On demand: "Kenny Dalglish"

After a pair of more experimental ventures - 2022's dance film Creature and 2024's environmental speculation 2073 - Asif Kapadia returns to what he knows (and arguably does) best: the feature-length documentary portrait of a notable public figure. Unlike previous Kapadia studies Ayrton Senna and Amy Winehouse, however, the tragedy in Kenny Dalglish's life hasn't been terminal. From an early age, Dalglish was a winner, then a champion, skipping briskly past off-pitch challenges in much the same way he did opposition defenders. (If there's any past Kapadia subject he resembles, it's a thoroughly sober Diego Maradona.) This doubtless accounts for the new doc's initially jolly, Roy of the Rovers-like framing: comic-strip credits of the kind Dalglish's fans would have pored over by bedside light back in the Seventies and Eighties, football stickers as on-screen punctuation, key goals from his Celtic and Liverpool days scored to period rock, a brief recap of Dalglish's courtship of Marina Harkins, the Glaswegian barmaid he wooed during lunchbreaks from training and soon thereafter wedded ("the best signing I ever made", as he later quipped). Here, once more, is the upward trajectory of a simpler age, when top-flight teams played, roomed, socialised and commuted together like teams, as opposed to disparate multi-millionaires flown in from all points via charter jet. Here, too, an age when football was free-to-air, where the F.A. Cup final was still a big deal, and where the biggest perk available to Liverpool players were chocolate digestives (brought in for the exclusive delectation of the Reds' self-described 'Jock Mafia': Dalglish, Souness and Hansen) rather than plain. In courting the football nostalgists among us, Kapadia seems to be enjoying himself again, waving a cinematic rattle for an inspirational figure of his youth, revisiting key matches - and great goals - on Grandstand and Sportsnight.

As a Liverpool fan himself, though, Kapadia has also internalised the significance of Heysel and Hillsborough to this particular story - and here tragedy does re-enter the picture; to contradict Bill Shankly, football suddenly appears something of far less import than life and death. After a first half of genial cheering up Wembley Way and down memory lane, Kenny Dalglish begins to gain in focus and rigour as its subject is confronted by off-the-pitch loss. Dalglish's comments to a reporter after Liverpool's eventual defeat at Heysel - "we did lose, but we didn't lose as much as some" - had already demonstrated an ability to hold the constituent elements of this world in proportion. Yet Hillsborough was the point at which a sporting figurehead fully assumed the mantle of statesman, Dalglish showing up time and again on behalf of the families bereaved that sorry afternoon, and insisting "it was our turn to be their supporters". (At one point, we even hear him directly overwriting Shankly, telling the press "football's irrelevant".) Kapadia offers a slightly more complete picture of Hillsborough's aftermath than did Stewart Sugg in his 2017 doc Kenny; indeed, the closing stretch here is so potent - and yet so compressed in its coverage of the institutional cover-up initiated by the Tory government in collaboration with West Yorkshire Police - I wondered whether Kapadia might have done better to make Dalglish at and after Hillsborough the whole film, rather than mournfully attaching it to a more conventional overview. The latter suffers from the fact Dalglish has remained to this day a somewhat guarded and private man - entirely new revelations are few and far between; the Sugg film may actually have benefitted from tempting Dalglish back out before the cameras, allowing us to parse his expressions - but the Scotsman's quiet decency in the face of outrageous slurs remains as stirring as anything his younger self achieved on the pitch. In times of turbulence for Liverpool Football Club, Kenny Dalglish stepped up and led by example; I don't doubt there are Reds fans who'd welcome him back in the dugout this very weekend.

Kenny Dalglish is now streaming via Prime Video.

In memoriam: June Lockhart (Telegraph 09/11/25)

June Lockhart, who has died aged 100, was an American actress who became a household favourite off the back of two choice television roles: first as Ruth Martin, mother to Jon Provost’s Timmy (and his unusually intuitive collie dog) in the longrunning Lassie (1954-64), then as Maureen Robinson, the matriarch of the intergalactic clan in Lost in Space (1967-69).

 
Lockhart inherited the first role from an unhappy Cloris Leachman at the start of Lassie’s fifth season, landing an Emmy nomination at the end of her first year. But it was as Lost in Space transitioned from black-and-white into colour at the end of its first season that Lockhart’s star soared: blue-eyed and redheaded, she radiated maternal warmth amid the vast cosmic void.
 
