Cinema

The TV sitcom Dad’s Army ran on the BBC from 1968 to 1977 (nine series, 80 episodes) with repeats still running to this day (Saturday, BBC2, 8.25 p.m.) and I sometimes watch these repeats with my dad (92) and we laugh like idiots and I sometimes watch with my son (23) and we laugh like idiots and sometimes the three of us watch together (combined age 169, should that be of interest) and we all laugh like idiots but I was not minded to laugh like an idiot during this film, possibly because I was not minded to laugh at all.

Like The Revenant and The Big Short, Spotlight is yet another Oscar contender ‘based on true events’ — although it has now been suggested that The Revenant was 99.7 per cent made up. (Does this matter? Only, I suppose, in the sense that you should know what you’re watching.) But we’re on firm ground with Spotlight, where the events — the Boston Globe’s uncovering of systemic child abuse by Catholic priests in Massachusetts — are a matter of record, although how you make a film about something so awful, I don’t know. Personally, I wanted the film to give it to the Church with both barrels, and let rip with fury, but it’s too restrained for that.

The Big Short is a drama about the American financial collapse of 2008. It talks you through sub-prime mortgages, tranches, credit-default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations ...and, yes, I just bored myself to tears typing that list. I had to prop my eyes open with matchsticks typing that list. I would even propose that I was more bored typing that list than I’ve ever been in my whole life, which is saying something, as I saw Monuments Men. And, previously, I would have proposed that there is no way you could ever make any of the above fascinating or compelling or sexy, let alone scathingly funny. But The Big Short is fascinating, sexy, compelling and scathingly funny. It’s a miracle.

The Revenant is a survival-against-the-odds film that so puts Leonardo DiCaprio through it I bet he was thinking, ‘I wish I was back on that boat that went down.’ He is mauled by a bear. Viciously. He is buried alive. He eats still-throbbing, blood-dripping raw liver, and quite forgets his manners. (Wipe your chin, man; there’s never any excuse.) He cauterises his own wounds, falls off cliffs, spins down rapids, slits open a dead horse and sleeps within for warmth. The film recently triumphed at the Golden Globes — best film, best director (Alejandro G. Iñárritu), best actor (DiCaprio) — but all I was thinking was, ‘Oh God, please let this be over soon.’ Faint hope.

This is the week of The Hateful Eight, the latest Quentin Tarantino film, but Tarantino being Tarantino, there were no screenings for reviewers, so I’ve yet to see it. There also seems to have been some falling out with the Cineworld, Picturehouse and Curzon chains such that their cinemas won’t be showing the film at all. Tarantino, such a pain, and if we were to meet, which I admit is unlikely —we move in very different circles — I would have no hesitation in telling him so. What’s he going to do? Slice off one of my ears, nail me to the wall with the other, stroll off to lunch, then come back and pump my chest full of bullets? On the other hand, I could just keep quiet, I suppose.

The Danish Girl is based on the true (if heavily revised and simplified) story of Lili Elbe, one of the first people ever to undergo sex reassignment surgery, but while the timing of this is right — transgender issues are surely the next equality frontier — the film itself somehow isn’t. It’s OK. It’s probably passable, if you’ve got two hours to kill. But it’s repetitive, excessively polite and also, given the subject matter, surprisingly dull. It opens when Lili is still Einar, married to Gerda, and if the two ever came round for dinner you’d be mouthing over their heads: ‘Who invited them?’ And: ‘Oh boy, do you think they are ever going to leave?

Apologies if you were expecting a review of Star Wars here, but Disney is not allowing critics access prior to the film’s opening on the 17th, and anyway, we’ve got Grandma, which was made for $600,000 in 19 days and has a running time of 79 minutes and stars a 76-year-old, so there is that. It’s also a feminist comedy with a plot driven by the need for an abortion, and if that doesn’t win you over, I’m not sure what else to say. It’s terrific? It’s small-scale, but punches magnificently above its weight? I laughed, and also cried? I could say that and have just said that, because it’s all true. Grandma stars Lily Tomlin and there is every sense this wouldn’t be a film unless it starred Lily Tomlin because she is the film, basically.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is the best-remembered title of a short career. Born in 1901, he was dead by 1935. The novel hymned the rhythms of rural life in north-east Scotland in prose that to modern ears sounds as if it comes from a museum of Grampian folklore. At its heart is Chris Guthrie, a spirited young woman whose dream of bettering herself as a teacher is thwarted by tragedy. The world of Sunset Song is a bull’s-eye for Terence Davies, the British director who has always been nostalgically drawn to the travails of unlucky women. Leadings actresses form an orderly queue to emote in his gorgeously lit interiors. Gillian Anderson was up for an Oscar for The House of Mirth and there was a Golden Globe nom for Rachel Weisz in The Deep Blue Sea.

