Stakeout: "Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter"

If cinemas are going to have to rely on reissues while we wait for the pandemic, strike and now wildfire-slowed movie machine to return to something like its former speed, far better our screens be filled with off-piste titles, rather than the same small handful of crowd favourites we've all seen ten times over. Given the current ascendancy of horror at the box office, it's also very shrewd for Hammer to offer renewed access to less familiar titles from its storied back catalogue - not least as any profits can presumably be funnelled back into the revived studio's 21st century endeavours. First up for reassessment: 1974's Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, overseen by Brian Clemens in the pause between TV's The Avengers and The New Avengers, and a film that spliced classic Hammer tropes with elements of Richard Lester's then-popular Musketeers films, and possibly even something of Bergman's The Seventh Seal in its central clash. Horst Janson plays the titular Army officer, a dashing, blond-haired figure of enlightenment whose trajectory across the greener stretches of the Home Counties intersects with that of a far darker force: a cowled figure who turns the wildlife he or she passes through to rot and is introduced dispatching several fair, white-gowned maidens by aging them irrevocably. Cue swashbuckling, vamp-slaying and one moment of pure early Seventies ripeness - so ripe, indeed, you half-wonder whether Clemens handed the day's directorial duties over to one Dean Learner. "I'll stay if you'll have me," simpers Kronos's glamorous assistant Caroline Munro, a former dancing girl the Captain has liberated from the stocks with one flash of his mighty sword. "Oh, I'll have you," our hero parries, followed by an overemphatic crash-zoom onto Munro's expectant features, so thrustingly phallic that the camera may as well have been mounted on our hero's manhood. Boiiiiiiingggggggg!!!

Mostly, the film rattles along. Just 90 minutes from pillar to post, worldbuilding without fuss, it finds room for post-Wicker Man folk-horror eccentricity (toads as vampire motion detectors!) while sketching in a variety of intriguing narrative backroads and byways: Ian Hendry in leather trousers as a rival swordsman who gets all his scenes done on the one alehouse set (textbook Hammer efficiency), Wanda Ventham (Benedict Cumberbatch's mum) as a shadowy lady of the manor. Its flaw is that it never really develops beyond this initial sketchiness. We were closer to the Three-Day Week than we were to Hammer's golden era, and audiences who'd just been terrified by the expensive Hollywood horror revival of The Exorcist could have been forgiven for finding this throwback on the cheap side. Clemens arrives at terrific isolated images - a bloodied hand piercing the frame, Carrie-like, from below; eyes reflected in a sword; faces turned to death masks; some very Bergman-ish crucifixion shadowplay - but they tend to rattle around inside devil-may-care storytelling. Janson, the German actor who would have been semi-familiar to audiences of the time from roles in The McKenzie Break and Murphy's War, is a princely, sporting presence - a James Hunt on horseback - who equips himself well in the action scenes, but we're barely introduced to the character before he rides off into the sunset again. Intended to launch a series, the film's commercial failure instead helped put a stake through Hammer's heart - but it wouldn't surprise me if someone associated with the company still entertains hopes of picking up where Clemens' blueprint left off.

Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter returns to selected cinemas from tomorrow; a limited edition 4K collector's edition Blu-ray is available from January 27.

Dylanland: "A Complete Unknown"

Could we have known thirty years ago - around the time he left the Disney of Oliver & Company behind to fashion 1995's delicate, pulsing indie fable Heavy - that James Mangold would someday become such a bedrock of Dad Cinema? After the second-gear exhilaration of 2019's Le Mans '66, Mangold returns to the territory of 2005's Walk the Line with his latest A Complete Unknown, which recreates Bob Dylan's formative years on the US folk scene. This milieu has been picked over many times before, most recently by the Coens' Inside Llewyn Davis, which defined Dylan by his absence (and who he wasn't). Here, the tousle-haired troubadour is set front-and-centre in an Oscar shot for Little Timmy Caramel, a process that involves the usual compression of timelines, rewriting of history and smoothing over of jagged life experience; what was once fringe activity gets made more palatable for the mass audience in a series of scenes you will have seen (and perhaps enjoyed) a dozen or more times over. You know the score: characters who introduce themselves by their full name ("I'm Bobby Neuwirth", "I'm Al Kooper") so as to impart their import to connoisseurs, the first notes of masterpieces scratched out on guitars (the musical biopic's Eureka moments), a closing bout of onscreen text to remind us This Is History. Mangold's film hedges its bets further by framing Dylan as one among many folkies who might yet suffer the indignity of their own Hollywood biopic, from oldtimers Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) to upstarts like Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). Practically the one surprise is that it's altogether more of a group shot than the expected portrait of an artist as a young man, repackaging multiple greatest hits compilations for the price of one ticket; even Johnny Cash recurs, played here by Boyd Holbrook as a wayward musical lodestar. Yet as a damning social-media post by Merrill Markoe has detailed, A Complete Unknown - directed by a man, written by two, and produced by five - is more dismissive of its women than a film on the Sixties folk scene needs to be, and generally proves content merely to replay familiar tunes, to stir dusty memories of boomer youth.

