cannes favourite Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, 48-year-old beauty store manager Etero (Eka Chavleishvili), is introduced tumbling over the edge of a ravine and only just succeeding to cling onto this mortal coil. As a pictorialisation of what it is to hit middle age, it's uncannily accurate: a rapid descent, leaving our gal to grab whatever comes to hand in the hope of maintaining some distance between herself and a premature grave. This will prove a real kick-bollock-scramble. Once Etero returns to level ground, she throws herself around the neck and torso of the vaguely baffled Murman (Temiko Chichinadze), a married delivery driver. Only in the aftermath of the pair's first sexual encounter, on a stockroom floor, do we learn Etero has finally put paid to her virginity, her erstwhile chastity a consequence of having to raise an abusive brother and tend to an aging father in the wake of her mother's demise. Soon, we appear to be back in Poor Things territory, looking on as this latter-day maiden aunt flings herself at the outside world, armed with a renewed appetite and appreciation for life, before the Reaper can return to make a more definitive claim. On a literal, basic level, that oddball title is a list of what Etero sees atop the ravine before she tumbles backwards into a new life: either a nondescript life flashing before a woman's eyes, or nonsensical last words. (A fourth word is missing: blackness.) But it also anticipates the way Etero changes her life up, and refuses to give into expected routine. Stretching ahead of her (and us) over these two hours: a late-life discovery of sexting, Viagra and afternoon delight in a moderately priced hotel room.

This quest for greater self-determination proceeds with an organic oddness, as opposed to all that forced oddness chez Lanthimos. No fish-eye lenses are required, just Naveriani's in-all-senses curious observation of frames prone to sudden, unusual, unexpected interruption. At the end of that first sequence, just after Etero has inched her way back up to the top of the ravine, a car roars past with some sort of flamingo lilo on the roof, as if to underline the fact that most people hereabouts are having vastly more fun than our heroine. Equally, I don't quite know what to make of the gigantic filo pastries Etero becomes fond of consuming. (Asked in a restaurant whether she wants to take one or two of the slices she's ordered home with her, she raises a firm hand: why wait?) No need for expensive CGI or production design, either; here is the absurd life we would find all around us were we to take a moment to appreciate it. The idiosyncrasy extends to the casting. Tossing all traces of vanity to the wind - presumably because she too has realised life's too short - Chavleishvili would appear to have physically more in common with the rumpled Michael Stuhlbarg or the hulking Michael Shannon than the svelte, yoga-toned Diane Lane types who typically get to have midlife awakenings in our romantic cinema. Yet in her unsmiling, uningratiating, predominantly black-clad way, she remains an extremely funny, incongruous screen presence - almost exactly the last person a movie such as this would normally focus on. The risk would be Ulrich Seidl-like misanthropy, yet Naveriani remains fiercely on her protagonist's side, never more so than when juxtaposing her with the more forbidding members of this community. Why shouldn't the Eteros of this world enjoy an arc of their own, a few scattered moments of late-in-the-day triumph? It's just that the film is never sappy or sentimental about showing it. As Etero smiles at a text she receives from Murman, Naveriani occasions a priceless cut to a village elder scowling at her from the other side of the bus; that rarest thing, a genuine surprise ending, unfolds against the backdrop of a Tbilisi downpour. Here, as elsewhere in Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, life goes on - but there's absolutely nothing routine about it.

Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry is now screening in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Is That Black Enough for You?!?"

Subtitled How One Decade Forever Changed the Movies (and Me), Is That Black Enough for You?!? is the eminent US film critic Elvis Mitchell's cine-memoir of growing up in parallel with the blaxsploitation movies of the 1970s. The films under observation were cheap, trashy, often nasty - they weren't always there to make nice, and some even divided Black audiences - but as Mitchell drily observes, they were also energised, far more in touch with wider social trends and shifts than much of the era's studio product, a liberation of some haphazard kind from what had come before. An early montage deals briskly with that backstory: decades of flatly racist stereotypes, white writer-director-producer-stars (of whom Olivier and Orson Welles were merely the most prominent) who thought it perfectly natural to don blackface, Black careers that went mishandled, obscured, obliterated. In its place, Mitchell offers a vibrant parade of Black faces and bodies, seen in everything from glitzy, hyper-expensive mainstream musicals to obscure, quasi-experimental, YouTube-sourced curios. To bolster his thesis, he adds interviews with contemporary Black talent - from the overlooked Charles Burnett to the never more visible Zendaya - who benefitted from these sudden eruptions or redirections of creative energy; these esteemed and illustrious talking heads chattily and candidly address what they themselves have been looking for on screen all these years, and some explain why they haven't quite found it yet. The title, which comes from the theme song to 1970's prime blaxsploitationer Cotton Comes to Harlem, becomes the mantra Mitchell applies to the hundred or so titles that fall under his gaze and ours, another way of asking "does it do us justice?" (In a way the old studio takes on Black life more often than not didn't.)

