Stay tuned: "I Saw The TV Glow"

If you've spent any time online in recent months, you'll likely be aware that I Saw The TV Glow arrives freighted with extratextual baggage; that its writer-director, Jane Schoenbrun, is trans; and that the film refers, whether explicitly or obliquely, to the experience of being trans. But what if you just walked into it, drawn by the mysterious light of the title or the copious four- and five-star reviews on the poster? Perhaps more aptly, given the milieu it describes: what if you stumbled across it on television in the middle of the night? Schoenbrun has given us a slowburn study of the bonds forged by cathode rays, one that opens in 1996, as asthmatic seventh-grade outcast Owen (Ian Foreman) befriends Gothy ninth-grader Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) via their shared love of a cult show: "The Pink Opaque", which clips reveal to be a fantastical mash-up of the then-voguish Buffy (young-adult network, strong female leads), The X-Files (monster-of-the-week episodes, tangled mythology) and the original Twin Peaks (photogenic leads, woodland setting, banal dialogue, dreamy mood, abrupt cancellation leading to least satisfying finale imaginable). Yet just as we're settling in for a leftfield coming-of-age drama, Schoenbrun starts moving the timeframe ahead, first by years, later by whole decades. The show continues to cast a spell, particularly on Owen, clinging to its comfort-blanket of mysteries on videotape, then DVD, then streaming, but the people on the screen seem angrier, lonelier, sadder; the innocence of their high-school sleepovers fades, and their closest friends move on. Our growing sense of entrapment - or boxing-in - is only heightened by adroit casting. The boyish Foreman is removed from the frame at an early stage and replaced by the heavier-footed, sorrier-seeming Justice Smith, a lad with furrows in his brow, a frog in his throat and a default expression of great upset, whose Owen appears to have realised the adult world he is entering into, with its ill-paid menial tasks and terrifyingly quiet nights in, has little to nothing on the magical TV show he thrilled to as a child. The movies don't tend to mention this much (for obvious reasons), but it can fuck us up, pop culture, just by elevating our expectations of what awaits us out there.

Twin Peaks, famously, had its own show-within-a-show in "Invitation to Love", the hysterical daytime soap that provided an ironic counterpoint to/running commentary on the events of the series it was contained within. Schoenbrun is evidently one of a generation of outsider artists who've gorged themselves on David Lynch's oddly wholesome brand of weirdness: other hat tips in that direction include the female lead's name, a midfilm bar sequence (which actually feels a slight misstep, as slavish in its homage as the end of Bonello's recent The Beast), the image of a TV on fire, and dialogue made newly glacial by the insertion of dead air between the lines. Yet the prevailing mood here proves less reminiscent of Lynch than early Gregg Araki, and 2004's unforgettable Mysterious Skin in particular: hypersensitive, yet more melancholy than outright weird, Alex G's shoegazey soundtrack describing quietly seismic shifts in the make-up of the characters' world. What I think it's really about - and here's where Glow maybe does get extratextual - is the struggle to articulate something within you, common to most teenagers, commonly borne out in chalk pavement etchings, dramas on CW and the WB and early films alike. For the characters on "The Pink Opaque", we only have the show's scriptwriters to blame for any inarticulacy. Yet for the characters in the film, the show becomes a safe means of connection, a way of talking about feelings without talking about their own feelings. (I would posit this is a broadly universal phenomenon - that cis hetero men have been known to do the same thing with sports, World War II and the Roman Empire.) 

