Retreats: "Keeper"

After the deafening fuss around last year's Longlegs and the box-office success of this February's Stephen King riff The Monkey, Keeper represents the first of Osgood Perkins' rapid-fire multiplex movies to have landed without much fanfare or popcultural trace. Possibly the trailers made it look overly familiar, like just another cabin-in-the-woods movie. In actuality, sitting with Perkins' latest reveals it to be less obvious in its line of creep and far less generically boilerplate. For starters, its protagonists Liz and Malcolm aren't the usual fresh-faced, carefree teens and college students, rather wary, lived-in thirtysomethings - played by Tatiana Maslany, late of The Monkey, and Rossif Sutherland, lesser-known son of the late Donald - introduced weighing up whether to take their fledgling relationship to a more committed level. The sources of tension they encounter on this weekend retreat are unusual, to say the least. The cabin itself, for one: all modernist wood and glass, its ceilings too high for comfort, its floorboards creaking underfoot, it could scarcely be any less homely or relaxing. The proximity of Malcolm's asshole cousin, holed up in an adjacent hut with a Slavic model, bodes very ill: Birkett Turton, in the role, both resembles and in many ways channels the younger Jeremy Piven. What of the mysterious chocolate cakes that so compel this camera's attention, and the occasional, Lynchian transposition of images, which appear to imply there's precious little boundary between past and present, between outside and in? What, in short, is going on here?, I found myself wondering, first after twenty minutes, again after forty minutes, and then once more around the hour mark, fully aware that Keeper is but a 99-minute movie.

In repeatedly asking that question - as you, too, surely will - one comes to understand why the reception has been so cool. Shelving the grabbier tactics deployed in Longlegs and The Monkey, Perkins here adopts a largely vibes-based approach that demands patience, moving his camera chiefly to obscure what kind of horror film this is until the closing minutes. He's not spoonfeeding or playing to the gallery this time; he's very much doing his own weird thing, which is bound to confound all those who queued up for The Conjuring: Last Rites. What kept me seated and largely intrigued was how this pared-back approach highlights this filmmaker's increasingly deft work with actors. (As the son of one notable performer, he may well be better placed than most to direct performance.) For the longest time, there's nothing much for anyone to go on save a vague sense of unease - but Perkins' leads are interesting personalities, and if Keeper is some Angela Carter-ish, overtly gendered fairytale about big bad men and the women they throw to the wolves, as one comes to suspect, neither Maslany nor Sutherland are playing it as such. She's alert and hypercontemporary, but also prone to distraction and drifting off; he's a little shambling and awkward, but in the way any late bloomer might be. Is the problem with these people or this place? All becomes clear amid Keeper's final movement, which shuffles through freaky and trippy to arrive at gloopy and oddly funny, while at every turn remaining intensely unpredictable. (To the last: what's going on here?) Whether Perkins really is the great white hope of American horror cinema, as some have posited, is anyone's guess. More so than the overcranked Longlegs, though, Keeper sustains itself while proving rather skilful besides: a yarn spun from doubts and undercurrents, backed up by subtly uncanny images.

Keeper is now showing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Dil Se..."

The first Indian movie to crack the UK box-office Top 10, 1998's Dil Se... was an intersection between three emergent masters of their craft: the gifted Tamil writer-director Mani Ratnam, the generational Hindi star Shah Rukh Khan and the increasingly prominent composer-auteur A.R. Rahman. Notice of significance was served by the opening song "Chaiyya Chaiyya" - the one on a train, granted overnight passage to the pantheon of great modern Bollywood numbers - although in retrospect this number serves as a signifier of where everyone's going, exhilarating forward progress and lushly romantic misdirection, bringing the mass audience on board before subsequent reroutings and derailments, with resulting mass casualties. The train is carrying Khan's All India Radio reporter Amarkanth Varma to Assam to interview the locals on the subject of fifty years of Indian independence; these locals prove altogether divided on how much progress has been made exactly. Here, Ratnam reveals a more critical project: weaponising a star - and a newly minted pin-up like Khan at that - to broach the story of the Tamil freedom fighters and the political violence of the 1990s. Khan can certainly put a charming face on this, setting out to court local beauty Manisha Koirala with good intentions and a boyish smile. But there are places and moments on this earth where even the best intentions and the most boyish smile offer little to no protection against the chill winds and ferocious storms of history. In many respects, it's remarkable Dil Se... became the blockbuster that it did.