It should be noted that Mangold, who apprenticed at a time the studios were still teaching their directors craft, is better than most at smoothing over. From an early stage, we feel we are in safe hands; this is presumably why Fox (or what remains of Fox after the Disney buyout) brought the film's release date forwards so as to compete for this year's awards. As a production, A Complete Unknown is broadly handsome: though a touch more cramped than Walk the Line - even studio budgets aren't what they used to be pre-2008 - that's not unhelpful for a drama that largely unfolds around a sunny (Australian-built) replica of Greenwich Village, and these sets do much to preserve the chilled atmos of a less cluttered era, wherein a provincial boy might well have had the time and space to rethink and reinvent himself as the voice of a generation. (The movie is meticulous in its recreation of how white people of a certain age remember the Sixties: that may be enough to ensure it's a hit.) These rooms are populated by performers who are also likely fans, and so feel especially compelled to channel the look and spirit of those they're impersonating; this extends to doing their own singing and playing their own instruments, as Walk the Line previously insisted. The pick of the pack is Norton's Seeger, a genuine character, and the one person on screen who seems any fun to be around, dorky as he is. The limitation is that much of the rest never gets past the level of surface impersonation: A Complete Unknown largely resembles some folk-themed holiday special of Stars in Their Eyes with unusually detailed linking segments. It's terribly bland for a Dylan movie - ploddingly prosaic, where Todd Haynes's I'm Not There was chancy and imaginative - and Chalamet-as-Dylan, nursing his cigarettes with maximum preciousness and never once appearing to age, at all points proves a far less compelling focus than the refusenik star of Don't Look Back, observed with jagged edges very prominently intact. Truth is almost always more interesting than these sorts of fictions.

A Complete Unknown opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.

In memoriam: Jack Bond (Telegraph 14/01/25)

Jack Bond, who has died aged 87, was a filmmaker who emerged from the British counterculture to specialise in portraits of artists, whether strictly non-fiction – as in his feted TV doc Dalí in New York (1966) – or wholly fantastical, as in It Couldn’t Happen Here (1987), the big-screen Pet Shop Boys vehicle described by its maker as “a saucy seaside postcard come to life and gone mad”.

His directorial career almost ended before it began. Hired on a BBC trainee scheme in 1962, Bond faced the sack after inventing outraged viewer responses during an early dry spell on Points of View (1961-present). He was only spared by controller Huw Wheldon, possibly sensing creative gifts that would be better deployed elsewhere.

Commissioned to mark the 50th anniversary of WWI’s outbreak, The Pity of War (1964) soon returned Bond to his employers’ good graces. He followed it with the career-making Dalí in New York, an hour-long study of the artist in residence at the St. Regis Hotel, fashioned at the point the Spanish surrealist was transforming his body into a canvas for performance art and his name into a saleable brand.

The Dalí that Bond filmed was equal parts exasperating (demanding his handlers source five thousand black ants for a performance piece) and fond. If it wasn’t for his wife, the artist admitted, “I would be lying in a gutter somewhere covered in lice.” Bond was both amused and charmed: “[He] always knew exactly what he wanted, and he got it… He was grand in the real meaning of the word.”

