Cinema

Molly’s Game marks the directorial debut of Hollywood’s most celebrated screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, and is based on his adaptation of the memoir by Molly Bloom. Nope, me neither, but she’s the one-time Olympic skier who, at the age of 26, started a high-stakes poker game for ‘the richest, the most powerful men in the world’ and ended up with the FBI in her face. Poor Molly, we’re meant to think, when the FBI ends up in her face, but I was delighted. Bang her up! This has been posited as the antidote to all those male-driven, big money Wall Street films, with Sorkin even declaring Ms Bloom a ‘feminist icon’. Well (she says, haughtily), we will see about that.

Menashe is a drama set amid Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox Hasidic community. It is performed entirely in the Yiddish language. It is peopled exclusively by Hasidic non-actors. (Real-life grocer Menashe Lustig plays the title character.) It is small and specific, admittedly, but it also tells a universal story about a father’s struggle to hold on to the son he loves, and it tells this story tenderly, thoughtfully, beautifully. It may even be my favourite frum film of the year. Thus far. (Still a few weeks to go.) This marks the feature debut of director Joshua Z Weinstein (no relation), who made documentaries previously, and who wrote this with Alex Lipschultz and Musa Syeed.

Battle of the Sexes recreates the famed, culture-changing 1973 tennis match between 55-year-old Bobby Riggs, a self-proclaimed chauvinist, and 29-year-old Billie Jean King, the world’s top female player who was out to liberate women and herself. (She was just discovering her true sexuality at that time.) Unless you happen to identify with Bobby — ‘Don’t get me wrong. I love women in the bedroom and in the kitchen, but these days they want to be everywhere!’ — this is certainly a great comeuppance film of the kind that will amply satisfy all your comeuppance needs. No complaints, comeuppance-wise.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is plainly wonderful, and stars Annette Bening, who is plainly wonderful, as Gloria Grahame, a one-time Hollywood movie star who in later life hits on hard times — ‘a big name in black and white. Not doing too well in colour,’ comments her landlady at one point — and embarks on a romance with a young English actor who is 30 years her junior. It is based on a true memoir. It is a love story, told tenderly, bravely, smartly, movingly. And believably. Older women, it seems, can be interesting, complicated, vital, attractive and sexual. Who knew? (But don’t spread the word, or they’ll all want to be like that, and won’t take the shitty bit-parts any more.

The Florida Project is a drama set in one of those cheap American motels occupied by poor people who would otherwise be homeless. It’s sad but not depressing, bleak but also joyful, and features one of the best and truest child performances you will ever likely see. Also, it is captivating without ever being condescending — I think. It is always so hard to know, but if you get too hung up on that, cinema will never be allowed to say that poverty exists, or deal with stories that don’t regularly get told, and that’s the end of my lecture for this week, you will be delighted to hear. The movie is written and directed by Sean Baker, whose previous film, Tangerine, about a transgender sex worker, was shot on an adapted iPhone 5 and won many awards.

Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner first came out in cinemas 35 years ago, which I was going to say probably makes it older than some readers, although this being The Spectator, perhaps not. It wasn’t successful in its day, but has since become a beloved classic (rightly), whereas this sequel, Blade Runner 2049, will likely do great box office today, but no one will give a fig tomorrow, once all the silly hype has died away. This is Blade Runner as a dull mainstream blockbuster populated by men who are the epitome of masculine cool and women who are needlessly sexualised fembots.

Borg vs McEnroe is a dramatised account of one of the greatest tennis rivalries of all time — between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe (the clue was always in the title) — that doesn’t hit nearly as hard as it should. It does the job. It gets us from A to B. But it doesn’t dazzle. It doesn’t have the dramatic smarts to lend either surprising tension or excitement to otherwise familiar events, or shed any new light on them. It’s more the pt-pt-pt-pt of a stolid baseline rally and now, you will be thankful to hear, that’s it with the tennis puns. (I only had two anyhow.) The film stars Sverrir Gudnason as Borg and Shia LaBeouf as McEnroe and it all plays out in the lead-up to their most famous showdown.

The film-maker Darren Aronofsky says he wrote Mother! in five days as if in a ‘fever dream’ and, as a general rule, what happens in a fever dream should stay in the fever dream, as the content will be plainly nuts. This is plainly nuts. This is even plainly nuts with an exclamation mark. Plainly nuts! However, it’s never plainly dull, so it does have that going for it. I think. Described as a psychological horror thriller, the set-up has a poet and his younger wife living in a magnificent, isolated house in the countryside that she is doing up. She is Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) and he is Him (Javier Bardem). She is in thrall to Him, and exists only to serve Him, while he is suffering from writer’s block and is distant.

The starting point for Taylor Sheridan’s crime-thriller Wind River is explicitly stated at the end when the following words come up on screen: ‘While missing person statistics are compiled for every other demographic [in the US], none exist for Native American women.’ A shocking fact that has to be worthy of a film, although whether this film is worthy of that fact, and isn’t just another genre melodrama featuring an American White Man coming to the rescue, has to be up for question. Also, it contains a brutal rape scene, just so you know. (I didn’t know. But wish I had, as I’d have likely steered clear.

Una is a psychological drama about a woman who was abused by a man when she was 12, and who confronts him 15 years later, and it’s a hoot. I’m toying with you. Of course it isn’t. It’s disquieting. It’s disturbing. It’s difficult. It’s 90 minutes of uncomfortably shifting in your chair and wishing you were at the latest heist caper that doesn’t make sense. But it is also compelling, up to a point, and your responses will be so complicated that you won’t know where to start unpicking them. Or how. The film is based on the play Blackbird by the Scottish playwright David Harrower, which has won multiple awards and starred Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams on Broadway.