This is, then, a complex text: simultaneously a love story and a political tract, Indian cinema's Titanic and Wuthering Heights as well as its Reds and Under Fire. In Rahman's title song, the two stars pitch woo while bombs go off around them: where Khan's early, starmaking vehicles saw the actor stretching his arms and legs on picturesque mountaintops, Ratnam dared to wonder what would happen if he was forced to pursue his beloved through a minefield. Given the violent tonal shifts, the film relies more than most on Khan's supreme adaptability, his abundant gifts as a storyteller: the latter are much on display in Amar's radio reports, with their on-the-hoof Foley work, as well as his interactions with those (non-professionals?) cast as the Assamese public. Yet Ratnam deploys Khan tactically, too: Amar is, for much of the duration, visibly just a boy, out of his depth and comfort zone, playing with fire. The opening scene - which finds him huddling on a railway platform, waiting for that train as a storm blows in - is but an early indicator he's going to be tested; he will spend much of the following two hours being beaten up, whether by his sweetheart's nearest and dearest, the local police, soldiers on both sides of this battle, his beloved herself, or simply the harsh realities of late 20th century India. The movies had made Khan famous, a dreamboat, an idealised swain; Ratnam, in one of those cruel but brilliant decisions on which great directorial careers often hang, made him a fool for love.

It is, then, a Mani Ratnam film above all else, the work of someone in fierce control of potentially explosive material that could, with less certain handling, have blown up in everybody's face. Almost thirty years on, we can say with some assurance that no-one - perhaps not even the laurelled Ritwak Ghatak - has shot the Indian landscape more comprehensively and more sensuously. That train song yields to a long hike through the desert, incorporating some lust in the dust; when the film does finally arrive among the mountains, Ratnam and his then-regular cinematographer Santosh Sivan (who went on to direct 1998's The Terrorist and 2001's Khan-starring hit Asoka) frame the peaks not as romantic reverie but an extreme in their own right, a place where people lose their lives. The pair eventually have to confine themselves to a more conventional destination - urban Delhi, where Amarkanth returns heartbroken come the second half - so as to tie this story up. If what follows the intermission proves more reined in than what's gone before - expressive close-ups replacing the expressionistic longshots - the film gains in tautness for it. Here, the political dovetails decisively (not to mention woundingly) with the personal, as Ratnam shows where his characters' misplaced passions finally carry them: Koirala does her most impressive work in a flashback that seeks to explain why she feels compelled to do what thousands of others have been driven to do before her. A teachable example of how to broach heavyweight social issues within a popular format - and curiously foresighted, given the especially fractious decade that followed - Dil Se... builds towards a setpiece on a par with any of the same era's Hollywood thrillers, before its unforgettable finale.

Dil Se... is currently streaming via Netflix, and available to rent via YouTube.

Germany in autumn: "Nuremberg"