Carol is an easy film to admire — so beautiful to look at; entirely exquisite — but such a hard film to feel anything for. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 lesbian novel The Price of Salt, this is a love story that, here, doesn’t venture below the waist, literally, emotionally or metaphorically. It glides across its own glittering surfaces, never investigating what may lie beneath, and playing restraint to the point of inertia. Its director, Todd Haynes, has spoken about how hard it was to make a Hollywood film about two women, starring two women, so I feel bad delivering the news, but deliver it I must: what was taboo in ’52 may not be that exciting today.

This is a documentary in which three men travel across Europe together, but they’re not pleasurably interrailing, even though there are often times they probably wished they were. For two of them, Niklas and Horst, the journey is about confronting their fathers, who were high-ranking Nazi officials responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews, while for the third, the eminent British human-rights lawyer Philippe Sands, it means visiting the place where his grandfather’s family was exterminated. This place, Galicia, which straddles the modern-day border between Poland and Ukraine, is the exact place my own grandmother’s family were murdered. Her father lost every one of his seven siblings. She lost every aunt, uncle and cousin.

Steve Jobs is a film about a man in whom I have little interest, but for 120 minutes I was at least quite interested, which is a result. But this doesn’t make it a great film, and in many ways it isn’t. It never quite pins Jobs down. It never quite works out what it wishes to say about him. That he was such a ‘genius’ it didn’t matter if he was also a bit of a dick? Or that it did matter, totally? Plus, the ending is calamitous. But it is well made, and the performances are ace, as is the dialogue, and I was kept interested, so the journey may well be worthwhile, even if the destination is not.

Brooklyn is a wee slip of a thing compared to the Bond film, Spectre, and cost $12 million, as opposed to $300 million, but what it lacks in length, budget, pre-title stunt sequences, theme songs, sports cars, exotic locales, babes in stages of undress, villains with master plans, Omega watches, rooftops chases, speedboats and exploding buildings, it more than makes up for with real storytelling and real feeling, which you just can’t create from post-production CGI, don’t you know.

Spectre is the 24th film in the Bond franchise, the fourth starring Daniel Craig, the second directed by Sam Mendes, and the first at not much of anything. Nothing new to report, in other words. It probably delivers what the die-hard fans want, but it is not like Casino Royale or Skyfall (no one talks about Quantum of Solace, by the way, because it’s assumed everyone involved was drunk) as it doesn’t deliver to those of us who never liked Bond, but then discovered that we did. Where has Bond’s interior landscape gone? Where is his woundedness? Where is the emotional heft? Who might we actually care about here? At least we open quietly, with Bond lying back in a meadow, simply watching the clouds float by... I’m kidding, of course.

Listen to Me Marlon is a documentary portrait of Marlon Brando that has him burbling into your ear for 102 minutes, but if you have to have someone burbling in your ear for 102 minutes — and there is no law saying it’s obligatory — you could do a lot worse. This isn’t one of your regular documentaries. There are no talking heads, and it’s not blah-blah-blah and then he did this and then he did that and then his BMI got ridiculous, and so on. Instead, it is based on the hundreds of hours of personal audio tapes Brando made in his lifetime, which haven’t been heard until now, and which were uncovered by film-maker Stevan Riley, who wrote, directed and edited.

The Program, as directed by Stephen Frears, is a biopic of Lance Armstrong, the American cyclist and ‘sporting hero’ who came back from cancer to win the Tour de France seven times before he was exposed as a drugs cheat. It is a thrilling fall-from-grace story, the sort that brings you out in goosebumps just thinking about it — to know you have cheated, to know you are about to be found out, to live with having been found out; how might any of this feel? This should have served Armstrong up on a plate, but it somehow doesn’t. It covers the ground, but it’s underpowered dramatically. It’s like watching a perfunctory documentary, acted out. It doesn’t give us the man. I wanted to see him unravel.

That cinema is having another Ballardian moment will surprise few fans. J.G. Ballard, who died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 78, was one of the darkest, most unsettling of post-war British novelists. In a career that spanned half a century from his debut as a science-fiction writer in the mid-1950s, his surreal imagination confronted such subjects as nuclear catastrophe and planetary drought. His discomfiting novel Crash (1973) attributed a deviant sexuality to the road accident. Ballard had a taste for ‘automobile pornography’, according to his biographer John Baxter, and fantasised about having sex with Margaret Thatcher in the back of the prime-ministerial Daimler V8. In 1991, I called on Ballard at his home in Shepperton off the M3, where he had lived for 30 years.

Who goes to big-screen Shakespeare? Not theatre-goers much, and with reason. Apart from the odd corker by Kurosawa, arguably Olivier and Orson Welles — and let’s bung in Zeffirelli for those with a sweeter tooth — the Bard is a better scriptwriter when the words are dumped and the plots he nicked from elsewhere are updated. See 10 Things I Hate About You (the Shrew as high-school comedy), Forbidden Planet (Prospero in outer space) and, best of all, West Side Story (in fair Manhattan where we lay our scene). There is, as it happens, a semi-respected English-language version of Macbeth by Roman Polanski, who used the cloak of art to get Lady M’s kit off (in his diaries, Kenneth Tynan perved over Francesca Annis’s ‘fesses tristes’).