Seen calling Dalí’s chauvinism out was the Welsh-born polymath Jane Arden, Bond’s then-lover and collaborator on three intense, experimentally inclined features: Separation (1968), which Arden wrote and starred in, and Bond directed; the trippy The Other Side of Underneath (1972), which Bond produced for Arden to direct; and Anti-Clock (1979), a Godard-adjacent surveillance saga, co-directed by Bond and Arden, which became a minor US hit upon attracting Andy Warhol’s patronage.

After Arden took her own life over Christmas 1982, a wounded Bond suppressed these films (“along with a lot of thoughts and feelings”) and lived a self-described playboy existence, sailing his boat Moonsaga around Europe. He was eventually tempted back to dry land to contribute to Melvyn Bragg’s The South Bank Show, and “Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum”, Bond’s imaginative Roald Dahl profile of 1986, led to an offer to direct It Couldn’t Happen Here. 

Initially conceived as a Pet Shop Boys video album, the project developed under Bond’s eye into an idiosyncratic, Clacton-shot theatrical feature, with the band’s Tennant/Lowe double-act being menaced in passing by Joss Ackland as a serial killer whose end-of-the-pier puns echoed Bond’s own back catalogue: “I’ve just been fishing with Salvador Dalí. He used a dotted line.”

Jack Cameron Bond was born in London on December 10, 1937, to insurance agent Frank Bond and postal worker Pat (née King). As a child, he was caught up in the Blitz: “We went to a beautiful house in the country. Very quickly we got bored, so we came back and spent the rest of the time being bombed.” The war, he said, turned him into “a fighter”. Leaving home at fifteen to move in with a barmaid who’d caught his eye, he subsequently trained in the Royal Army Educational Corps; his teaching plans were abandoned, however, after discovering the low rates of pay. 

In later life, Bond completed several independently produced documentaries. The Blueblack Hussar (2013) was a revealing study of former pop pin-up Adam Ant on his comeback from mental health issues, wearing his bruises and battlescars as he once did warpaint; An Artist’s Eyes (2018) followed the instinctive young painter Chris Moon, poised on the verge of a commercial breakthrough that never quite follows.

The new century, however, brought plentiful appreciation of Bond’s own work. Dalí in New York went on permanent show at Florida’s Dalí Museum, earning its director a medal from the Raymond Roussel Society in 2023; while his collaborations with Arden were issued on DVD by the BFI, as was It Couldn’t Happen Here, complete with the promo for festive chart-topper “Always On My Mind” and Bond’s wry audio commentary: “Were we ever examined by doctors to see if we were sane?”

Bond is survived by his partner Mary Rose Storey, stepdaughter Lily Marlene von Kalbach, and three of his four children by his first wife Moira Tulley; his daughter Rebecca died in 2018.

Jack Bond, born December 10, 1937, died December 21, 2024.

In memoriam: Phyllis Dalton (Telegraph 13/01/25)

Phyllis Dalton, who has died aged 99, was a costume designer whose work on film earned her two Academy Awards: for Doctor Zhivago (1966), the second of two major assignments for the director David Lean, and for Henry V (1989), the first of three collaborations with Kenneth Branagh.

Both were projects from the more spectacular end of the Dalton wheelyard, involving oversight of sizeable costume departments and hundreds of extras. More commonly, Dalton specialised in a form of period dress that dutifully sublimated the necessary hours of research and unshowily devoted itself to conjuring up a particular era. 

Hers was the kind of fundamentally practical costuming that didn’t fall apart amid multiple takes of a frenetic battle scene, that had a lived-in quality rarely noted in reviews but essential to establishing the credibility of a film’s world. As Dalton put it: “Anyone can make a smart frock; it’s much more difficult to make people from the past who are wearing ordinary clothes look real.”

On Doctor Zhivago, Dalton played a vital part in evoking the Russian revolution and its aftermath, though this wasn’t her first largescale Lean collaboration. Four years before, she had been the costume designer on Lawrence of Arabia (1962), where – among other items – she sourced and styled the pristine white headscarves that popped so indelibly against the film’s cinnamon desertscapes.  

On behalf of her director, she played a crafty but undeniably effective tailor’s trick, stitching Peter O’Toole’s Army duds a size too small to signify Lawrence’s growing discomfort with military duty; she later placed the actor in ever lighter robes, to suggest a figure evaporating under a relentless sun. 