Without this emotional encryption device, life becomes far trickier: you see it later on in the film, as the now palpably unhappy, self-harming, increasingly discombobulated Owen discovers his old pals have different memories of this formative experience, and fails to relate to the suburban normies around him, who seem so full of confidence, in themselves and around others, that they may as well be characters from another series, or planet. The one figure in the vicinity who appears comparatively assured is Schoenbrun, who's used this struggle as the basis for an affecting, unsettling mystery such as might feature in "The Pink Opaque" itself, a cautionary tale on the perils of not looking too deeply inside yourself, a more abstract moodpiece that varies in intensity, and a series of images that print themselves firmly upon the imagination. This is what I would define as a frequency-film - you have to tune into it, appropriately - and I can well understand the responses both of those who've found it ineffably profound and those left shrugging. (It strikes me as dependent on a fundamentally torturous relationship with one's inner life that even some happy-go-lucky trans folk may not share.) Still, I would hope anyone who happens across I Saw The TV Glow down the line in the wee small hours would be intrigued enough to stay tuned, as with anyone who's ever been given pause to contemplate the vagaries of this world: how strangely, incomprehensibly, often cruelly it turns, how there are things out there even those of us who work with words struggle to put into words. There are mysteries in life we cannot finally explain, and for which no episode guide can truly prepare you.

I Saw The TV Glow is now playing in selected cinemas.

Bird: "Tuesday"

Grief truly is a thing with feathers in the Croatian-born, London-schooled Daina O. Pusic's Tuesday, the kind of curveball our stalwart funding sources (the BBC, the BFI) could only have been persuaded to toss out with the marketing might of A24 at their arm. Nothing in this striking feature debut is quite as arresting as its opening movement, which sets us to believe a manky CG parakeet - initially palm-sized, but prone, like the film, to shapeshifting - is acting as some squawking Grim Reaper, flapping from municipal car park to backstreet to front parlour and, with a sweep of a wing that begins to resemble a final curtain, doing for those whose number is up. These first minutes are cosmic, trippy, properly freaky, so it's a slight pity that what follows reverts to the altogether familiar shape of the Small British Film: housebound, setbound even. The accursed bird now swoops into the lives of terminally ill teen Tuesday (Lola Petticrew) and her mother Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, sans her usual hair and make-up team), who - as established by an early sequence in which she falls asleep in a park - is keen to avoid the subject of her daughter's imminent demise, and seems to be barely holding it all together in most other respects. The parakeet is still there, whether poised accusingly on the windowsill or curled up in Tuesday's inner ear, and talking with the voice of Arinzé Kene, no less; it's just it now serves the symbolic purpose of an elephant in the room, embodying all the things we fail to talk about when we talk about death. Even as I write those words, though, it feels like a critic's doomed attempt to impose outside shape and dull rationale on what proves, to its credit, a relentlessly restless and protean viewing experience.

As I hope you can tell, Tuesday has a certain idiosyncrasy in its favour. This is palpably the film Pusic, going long after a run of similarly animalistic shorts, wanted to make, and a film she's been left alone to make. It's encouraging, too, to see a low-budget British film that so capably integrates an effect as a major character: clearly, it's better for such a venture to do one effect well than try and rush through a thousand and one in the pell-mell of post-production. Yet Tuesday will inevitably hinge on the degree to which you feel the whole picture works, and I found my own answer changing almost from shot to shot. It's not necessarily bad that you come away unsure what sort of filmmaker Pusic wants to be; she's leaving her options open in an industry that has traditionally only had a few avenues to offer its creatives. Her film has a thick streak of the fantastical written through it: one immediate reference point would be that Pan's Labyrinth/A Monster Calls school, where the boundaries between this world and the next, the living and the dead, are porous to say the least. Yet even as the parakeet calls Stalin a "fucking prick", vomits on Tuesday's carpet and gets flambéed by Zora, I kept being reminded of kids' TV (the set design feels a limitation here); and it could well be that Pusic has a great career in advertising ahead of her. (Close your eyes when the bird is talking, and you could be listening to the next Aleksandr the Meerkat.) Petticrew and Louis-Dreyfus give good, precise performances - doubly so when interacting with the bird - and if you do find the film working for you, it'll be because the actors make the mother-daughter relationship so moving. Still, there are elements that don't integrate half as well, which is why I'm allowing for some variability of response. Tuesday's final days coincide with a wider apocalypse, signified by clouds of flies descending and Mr. Tumble stumbling zombie-like out of a bush. I sort of get it: Pusic is surely underlining that death is all around us, and that it behoves us to look it square in the eye. Yet these apocalyptic tropes undercut the film's message about ordinary, everyday grief; if this is the end of everyone's days, then Tuesday's passing is but a passing blip. Still, we've spent so many years lambasting the British industry for refusing to take a chance on anything that isn't a Downton Abbey derivative that it seems churlish to beat on a genuine risktaker when some of its swings don't connect. That Glazeresque opening really is brilliantly strange, and you can always mess with your own teens' heads by saying you're smuggling them into another Rio sequel.