As far as this awards season goes - and in as much as Nuremberg can be considered an awards-season contender - this is as trad as it gets. A film based on historical events one can infer from that loaded title alone; a film where practically the first word to emerge from a fresh-faced American GI's mouth is a period-appropriate "jiminy"; a film where everything points and builds towards some form of courtroom activity. Pre-empted (at least on its UK theatrical release) by the Sky logo, Nuremberg is also the 2025-26 contender that most resembles a television miniseries, and may even have been pitched as such at some point in its genesis. That much becomes apparent from the surfeit of main characters jockeying for attention and screen time, and the levels of crosscutting and montage writer-director James Vanderbilt has had to maintain to lend his material cinematic shape, or to make ungainly history fit the template of stirring awards-season drama. Adapting Jack El-Hai's 2013 tome The Nazi and the Psychiatrist as a means of grappling with the Allies' prosecution of the German high command at the end of WW2, Vanderbilt adopts a two-pronged line of attack. His macro narrative concerns US Supreme Court judge Robert Houghwout Jackson (Michael Shannon) and his efforts to ensure German officials were fully prosecuted in a court of law - rather than merely executed on sight - while denied the opportunity to turn the dock into a soapbox. The micro narrative, playing out in a rabbit warren of underground prison cells, involves Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), the hepcat psychiatrist pressganged into babysitting Nazi big fish Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) following the latter's capture and before the ensuing trial. In this lopsided cut, one of these throughlines proves more compelling and convincing than the other.

Much like the prosecution it describes, the film is unwieldy but noble: even those who won't see fit to applaud wholeheartedly will likely come away admiring the effort. Vanderbilt, an erratic writer-turned-director who will forever have the screenplay credit for 2007's Zodiac in his favour, has at least grasped both the importance and the implications of this particular historical moment: what it meant for Jackson to prosecute the likes of Göring, and what Kelley hoped to learn or otherwise gain from spending time in Göring's company. (An understanding of the evil the Nazis had wrought, for starters, though Kelley had also been recruited to garner the intelligence that might make that post-1945 shibboleth never again a reality.) As characterised here, Kelley is meant to be fickle and glib - as he freely admits, he's also intending to get a profitable book deal out of his endeavours - but Malek, giving by far the weakest performance here, elects to try and turn this ensemble piece into his own personal star vehicle. Introduced wowing a fellow train traveller with a card trick, this Kelley appears too busy thinking up business with props (coins, cigarettes, Aviator shades) to truly probe the darker recesses of Göring's psyche; Malek's default expression is a pop-eyed, self-satisfied smirk. I wondered whether he was the performer who first brought this book or script to the producers, making himself a non-negotiable consideration, an attached string. If not, this may well end up this season's foremost example of casting that unlocks valuable co-production finance (because - hey - Bohemian Rhapsody made the money it did) but is far from right for the role - or just wrong enough that we resent the pulling of focus. As it is, the film's most satisfying scene finds Army sergeant John Slattery dressing Malek-as-Kelley down for not comporting himself in the appropriate manner. If only Vanderbilt had done likewise.

It's a pity, because elsewhere Nuremberg upholds this filmmaker's tactic of standing back from his actors, awestruck, and allowing them to do what they do. It's a quiet, connoisseurial treat to watch Shannon, alternately grumpy and grave, feel his way through the various moral dilemmas the trial presents; the scenes with the Supreme Court judge share something of the brisk, lightly worn humanism of Matt Charman's script for Spielberg's Bridge of Spies, blessed as they are with an actor determined to keep any vulgar grandstanding or false notes at arm's length. And Crowe is terrific, giving his almost-avuncular Göring a credible accent, a sly chuckle and a growing gravitational pull. You still wouldn't cross him, but he's better company than you might think; worryingly - and as with so many of Crowe's heavyweight roles, from Romper Stomper's Hando onwards - there are points where you could convince yourself, as Kelley apparently did, that you know and maybe even like this guy. Here is a man disturbingly at ease with a world he's left in ruins, rational enough to realise he's better off behind bars and taking his chances with what he perceives to be lesser, weaker men. The viewer's reward for sticking with it for two-and-a-half hours is a last-reel showdown between these two extremes - Jackson tall and upright in every sense, Göring squat and seated - which yields the most foursquare of Nuremberg's matinee pleasures. The long path there takes in scenes that function and scenes that don't quite, and nothing in Vanderbilt's storytelling is as potent as the actual concentration camp footage the film enters into the multiplex record as evidence in favour of a guilty verdict. That may well be a given, though, and at the very least demonstrates the film's core of ideological seriousness - a useful holdover from the last century - which not even a preening dilettante like Malek can entirely obscure.