In 1967, she was voted Favourite Female Star in the annual Photoplay Awards; for years afterwards, she would be approached by fans who told her the late Sixties’ other notable Mrs. Robinson had inspired them to become scientists. As she once quipped: “I did Lassie for six years and I never had anybody come up to me and say ‘it made me want to be a farmer’.”
 
June Kathleen Lockhart was born in New York on June 25, 1925 to actors Gene and Kathleen Lockhart (née Arthur). She made her debut aged eight in a Met Opera production of Peter Ibbotson; after the family relocated to Hollywood, the young June attended Westlake School for Girls, making an uncredited film debut – alongside her folks – as Belinda Cratchit in MGM’s A Christmas Carol (1938).
 
Prominent studio work followed as the hero’s sister in Sergeant York (1941) and society belle Lucille Ballard in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). Anticipating things to come, she inherited Elizabeth Taylor’s Lassie Come Home role for the sequel Son of Lassie (1945); there was a very different brush with the furry side of life as the heroine of the Universal horror She-Wolf of London (1946).
 
She soon caught the Broadway bug, winning a Tony with the 1947 premiere of F. Hugh Herbert’s For Love or Money; “Lockhart has burst on Broadway with the suddenness of an unpredicted comet,” wrote one awestruck observer. She would return to the stage in subsequent decades: in 1979, she was directed by Peter Hall in a West Coast staging of Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce.
 
Lockhart bolstered her growing TV popularity with appearances in such popular Western series as Have Gun, Will Travel (in 1957-8), Rawhide (in 1959) and Wagon Train (between 1958 and 1960); she also served as a hostess on televised Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, while advertising Campbell’s soup and – inevitably – Gravy Train dog food.
 
She cameoed as herself on the postmodern sitcom It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (1987), advising the star on how to care for a stray collie, and described a 1995 guest spot on Roseanne as “the highlight of my career”. Later, she returned to familiar territory, playing a holographic schoolmarm in the big-screen Lost in Space (1998) before voicing the computer in Netflix’s 21st century revival of the show, her final credit.
 
Away from the cameras, she was a politics junkie from the moment she asked Harry Truman what life was like in the Oval Office (“He looked at me and said ‘it’s just like being in jail’”). She travelled with both Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson before the 1956 election, and regularly used her lifetime pass to White House press briefings, using her platform to speak out against the Vietnam War and champion progressive causes.
 
She remains among the few to have two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame – one for her film work, one for TV – but confessed entertainment wasn’t everything: “I’m not really affected whether or not the phone rings asking me to do a job. When you’re working, you’re very professional and you do the work. You know your lines and you hit your marks and your collar’s clean. [But] there is a wonderful world out there besides what you do on screen.”
 
She married twice in the 1950s, to John F. Maloney and the architect John Lindsay; both ended in divorce. She is survived by her two actress daughters with Maloney, Lizabeth and Anne.
 
June Lockhart, born June 25, 1925, died October 23, 2025. 

Monsters inc.: "Predator: Badlands"

Writer-director Dan Trachtenberg eased his feet under Hollywood's table by finding the tools to unlock long-dormant franchises. His reward for his surprisingly sinuous and profitable work on 2016's Cloverfield sequel 10 Cloverfield Lane was taking possession of the keys to the Predator series, starting with 2022's prequel Prey, a late-lockdown favourite that pitted a young Native American tribeswoman against much the same monster that had bedevilled Arnie, Carl Weathers and co. back in 1987. More so than that small-screen predecessor - a Fox production emitted into the world via Disney+ - this weekend's Predator: Badlands forms a byproduct of Disney Corp's ongoing Muppet Babyfication of all its IP. Trachtenberg and co-writer Patrick Aison have folded into the Predator universe elements of the Alien, Star Wars and Avatar franchises, much as Disney+'s recent TV hit Alien: Earth saw Noah Hawley recycling some of Blade Runner's more intriguing themes and ideas. Nothing overturns the general sense these series are done and dusted, their most compelling stories long mined, told and sold; the corporate hope is that the franchises remain big enough to generate sufficient light, heat and cash when two or more of them are bashed together like flints. Badlands' first and biggest jumpscare comes before the film's even begun with the revelation the BBFC have seen fit to award it a 12A certificate. A 12A-rated Predator spinoff is surely no right thinking person's idea of a good time at the movies, but then the new film - less Alien vs. Predator than Alien x Predator; a collab, as those who are now young enough to see it might say - isn't interested in bloody tooth-and-claw conflict so much as peacemaking and saleable synergy. Overseeing an alliance between a damaged Weyland-Yutani android (Elle Fanning) and wide-eyed, boyish Predator Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), Trachtenberg's film dares to suggest the real Predators are the friends and deals we made along the way.