Tuesday is now playing in selected cinemas.

Darker webs: "Spider-Man 2"

From Where We Are Now, it may be close to impossible to conceive this. Yet once 2002's Spider-Man proved a hit - and only once it proved a hit - a sequel was commissioned; and once the original screenwriter David Koepp passed, because he had a promising directorial career of his own to get on with, Sony turned to the septuagenarian scribe Alvin Sargent, a two-time Oscar winner for such grown-up ventures as 1977's Julia and 1980's Ordinary People. This was the first sign of renewed ambition on Spider-Man 2's part: it would be a sequel that definitively moved things along, acknowledging its characters had learnt from the events of the first film, even as they became young adults in their own right. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is now a delivery boy and struggling student, his beloved Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) a model and actress (this being the noblest goal Hollywood could wish for a heroine in 2004), Harry Osborn (James Franco) a suit assuming control of his late father's company. First things first: it wasn't just more of the same. (One frustration with the subsequent reboots was that a gamer experiences after their avatar perishes or their console glitches out, forcing them to go through the early levels all over again.) Film two's theme is growing pains, whether the perils of not getting what you want (PP/MJ) or getting what you don't want (the notoriety that became an even bigger problem in later films), a sense your body is failing on you (as with Parker's suddenly sketchy webshooters, almost certainly a greater concern to middle-aged creatives than thrusting teenage onlookers), the troubles that follow from finding out your heroes (here, Alfred Molina's Otto Octavius) aren't all you believed them to be. It's all more complicated now, and only occasionally does Spider-Man 2 regather the boyish pep that sustained early runs of the comic and Sam Raimi's original film: you catch a glimpse of it when Parker tells the young kids stunned by his backflip over a speeding vehicle that such feats are possible if they, too, would only eat their greens.

If that sounds earnest, well, that's what differentiates a Kennedy-era creation like Spider-Man from, say, the fundamentally postmodern Deadpool, and it never quite clots or gets cloying. The sequel is energised by Raimi's gift for storyboarding - and finding the images that, while locating an evocative, even stirring halfway house between the comic book and the cinema, keep this story moving in the right direction. A woman sees her own terrified reflection in the shattered glass headed for her jugular; the Spidey-suit gets tossed in a trashcan, its mask sticking out just so; a series of juddering camera jolts - pneumatic push-ins just after a car gets tossed through a coffee shop window - mark the reemergence of Doc Ock come the final act. Right through to his dying moments, the villain remains a superlative visual gag, rising up from the operating table to do for the surgeons trying to separate him from his tech, and later conversing with these vicious metal claws, which breach the frame like minions looking for a command, or Emu for Parky. The PG rating is perhaps down to a prevailing geniality of spirit and tone, but the action is both more expansive and more intense second time around: Raimi segues breathlessly and seamlessly from a vertical stand-off (atop a clock tower) to a horizontal charge (on one of the city's elevated trains) which forcibly unmasks our hero and converts him, at a considerable rate of knots, into a secular Christ figure suffering for New York's innumerable sins. Sargent and Raimi are united in their desire to build character, rather than merely worlds, and also to do it with a few deft strokes of the penhand, rather than the circumlocution-slash-twaddle that has passed for backstory in subsequent Marvel movies.

