On demand: "Speak No Evil"

The Danish shocker Speak No Evil caused a minor commotion on the horror festival circuit in 2022, in part, one suspects, because it looked unlike anything else on the horror festival circuit at that time. With its not uncostly aesthetic of cosy furnishings and aspirational knitwear, it gains an odd, effective quality: it's a horror film that looks like the kind of genteel Susanne Bier endeavour that would happily, and altogether mildly, meet the needs of BBC4's Saturday night "upmarket Eurofilm" slot. Yet Christian Tafdrup's film gradually reveals itself to be a wolf in sheep's clothing, nasty in both its underlying messaging and onscreen execution; what's finally been dressed up here is a nationalist party's slogan of "you can't trust foreigners these days". A Danish couple - Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch) and Bjørn (Morten Burian) - befriend Dutch contemporaries Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders) on an idyllic Tuscan retreat; pointedly, they bond over their cultures' shared rejection of political correctness, although the meat-loving Dutch pair (who definitely voted for Wilders) prove more enthusiastic about this than the weaker-willed Scandinavians. The real trouble begins after the former invite the latter back to their remote Low Countries home, where the signs all's not right rapidly stack up: the hosts' heavyhanded treatment of their mute son (and dismissive treatment of his Arab babysitter), a dispute over paying for an expensive dinner, ominous soundtrack parps over shots of a windmill. The vibes are very distinctly off - and this, we are led to believe, is Europe as we find it a quarter of the way into the 21st century.

Tafdrup keeps one hand firmly on the dial that determines how off those vibes are, staging the whole film, from front to back, as a mounting series of transgressions, first conversational and only arguably forgivable, then physical (Patrick walking into a bathroom where Louise is showering, and peeping on the Danes making love), then fatal. The whole plot literally turns on a wishy-washy liberal's need to make nice: events deterioriate rapidly after mealymouthed wretch Bjørn returns to his hosts' place to retrieve a toy rabbit his daughter left behind after they fled in the middle of the night, and then has to justify taking the position he did. ("Why are you doing this?," he asks Patrick late on. "Because you let me," is the response.) This is demonstrably - and I might also say all too obviously - a film that hails from the same corner of the world that gave us the Lars von Trier variations, Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt and those cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad; to find Speak No Evil as shattering as many on the festival circuit apparently did, you will need to have filtered out some fairly loud bait-the-libs snickering coming from behind the camera. One of the reasons Tafdrup made the film look as it does, you realise, is to sucker in exactly the audience whose lifestyle and attitudes he means to razz. (You too have to go along with it, in order for it to finally knock you out.) Some skill is involved in this, not least in delaying the reveal of precisely why the vibes are off, and the actors work well as a push-me-pull-you unit, taut passive-aggression giving way to actual aggression, even if I wasn't entirely sold on the bad decision-making required of the Danes to keep this ordeal going, nor finally the psychology of their tormentors. If you were feeling kindly, you'd say it was a well-engineered wind-up from a country that's come to specialise in winding the world up. If you're having an off day, you might be more inclined to label it brattish trolling, the movie equivalent of spending 95 minutes in the Breitbart comments section.

Speak No Evil is currently streaming via Shudder, and available to rent via Prime Video; an American remake opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow, and will be reviewed here in due course.

On demand: "Louisiana Story"

1948's Louisiana Story found Robert Flaherty picking up where he left off when World War II interrupted, with another peaceable, poetic, artfully constructed documentary-fiction hybrid, albeit now with an ominous sense of things to come. Non-fiction legend has it that the veteran filmmaker only got this one, his final feature before his death three years later aged 67, over the line thanks to a sizeable financial contribution from the Standard Oil Company. Yet a certain editorial nous is evident in the way Flaherty folds in this encroachment, and makes a film about a paradise being lost. First, he gives us the paradise: a small Cajun family unit (mutely devoted ma, "colourful" pa, their cheeky, gap-toothed offspring, his pet raccoon) living a broadly idyllic existence on the banks of the Mississippi. Then he introduces the complications, via signs of American modernity: the slick speedboat of the corporate forces pursuing an interest in this territory, its backwash capsizing our young hero's canoe; a vast oil derrick hoisted into position to blot the landscape; a soundtrack that suddenly fills with clanks and bangs. For a while, Flaherty gives his backers what they may have wanted from their investment. While the Pulitzer-winning score by Virgil Thomson busily signals progress, development and that everyone before the camera is going to be in the money once the desired black gold is struck, we watch the kind of friendly human faces one might have seen in early Esso or Shell commercials, lingering close-ups on drill bits and mining infrastructure, and cutesy-funny interactions between the boy and the engineers overseeing the project. (Here, the movie meshes with another of the era's forms of industrial filmmaking: Disney's live-action nature tales.)