Nuremberg is now playing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Ravanaprabhu"

Written and directed by Ranjith, 2001's Ravanaprabhu was one of a pair of films the Malayalam superstar Mohanlal made in the guise of one Mangalassery Neelakandan. The character was first seen in 1993's Devaasuram (written by Ranjith but directed by I.V. Sasi) as a feckless rich kid engaged in gangland rivalry with fellow heir Mundakkal Shekharan (played by Napoleon; no, not that one); he returns here, older and greying of locks, as an entrepreneur whose feud with Shekharan, now operating as a one-armed property baron, is reignited by the actions of his own impulsive flesh-and-blood Karthi (Mohanlal again). The mass cinema, like history, repeats itself; the idea, underlined by the sequel's title, is that the two aging warhorses are the Ravana and Rama of the new, increasingly capitalist India, locked in battle to the death. This time, however, it's the bull-like Karthi - more Sonny Corleone than Michael - who takes up the fight: introduced smashing up a hospital to which Shekharan has donated, he's an agent of chaos and destruction wielding a peacocking catchphrase (savari giri giri), which is pure sound and fury, signifying nothing. Karthi became a fan favourite, but Mohanlal the foursquare character actor makes the older man by far the more interesting and affecting screen presence: uxorious yet bereft, regretful both that he cannot fully enjoy the fruits of his labours and that this turf war has re-escalated. It would be a stretch to suggest that Ravanaprabhu was a South Indian rebuke to the same year's Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, the Karan Johar-engineered Hindi blockbuster that insisted the kids were all right - it opened four months earlier, and the two movies really have as much in common as, say, Unforgiven and Clueless - but its first half, at least, gestures wearily towards the fact that each successive generation of capitalists has proven more vicious, vulgar, entitled and grasping than the last.

It's still mostly fathers, sons and the line of succession - everything the 21st century cinema would subsequently begin to back away from, in search of fresher themes - but Ravanaprabhu stands as a vivid, not to mention punchy reminder of the pleasures of the traditional, and why audiences kept faith with such stories for so long. Mohanlal has never been the most athletic or limber screen presence, but in the younger man's action sequences, he figures out a compelling way to use his bulk; despite his passing resemblance to a hairier Willie Thorne, he does look like he could do some damage. Around him, Ranjith's script fleshes out this intrafamilial struggle with various courtiers, hangers-on and lawmen, themselves torn between the old ways of doing business and a desire to forge a more peaceable future. His material may be time-honoured, but he shoots everything like a comic strip: big, emphatic close-ups, whiplash whip pans, Godardian zooms into signs and signifiers. The roadside fistfight that pre-empts the intermission - or "tea break", as it's rather charmingly styled here - finds Karthi trading blows with a police assailant in the direct path of oncoming trucks. (It also yields an especially cherishable grace note: the star casually leaning against a jeep as police reinforcements show up, as if to say "Fighting? What, me?") It softens in the second half, as Karthi - consumed by affection for Shekharan's doctor daughter (Vasundara Das) - redeems himself to some degree. Yet the whole remains fiercely entertaining right through to its fiery petrol-tanker finale, elevated by some of the period's most poetic songwriting, possessed of the intrigue and incident of a great novel or play. For a few months back at the very start of the millennium, Mohanlal appeared to be on top of the world, playing a withered Lear and a baseball bat-wielding Hamlet simultaneously, and knocking both roles clear out of the park.