You can tell Raimi and casting director Dianne Crittenden were on something like the right, characterful lines from the number of pre-famous faces spotted in supporting roles: Octavia Spencer and Elizabeth Banks in film one, Banks and Joel McHale here. Up top, state-of-the-art visual effects are welded to rigorously steered performance: Molina suggests a man literally deformed by grief even before the computers kick in, and reminded me I could barely recall the villains in the Garfield/Holland Spider-Men. If I was slightly less wowed by Spider-Man 2 this time out, I suspect a) that's partly how these movies operate (they're built above all else for opening weekend), and b) it struck me that some of the issues that would sink 2007's overstuffed Spider-Man 3 were lying dormant here. Sargent's script is a well-organised patchwork, but it's a patchwork nevertheless: too many villains (Doc Ock, Franco's Harry, Dylan Baker lurking as a professor set up to be something he's not), too many love interests, and a thick strain of self-analysis that leaves Parker an at best reluctant hero for the bulk of the running time. These franchises are like Doc Ock's magnetising machine; they draw everything in, burn it all up, and threaten to bury human interest. In retrospect, the sequel looks less like a pinnacle than a clearly identifiable tipping point, which is harder to cheer than the giddying highs of the first film. The complication of Peter Parker runs in parallel with the complication of the Spider-Man franchise, and the complication of superhero movies - the more issues they take on, the further away they carry us from zippy good-versus-evil fun - is their downfall. These things need to be light, so they fly, but not so weightless they make the popcorn feel like a filling meal. For a film and three-quarters, Raimi got the balance right, which is an achievement - but there would be bigger challenges ahead, with far less satisfying outcomes.

Spider-Man 2 is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Suicide squad: "Deadpool & Wolverine"

Given that Deadpool & Wolverine has taken roughly a squillion dollars over the course of the Olympics, it can be assumed that this is what the mass audience now wants. So what do they want? Escapism, first and foremost, arguably a variant of that some of us sought amid the widescreen spectacle of Paris 2024, and not wholly incomprehensible at a moment when even those of us fortunate enough not to be in Gaza or Ukraine are being confronted, on a daily basis, with dead bodies on our social-media timelines. Familiarity, too: recognisable names, faces, characters and costumes, a tone established in the opening frames that never modulates or relents, randomly applied songs from all our childhoods. (If you're wondering why N*SYNC's "Bye Bye Bye" - a bad song in 2000, no better now - has returned to the upper reaches of the UK singles chart, it's entirely down to D&W's credits sequence, in which Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool kebabs dayplayers while busting secondhand boyband moves.) If you were feeling especially optimistic, you could claim the film's success as proof of a desire for studio-backed comedy - that the multiplex crowd has once more gravitated towards the promise of jokes and levity, albeit in vastly greater numbers than they did to The Lost City and Ticket to Paradise in 2022 and Anyone but You over the Christmas break. Most of all, though, I think these numbers prove the audience wants something they've been sold on for the past 25 years - be that the X-Men series or the Johnny-come-latelys of the MCU - to continue. Where recent Marvel offerings - called things like The Marvels or Captain Marvel, in the desperate hope we might at least remember the name of the brand - landed as sputtering, incoherent afterthoughts, a Trump campaign speech in 2024, Deadpool & Wolverine is business as usual, full steam ahead. From its initial bout of gravedigging (addressing the question of how to revive a character finished off in 2017's Logan) to its constant repositioning of Deadpool as a "Marvel Jesus", the movie intends to resurrect. Its success has made for the industry story of the year, great for the trade papers: very rarely can you have seen a film where the dialogue threatens to be drowned out by the sound of studio stock rapidly ticking upwards. But that's just one problem with D&W: the sense we're dealing less with cinema per se than an especially potent dose of corporate Viagra.

