Cinema

The Selfish Giant is a British social-realism film in the tradition of all such films from Kes onwards, so it never feels particularly fresh, but it does feel real and true, is superbly performed, and it does pack quite an emotional punch. I had to gather myself afterwards, and I’m still gathering myself, and may be gathering myself for some time to come. So it’s good at what it does, even though what it does has been done before. At least I think that’s what I’m trying to say. I’m never really that sure. This is the second feature from Clio Barnard, whose first, The Arbor, was a portrait  of the Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar, inventively told by fusing lip-synching with  first-hand testimonies.

The main thing you should know about Captain Phillips is that it really puts you through the wringer. It’s based on the true 2009 story of the hijacking of a US container ship by Somali pirates, and the Navy Seal rescue mission that ensued — pirates, a word of advice: if you are going to kidnap Tom Hanks, America is simply not going to let you get away with it — and my heart was in my mouth throughout. It is nail-bitingly exciting, even if you know the outcome, and I think I can safely say it’s a better film than the one I thought I was going to see. Or, to put it another way, when I initially saw ‘Captain Phillips’ was about to open my first thought was: ‘Gosh. I wonder who is playing Princess Anne.

Just how interesting you find The Fifth Estate may entirely depend on how interested you are in the whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, in the first instance. This does not do what Senna did, for example, or what The Social Network did, and grip you in the places you didn’t know you could be gripped with a subject matter you’d no idea could be gripping. It’s not like that and I’ll tell you for why, in bullet points, because I’m just in a bullet-y mood today, and if you don’t use your bullet points — we are all allocated a certain amount at birth — they will start to atrophy and rot.

People are generally saying Filth fully fulfils the promise of its title and is not for the faint of heart or queasy of stomach or lily of liver and, alas, I am all three, in spades. (My liver is, in fact, so lily-ish it may be a wonder of medical science.) Rape. Anal Sex. Violence. Drink. Drugs. Masturbation. Vomiting down yourself. There’s a part of me that would like to say that’s the average Saturday night in our house, but the truth is we generally watch The X Factor and record Strictly. So I endured this film, from behind my hands, rather than enjoyed it, but in the enduring, was there some reward, as can sometimes happen? We can work that out as we go along. No advantage in rushing such things.

Blue Jasmine is the latest film from Woody Allen who, at various stages of his career, has been declared on-form, off-form, sliding-from-form, returning-to-form and, for all I know, as I don’t follow these matters closely, wearing form like a carnival hat with tinkling bells, but there is no need to bother with any of that. All you need know is Blue Jasmine is brilliant. It’s brilliantly written, directed and observed; it’s brilliantly watchable, if not mesmerising; and brilliantly performed, particularly by Cate Blanchett, who will knock your socks off, and may knock them off so explosively there is every chance you will never retrieve them again. (They might be knocked off all the way to kingdom come, for example.

Someone who knows their Dianaology will have to fill me in – did this actually happen? The late Princess Di is walking through central Portofino in Italy. She’s being jostled on all sides by an insistent public and an even more insistent swarm of photographers, when, suddenly, the crowds part. There, huddled by his family, is a thin blind man. She reaches out to him and he reaches back, taking her hands. Then he presses at her face as though it’s Braille; trying, as movie blind-people are wont to do, to read her soul. Sunlight streams down from the heavens. We never see the man’s sight restored — perhaps that’s for the spin-off, Eyes Wide Open: The Diana Miracles — but we get the point.

Just do it, quoth the Nike advert — and these men just did it. Grass, asphalt, fear, pain, doubt and limitation; all surpassed in the pursuit of human excellence. The racing driver James Hunt and the baseball player Jackie Robinson may have practised different sports, but they were both champions. And, with Rush and 42, they both have fine-looking films dedicated to them this week. Cinemagoers who want to tread the contours of greatness, and understand its peaks and troughs, need look no further. Hollywood has it covered. But for those of you who just want to see some stuff blow up and some bad guys capped, then how about the movie I actually ended up watching? Roland Emmerich’s White House Down.