But, as Dalton revealed, this was only a small part of the work required to fill Lean’s monumental frames: “One of the things was we did actually dress absolutely every last person you see on that screen… Lots of people think the Arabs all wore their own clothes, but that was another case of [there] being ten identical outfits for everybody.”

If anything, Zhivago was a more ambitious and challenging production yet. Over the course of the project, Dalton and her team delivered 3,000 costumes and 35,000 individual items of clothing; both Omar Sharif’s title character and Julie Christie’s Lara had ninety costume changes apiece. The challenge was even greater for attempting to reconstruct Russian winters while filming in Spain at the height of summer: Dalton was personally stationed to keep an eye on extras shrugging off their heavy furs in the sweltering Soria heat. 

In a 2000 interview, she evoked her back-and-forths with Lean, in discussing the pink marabou worn by Geraldine Chaplin’s Tonya: “I originally did a much more sophisticated design because I thought she’d been at finishing school in Paris. She had a lovely big black sort of fluffy hat and a very tight, very pale pearl grey outfit. But David said he wanted her [in] white or pink or something. I said she can’t sit [wearing that] in the train all that time, and that was me being boring, really. In the end, you know, obviously you give in, and I did the pink outfit and he loved it.”

Such flexibility occasioned Dalton her first Academy Award; with Branagh’s Henry V, she was closing the circle, having previously served as a wardrobe assistant on Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film. Such experience made Dalton invaluable. According to producer David Parfitt, Branagh’s emergent Renaissance company, newcomers to cinema, had the idea “to surround ourselves with the very best people, on the assumption they would know what they were doing, and therefore cover our arses”.

In wartime London, Dalton had had to raid Old Compton Street’s button shops to decorate Renée Asherson; she now had a small fortune with which to bestow additional sparkle upon Emma Thompson’s Catherine of Valois. Again, though, Dalton mostly devoted her efforts to accurately serving the period: “One of the most important things about the job is that no-one should really notice the costumes, unless it’s a film about fashion, of course, where you’re supposed to.” Any singling out, praise or prize was deemed “a bit of a backhanded compliment, really”.

She was born Phyllis Margaret Dalton in Chiswick on October 16, 1925, elder of two children to a railwayman father and a mother who worked in a bank during the war years. After failing her eleven-plus exam, she was privately schooled in Uxbridge before studying dressmaking at the Ealing College of Art.

During WW2, Dalton began Wren training at Bletchley Park, which she confessed to finding “unbelievably boring”. An early instructor of hers said she hoped her new charge didn’t have “an artistic temperament”, and her creativity was limited to heating her bunk with lemonade bottles topped up with hot water: “I never thought the work was for me, but as there was a war on, we got on with it.”

Towards the war’s end, however, there was a stroke of luck. A grandmother entered Dalton in a fashion journalism competition in British Vogue; though her writings didn’t win, they impressed editor Audrey Withers enough to introduce Dalton to Elizabeth Haffenden, then costume designer at Gainsborough Studios in Islington.

Upon being demobbed, Dalton was taken on as a wardrobe assistant, eventually working her way up to designing in her own right. She went solo on the low-budget Rank thriller The Dark Man (1951), put Richard Todd in tartan for Disney’s Rob Roy, The Highland Rogue (1953), and moved into international production with Darryl Zanuck’s Caribbean-set social drama Island in the Sun (1957), gifting stars Dorothy Dandridge and Joan Collins glamorous swimwear and gowns.

She was responsible for the Army greens of the fondly remembered spy drama Carve Her Name with Pride (1958) and the Navy whites of The World of Suzie Wong (1960); her growing influence on the look of her chosen projects was such that the sailor’s outfit she assembled for Peter O’Toole in Lord Jim (1965) – the right size, this time, but with a top slit suggestively to the navel – found its way onto posters.

She proved more than adaptable as the medium segued from black-and-white into full colour: Carol Reed, arguably post-War British cinema’s second most significant director after Lean, sought out Dalton to provide both the crisp pyjamas and linen suits of Our Man in Havana (1959) and the playful jumble-sale free-for-all of Oliver! (1968), for which Dalton received her second Oscar nomination. (She lost to Danilo Donati’s work on the same year’s Romeo and Juliet.)