Yet the overall picture we're looking at is markedly different from the unspoilt, essentially 19th century landscapes of Flaherty's Nanook and Tabu. In shifting his focus back to America, the filmmaker raises one of the bigger questions hanging over the second half of the 20th century: now that we've agreed war isn't the way forward, just how much is big business going to (be allowed to) take? You wouldn't necessarily have to stretch too far to see Flaherty constructing a parallel between the oil men tampering with nature and the frankly terrifying alligators floating down river, putting that cute raccoon (among other examples of local wildlife) in mortal danger. These are hunting grounds, after all, and it takes on-the-ground smarts, real resistance and unity, to outwit and see off such predators. Over the next 75 years, profits and waters would rise, the levees would break (if not the levies), and man would continue to pump petrochemicals into the sky and hope for the best; for much of that time, successive waves of documentarists (starting with the Direct Cinema movement spearheaded by Richard Leacock, one of Flaherty's assistants here) sought a back-to-basics purism that led to Flaherty being written off critically as either a figure of white paternalist condescension, a faker or a hopelessly wide-eyed naif. You can't fail to be struck by the wonder still present in this filmography - wonder at what's been put before the camera, that we should all see such sights - yet the films now appear far more complex, revealing and rewarding than any of the above labels would allow for: what Flaherty signed off with here is, at heart, an uncannily beautiful film about despoilment.

Louisiana Story is currently available to stream via Sands Films online.

The peacemaker: "GOAT: The Greatest of All Time"

It takes real chutzpah - or colossal testes - to title your latest star vehicle (and penultimate film) GOAT: The Greatest of All Time. Such self-confidence may, however, come naturally to Vijay, the Tamil megastar who's reliably delivered hit after hit for his industry, most recently Leo, last October's slaphappy remake of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence. The new title represents a steep promotion for a performer historically referred to by the nickname "Thalapathy" (or "Commander"); it is also, we might surmise, canny positioning for a public figure about to leave acting behind for a career in politics as the head of a party reportedly converted out of his own fanclub. The new film presents as scarcely less derivative than Leo, apparently born of its leading man's late-career desire to have his own Mission: Impossible, 24 and True Lies, or - closer to home - something like the Hindi TV hit The Family Man crossed with one of those blockbusters in which Shah Rukh Khan (this era's foremost GOAT contender) faces off against another version of himself. 

Vijay's anti-terror agent Gandhi (note the name; it matters) is already leading a dual life as we find him: a living legend in the ill-maintained offices he shares with varyingly slovenly and disreputable colleagues, he's yet to reveal his true identity to his wife (Sneha), pregnant with the couple's second child, leading her to take all her man's nocturnal creeping as evidence he must be straying elsewhere. This long-game deception quickly unravels, as Gandhi is forced to juggle a family getaway with state business: bad news for the Thai cab driver he gets gunned down in the line of duty, even worse for Gandhi's young son Jeevan (S.J. Akhilan), removed from the picture by ne'er-do-wells at the exact moment his new sister arrives into the world. (In a film this manic in its plotting, it suggests less the circle of life than drive-thru reincarnation.) Thereafter our guy must prove himself both the greatest agent and greatest father of all time; if you might hope the greatest movie star of all time would lay on a bit more originality for our troubles, the film's messaging - particularly for someone entering politics in opposition to Modi's BJP - is rarely less than on point. This Gandhi learns that in affairs of state, as with matters of the heart, honesty is forever the best policy.