It's fan fiction, then, evident as early as a deathly prologue conducted in the Predators' native tongue, and chiefly of interest for what it reveals about the insecurities of those fanboys being paid handsomely to write it. Dek is dispatched on his mission by an overbearing father - tough even by Predator standards - who doesn't believe his boy has what it takes to be a warrior; some discussion of the differences between alpha and beta males ensues. Ominous references to "the company" would indicate Trachtenberg and Aison are no less aware of the compromises that result from leaping into partnership with corporate paymasters, even as their film shruggingly signs off on every last one of them. The lateral thinking Trachtenberg brought to his Cloverfield project has gone awry here, certainly: a stray, questionable writers' room spitball - what these Predators really need is a girlfriend - accounts for the shuttling on of the angelic Fanning, with her snub nose, can-do attitude and undying fascination with the finer points of Predator lore ("that plasma sword is interesting"). The absence of any real dramatic weight stems from a sense all of this is happening on - or has been generated by - a messageboard far, far away. The action is heavily digitised; the kills kept forever out of shot. We know the razor grass and the plants that fire paralysing darts won't do too much harm, because a) we're deep in franchise territory, where everybody gets out alive and b) that certificate serves as both spoiler and as good a review as any. This is Predator only, you know, for kids. If Badlands functions at all, it's as corporate housecleaning - allowing a studio to fold its franchises together - and/or mere technical exercise: the VFX wonks push the buttons that yield yet more merchandisable bugs, while the audience is once more reimmersed into the same virtual sci-fi environments as James Cameron's third Avatar film, opening next month and prominently trailed beforehand. Yes, some screenings of Badlands are in 3D; yes, you'll need glasses for that; yes, you'll have to pay extra for something that appears so conspicuously reduced. This kinder, gentler, live-laugh-prey confection - which ends, I kid you not, with a Predator forming his own clan with a possible wife and a big furry cat creature, and only the prospect of some future Disney+ sitcom (Predator's Nest?) lurking around the corner - operates under the misapprehension that everyone who thrilled to the 1987 original emerged thinking well, that was good, but I hope someone eventually does a version of it for children and nerds (if, indeed, there's now any distinction between the two). Make Predators fearsome again, that's what I say.

Predator: Badlands is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 31-November 2, 2025):

1 (new) Bugonia (15) **

2 (2) Regretting You (12A)

3 (re) Back to the Future (PG) *****

4 (1) Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (12A)

5 (4) Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie (U)

6 (5) Black Phone 2 (18)

7 (6) I Swear (15) ****

8 (3) Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc (15) **

9 (8) Pets on a Train (PG)

10 (7) One Battle After Another (15) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Back to the Future

2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

3. Hedda

4. Roofman

5. Die My Love

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (13) Superman (12)

2 (1) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12) **

3 (25) Weapons (18) ***

4 (2) The Fantastic Four: First Steps (12) **

5 (6) Practical Magic (12)

6 (5) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

7 (3) Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (PG)

8 (38) It: Chapter One (15) **

9 (22) It: Chapter Two (15) **

10 (8) The Conjuring: Last Rites (15) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Battleship Potemkin

2. The Curse of Frankenstein

3. Misericordia

4. Sinners

5. F1: The Movie

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp [above] (Wednesday, BBC Two, 2.35pm)

2. In Which We Serve (Tuesday, BBC Two, 3pm)

3. Men in Black (Sunday, Channel 4, 6.10pm)

4. Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (Saturday, ITV1, 4pm and Thursday, ITV1, 11.20pm)

5. The Wooden Horse (Friday, BBC Two, 2.45pm)

"The Run" (Guardian 03/11/25)

The Run ***

Dir: Paul Raschid. With: Roxanne McKee, George Blagden, Dario Argento, Franco Nero. 90 mins. Cert: 15

The 32-year-old writer-director Paul Raschid is surely too young to recall the multiple endings of 1985’s Clue and those hotly traded Choose Your Own Adventure books; perhaps subsequent, digitised RPGs left this filmmaker with his penchant for interactive cinema. Either way, intrepid souls heading to Whitechapel’s Genesis between now and New Year will once more take up glowsticks to determine their path through the woods of Raschid’s latest horror-thriller. Again, The Run demands split-second judgement calls one may not be accustomed to making slumped under a half tonne of popcorn. Again, there’s a 50/50 possibility you won’t get what you vote for; as our own Phil Hoad wrote of Raschid’s 2022 endeavour The Gallery, this feels an appositely post-Brexit format.