She worked more selectively in the 1970s, winning a BAFTA for her spare, elegant tailoring on Alan Bridges’ Palme d’Or-winning adaptation of The Hireling (1973), one of the great lost films of the decade. She returned to epic territory for the ambitious religious yarn Mohammed, Messenger of God (a.k.a. The Message, 1976), dressed the live-action scenes in Lionel Jeffries’ The Water Babies (1978) and had fun with the wacky Disney adventure The Spaceman and King Arthur (1979).

After amusing herself with Kim Novak’s embonpoint on the all-star adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d (1980), Dalton then segued into the burgeoning international TV movie sector, winning an Emmy for her work on Clive Donner’s adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982) starring Anthony Andrews, Jane Seymour and Ian McKellen.

She kept a hand in cinema, however, just about protecting her costumes from the pigs wreaking havoc in the Michael Palin comedy A Private Function (1984), and thereafter moving onto The Princess Bride (1987), where she designed a shoe to protect the injured toe of leading man Cary Elwes, and helped an entire generation fall head over heels for an ethereally pretty Robin Wright.

She followed Henry V with two further Branagh projects. On the noir pastiche Dead Again (1991), Dalton expressed some measure of disappointment that costumes designed for colour photography were instead being filmed in monochrome. More happily, the Chianti-shot Much Ado About Nothing (1993) – Dalton’s final credit – punched up the eminently photogenic cast’s tans with light shirts and smocks: “[Ken] wanted them earthy… bosoms nearly hanging out but no corsets, which is quite a problem to do, you know, when you haven’t got any construction.”

A longtime resident of Putney, which she described as halfway between the shops and the studios, she was awarded an MBE in 2002, and in 2012 was the subject of a BAFTA tribute attended by Omar Sharif, Tom Courtenay and Peter Egan, an event she greeted with characteristic self-effacement: “I’m surprised by all this attention… I’ve worked with some wonderful people, not just great directors, but great costumiers and costume assistants. You have to be a team; it’s very important. It’s no good if everyone ruins the look of what you’re doing, which is easily done.”

She was married once, to the theatre producer James Whiteley; they divorced before his death in 1976.

Phyllis Dalton, born October 16, 1925, died January 9, 2025.

Uptight downtown: "Babygirl"

Before she turned writer-director, Halina Reijn acted in films by Paul Verhoeven (2006's Black Book) and Peter Greenaway (2012's Goltzius and the Pelican Company), making her a prime candidate to try and revive the Nineties-style erotic entertainment Stateside. Any even partly sympathetic review of Reijn's latest Babygirl is going to have to concede it's not much of a thriller - don't, whatever you do, go in expecting the thrusting corporate intrigue of 1994's Disclosure - but it plays surprisingly well as tangled comedy-drama, and may just function as satisfying fantasy fare for viewers of a particular disposition, in the same way the Fast & Furious movies have done for boy racers the world over. Nicole Kidman's Romy is presented to us as a woman who seemingly has it all: married to theatre director Antonio Banderas, her day job the CEO of some package-picking organisation, she's been blessed with a nice house, sweet kids and regular sex - though she elects to finish herself off in an adjacent room with the help of BDSM porn, a dirty secret she hasn't yet been able to breach with her man. This life of routine is disrupted when Romy crosses paths with the disarmingly upfront Samuel (Harris Dickinson), a young intern introduced subduing an aggressive dog on the street. Samuel similarly stands up to Romy - it helps that Dickinson is one of the few leading men who've matched Kidman for height - having spotted that some sweet spot between her ears or thighs is frustrated with being treated like corporate royalty; he's a diagnostic tool ("I think you like to be told what to do") for a woman who's long been geared towards smooth running, but who secretly - in her own mind, shamefully - prefers things at least a little rough. One reason Babygirl will disappoint anybody expecting thrills is that it's been specifically directed towards the easing of tensions; instead, Reijn proposes something else, a fond profile of a woman who appears effortless before the camera and in the boardroom, but who finds communication elsewhere, notably in the bedroom, difficult in the extreme.