The easiest thing would be to sneer at Richard Curtis’s new film About Time, and so I will a little, or maybe significantly. It’s hard to know at this point, as I’m up here, at the beginning, and the end is down there, at the bottom, and who knows what will happen in between. It’s as much a mystery to me as to you. However, pre-sneering, in whatever amount, I should make clear that if you have enjoyed Curtis’s previous films— Four Weddings, Love, Actually, Notting Hill, but not The Boat That Rocked, which we’ll pretend never happened, as that’s best all round — you will enjoy this. It’s more of the same, pretty much, as our bumbling hero searches for love, bumblingly.

Berberian Sound Studio is a film about a man who can’t get his expenses repaid and hurts a lot of vegetables — don’t worry, the RSPCV is on to it — although I suspect there may be rather more to it than this. I suspect there are hidden meanings. I suspect there are references to those nasty Italian giallo films of the Sixties and Seventies. I suspect it is, at least in part, a love letter to old, analogue sound technology. This is, in short, one of those arthouse tarts, always winking and hitching its skirt to those in the know. Yes, annoying for those not in the know — stop winking! Stop hitching your skirt! Have you no pride? — but I wouldn’t write it off all the same. It’s brilliantly creepy, whatever.

What Maisie Knew is an adaptation of the Henry James 1897 novel, updated to Manhattan in the now, and is described in the bumf I received as ‘heart-warming’, which is utterly strange, as it’s a child-caught-in-the-middle drama, and just so painful. It’s compelling. It’s exquisitely done. It’s brilliantly acted. (According to the most recent figures,  the chances of Julianne Moore turning in a duff performance are 0.00 per cent.) But it’s not a comfortable watch, which should not put you off, of course. There must be discomfort at the cinema just as there is discomfort in life, as Socrates might have said, if he had lived to experience film.

Mid-August is a hopeless time for films; so hopeless, useless and bleak, if I don’t use three words when one would have done, I am just never going to fill up this space. The assumption is people don’t wish to visit the cinema on summer evenings, or they are on holiday (I wish!), so the studios put out all their rubbish. This week sees the opening of Bachelorette (a Bridesmaids rip-off), Planes (a Disney film, originally intended for DVD only) and The Lone Ranger, which is said to be so lousy, terrible and awful the producer is going to be hung from a lamppost on Sunset Boulevard, as a warning to all other Hollywood producers.

The thing is, I love the character of Alan Partridge so much it may well be that, when it came to this film, I left my critical faculties outside the screening room, possibly somewhere along Wardour Street. If you see them, might you return them? I would hate them to fall into the wrong hands, or be sold to the highest bidder. Anthony Lane of the New Yorker, for example, has always been after my critical faculties and the late film critic Roger Ebert was once quoted as saying he’d pay anything for them; anything. Luckily, he was American, and they would never be allowed to leave the country, but you see what I’m saying? Why it’s important I get them back?

Sandra Bullock is a highly watchable actress and she seems like she’d be fun to hang out with — I have no idea why I think that; I just do — but, Jesus, how does she choose her movies? With a blindfold and pin? Sure, she won an Oscar for The Blind Side, during which she dragged around that poor black boy as if he were a tired old circus bear, and there was Speed and After You Were Sleeping, but The Proposal? Premonition? Speed 2? Two Weeks Notice? I suppose you think I’m going to add: ‘And now this?’ which I am, although not unreservedly. It’s not all bad. It’s possibly only half bad. Perhaps when she was poised with pin, the blindfold shifted? And she saw out of one eye, at least?

