Cinema

Moonage Daydream is a music documentary like no other, which is fitting as the subject is David Bowie. If it’s David Bowie, make it special or just don’t bother. And this is special. It’s an immersive, trippy, hurtling, throbbing two hours and 15 minutes. If Disneyland did a Bowie ride, this would be it. Yet it isn’t shallow. There are some real insights. Bowie was cool and sexy and beautiful, but also somehow aloof and otherworldly, an enigma, never everyday. I can imagine Paul McCartney at home and I can imagine Mick Jagger at home. But I have never been able to imagine David Bowie at home, turning to Iman and saying: ‘What shall we do for dinner? Fish again?

You always have to brace yourself for the latest David Cronenberg film, but with Crimes of the Future it’s not the scalpels slicing into flesh or the mutant dancer with sewn-up eyes (and mouth) or even the filicide (oh, boy) you have to brace yourself for. In this instance, the most shocking thing is that it’s so muddled and dreary. It’s a gore-fest, true enough, but it’s a gore-fest that is mostly a snooze-fest. That’s what you need to brace yourself for.

The Forgiven is based on the novel by Lawrence Osborne and stars Ralph Fiennes (terrific) and Jessica Chastain (ditto) as a wealthy British-American couple driving to a weekend-long party in a luxurious Moroccan desert villa when they hit and kill a young local boy on the road. Oops. What the film adds up to, I cannot say, as it isn’t clear. Who is forgiven? Is anybody? It’s ethically ambiguous and you have to do your own moralising, which is always a drag. (Note to filmmakers: I’m old, I’m tired, please spoon-feed me.) But it’s a compelling, tense journey even if it’s a pitiless one. Human nature doesn’t come out of this at all well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Beast is, the blurb tells us, a ‘pulse-pounding thriller about a father and his daughters who find themselves hunted by a massive rogue lion intent on proving that the savannah has but one apex predator’. Whether this was ever intended to be a serious film, I cannot say, but it’s fun in its schlocky, gory, silly way, doesn’t outstay its welcome (it’s barely 90 minutes) and will satisfy anyone who has ever yearned to see Idris Elba wrestle a lion and then punch it full in the face. Not my dream especially, but each to their own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

My Old School is a documentary exploring a true story that would have to be true as it’s too preposterous – it is absolutely nuts – for any screenwriter to have made it up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDazGVIs9C0 You know something is up but not what and if you’re coming to it fresh your jaw will hit the floor It’s the story of Brandon Lee, who was 16 when he enrolled as a new student to a secondary school in the Glasgow area in 1993. Or is it: was this new boy a 16-year-old called Brandon Lee? And now I’m in a pickle. If I say more it’s a spoiler. The film plays its cards close to its chest until the 45-minute mark. You know something is up but not what and if you’re coming to it fresh your jaw will hit the floor.

Eiffel is a romantic drama purporting to show how a passionate but forbidden love inspired Gustave Eiffel to design and build the Eiffel Tower. The producers say that, by merging fact and fiction – the romance is a fiction, more or less – they hope to create ‘the French Titanic’, which is aiming rather high, if not way, way too high. The love affair is tiresomely humdrum – if you’re going to make it up, please make it up better – plus the stakes are too low, particularly as the Eiffel Tower never hits an iceberg, does not sink, and nobody dies. Although you might, a bit, from boredom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

It doesn’t help the cause of The Railway Children Return that the original 1970 Railway Children film is currently on iPlayer. Just to test my capacity to cry, having emerged dry-eyed from the new one, I came home and re-watched the original. Yup. The 2022 sequel has three scenes of the new cohort of Railway Children – three second world war evacuees from Manchester, Lily, Pattie and Ted – waving goodbye to their soldier father as he departs for war, in the fog, never to return. Violins soar. Eyes remain dry. The 1970 film has just one scene of Daddy arriving home, in the fog of a steam train, and it still makes me sob every time. So is a return more moving than a departure? It certainly can be, but you have to live through the desolation first.