The editorial approach isn't dissimilar to Mark Cousins' recent compendium films: first person, close-to-the-mic narration, with idiosyncratic turns of phrase that reveal the author's own interests and biases. (My impression was that Mitchell is more of a Sweet Sweetback than a Shaft guy, possibly as the former demands careful critical handling - but he also sees how both films were instrumental in the repositioning and reshaping of the Black screen protagonist.) The clips, which speak to a lifetime of wide-ranging viewing, run the gamut and should in themselves be enough to pull any cinephile in: 1940s zombie movies, where the role of the Black comic support was to roll their eyes and run screaming offscreen; recently rediscovered countercultural artefacts (1968's Uptight and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One); even Robert Downey Jr.'s ironised blackface in 2008's Tropic Thunder. It is, granted, somewhat ironic in itself to be watching Mitchell's film on Netflix, whose library of pre-2000 titles is patchy at best. Wouldn't it be great to double-bill Is That Black Enough for You?!? with 1973's Cleopatra Jones, or 1974's Uptown Saturday Night? Still, the arguments being made hold: the leads in 1964's Nothing But a Man should have enjoyed longer and vastly more successful careers, and something was very definitely going on in the Black cinema of the 1970s, even if it had to creep into view from the movies' indier fringes (1968's Night of the Living Dead) and got sent back there once Rocky Balboa replaced Muhammad Ali as America's favourite fighter and the Bee Gees repurposed the essentially Black sound of disco. After the Seventies, American movies got whiter again, and it took several more decades to course-correct.

Formally, Mitchell's film is rather foursquare, almost exactly how you'd convert a textbook or reference guide into images: it proceeds year by year, almost month by month, highlighting notable titles with a few minutes of commentary from either the director or his guest stars. If it's sometimes a little clipped in itself, that's surely because its maker was hustling to get in as much as he possibly could, but generally there's a nice, jazzy flow to these 135 minutes, and those films that did make the final cut are grabby, diverting and largely unfamiliar because undercirculated: the legacy problems of 1974 are also those of 2024. The aim appears no greater and no lesser than assembling a canon, but it's a far more extensive canon than you might have guessed from the handful of scratchy Super Fly knock-offs, and Mitchell addends those useful sidebars and footnotes that are the mark of the best critical endeavours. (Call them areas for further research.) I had no idea that The Wire's Glynn Turman, a graduate of blaxsploitation (via 1975's Cooley High) showed up in a Bergman movie around the same time (1977's The Serpent's Egg), and whatever your shade, it's hard not to be stirred by the sight of Harry Belafonte, in one of his final screen appearances before his death last year, recalling his defiant response to one of the corporate film business's drearier ultimatums: "Fuck it, I'm going to Paris." That's the spirit.

Is That Black Enough for You?!? is currently streaming on Netflix.

Mollywood nights: "Varshangalkku Shesham"

The Malayalam cinema has been enjoying substantial success not just this year but this past month, so perhaps we should permit it some measure of self-congratulation. Vineeth Sreenivasan's Varshangalkku Shesham has been composed as a would-be rousing hymn to the industry's creativity and durability, its ability to work cinematic miracles with often only limited resources; the drumbeats of its rich, keening songs become indistinguishable at times from the resounding thump of a hearty slap on the back. At the film's centre are two lifelong friends who first meet in the backwaters of late 20th century Keralan theatre and are then reunited, in something close to the present day, as showbusiness survivors, older and wiser, but also greyer, sadder and wearier. Murali (Pranav Mohanlal) is a prodigal musician and songwriter who succumbs to solitude and drink; Venu (Dhyan Sreenivasan, the director's brother) a runner turned writer-director who enjoys a decade of solid hits before losing his way. While shifting us between past and present - the title, translated into English as "Years Later", also serves as an onscreen graphic - writer-director Sreenivasan begins to riff on the way careers are made and destroyed, reputations gained and lost, and how lives switch track, sometimes gathering momentum, sometimes tailing off. Doubtless inspired by several decades' worth of real-world industry legends, it's an innately literary construction - a sort of South Indian Last Orders, with movie love swapped in for military service - announced by early scenes of courtship conducted via notes in the fly pages of college set texts. It helps that the younger versions of these characters are still of an age to dream and woo, but the first hour or so forms the strongest stretch of Malayalam filmmaking I've seen so far this year: proof you can make popular cinema without jettisoning any and every trace of poetry. In movies as in life, however, the problems come later - foremost among them how to keep it up.

For once our heroes pass into the Madras film business - versatile Venu seeing his enthusiasms embraced, Murali watching as his are subsumed and turned against themselves - VS gets both broader and more familiar. On a scene-by-scene basis: Sreenivasan has modest fun recreating the kind of movies that were made in a certain place at a particular time, as per everything from Singin' in the Rain to last year's Hindi TV standout Jubilee. In terms of characterisation, where Murali has been drawn along time-honoured, rather careworn lines as the self-loathing virtuoso who duly pisses his talent away. And in terms of overall shape, too: we pass through break-up, reunion and eventual comeback, each encountered more or less where you'd expect them to be in a film of this type. Sreenivasan pulls off individual coups here and there, such as the creation of a signature song (the movie's equivalent of "Shallow" or "That Thing You Do!") which flows through the drama, becoming the making of one creative and the undoing of another. There's still poetry present, in other words, but its lines and cadences become far less distinct, the script struggling to distinguish its behind-the-scenes war stories from the many others we've seen and heard. Late on, that poetry is replaced by Reels: local favourite Nivin Pauly injects some welcome energy as "Nivin Molly", the social media-addicted megastar headlining Murali and Venu's belated comeback vehicle. Even here, though, VS presents as inflexibly male: it could badly do with a Debbie Reynolds to set alongside its Kelly and O'Connor, the better to stop it hammering insistently away at the same nostalgic notes. For while the film remains genial in its backslapping, it's also two hours and forty-five minutes of men paying tribute to themselves, their genius, their hurt and resilience; while that's no doubt true to the structure and composition of the Malayalam film industry as it was at the millennium, in 2024 it also comes with a real air of locker-room fustiness. The great South Indian films of the past few years have demonstrated a heightened, bustling sense of community, both before and behind the camera. Sreenivasan gets some of that collective magic up on screen, but he's rather keener than you might like to frame it within the context of what is almost exclusively a boys' club.

Varshangalkku Shesham is now playing in selected cinemas.