Frances Ha will make many spit ‘Frances...Bah!’ but I won’t be among them. Yes, it is rather kooky, and highly self-conscious, with its New Wave references and its Woody Allen influences (it’s a serious, black-and-white, Manhattan comedy), but it’s also sweet, endearing, touching, and features proper women you can actually believe in, and who aren’t just drippily searching for love, which is something of a novelty. Plus, it comes in at under 90 minutes, which is totally great. I was over the moon about that. You know, when I am appointed Professor of Film Studies somewhere, as is still only a matter of time, the first thing I will tell my students, once we’ve dealt with the New Waveyness of the New Wave — Goddard: he was a one!

Wadjda is the first feature-length film to come out of Saudi Arabia, and was shot by the country’s first female director, and although people will talk about how it breaks boundaries and how pioneering it is, that’s not what you most need to know. What you most need to know is that it’s fascinating, involving, moving, an entirely excellent film in its own right and, therefore, rather unlike The World’s End, which isn’t. It also has a few good jokes in it, which is rather unlike The World’s End, too. And it treats women as worth more than a quick shag in a toilet, which The World’s End doesn’t, just so you know.

Pacific Rim is a giant monsters v. giant robots film and although written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, who made Pan’s Labyrinth, which was sublime, it’s still just a giant monsters v. giant robots film, and now we have dealt with that, we can move on to The Moo Man. The Moo Man is not like Pacific Rim. There are no giant monsters seeking to destroy the world, and no giant robots seeking to protect it. There is no CGI, no 3D, no battle scenes, no violently thumping soundtrack, no action — bar a day trip to Eastbourne — and no token woman who is feisty, as is the way with token women when the alternative might mean having to actually give them a fair crack of the whip.

Sofia Coppola’s latest film is not an action adventure, or a supernatural horror, or a stoner comedy, just so you know. Instead, it’s about the emptiness of the celebrity lifestyle just as her Lost in Translation was about the emptiness of the celebrity lifestyle, and Somewhere, and Marie Antoinette, in its way. Write about what you know, everyone says, and fair play to Sofia. Being ‘Hollywood Royalty’ herself, she can’t be any stranger to excess, and she has thought about it, and keeps thinking about it, and The Bling Ring is, I would say, and for what it’s worth (not much, I suspect) her best film to date. It’s taut, makes its point without hammering it home, well acted (particularly Emma Watson; I know!) and visually delicious. The Louboutins!

Hummingbird is a British thriller starring Jason Statham which may be all you need to know to keep away and if it is, can’t say I blame you. Statham is the actor who rose to fame as one of Guy Ritchie’s entourage and now plays bad-ass, hard-boiled action heroes of the kind who can take on whole armies and crack open all their heads and emerge breathless, admittedly, yet with only one small graze. I normally avoid his films and films of this type as they are just not my thing — you’d think anyone who could take on whole armies and emerge with just a single graze would be interesting, but not so much — yet I was seduced into giving it a shot. It looked promising.

To quote the watch adverts, here’s a timepiece that will last a lifetime: the Doomsday Clock. And the reason it will last that long? Because when it stops, so will your life. This is the figurative clock that has been maintained by a bunch of Chicagoan atomic scientists since 1947. The closer its hands are to midnight, the closer we are to nuclear annihilation. It started off at seven minutes to midnight. But now, as any paranoiac will tell you, it is two minutes further on. We are, in this one specific sense, five minutes away from The End. Did Richard Linklater have this in mind when he named his new film Before Midnight? Probably not. This isn’t, in truth, a film about death by fission and fusion, but a simple middle-aged love story.

I Am Nasrine is one of those small, low-budget films showing somewhere awkward on a day and time that probably aren’t ideal but you can’t expect everything in life to be handed to you on a plate, and it’s worth the effort, if you can stir yourself sufficiently. (Can you? Most people I asked said you couldn’t, but I believe in you, as I always have.) Its writer-director, Tina Gharavi, who is Iranian-born but is now a lecturer in Digital Media at Newcastle University, was nominated for a Bafta for most outstanding debut, and although it is one of those films about the immigration experience, and a young woman who flees her home country for one of those better lives that could well turn out worse, it’s not what I would call An Earnestly Grim Wrist Slitter.