Where the Crawdads Sing is based on the bestselling book (by Delia Owens) that I picked up from one of those three-for-two tables at Waterstones and always thought I’d read but for some reason never did. I can’t now say the film’s not as good as the book and send everyone involved to prison, which is a pity, as that was most satisfying. (See last week’s review of Persuasion.) Still, it’s always interesting to find out what they’ve done with a book you haven’t read and, based on this, it was a lucky escape. The film is so cliché-ridden there’s a point where an entire courtroom gasps and I laughed. Not proud, but it was beyond my control. Could I send everyone involved to prison anyway? For cocking up a book I haven’t read?

Brian and Charles is a sweetly funny mockumentary about a lonely Welsh inventor who is not that good at inventing. That said, I reckon his ‘pine cone bag’ would sell pretty well if Vivienne Westwood got behind it. (His ‘trawler fishing net shoes’ would, admittedly, be a tougher proposition.) Then, more by accident than design, he manages to invent a robot, and a friendship develops between the two. This film won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and while it doesn’t invent much itself – it is essentially Wallace & Gromit in spirit – it is still loveable beyond all measure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

The Princess, a new documentary film, is the first re-framing of the Princess Diana story since it was last re-framed, about ten minutes ago, and before it will be re-framed again, probably by Tuesday. We’ve had The Crown recently, and Spencer, and our favourite, Diana: The Musical (‘It’s the Thrilla in Manila but with Diana and Camilla’), and there are several upcoming books, one of which, R is for Revenge Dress, ‘explores the celebrated life of Princess Diana through the alphabet’. To those who say the poor woman should be left to rest in peace, I would say: F is for Fat Chance. But is this the definitive documentary we’ve all been waiting for? Possibly not. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Elvis is Baz Luhrmann’s biopic of Elvis Presley and it’s cradle to grave but told at such a gallop you’ll be willing it to stay put even if it’s just for two minutes. You may even be begging: Baz, come on, just hold still. But no, we’re off again. I’ve had fever dreams that have been less delirious. But on the plus side, even if it’s never deep or enlightening, it has a fizzing energy, and because it doesn’t dwell on anything, we don’t dwell on fat, sad Elvis at the end. Which is a relief. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp2BNHwbwvI Because it doesn’t dwell on anything, we don’t dwell on fat, sad Elvis at the end. Which is a relief The film opens as it means to go on. That is, flashily.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande stars Emma Thompson as a retired, widowed religious education teacher in her sixties who books sessions with a sex worker (Daryl McCormack) because, for the first time in her life, she would like to experience good sex. Her husband was a roll on, roll off sort of fella, she’s never slept with anyone else and her body, she says, ‘feels like a carcass I’ve been dragging round all these years’. You have to admire her courage. I don’t think I’d even have the courage to book a hotel room for two hours in the afternoon. I’d probably pay for the night so that no one would know. Or would a week be safer? Written by author and comedian Katy Brand, and directed by Sophie Hyde, this is a riveting film and an important one.

All My Friends Hate Me is a film about a university reunion weekend and should you have an upcoming university reunion weekend, I’d duck out if I were you. No good will come of it. This is social anxiety as horror (almost) and you won’t just cringe for the full 90 minutes, you will violently cringe. It may take you days to uncringe. It’s a clever film, and surprising, and compelling. Yet it is also an endurance test. You won’t regret seeing it, but you will be so glad when it’s over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Bergman Island sounds, on first acquaintance, like a theme-park attraction. Roll up, roll up! Let us speed you through the shed where Max von Sydow is weeping and then plunge you downwards until you come face to face with a priest struggling with his faith. Then you’ll twist hard left – hold on! – to encounter Liv Ullmann suffering from a series of nightmares in which God appears graceless and indifferent. Or is God dead? To be fair, I’d probably go on such a ride. It may be more exciting than this, and over more quickly. That’s possibly too harsh, but this film is certainly most self-regarding. Written and directed by Mia Hansen-Love, it is a meandering, literary, dreamy, inconclusive take on I’m-not-sure-what. It’s not wholly unbeguiling.