The path here is literal: we’re redirecting fitness influencer Zanna (Roxanne McKee) as she circles Lake Garda on what proves an eventful morning jog. Further synopsis would inevitably be provisional, but the interactive element begins with some light stretches – choices of music or podcast while running, and whether to greet passing locals – before turning existential as our heroine attracts masked pursuers. As your Guardian correspondent, I was both contractually and constitutionally bound to propose kindness wherever possible, but my lively Saturday night crowd chose anarchy at most junctures, yielding several chastening false starts and dead ends. Again, each audience’s mileage will vary; I will say that, collectively, we just about got what we deserved.

As a 21st century artefact, The Run can seem clunky: there’s still scope for Raschid to tighten the cause-and-effect, and some of his dialogue feels rough-edged when not purely functional. As an experience, it falls somewhere between uncommonly adaptable test screening and dropping by a R&D lab (or friendly D&D game). An athletic McKee makes her big moments count as the one character who comes into closest focus; huntsman Franco Nero and priest Dario Argento lurk in dispatches. Unlike some of the technological deviations now plaguing us, this one does feel hand-turned and human-derived, its narrative crowdsourced by definition. Any bad losers can always return the following night and make better informed choices – not least profiling their fellow voters going in.

The Run is now playing at the Genesis, Whitechapel. 

Bleak moments: "Dragonfly"

A few years back, Ben Wheatley announced plans for a series of films that would take the pulse of the British nation post-Brexit - a project that seems to have been put on hold after 2018's spirited Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (f.k.a., as I'm duty-bound to append, Colin, You Anus), possibly as the BBC no longer has the cash. The similarly adventurous Paul Andrew Williams now picks up that line of thought with his new state-of-the-nation drama Dragonfly, centralising as it does everyday life in those squashed provincial towns (here Castleford, passing for any number of equivalents in the South) left behind amid the death march of austerity. These particular lives are initially observed in abject isolation. A painfully frail-seeming Brenda Blethyn hobbles into shot as Elsie, a widow who sees no-one save a care worker who typically has six other clients to make time for on her daily rounds; an especially drained Andrea Riseborough, who at least has a gruff mastiff terrier to keep her company, is twitchy and tattooed as her neighbour Colleen. Two lonely women, then, two representative Brits, living side-by-side but otherwise entirely separate existences. Interventions and transgressions ensue. The dog goes hog wild on Elsie's prized flowerbeds; Colleen, in an atypically magnanimous gesture, offers to do Elsie's shopping for her by way of apology. No man is an island, even on an island where - both politically and spiritually - the people have done just about all they can to wall themselves off.

As you'd maybe expect from the above, Dragonfly shapes up as small and self-contained: visibly the kind of project you can still get made with the finite funding of the British indie sector (and with European funding starting to dry up), it finds Williams attempting to recreate the domestic bathos of certain Mike Leigh endeavours, poking around inside poky houses, tying himself to the kitchen sink. (Where this filmmaker's 2006 breakthrough sprinted breathlessly from London to Brighton, here he can barely summon the resources to go to the end of one street.) One crucial difference, however: this is a Mike Leigh scenario shot like a Michael Haneke film, as if to accentuate how unhealthy the state of play is. Williams sets the action under dishwater-grey skies, offering little in the way of sunshine; he zooms in on the two women's bungalows from the other side of the street, like the unknown cameraman in 2005's Hidden; he lingers on a table loaded with cakes and biscuits as Elsie potters offscreen to answer her front door. You may well start to dread the general direction of travel, and you'd be right to dread the direction of travel. With its 15 certificate, Dragonfly is never quite as jolting as Williams' previous film, 2021's violent revenge thriller Bull, but it's also far from the conspicuous cosiness of Williams' Silver Screen favourite Song for Marion: it forever feels more of an Andrea Riseborough film - chippy, vaguely confrontational - than it does a cuddly Brenda Blethyn vehicle, an intuition borne out by the film's closing moments.

