Cinema

A three-hour Japanese epic about a classical performance art (kabuki) isn’t the easiest sell, I’ll grant you, but I’ll give it my best. Kokuho is multi-award winning. It is the highest grossing live-action film in Japan ever. It is sumptuously filmed. It is masterfully sweeping. The kabuki itself is stunning, so much so that you may one day wish to visit the kabuki theater in Tokyo, although be warned: the shortest production is four hours. Some last all day. Looked at this way, you are getting off lightly here. Directed by Lee Sang-il, and adapted from Shuichi Yoshida’s two-part novel, the film is a drama spanning 50 years. It opens in 1964, in Nagasaki, with the shocking killing of a crime boss while his 14-year-old son Kikuo (Soya Kurokawa) looks on.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is the film that fans of the television show have long been waiting for, so I must watch what I say. The story follows a group of exceptionally violent Birmingham gangsters operating between the wars and if you see it at the cinema you’ll hear a message before the opening credits. It’s Cillian Murphy imploring audiences not to give away any spoilers and ruin it for everyone else “by order of the Peaky Blinders!” There will be no spoilers here today. I have no wish to get my face slashed. Although I’ve dipped in and out of Peaky Blinders down the years, I’ve never stuck with it and am not steeped in its lore – I can’t stomach all those beatings even if they are highly stylized and set to cool rock music; my fault!

EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert is a concert documentary that grew out of the 65 boxes of unseen Las Vegas performances discovered by Baz Luhrmann while researching his 2022 biopic Elvis. As I have little interest in "the King" I approached with a heavy heart. But now? I’m abundantly interested. In fact, I’ve shifted from indifference to thinking that if I could see one musical artist live at their peak it would have to be him. He’s that electrifying. A warning, however: it’s a 12A. "Elvis picks up a bra thrown on to the stage during a concert performance and puts it on his head," notes the BBFC. I wish I’d had the chance to throw a bra that he’d put on his head. Hopefully, it would have been one of my nicer ones that day. They are of varying quality.

H is for Hawk is an adaptation of the bestselling memoir by Helen Macdonald who, following the sudden death of her beloved father, channels her grief through the training of a goshawk, Mabel. The film stars Claire Foy, who is superb, as is the nature photography, but is it right, keeping a wild animal captive, and depriving it of its natural behaviors because it helps you in some way? What’s in it for this gorgeous bird, I kept wondering. The cruelty is never addressed. This is solely about human need. We’re not even told who plays Mabel, so I can’t say what she has been in before or whether she has won any awards. (I would hope so; she is magnificent.