For those of us who have no skin whatsoever in the games of the MCU, Disney's commercial fortunes or Reynolds' truly bizarre resurgence as a writer-producer-star-corporate shill, Deadpool & Wolverine is at best inexplicable, at its worst an impressive atrocity; it is to director Shawn Levy, the Canadian-born sleeper agent who's spent the best part of three decades attempting to destroy the American cinema from within, what 9/11 was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. As aggressively mediocre in its framing as it was in its promotion, often downright ugly in its effects, these never-ending 128 minutes mostly play like deleted scenes from shows and movies you haven't watched, held together by a postmodern narration that starts like a director's commentary, grows numbing inside ten minutes and so insufferable over the long haul you start to wonder whether Eli Roth's Borderlands, in the screen next door, can really be as bad as critics and audiences alike are making out. In as much as there is a narrative framework here - because the established non-rules of the Marvel multiverse apply - our heroes are two characters in search of a better author than this script's five credited writers (including Reynolds himself), set adrift amid "the Void", basically the rubble of the old studio system. An early scene has Deadpool alight upon the 20th Century Fox logo, half-buried in sand like the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes: it's meant to be a knowing nudge in the ribs of anyone who's kept an eye on the Hollywood business pages, but plays, like all the other Disney-Fox schtick that makes it onto the screen, as merely gloating. Hugh Jackman, second best actor in this whole comic-book cycle after Downey Jr., at least remains true to the spirit of Wolverine: the character's anger meshes with the bemusement of a performer dragged into a cartoon version of the genre he'd thought he'd left behind. The curious thing about D&W is that, while utterly soulless in comparison with Logan, it's not an entirely terrible Wolverine movie; it's just that it's playing at the same time as what is, even by the low-to-non-existent standards of the Deadpool series, a truly abysmal Deadpool film.

The two standalone Deadpool films formed a snarky adolescent commentary on the growing ubiquity of all things superheroic - nothing too wounding, as they were themselves Marvel movies, but made under the banner of Fox, and with a hard R certificate, they enjoyed a measure of freedom with regard to the raspberries they blew that might seem exhilarating if you were fifteen years old. Now, after the Disney takeover, we learn Deadpool's alter ego Wade Wilson wants to "find his place" within the Avengers; granted, he sets about this sappy task while making the jokes about anal play he's been doing, incessantly, since film one. Again, everyone's pitching for transgressive B-movie pleasures - off-colour gags, exploding heads, baby knife - but this being a calculated A-budget proposition, indeed the centrepiece of Hollywood's summer season, D&W has to keep finding ways to take the edge off. Cameos from earlier action figures, found in the recesses of the fanboy imagination and decommissioned studio backlots; bits with Deadpool's scrappy dog; a lot of telling the audience what exactly it's doing and referencing. Yet rather than feeling reassured, I was instead gripped by a new and soul-sucking sensation: I wasn't just watching a bad film but a bad film that knows it's a bad film, and furthermore realising that the worst thing to have happened of late to American popular cinema (corporate superhero movies) just got a second chance at swallowing up the cultural oxygen, money, column inches and leisure time remaining to us. "They're going to make him do this when he's ninety," Deadpool joshes of Wolverine late on; here is a film that smirks and winks while telling us the movies aren't going to improve any in our lifetime. 

Critics appear to have left D&W alone in the main, whether reasoning that it's clearly Not for Us, running scared of the more rabid fanboys, or not daring to run anything that goes against an earlier, 20-page promotional feature. Some wannabe edgelord will doubtless include it on his year-end Sight & Sound Top 10 list, citing Levy's film as the most radical dismantling yet of classical Hollywood form, but - seriously - fuck him, and fuck the apologists, and fuck Ryan Reynolds, too, with his reverse-Bradley Cooper career, lapsing into well-compensated smuggery after realising not trying is easier than trying, and that you can make a lot of money peddling mediocrity with footnotes. (While I'm on this tear - because it's all connected - fuck Wrexham, tinpot nouveau riche chancers who've given us the least cheering underdog story in 21st century sport; fuck Disney-backed streaming shows about "the business of football"; and fuck Blake Lively for reconfiguring domestic abuse into glossily photogenic romantic fantasy, and enjoying a comparable hit with it. How symptomatic it is of these grim times that we should suddenly be confronted with a Hollywood power couple in the same way Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were a power couple.) By some distance the worst film ever to make a billion dollars at the international box office, the type of runaway smash that leads you to believe an indiscriminate nuclear strike would only be the second most terrible fate to befall humankind in the present moment, D&W may ultimately say less about what the mass audience wants than about what our creatives have forced down their throats this past quarter-century - that, to lapse into Deadpoolesque scatology for a second, a generation-and-a-half of cinemagoers have now been successfully bullied into swallowing this shit. Fuck them, and fuck this.

