Cinema

From the moment this all-female reboot of Ghostbusters was announced, the fan-boy panic set in: where will it end? An all-female Top Gun? Will it make me pregnant? Who are these ‘women’? Where do they come from? Are they a recent thing? Do we know any? If it’s proved they can carry big Hollywood comedies, how will they ever be stopped? Such vitriol had to be coming from a sexist place as films are rebooted all the time and superheroes are endlessly — Batman can’t bend down to pull up his socks without being rebooted — yet they don’t provoke hate. Plus, it’s not as if remaking a film erases the earlier one. You can purchase the 1984 original on DVD for £3.

Anthony Weiner is the American politician who made a comeback after a sexting scandal and stood for New York mayor. He was topping the polls, when a second sexting scandal broke, which proves what, probably, none of us had suspected all along: that thing you do where you send women pictures of your erect penis must be awfully hard to quit. This fly on the wall documentary was, happily, already filming Weiner and his fascinating wife (Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s long time aide) when his career imploded, and the result is as supremely entertaining, painfully funny and queasily riveting as you might have hoped, with one caveat: why is it so awfully hard to quit? Why is it so awfully hard not to press ‘send’?

Perhaps you have sometimes wondered: how would you even begin to make a film about going blind and being blind and what that means? How, when the subject is so profoundly and inherently uncinematic? Or maybe it’s other thoughts that keep you awake at night — such as when we all finally receive our £350 million a week plus free puppy, where will we be expected to keep them? — but even if that’s so you’ll still find Notes on Blindness to be a singular achievement, as well as a truly wonderful one. This is based on the audio recordings of John Hull, the academic, writer and theologian who was Emeritus Professor of Religious Education at the University of Birmingham.

The Secret Life of Pets is the latest animation from Illumination Entertainment, which also brought us Minions and Despicable Me, but whereas they were smart, funny, charming and original, this is not that smart, not that funny, not that charming and not that original. It’s an average caper that feels familiar and suffers mightily from an excess of chase scenes although, in the interests of full disclosure, I should add I attended the screening with a six-year-old who said afterwards: ‘I loved it.’ Six-year-olds. We are fond of them and all that, but they just don’t ever get the bigger picture, do they? This is set in Manhattan and concerns Max, a little terrier as voiced by Louis C.K. (The dogs speak, but to the human ear it sounds like barking.

Matteo Garrone’s first English-language film is a baroque fantasy based on Pentamerone (Tale of Tales), the 17th-century collection of fairy tales by the Italian poet and courtier Giambattista Basile. (It is also known as The Story of Stories, ‘Lo cunto de li cunti’, but that, I think we can all agree, travels rather less well in the original language.) Garrone, who is best known for his grittily realistic Neapolitan crime drama Gomorrah, has thrown gritty realism entirely to the winds here. Instead, this is fantastically unhinged, veering madly between wonder and horror, gorgeousness and grotesquery, as hearts are eaten, fleas are cuddled, and an old woman’s youth and beauty are restored once she’s been suckled by a witch. (Take that, Clarins!

Every now and then, with great infrequency (alas), a film comes along that is like no other and completely knocks you for six, and that is Embrace of the Serpent. The first Colombian film to be nominated for an Oscar — it lost to Son of Saul, should you set any store by such things — it was filmed in the Colombian section of the Amazon basin, with a script developed in consultation with native tribes, and tells the story of a shaman’s encounters with two white scientist explorers, which unfold in different time periods. So far, so National Geographic; a world disappeared by colonialism and all that (sorry; our bad).

Regular filmgoers must be losing count of the Rabelaisian revelries they’ve been invited to of late. You may recognise the type of do. The camera ushers you through a door and, wham, the music’s strafing your eardrums and everyone’s letting their hair down along, often, with their underwear. There’s usually a white horse grazing by the pool. The Ballard adaptation High-Rise has one such scene, as do the latest Le Carré film Our Kind of Traitor and the Saudi-set Tom Hanks vehicle A Hologram for the King. Throw on your party shirt and roll up for another courtesy of The Nice Guys. ‘Dad, there’s like whores here and stuff,’ says the heroine, who is no more than 12.

Love & Friendship is based on the little-known Jane Austen epistolary novella, Lady Susan, which was not published until after Austen’s death, and was then ill received. As G.K. Chesterton declared: ‘I, for one, would have willingly left Lady Susan in the wastepaper basket.’ Knowing what I know now and having, in fact, read Lady Susan, I, for one, would have willingly punched G.K. Chesterton in the head, had I been around at that time. And, had I wished to torment him further, which is highly likely, I might have then told him that it would one day be turned into the most delicious hoot of a film, so put that in your pipe and smoke it. I think he’d know he’d met his match.

Heart of a Dog is a film by Laurie Anderson and it’s a meditative, free-associating rumination on life, loss, love and dogs, with particular reference to her and her late husband’s (Lou Reed, who died in 2013) beloved rat terrier, Lolabelle (who died the same year). It follows no linear logic. It’s a visual collage, a cine-poem, a dreamy documentary essay that was screened in London earlier this week to owners and their dogs — to rave reviews. ‘It’s great!’ said a golden retriever, but as he said the same of ‘a ball’ and also ‘a pizza crust’, he may not be the most reliable of critics. (This is why you never see golden retrievers on Film 2016 or writing for Sight & Sound.

Everybody Wants Some!! is a comedy written and directed by Richard Linklater, which is the good news, but it’s set among baseball jocks at a Texas college in 1980, which may be the less good news. Your enjoyment of the film may depend not on Linklater’s abilities, which are there for all to see — Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Boyhood — but on how much time you wish to spend with these dudes anyhow. They drink and party, party and drink, and drive around town tooting at girls in short shorts who are just short shorts as they aren’t given any actual dialogue except in one trying instance. I was fed up of them all by the end, I have to say — and rather pleased to get rid.