The bulk of this three-hour film, co-written and directed by Venkat Prabhu, more or less represents what our multiplex-bound actioners now are: long, loud, faintly mechanical and exhausting in their insistence on an agitating setpiece every twenty minutes, and prone to sometimes questionable intelligence. ("Some random group is protesting the reopening of our embassy," Gandhi is told when he touches down in Moscow; you'd hope MI6 would do better for Bond.) Yet GOAT is also never dull, broadly likable, and elevated by those humanising touches its lead addends amid the mayhem: a dry heave after he guns down one baddie, an amused chuckle after he sets two more against one another, some awareness this is dirty or silly work for a grown man to be doing (and watching), and hidebound material that can only benefit from being loosened up. After Gandhi is relegated to desk work - necessary rite-of-passage for any screen maverick - he enters one fight scene with a schoolboy's satchel slung over his shoulder; and there follows the film's grandest, most intriguing humanising gesture, as amid the kerfuffle, he catches a glimpse of his younger self. Now we suddenly have not just two Vijays for the price of one ticket, but also find ourselves present at a standoff between the Vijay of the present and the Vijay of the past. "V squared for victory," as the lyrics of one of Yuvan Shankar Raja's thumping songs reframes it, doubtless echoing sentiments voiced in early script meetings.

It obviously helps that Vijay, fifty this year, is younger and fresher-faced than Robert De Niro was circa The Irishman, but the deaging tech here is so effective you may start to wonder whether the star is passing off his actual son in this secondary role, but no, apparently that is him in attentively airbrushed form, a microchip off the old block driven to malice by the sins of his fathers. The inclusion of this character's backstory - albeit in a film drunk on backstory, that constantly feels a need to be explaining itself - is not unpromising. For one thing, it indicates that should Vijay one day wind up becoming PM of India - not improbable, given GOAT's weekend box-office - he might well be given pause before, say, bombing Pakistan or the Middle East into near-oblivion. Where our hero differs slightly from a Bond, Bauer or Ethan Hunt is that he's not primarily driven by vengeance, rather a need to clean up after his own mistakes, whether his absentmindedness as a father or his unthinking brutality as a tool of the state. In a film that has some fun with names - minor characters adapt the codenames Bose and Nehru at various points - there is good reason Gandhi is called Gandhi: he's set to working towards the preservation of peace, be that around the family breakfast table or inside the nation's bustling cricket stadia. It is still largely a family matter, one in which we're invited to cheer the father over the son, and in which women have nothing much to do save gyrate in songs and play damsel in distress. (If SRK remains the true GOAT in this viewer's mind, that may be because he can play many selves, stock a movie this deep with references to his back catalogue, and still find room for his co-stars to shine.) Vijay, to his credit, handles each development with a brisk professionalism that itself bodes well: leave it with me, every gesture tells us, I'll clear this up and have you home in time for at least the conclusion of tonight's IPL fixture. That's not necessarily a guarantee of GOAT status, but party political broadcasts have been much less entertaining and made far worse propositions to the electorate.

GOAT: The Greatest of All Time is now showing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "American Dharma"

Another of Errol Morris's occasional feature-length studies of notable public figures, 2018's American Dharma found itself mired in some controversy after its initial screenings, to the extent it barely travelled in the way last year's comparatively simpler The Pigeon Tunnel did. The controversy derived from Morris's choice of subject: Steve Bannon, the producer-director turned libertarian guru who had as much to do with the election of Donald Trump as anyone, and who has spent the years since roaming the globe preaching endless culture war. Here is one of those next-level bullshitters who, much like Jordan Peterson, Dominic Cummings and Andrew Tate, harnessed the power of the Internet to bolster his personal profile and briefly achieved notoriety in the mid-2010s before being comprehensively found out. (Bannon was sentenced to jail time in October 2022, having been found in contempt of a Congressional investigation into the events of January 6th; he is due to be released before November's election.) On the surface, Morris's film represents an effort to meet its subject in the middle: he sets Bannon, who must have entertained some suspicions, in a mock-up of Gregory Peck's briefing room from Twelve O'Clock High, a formative text of Bannon's youth, and invites him to talk about the notionally neutral subject of movies. Bannon, we learn, was for many years a regular at the Telluride film festival; he was inspired to go into filmmaking after seeing a Q&A Morris gave after a screening of 2003's The Fog of War; and the documentarist duly digs out clips from the cinematic hymn Bannon subsequently composed to Reaganism. (A more conventional Ronnie biopic starring Dennis Quaid has just opened in the US behind the Beetlejuice reboot: the undead walk among us anew.) Gradually, inevitably, the conversation expands beyond art to life, a sly process by which Morris begins to reveal something of Bannon's character and philosophy, and possibly how we all got to this fraught moment in history.