Deadpool & Wolverine is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of August 2-4, 2024):

1 (1) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

2 (2) Despicable Me 4 (U)

3 (3) Twisters (12A) ***

4 (4) Inside Out 2 (U) ****

5 (new) Harold and the Purple Crayon (PG)

6 (5) Longlegs (15) **

7 (re) Spider-Man (12A) ****

8 (6) A Quiet Place: Day One (15) ***

9 (new) Blackpink World Tour (Born Pink) in Cinemas (12A)

10 (new) My Neighbour Totoro (U) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Spider-Man 2

2. My Neighbour Totoro

3. I Saw the TV Glow

4. Tuesday

5. The NeverEnding Story

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (12)

2 (3) The Fall Guy (12) **

3 (new) Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (15)

4 (8) Meg 2: The Trench (12)

5 (2) IF (U)

6 (5) The Bikeriders (15)

7 (4) Twister (PG) ***

8 (6) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12)

9 (10) Dune: Part Two (12) **

10 (9) Civil War (15) ***

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

2. Hundreds of Beavers

3. Abigail

4. Monkey Man

5. Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Bridge of Spies (Wednesday, BBC1, 11.20pm)

2. Braveheart (Friday, BBC1, 10.40pm)

3. Love & Mercy (Saturday, BBC2, 12.30am)

4. Mission: Impossible III [above] (Monday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

5. Spy (Friday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

Web 1.0: "Spider-Man"

To revisit Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films two decades later, as the release schedule now permits, is not just to pit Comic-Book Movies Now against Comic-Book Movies Then, but also to try and pin down what Raimi got so right here and so wrong on his Dr. Strange sequel. For starters, 2002's Spider-Man arrived at a moment before Comic-Book Movies were a formula, when - even within the framework of a megabudget Sony adaptation of a longstanding Marvel favourite - a director could still impose themselves on the material, whether by dashes of horror or a sunny, boyish outlook. Upon release, the movie was claimed by the poptimists among us as a counterblast to events in New York the previous September; it came with some extratextual baggage, then, but otherwise now seems refreshingly uncluttered with backstory, sidebars and cameos. (You had to wait until 2007's Spider-Man 3, returning in a fortnight, for that: perhaps these things are just destined to swell up like spider bites.) The essence of Raimi's version is right there in Peter Parker's opening narration: "This, like any story worth telling, is about a girl". Already, we are being gathered to heed the call of something simple and relatable, a story worth telling, even if it is one we've all heard before, and several times since with variations.

So, yes, there it is: the spider bite; the dead uncle; the sticky wrists that confirm this as a tale of dawning adolescent potency (and - boy - does Raimi know it, having Aunt May interrupt our boy as he's in the middle of his bodily R&D). In the craftsmanlike hands of writer David Koepp, a decade on from adapting Jurassic Park, these basic story elements are connected with a tersely spun web of cause and effect, consequence and (yes) responsibility. The guileless Parker (Tobey Maguire) lets a petty crim go out of spite, only to later find out this nogoodnik did for his beloved Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson); he bests overreaching technocrat Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe), only for the latter's brooding son Harry (James Franco) to vow revenge. With such a story in place, Raimi is freed to doodle around the edges, to personalise, as Tim Burton had done in his Batman blockbusters a decade before. Yes, there are the obligatory tentpole action sequences - but set against the choppiness that was to follow, these now have the advantage of relative simplicity, Raimi electing to swing his camera around in largely unbroken takes, as he'd done on the Evil Dead movies, rather than resorting to excessively convoluted edit-suite trickery. (Lest we forget, this was the summer of The Bourne Identity: the movies were starting to learn how to move again.)