Ravanaprabhu is currently available to rent via Prime Video.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of November 14-16, 2025):

1 (new) Now You See Me: Now You Don't (12A)

2 (new) The Running Man (15) **

3 (1) Predator: Badlands (12A) **

4 (new) Nuremberg (12A) ***

5 (new) Jujutsu Kaisen: Execution (15)

6 (2) The Choral (12A)

7 (new) Christmas Karma (12A)

8 (3) Regretting You (12A)

9 (9) A Paw Patrol Christmas (U)

10 (4) Bugonia (15) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Sisu: Road to Revenge

2. Wake Up Dead Man

3. Keeper

4. Nuremberg

5. Die My Love

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

2 (new) F1 The Movie (12) ***

3 (3) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12) **

4 (4) Nobody 2 (15)

5 (2) Superman (12)

6 (10) The Grinch (U)

7 (re) The Naked Gun (15) ***

8 (new) One Battle After Another (15) ****

9 (6) Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (PG)

10 (7) Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. The Curse of Frankenstein

2. The Ballad of Wallis Island

3. F1: The Movie

4. The Naked Gun

5. Bring Her Back

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. No Bears (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.35am)

2. Planes, Trains and Automobiles [above] (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)

3. Wagon Master (Saturday, BBC Two, 2.15pm)

4. C'mon C'mon (Wednesday, Channel 4, 2am)

5. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Saturday, BBC Two, 3.35pm)

In memoriam: Henry Jaglom (Telegraph 20/11/25)

Henry Jaglom, who has died aged 87, was an actor-turned-filmmaker who became a snappily dressed mainstay of the American independent scene. Though he generated few hits, his talky, testy, largely improvised pictures – notably the arresting Tracks (1976) and Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1983) – demonstrated an idiosyncratic creativity that bore the influence of his friend and mentor Orson Welles.

Jaglom first emerged amid the free-ranging New Hollywood of the 1970s; alongside fellow traveller Jack Nicholson, he’d helped edit Dennis Hopper’s landmark Easy Rider (1969). “The possibility opened up that you could really do serious and interesting work and survive commercially,” he later told the author Peter Biskind. “We wanted to have film reflect our lives.”

His directorial debut A Safe Place (1971), starring Tuesday Weld as a dreamer falling under Nicholson’s spell, was far beyond the ken of the old studio system, not least as Nicholson agreed to participate in return for a new colour television set. Village Voice called the results “experimental, audacious, demanding, arrogant and vulnerable”; at the New York Film Festival, the film sparked shouting matches. (One fan was Anaïs Nin, who called it a masterpiece.)

Shot without permits on the Amtrak network – a process that saw director and star being sporadically ejected mid-shoot – Tracks cast Hopper as a Vietnam vet transporting a fallen comrade’s coffin across America. The comedy Sitting Ducks (1980) proved a surprise arthouse success; while critic David Thomson dubbed Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, a lonely-hearts romance featuring Welles, Karen Black and a young Larry David, “a new kind of film”. 

Jaglom’s subsequent, semi-autobiographical features often burrowed down into moments of transition. Always (1985) dramatised the end of his first marriage to Patrice Townsend; Someone to Love (1987) proved Welles’ cinematic swansong; the romance Déjà Vu (1997), starring Jaglom’s second wife Victoria Foyt, marked the only time Vanessa Redgrave appeared on screen with her mother Rachel Kempson. “I don’t direct,” Jaglom insisted. “I take away. I extract. Orson said I was like an old Eskimo carving away at a walrus tusk, trying to find what’s inside.”

Henry David Jaglom was born in London on January 26, 1938 to Simon M. Jaglom, a Ukrainian Jew who ran an export business in Danzig, and his German wife Marie (née Stadthagen). The family fled Europe after the Nazis offered Simon honorary Aryan status (“he realised when they want to make you an honorary of what you’re not, it's time to leave”); they settled in Manhattan, where Henry attended Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School.

After studying English at the University of Pennsylvania, Jaglom rejected his father’s pleas to follow him into business, instead taking an allowance to study at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio; later, he wrote and directed off-Broadway, debuting on TV in the CBS social drama East Side/West Side (1963). He relocated to L.A. in 1965, appearing in several key New Hollywood texts – including the Nicholson-directed Drive, He Said (1971) – before making A Safe Place.