So who is Steve Bannon, exactly? The first of many contradictions: a garrulous lone wolf. A man on a perpetual war footing, who chiefly absorbed from mid-century American cinema not its romanticism or emotionality (he speaks neither of Sirk nor Doris Day), but its thick streaks of fatalism and paranoia. He has the down-and-dirty instincts of a tabloid muckraker - cf. his lipsmacking account of Anthony Weiner's downfall, which he helped engineer during his tenure at the right-wing website Breitbart - but sincerely regards himself as a latter-day Patton or MacArthur. (Even now, you suspect, he's probably sat in his cell, considering himself a prisoner-of-war: as Morris discovers, The Bridge on the River Kwai looms large in his mindset.) He has an armoury of stats to bolster his every argument, and could doubtless make up a few more if he were losing; in a pointed formal touch, Morris loads Bannon-derived headlines onto the screen like bullets in a chamber. Bannon even demonstrates blunt flashes of strategic brilliance, which collectively suggest how he outmanoeuvred the pinko-liberal snowflake Left in the summer and autumn of 2016. (Of course, dark arts and dirty money can only help.) The controversy resides in the extent to which Morris lets Bannon talk; the argument is that blowhards like this don't need another platform right now, and may be best left alone to blow themselves out. There is, certainly, material here that will be deeply discomfiting to liberal-minded viewers who've long since tagged Bannon as among the foremost boogeymen de nos jours. You may, for one, find yourself nodding in instinctive agreement with Bannon's anti-elite stance, and stirred by his calls for an urgent redistribution of wealth, for an end to pointless, costly overseas conflicts. (Even if you sense an innately bellicose individual starting to contradict himself once more.) At one point, Bannon declares a - granted, begrudging - respect for the support Bernie Sanders has drawn in recent years. His talk of dharma - interpreted here as duty or destiny - suggests this is not an entirely unspiritual man.

Yet in apparently allowing his subject to dictate the terms of this negotiation, Morris spots (and shows) how rapidly men of the libertarian stripe run out of niceties and pieties and drift towards far less appealing extremes. There is merit in letting Bannon get comfortable, to let him think he's winning the war of words, even as the words that then drop from his lips are enough to give anyone who hasn't swigged the MAGA Kool-Aid the most severe of pause and heartburn. When Morris sheepishly confesses he voted for Hillary, it's couched in a way Bannon can only ever hear as an admission of weakness - and yet it's also a palms-up show of honesty that lures Bannon into extending his generally contemptuous air into outright Islamophobia. Similarly, all Bannon's highfalutin talk of cryptocurrency - tool of a brave new world and a fully deregulated America - is finally revealed as a means of ripping off gamers with disposable income. There seems little point in taking the fight to Bannon in this context, because a) that's what he'd expect, and b) that's what he's spent his whole life training for. (The briefing room is his spiritual home.) Morris instead plays a longer, wilier game, exposing his subject as another grabby boomer who's constructed an elaborate ideology ("an apocalyptic rationalist," Bannon grandly dubs himself) to achieve his ends. We might still quibble with some of the archive on this particular project. Time and again, we have endure Trump's peacocking, which was insufferable at the time, and is barely less so now the candidate has descended into sub-Grampa Simpson, Hannibal Lecter-fetishising senility. Yet even this works towards a sense that what Bannon brought about back there wasn't the desired revolution so much as a short-term con job: a show of unimpeachable potency and will that needed smart(er) heads around - like Bannon, like Cummings - to spin and sell it to the masses. Bannon was still at it as Morris found him, insisting being cast out from the White House was a logical development so Trump could stand supreme on his own two feet; yet it seems equally plausible Trump was simply too dumb to realise what he was losing in banishing Bannon. (Hence 2020.) Morris, for his part, only succeeds in drawing his subject out of the dark and into the light. The Bannon he films is patently a dangerous man to have anywhere near a seat of public office - but that's why he was so effective in 2016, and that's why he's behind bars now. American Dharma is less the glowing portrait its fiercest critics insisted than it is the confessions of a pyromaniac.

American Dharma is currently available to stream here.

In memoriam: James Darren (Telegraph 06/09/24)

James Darren, who has died aged 88, was an American actor and singer who became a teen idol in his early twenties; though he struggled to make the leap to fully-fledged leading man status, he nevertheless enjoyed a sixty-year career in showbusiness.