It is, granted, another in the recent run of Movies About Business, a project couched in a certain way so as to be greenlit by actual executives. (It's quietly revealing that Babygirl should be opening on the same weekend as Maria: sent out to fight among themselves, here are two tony, female-led awards contenders the industry isn't sure what to do with, nor what the audience is going to make of them.) Yet it has two factors that kept me onside: an emotional complexity that owes more to the European arthouse than it does to those Fifty Shades movies, and Nicole Kidman, operating on another level altogether. Where Maria's Angelina Jolie is all surface, Kidman goes deeper and pushes further still. It's not just in the intimate scenes, which make us feel sorry for Keith Urban, but in the linking contextual sequences in which Romy submits to Botox, cryogenic freezing and (somehow worst of all) business podcasts, and the movie cops to the processes to which women who've grown used to a certain quality of life - possibly including La Kidman herself - feel obliged to submit on a regular basis. (Somewhere in these brisk, matter-of-fact cutaways: what The Substance might have exposed, were it not so keen to exploit Demi Moore's desperation.) As a performance, this is one part laying bare to two parts whistleblowing: actorly acknowledgement that some part of wanting it all may in fact be wanting not to be adored, a desire to escape the beautician appointments and designer duds and be treated like an employee, to be approached not as a goddess, but seen - really seen - as a real woman with real desires that need satisfying. The question is how, and here Reijn begins to reveal the film's serious intent: to figure out where the boundaries might be in the wake of all things #MeToo. Romy straightens herself out - by employing Samuel to straighten her out - only to walk, newly relaxed, into a whole other set of complications, not least how to get this liberating fling past HR. Which is where Babygirl begins to get properly funny - funnier, indeed, than Reijn's previous Bodies Bodies Bodies, which squandered its cast of emergent American comedians on utterly disposable material.

One way of approaching the new film is as a revision of Eyes Wide Shut (maybe even The Piano Teacher?) with Kidman recast as the uptight lead. Getting Romy out of her comfort zone entails days and nights in the grottiest hotels in existence (what an intern's stipend gets you, presumably); it also allows Reijn to contrast the fathomless complexity of female sexuality - these panties get in such a knot - with the relative simplicity of male desire. In several places, Babygirl appears to flirt with an anti-feminist reading: on some level, what it implies is that some women are wild animals who need training by boys who keep cookies in their pockets for that very purpose. Yet even that's been framed within the context that sexuality is an odd fucking thing for any of us to have to get our heads around, and that we'd do well to approach the task with compassion, humour and patience. The writing has one obvious limitation: the Dickinson character is not much better defined than a plot device, being the key to unlocking and unblocking this woman. (We never fully shake off our suspicions that if a real intern behaved like this, he'd be clearing his locker in a heartbeat.) But he's crucial to the dynamic Reijn is fostering here. If the hotel scenes occasionally assume the look of an actors' exercise - and Reijn surely intends some parallel between these power games and the production Romy's husband is seen rehearsing - these actors visibly benefit from having been directed by someone who's been in their position before: we're set to watching two people feeling one another out in compelling ways, and a director taking supreme care to protect her performers from indignity or foolishness. Part of the mainstream's recent terror of sex has been a fear of how to film sex: how do you observe these physicalities while avoiding crossing any lines with regard to taste, decency or consent? Fashioned by a Dutchwoman - as liberated as Verhoeven, if evidently not as male in the gaze - Babygirl provides one model for future explorations; whether or not you find it sexy will be a matter of personal preference, but the framing is always warm and inviting - it's attractive filmmaking - and it'd be one heck of a conversation starter if arrived at as a date movie. My brain, at least, was stimulated - and I'll take that from any movie on general release.

Babygirl is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Diva: "Maria"

One of the issues affecting world cinema right now is the growing tendency among acclaimed arthouse filmmakers to pursue funding for English-language features. Almodóvar's The Room Next Door was, as most observers concluded, basically fine; it allowed its maker to expand his reach while trying something new. Yet few of us would rank the resulting film among the director's very best, or as among the most compelling reasons to visit a cinema in 2024. Pablo Larraín has been this way before, with 2016's Jackie and 2021's Spencer, impressionistic portraits of women at the mercy of the world and the men who run it. Both of those films were fine; semi-interesting in their refusal of standard biopic framing and conventional plot, they carried leads Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart somewhere close to the awards conversation, as their producers would surely have hoped upon initiating these projects. They were also ever so slightly off: movies shot in a second tongue, seen fumbling in places for the nuance, texture and rigour Larraín worked into his early, career-making run of films shot in his native Chile (2008's Tony Manero, 2010's Post Mortem, 2012's NO, 2016's Neruda). For long stretches, both Jackie and Spencer could have been mistaken for one of those chi-chi fragrance commercials directors often make with big stars between the less well-paying projects they really want to be getting on with: aspirationally glossy images, brisk cutting, movement for movement's sake, familiar faces being idolised by the camera. I was reminded of this during the montage that opens Maria, Larraín's study of opera legend Maria Callas in her final days of seclusion. We watch Angelina Jolie's Callas soaking up plaudits onstage, burning her costumes, facing up to the emptiness of her life offstage in 1970s Paris. We marvel at the interiors and clothes, the sunglasses and cheekbones. And we wait for a logo to appear, and the voiceover to kick in: New parfum. Solitude pour femme.