In the new millennium, Jaglom puzzled away at an industry he’d been increasingly forced to observe from the margins, yielding such curios as Festival in Cannes (2001), starring Anouk Aimée, and Hollywood Dreams (2006) and Queen of the Lot (2010), showcases for his third wife Tanna Frederick.

Though these dogged endeavours were true to a filmmaking ethos conceived decades earlier, the money was drying up and critical enthusiasm waning, while the distribution models had changed beyond recognition. Jaglom’s final film Train to Zakopané (2017) – a black-and-white period piece, inspired by his father’s stories of an anti-Semitic travelling companion – premiered at L.A.’s Jewish Film Festival, then practically disappeared.

Drawing altogether more column inches were Jaglom’s gossipy conversations with Welles, transcribed for Biskind’s 2013 book My Lunches with Orson, and Netflix’s reconstruction of Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind (2018), in which Jaglom cameoed as himself. His final screen appearance will be in the indie Everyone Asked About You (2025), released to streaming this October.

Jaglom wed three times; his marriages to Townsend and Foyt ended in divorce, while his marriage to Frederick was annulled in 2019. Speaking last year to the author Mary Tabor about Always and the end of his first marriage, Jaglom recalled: “I was crying and on the floor and I was desolate. And [Orson] said to me, ‘Look, if you were a songwriter, you’d be writing songs about this. If you were a poet, you’d be writing poems. You’re a filmmaker, make a film about it.’”

He is survived by his two children with Foyt, Sabrina and Simon O. Jaglom.

Henry Jaglom, born January 26, 1938, died September 22, 2025.

"Sisu: Road to Revenge" (Guardian 19/11/25)

Sisu: Road to Revenge ****

Dir: Jalmari Helander. With: Jorma Tommila, Stephen Lang, Richard Brake, Sandy E. Scott. 88 mins. Cert: 15

2022’s Sisu had the look of a one-hit wonder. A Finnish indie pitting a grizzled prospector against an entire platoon of Nazis, it found writer-director Jalmari Helander heeding the lessons of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road: principally that convoluted plotting stirs no man, and that there is cinematic value in going pedal-to-the-metal along a single, straight narrative line. That profitable sleeper now yields this choice continuation, which somehow feels more expansive while still clocking in under 90 minutes. Having seen off the SS, indomitable hero Aatami (Jorma Tommila) gains both a tragic backstory and a new, vicious post-War foe in wily James Cameron fave Stephen Lang, playing the tremendously named Red Army butcher Ivan Draganov.

Again, the economy of Helander’s approach proves striking and thrilling. No unnecessary obstacles have been placed between the audience and a good time at the movies: we get one scene of Aatami dismantling his family home beam by beam and one scene of Draganov being sprung from jail before the pair intersect on the backroads of Soviet-occupied Finland. Cutting to the chase grants Helander time to craft setpieces in which Aatami outthinks and outflanks the Red Army’s might; in this respect, Sisu 2 is a more-of-the-same sequel. The good news is that what’s repeated remains terrific: punchy, old-school stuntwork, crisply uncluttered cutting, and varied, inventive baddie-splattering, from the moment Aatami deploys one of those beams to take down a jetfighter.

Revelling in his homeland’s gorgeous, sundappled scenery, Helander manoeuvres with the boyish enthusiasm of kids playing war games in the woods: you half-expect someone’s mum to call everybody in for tea. Yes, it’s cartoonish – look sharp for one regrettably misplaced mousetrap – but that comic-strip simplicity serves as a rebuke to our knottier blockbusters. You don’t need excessive CGI or exposition with effects as potently compelling as Tommila’s bloodied, defiant face, while the writing gathers grace notes at pace: those beams become a memento, then a liferaft, then a new beginning. Like his protagonist, Helander holds onto the essential, torches the rest, and goes harder and faster for it. His film should raise huge cheers in Kyiv – and, indeed, everywhere else it plays.

Sisu: Road to Revenge opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.