Tanned and toothsome, he won hearts as singing surfer Jeff “Moondoggie” Matthews in Gidget (1959), a beach-set coming-of-age comedy for youngsters who hadn’t seen themselves amid the angsty The Wild One (1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Studio Columbia had eyed Elvis Presley for the role, but shooting coincided with Presley’s military service; instead, they settled on Darren.

In many ways, this was unlikely casting: Darren couldn’t surf and was a poor swimmer. But he could carry a tune, which was enough to sway the execs. “They were thinking about having someone do the vocal and I would lip sync,” he recalled. “I told them I could do it, so we went into one of the sound stages and I sang ‘Gidget’. They said, ‘He sings fine’, then I did all the other songs.”

That theme song made #41 on the US Billboard chart, launching a secondary singing career, even if Darren’s subsequent singles – including 1959’s “Teenage Tears” and “Goodbye Cruel World”, a US top three hit in 1961 – sounded less like prime pop than coded cries for help. The attentions of screaming fans provided some consolation, but as Darren once admitted “at times, it was Chinese torture”.

More mature roles followed – a trumpet-playing best pal in The Gene Krupa Story (1959), opposite Sidney Poitier in the Korean War drama All the Young Men (1960), as Grecian scrapper Spyros Pappadimos in The Guns of Navarone (1961) – yet as Darren diplomatically phrased it “the people handling my career at that point didn’t really take advantage”.

Instead, he found himself pitched into Gidget sequels – Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961), Gidget Goes to Rome (1963) – and providing Yogi Bear’s singing voice in the feature-length Hey There, Yogi Bear (1964). “They had me under contract,” Darren shrugged of his Columbia deal. “I was a prisoner. But with those lovely young ladies, it was the best prison I think I’ve ever been in.”

He was born James William Ercolani in Philadelphia on June 8, 1936, one of two sons to Catholic parents. A mildly troublesome child (“a Dennis the Menace sort, not a bad kid”), he dropped out of school aged 16 and began commuting to New York to study acting under the influential Stella Adler. Moving to L.A. in 1954, he was signed by Columbia and underwent a name change inspired by the Kaiser Darrin sports car. 

He was launched in Rumble on the Docks (1956), a knock-off of On the Waterfront (1954) bearing the tagline “Out of Their Teens… Into Big Time Crime!” He proved an instant hit with young cinemagoers, reportedly inspiring 400 to 500 fan letters per month to the studio, second only to Kim Novak.

Once liberated from studio servitude, he scuffed up his clean-cut screen persona with Jess Franco’s Eurosleaze thriller Venus in Furs (1969), then settled into regular, well-paying nightclub gigs and TV work. Playing the adventurous Dr. Tony Newman on Irwin Allen’s fondly remembered The Time Tunnel (1966-67) kept him in the public eye; a Vegas residency with comedian Buddy Hackett exercised the vocal cords.

Guest spots followed on Police Woman (1976), Charlie’s Angels (1977) and Hawaii Five-O (1978-79), and Darren eventually became a series regular on two primetime hits: as the genial Jim Corrigan on William Shatner vehicle TJ Hooker (1982-86) and as the crooning hologram Vic Fontaine on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1998-99). 

Modelled on old pal Frank Sinatra, that role led to a revival of interest in Darren’s singing career. He rerecorded the show’s songs in a big band style for his 1999 album “This One’s from the Heart”; 2001 follow-up “Because of You” featured arrangements Sinatra himself had turned down; while Steven Spielberg used “Goodbye Cruel World” as scene-setting in his autobiographical The Fabelmans (2022).

Interviewed in 1983, Darren revealed the practical mindset behind his longevity: “Every career has its hills and valleys. The most important thing is that you are happy with you. [Nobody]’s career… has always been climbing. It always levels out and you want to make sure you have good investments and financial security and bread on the table.”

He is survived by his second wife Evy Norland, a former Miss Denmark whom he married in 1960, and three sons, two by Norland and one, the CNN anchorman Jim Moret, by an earlier marriage to Gloria Terlitzsky.

James Darren, born June 8, 1936, died September 2, 2024.