It's not that this Britain is rotten beyond redemption: for a while, the two women strike up an alliance of sorts. It's just there's nothing much going on here: no jobs, no prospects, no sign of improvement any time soon. (In the end credits, Williams thanks his antidepressants, which scans.) For much of its running time, Dragonfly proves subtly disconcerting. The women's bond is set against a wider backdrop of carelessness; what Williams is describing is a recognisable sense of abandonment and stasis, of people being left to their own devices. Yet to demonstrate just how little is going on, he has to commit to a perilously low level of onscreen activity: an hour of scenes go by featuring nothing more dramatic than Elsie succumbing to a sneezing fit, or feeling her arthritis flare up again. Right through to January's Hard Truths - arguably the most potent Brexit movie, despite never once mentioning the B word - Leigh has actively shaped his scenes of the humdrum: his methodology identifies the conflicts in play and points his characters in a particular direction, be that tragic, comic or both. Williams, by contrast, merely shuffles his performers back and forth between bungalows, attempting to kill time before final-reel developments. The film, like the country it mirrors, ends up in limbo: neither one thing nor the other, neither here nor there. (One thing it could be: Williams' audition for Channel 5's incoming Play for Today revival.) Nudged along by its two rocksolid leads, Dragonfly is much like life, and very much like British life as it is today - but you may also start to wonder why you've paid to see it, when you can get much the same suffering at home for free.

Dragonfly opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

The tender trap: "Plainclothes"

There haven't been many legitimate thrillers that have staked out the gents' loos as a possible site of tension and unease, so the very least we might say for Carmen Emmi's feature debut Plainclothes is that it's breaking new if somewhat insalubrious cinematic ground. Emmi's protagonist, fresh-faced Officer Lucas Brennan (Tom Blyth), has climbed the macho ranks of his New York state police department thanks to his undercover work in a bland shopping mall, where he entices gay, curious and closeted men alike into the stalls, initiating the illicit activity for which these cruisers can be arrested and charged. (An early blast of OMC's "How Bizarre" pegs the action to some time in the mid-to-late Nineties, that era when George Michael became the most illustrious modern arrestee for the eternally Victorian-sounding crime of importuning.) If Lucas appears unduly conflicted, it's because - unbeknownst to his jockish colleagues - he leans this way himself, and thus intuits more than most the psychic and reputational damage his dirty work might be bringing about. Worse follows after he finds himself tumbling for one of those he tempts into the bathroom: Andrew (Russell Tovey), a self-assured married man who's played the DL game before and would seem to know his way around. The sexuality may have changed - because we're 40 years on, and the movies can be more open about such matters nowadays - but Plainclothes really isn't so different, narratively, from those sweatily heterosexual police thrillers of the late Eighties and early Nineties: once more, we're watching a cop being driven by desire to abandon the taut moral and ethical codes he'd previously set for himself. It's Someone to Watch Over Me with a janitor standing by.

Less glossy than that sounds, perhaps: the new film is, after all, a product of today's thrifty American independent sector. Rougher-edged, too, for Emmi's script proves far stronger on context than it is on scene-by-scene plotting. The action unfolds around a chilly, conservative commuter town, far from the warmth of any latter-day Gay Village; Lucas sporadically returns home to a sprawling, bickering Irish-American family (loving mother Maria Dizzia, homophobic dipshit brother Gabe Fazio). One peculiar formal conceit wouldn't have seemed so out of place in the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s: Lucas's memories and POV shots are rendered as glitchy video footage, almost as if he's decided to turn himself into a walking surveillance camera, a detached observer of desires he cannot personally fulfil. Here, and yet not for the last time, Plainclothes feels overemphatic. It's a film that often seems somewhat torn itself, unsure whether to catch the eye or walk a more downcast, realistic beat, using sharp montage to cut around the slack in sometimes wobbly material. The hook's strong enough: two men with secrets to keep moving closer and closer, with all the danger that entails. Yet the 15-rated handling offers nothing that wasn't done more forcefully in the 18-rated Stranger by the Lake and Femme, and some of the underlying psychology struck me as rather pat. Is it not a bit insulting - or at least decidedly on the nose - that our boy should fall for daddy Tovey at precisely the moment he loses his actual father? (Are gay men this easily typified?) Granted, you might say anything is plausible in the halls and bathrooms of human desire; you might also cling to the fact there is still psychology of a kind here. In its final reel, however, Plainclothes succumbs to Sundance Lab plotting - using an incriminating letter, plucked out of nowhere, to conclusively raise the stakes - so label it a mixed bag: a film that shows promise in fits and starts, even as it begins to squander its own compelling set-up.

Plainclothes is now showing in selected cinemas.