Before we turn our attention to Florence Foster Jenkins — but if you can’t wait, it’s so-so — I feel I should address the several hundred (and counting; hell’s bells) comments below my negative review of Captain America: Civil War last week, and the many pleas that I should ‘get a life!’, which seemed a bit rich. Indeed, as I’m not the one overly invested in a film franchise where the films are barely films, just noisy assemblages of CGI set pieces, am I the one most in need of this ‘life’ being talked about?

Captain America: Civil War is the 897th instalment — or something like it — in the Marvel comic franchise. This time round, the superheroes take sides, with the marketing asking if you’re #TeamCap or #TeamIronMan but not if you’re #TeamNeither, as would be most useful in my case. I swear this is the last Marvel film I will see as I never get anything out of them and whatever I say only sets the fans against me, which is not what you want at my age. I only attended this one because I had read the American critics (and some of the British ones who’d had a heads up). They all said, at last, a decent Avengers movie with ‘emotional depth’ and ‘moral complexity’, and now I have to question what planet they’re living on.

Jane Got a Gun is being sold as a rousing feminist Western although the truth is that it’s about as rousing and feminist as my cat, Daphne, who is 17, and now barely moves but who, back in the day, made herself available to every passing Tom. So you don’t look at Daphne and think ‘rousing feminist’, just as you don’t come away from this film and think ‘rousing feminism’ — assuming you are minded to think anything at all, and haven’t just been bored to death. Produced by Natalie Portman, who also stars, the film has had its troubles.

This Jungle Book is Disney’s remake of its animated classic of 1967, as beloved by all generations thereafter. Warner Bros also has a remake in the pipeline, directed by Andy Serkis, and due for release in 2018, so it looks as though we’ve reached peak Jungle Book remake, although I personally won’t be happy until Quentin Tarantino has a shot: ‘I’ve reached the top, but had to stop and that’s what’s bothering me ...mother fucker!’ Many are scornful of these ‘reimaginings’, as they’re called, saying it indicates that Hollywood lacks original ideas.

The French master film-maker Jacques Audiard has never been anywhere near Hollywood plot school. His films contain gathering menace — something somewhere is going to go horribly wrong — but where the menace will come from, and who will get hurt, is anyone’s guess. In his astonishing prison drama A Prophet the threat to its greenhorn French-Arab inmate comes from all quarters until he himself evolves into the threat. There are two almost unwatchable scenes in Rust and Bone: in one a marine-park trainer of orcas wakes up in hospital to discover she has lost both legs; in another a bareknuckle street fighter has to thump a hole through the thickening ice to rescue his young son.

I once forced some pals on a skiing holiday to spend an afternoon off the slopes watching Chalet Girl. Suffice it to say, I have a high tolerance for lowbrow ski films. So if saccharine tales about plucky Alpine underdogs really aren’t your thing you might want to give my views a miss — as you might Eddie the Eagle, a biopic so drenched in cheerful clichés about the British class system, the power of perseverance and cheap slapstick laughs, it is a kind of Downton Abbey on skis. That said, it’s hard to remember an afternoon at the cinema I’ve enjoyed more in recent times (and it’s definitely better than Chalet Girl). Such enjoyable silliness, such easy laughter.

The big hitter this week is, of course, Batman v Superman, but if you want to learn something new, and meet characters that’ll stay with you long after, well, get yourself to Court. This is an Indian courtroom drama in which the wheels of justice grind so slowly you’ll want to scream, and now I can see I haven’t sold this well. ‘What do you fancy seeing at the cinema, dear? A courtroom drama in which the wheels of justice grind so slowly you’ll want to scream? Shall I book, or will you?’ But Court’s lassitude is kind of its point. It is one of those film in which not much happens but everything happens.

High-Rise is Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel, and it is deeply unpleasant, if not deeply, deeply unpleasant. (Ideally, I would wish to repeat ‘deeply’ several hundred times, but I do not have the space.) Based on the dystopian notion of tower-block residents regressing into a primitive state once societal norms and the class structure are removed, it sounded promising, like an adult mirroring of Lord of the Flies. But Wheatley is so in love with his own visual style and excesses that all allegory and satire is lost while the violence escalates and women are beaten then raped. Misogyny with social commentary comments on misogyny, but without that it’s just misogyny served up for its entertainment value.

Anomalisa is an animated film written by Charlie Kaufman, and while the temptation is to label it a midlife crisis movie, because labels make life so much easier, it is not that clear-cut, just as it never is with Kaufman, who has always refused to explain himself. (Asked what his films are about, his stock response is: ‘It’s about an hour and half.’) I can only say the more you think about this after the event — and you will think about it constantly, as it sets up a sort of thrum under your skin — the more truth and sadness and humanity you will see in it. And it’s all been achieved with stop-motion animation of the kind that CGI was meant to kill off, but thankfully didn’t.

The latest film from the Coen brothers is a comedy set during the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood and in some respects it is utterly delicious. George Clooney wears what is effectively a leather miniskirt throughout, which may not be ‘age-appropriate’, as they say, but is wholly pleasing. (I was personally delighted, I must confess.) And Ralph Fiennes finally nails it comedically, which is a relief, as it’s been just so painful watching him try down the years. But the film is also troublesome, just as so many of the Coen films are troublesome. Why? Why this film, and what do they want us to take from it? Is it as inessential as it seems? The Coens always take you on a ride, you’re just never sure if you’re also being taken for a ride.