On demand: "A Tale of the Wind/Une Histoire de Vent"

In a 1929 short, the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens hymned rain in all its forms. Nearly sixty years later, with the climate changing and Ivens long established as the grand seigneur of the poetic documentary, he struck out for China in the hope of finding and filming fresh air. A circle had been fully turned in the meantime, and the resultant project, 1988's A Tale of the Wind, achieves a rare poignancy that goes beyond the fact this was, cinematically, its maker's last breath. (Ivens died the following year, aged 90.) What would appear the obvious images of wind (or the obvious images of wind to a Dutchman: the sails of a windmill, planes, washing billowing on a line) are dispensed with early on. Once production shifted East, Ivens resumed filming the kind of rapt, attentive non-fiction studies he'd been making since the silent era: tai chi practitioners using their hands to slice the air, helicopter sweeps over illuminated new towns, footage of kites and puffing steam trains. Yet he also folds in restaged or dramatised encounters that illustrate both the film's genesis - cf. Ivens sitting with headphones in the Gobi desert, listening to radio transmissions describing the rising number of freak weather events - and the toll of making a film in advanced old age in a place that slowly reveals itself as less than wholly welcoming. Throughout his stay, Ivens is stalked by a trickster figure who possibly represents death, scattering banana skins in its wake; at one point, he re-enacts his own collapse mid-filming; a fantasy sequence, intercut with the subsequent hospital stay, shows Ivens emerging from the mouth of a Méliès moon. A man who witnessed the birth of cinema is here observed approaching not just the movies' centenary, but the end of the world and line. There aren't many films with the vision, ambition and sheer life in them to show you that.

In many ways, A Tale of the Wind is unusual, in that the people and objects it records are less significant within the overall conceptual framework than the notionally blank space separating them, the channels, streams and air pockets Ivens determined to catch on camera and preserve on celluloid. (On-the-fly portraits of patterns in the sand dunes and uprooted trees themselves form an attempt to record that which has already long passed through.) "We are mad to be filming the wind," Ivens can be heard telling his crew at one stage. "But it's necessary all the same." A weary, wheezily asthmatic nonagenarian, never seen without his walking stick, apparently overheating in the jacket that would seem to have been his work attire for however many decades, the filmmaker is preserved on screen as a silver-maned, Vardaesque spirit: interested in everything around him (including that which is invisible and possibly unfilmable), propelled by a heightened sense of curiosity and discovery, a desire to see everything on this planet as though for the first time, or perhaps the last. He's given to a certain degree of self-romanticising, as Varda surely was in her dotage; he shoots himself posing at the top of a mountain, like a wanderer in a Caspar David Friedrich painting, to illustrate just how far he was prepared to go to pursue his theme. As a result, this Tale often has the feel less of conventional documentary practice than of one of those folk songs carried on the breeze from generation to generation: the legend of Joris Ivens, a man who went out into the world with a camera and microphone, showed us sights and wonders, and tried to bend nature to his will. In its cutesier stretches, the film merely ruffles the hair, as an old man might while telling children like you and I such stories. At its imaginative best, though - as in the stirring and elevating final sequence, in which a hardy veteran gets to determine the manner of his own leavetaking, as so few of us do - A Tale of the Wind truly, indelibly soars.

A Tale of the Wind is currently streaming via YouTube.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of August 30-September 1, 2024):

1 (4) Despicable Me 4 (U)

2 (3) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

3 (2) It Ends with Us (15)

4 (1) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

5 (new) André Rieu's 2024 Maastricht Concert: Power of Love (U)

6 (7) Inside Out 2 (U) ****

7 (6) Blink Twice (15) **

8 (10) Twisters (12A) ***

9 (9) Coraline (PG) ****

10 (new) AfrAId (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Third Man [above]

2. Batman Forever

3. The Terminator

4. Sing Sing

5. Kneecap

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Inside Out 2 (U) ****

2 (new) Despicable Me 4 (U)

3 (new) A Quiet Place: Day One (15) ***

4 (new) Longlegs (15) **

5 (new) The Silence of the Lambs (15) ****

6 (2) Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga (15) ****

7 (17) Back to Black (15)

8 (4) The Fall Guy (12) **

9 (8) IF (PG)

10 (11) This Time Next Year (12)

(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. The Lavender Hill Mob (Sunday, BBC2, 12.40pm)

2. Alien (Friday, BBC1, 10.40pm)

3. Beetlejuice (Saturday, Channel 5, 3.20pm and Friday, Channel 5, 11.55pm)

4. Gladiator (Saturday, ITV1, 10.40pm)

5. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.35pm)