What follows never quite throws off an air of advertorial. When Maria isn't trying to sell us on the essence of Callas, it's trying to sell us bigtime on Jolie, her imperious jawline mapped in adoring close-ups that seem dictated less by the character (who claims to have lost her voice) than by the demands of a performer and her people. (Here, Larraín seems like a hired gun at the mercy of an especially exacting client; Jolie must have glided into the showroom and pointed at what Jackie and Spencer did for their leads before issuing her queenly command: "do me another one of those, would you?") The failure to sell me on either front was firstly a matter of form, and secondly situational. These heavily stylised films represent an attempt to escape the flat biographical realism one witnesses in a plodder like next week's A Complete Unknown and instead acknowledge and even embrace the biopic's artificiality; in certain respects, they may be more experimental than Larraín's early successes. They're also far less dramatically satisfying, because the frames set around them, polished yet self-conscious, keep getting in the way; it takes half the film to get used to the approach, and even then you have to look past the director's choices before you can begin to assess those of the film's subject. I'm also not sure this one has the right frame. Jackie was part Washington procedural, part ghost story, which felt right for a film about living at the mercy of the dead. Spencer was pure Gothic horror, because it was the story of a princess at the mercy of her keepers. Maria is couched as... well, what, exactly? A gilded mope was as close as I could get to summing it up, and it wouldn't be a failure of empathy if, in early 2025, with the world on fire and ordinary people facing mortal peril, audiences have a hard time relating to this adored figure as she wafts around her palatial residence, pokes over old memories and tells the imaginary film crew in her head how unhappy she is. For much of its duration, Maria is artists talking among themselves, money talking to money, though it began to grow on me in its closing stages; here, Larraín adopts the one good tack in Steven Knight's script, which is to approach Callas as if she were the tragic subject of one of her own arias. Paris, naturally, looks lovely, if shot in such a determinedly smoky soft focus it leaves you concerned you might be developing cataracts; cinephiles will also enjoy watching Jolie interacting with a spruced-up Vincent Macaigne as her butler. But for the third time with these Larraín biopics, I'm afraid I wasn't entirely buying it.

Maria is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of January 3-5, 2025):

1 (new) Nosferatu (15) ***

2 (2) Mufasa: The Lion King (PG)

3 (new) We Live in Time (15) **

4 (1) Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PG)

5 (4) Moana 2 (U) ***

6 (3) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

7 (5) Better Man (15) **

8 (6) Paddington in Peru (PG)

9 (7) Gladiator II (15) ***

10 (8) Conclave (12A) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Se7en

2. Babygirl

3. A Real Pain

4. Rocco and His Brothers

5. Nickel Boys

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

2 (new) Conclave (12) ****

3 (9) Dune: Part Two (12) **

4 (4) Venom: The Last Dance (15)

5 (6) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

6 (18) The Fall Guy (12) **

7 (14) Oppenheimer (15) ****

8 (15) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)

9 (25) Barbie (12) ***

10 (24) Terrifier 3 (18)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Juror #2

2. Speak No Evil

3. Kneecap

4. Evil Does Not Exist

5. The Apprentice

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Shape of Water (Thursday, Channel 4, 1.40am)

2. Pride & Prejudice (Saturday, BBC2, 6.35pm)

3. The Hurt Locker [above] (Saturday, BBC1, 12 midnight)

4. Saving Private Ryan (Sunday, BBC2, 10pm)

5. Missing Link (Saturday, BBC1, 2.30pm)