Crucially, for our purposes, the film keeps finding ways to shuck off its costumes and chicanery, and to return its focus to a cherished group of performers. Raimi visibly has time on set to work with his actors, and thereby inject wit and feeling into a scene, in a way directors most likely don't now Marvel have locked themselves into delivering four films a year between now and 2525. As a result, Spider-Man remains sweet and funny - or sweeter and funnier than comparably corporate endeavours have presented as in the years since. It's Dafoe, setting a remarkably high bar for supervillainy, muttering "ooh, cold" as he's strapped into some vast metal transformation machine, and subsequently cracking up while talking to himself in the mirror - a blockbuster effect founded on simple, appreciable B-movie shooting and cutting. (He also gets one of the film's best, subtlest jokes, arriving at Aunt May's Thanksgiving dinner with the line "I've picked up a fruitcake", before eyeing up his spider-quarry over the carving knife.) It's Maguire going affectingly saucer-eyed in the presence of Kirsten Dunst - well on the way to becoming the great American actress of the 21st century - and doing a better job of making us forget his spell in the Pussy Posse than Leo DiCaprio ever has. 

This Spidey and MJ deserved all the MTV Awards going, not least for alighting on a tentative, touching chemistry, founded on these kids' mutual awareness this world hasn't exactly been optimised for them to be happy, whether together or apart. (For perhaps the first and last time, a Marvel movie predicts the way the century would go - though media types will also chuckle wryly when JK Simmons' Jonah Jameson tells Parker freelancing is "the best thing in the world for a kid".) Their upside-down kiss, however, encapsulates in one image everything this Spider-Man gets right: here is a reinvigorating spin on a perilously square and dusty storybeat. There would be comparable pleasures in the Andrew Garfield/Emma Stone Spider-Men and in Jon Watts's Tom Holland/Zendaya reboots, but they were scattered and forever secondary to positioning, how these films related to a wider corporate superstructure. In 2024, returning to Raimi's Spider-Man means forgiving occasionally clunky green-screen work, one faintly homophobic joke in the wrestling sequence that unites Bruce Campbell with "Macho Man" Randy Savage, and, well, James Franco. Yet this is still the version of this story that feels like the complete package: a brisk two hours of spectacle, fun, romance and jeopardy, with a Macy Gray song plumb in the middle (such that we might wonder whether Gray might actually be the ingredient missing from later Marvel items), and a stirring Chad Kroeger duet amid the closing credits that makes it impossible for me to pour the scorn on Nickelback some folks do.

Spider-Man is now playing in cinemas nationwide; Spider-Man 2 returns to cinemas nationwide tomorrow.

For what it's worth...

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

1 (new) Deadpool & Wolverine (15)

2 (1) Despicable Me 4 (U)

3 (2) Twisters (12A) ***

4 (3) Inside Out 2 (U) ****

5 (4) Longlegs (15) **

6 (5) A Quiet Place: Day One (15) ***

7 (new) Raayan (15)

8 (7) Bad Newz (12A)

9 (new) I Saw the TV Glow (15)

10 (6) Fly Me to the Moon (12A)

(source: Comscore)

My top five:

1. Spider-Man

2. Werckmeister Harmonies

3. My Neighbour Totoro

4. The NeverEnding Story

5. To the End

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (12)

2 (2) IF (U)

3 (22) The Fall Guy (12) **

4 (4) Twister (PG) ***

5 (new) The Bikeriders (15)

6 (5) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12)

7 (10) Abigail (18) ****

8 (39) Meg 2: The Trench (12)

9 (3) Civil War (15) ***

10 (7) Dune: Part Two (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Hundreds of Beavers

2. Abigail

3. Monkey Man

4. Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry

5. Love Lies Bleeding

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Point Break [above] (Saturday, BBC1, 11.50pm)

2. All the President's Men (Sunday, BBC2, 10.30pm)

3. The Piano (Monday, BBC2, 11.05pm)

4. Mission: Impossible (Sunday, ITV1, 10.15pm and Thursday, ITV1, 10.45pm) 

5. Honey Boy (Wednesday, Channel 4, 2.45am)