Top Gun is back, nearly 40 years after the original, with reprised roles for Tom Cruise (59) and Val Kilmer (62) but nothing for Meg Ryan (60) or Kelly McGillis (64) although I can’t work out why. The first film is iconic and will likely remain that way unless you are stupid enough to rewatch it (I was stupid enough, and it hasn’t dated well; bland and corny). The sequel also hits its marks as if following a guide entitled How To Write a Blockbuster in Not That Many Steps With a Ton of Colossal Planes, but it is better done. Just. Maybe. The deal is: here’s a bad thing. Now go kill it Even if you find Cruise a little creepy, as I do, you can’t deny he has an aura, as if he were the Last Great Movie Star.

Terence Davies’s Benediction is a biopic of the first world war poet Siegfried Sassoon told with great feeling and tenderness. The result is quietly powerful, quietly devastating and, happily, is not afflicted by the usual clichés that afflict this genre. Sassoon never, for example, crumples what he’s just written and throws it across the room. For this we must be grateful, and are. The film juggles two timelines, with the young Siegfried played by Jack Lowden – once a rising star, it is probably now fair to say he has fully risen; he is wonderful here – and the old Siegfried played by Peter Capaldi.

We’re doing multiverses now. Last weekend, a friend dragged me to see Marvel’s latest product, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. For two hours I watched characters earnestly talk about their trauma, and then fly around firing jets of coloured magic at each other, and then more pompous trauma talk, like five-year-olds playing at adult emotional life, and then more joyless beams of coloured magic. I left the cinema muttering like a deranged war veteran. ‘Someone needs to be punished for this. We need show trials. We need to make them suffer for what they’ve done.’ My friend spoke, but I could barely hear him. I stared at an empty space roughly 50 metres behind his head. ‘You. You brought me here. You did this.

In Rus, which we now call Ukraine, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard) begins his pursuit of revenge. A sea captain who later aids him is called Volodymyr. But these incidentals have no relevance to the current war, except in one aspect that I want to come on to. Though the film’s hero is called Amleth, the original of Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, you can forget Elsinore. The director Robert Eggers’s world in The Northman is that of the Norse sagas, of corpse-eating ravens, runes, mud, gore, human sacrifice and sudden violence. One of the runes on the title cards between scenes is named after the word for ‘ulcer’. The sun never shines. It is surprising that, in their wet homespuns, everyone isn’t shivering.

Downton Abbey: A New Era is the second film spin-off from the TV series and, like the first, it doesn’t have to try especially hard if at all. It could be two hours of Mrs Hughes darning socks or two hours of Mrs Patmore concocting something disgusting (kidney soufflé?) or two hours of Lady Grantham requesting tea in bed and fans would still love it to the tune of whatever the last film made. (Millions.) That said, I have always had a bit of a soft spot for it. As the theme music starts up and we get that first sweeping vista of the estate, it feels reassuring and familiar, like putting on a pair of old slippers. On the other hand, old slippers can become highly embarrassing in time, so there is also that.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent stars Nicolas Cage playing a version of Nicolas Cage, in a parody of Nicolas Cage and the many, many films of Nicolas Cage. This couldn’t, you will have already surmised, be more Nicolas Cage, and if you are wondering how much Nicolas Cage is too much Nicolas Cage you could say any amount of Nicolas Cage is always too much Nicolas Cage. But that’s exactly what this film is playing with and it’s a hoot. Cage fans will want to fill their boots. My own face hurt by the end It is directed by Tom Gormican, who co-wrote the film with Kevin Etten, and Nicolas Cage plays ‘Nick Cage’, a Hollywood movie star famed for his unique, unhinged intensity – why does that sound familiar?