Film

In December 1996, audiences lining up to see a teen horror picture starring Drew Barrymore, from the director of A Nightmare on Elm Street, got the shock of their lives. Not only was Barrymore, the best-known actor in the film, murdered in the first 15 minutes, but the opening set-piece was arguably the most shocking moment in movies since Janet Leigh had met a grisly end in the shower in Psycho. As Barrymore is stalked, first by telephone and then in person, by a sinister masked killer, the tension and horror build to virtually unbearable levels before its horrific climax. The rest of the film lived up to its opening, but for sheer, never-to-be-forgotten chutzpah, the beginning of Scream is indelible.

After Prince Harry’s first date with the future Duchess of Sussex, he repaired to a friend’s house off the King’s Road. ‘Out came the tequila,’ he recalls in his much-discussed autobiography, Spare. ‘Out came the weed. We drank and smoked and watched… Inside Out.’ Meghan, however, interrupted his stoned reverie by Facetiming him, and immediately asked: ‘Are you watching cartoons?’ Harry replied: ‘No. I mean, yeah. It’s… Inside Out.’ It was, he recalls, ‘good weed, dude’. The quality of the Disney film, he doesn’t mention – though his pointed double use of ellipses around its title suggests it perhaps has some significance in relation to this new girlfriend.

Reading that Madonna has decided to cancel the film about her life that she has been working on for the past two years, I felt a pang of sorrow. The biopic sounded like the biggest vanity project ever attempted – and thus promised to be an excellent ‘mock-watch’, as I’ve named the cinematic equivalent of the ‘hate-read’. In the specific case of biopics (always an easy thing to get wrong when one person imitates another, often with hilarious results), perhaps ‘sham-shaming’ is even better. Madonna was reported to be directing, producing and co-writing the film with the Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody, who has since moved on to the live-action Powerpuff Girls, obviously keen to get to grips with some real women of substance.

If the 20th century was the age of the common man, the 21st is the age of the common man’s confounding. Between shambolic politics, culture wars and actual war, nothing is turning out quite as well as anyone expected. What was meant to be an era of freedom and enlightenment seems to have become the opposite.   Nowhere is this more evident than in the way we interact with one another. In what feels like the blink of an eye, discourse, and by extension society, has taken up residence on the internet. The pace of the outrage cycle has gathered such speed that we must always be finding something new to be incensed by. Social media has made us myopic, scrutinising everyone and everything until we find or invent reasons to clutch at our collective pearls.

The Tomb Raider franchise seems to have been a graveyard for oddly overqualified people. Angelina Jolie played the character of Lara Croft twice after winning an Oscar, and subsequently Alicia Vikander gave the English aristocrat-turned-global adventurer a go. Neither left much of a mark – which is why it is all the more surprising that Fleabag creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge is to write the scripts for a new Amazon series based on the video game. It has been wryly observed that, despite her heroics in the forthcoming Indiana Jones film, Waller-Bridge herself is not expected to play Lara Croft. That’s a disappointment for those of us who would enjoy a mixture of arch smirks to the camera and jokes about kinky sex from the globe-trotting, shorts-clad daredevil.

The pundits called it long ago: Avatar 2: The Way of Water was going to be a flop. They did allow that betting against the so-called ‘king of the world’ James Cameron was rash – after all, Titanic and the first Avatar film overcame almost hysterically negative buzz in order to become box office behemoths. But there were too many reasons why the latest Avatar was going to fail. Nobody remembered the first film, they said. It wasn’t meme-able, they warned. Sam Worthington, its supposed star, was a nobody. There were too many blue people in it. The first film had had the novelty of 3D, but that was now a completely defunct format, popular only in China. People had moved on.

The Menu is a horror film about fine dining that revolves around a psychotic head chef (Ralph Fiennes) who runs a destination restaurant on an American island. The island is uninhabited apart from the chef and his staff, who pluck it for the most refined marine treats to serve the obnoxious clientele on a nightly surprise menu. As I sat in the cinema watching it recently, I felt delighted, then sick, then scared – and then enlightened. Enlightened because I finally understood that fine dining – once the summit of high living and my own former obsession as a greedy twenty-something working in lifestyle journalism – is over. It is not just that in this era of obsessive authenticity and sentimentality fine dining feels passé.

Sibling rivalry is nothing new, as the Old Testament’s story of Cain and Abel attests. Back in 1966, director John Huston cast hellraiser Richard Harris as fratricidal bad boy Cain in The Bible: In the Beginning. Years later, Ray Winstone played Cain’s even naughtier descendent Tubal-Cain in Darren Aronofsky’s decidedly odd Noah (2014). 2009 also saw the tale of Cain and Abel recounted more jocularly in Year One (2009), with David Cross and Paul Rudd as the feuding brothers. Of course, the Biblical duo’s argument was settled in a more lethal way than Harry and William’s ‘dog bowl brawl’.

It would be fair to say 2022 was not a vintage year in cinema, reflected in UK box office receipts which remain around a third below the pre-pandemic year of 2019. That’s not to say there weren’t some enjoyable releases (such as The Banshees of Inisherin, Triangle of Sadness and The Northman) – but the biggest hits of the year consisted of superhero franchises and movie sequels (Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, Jurassic World Dominion, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, etc).

Banshees of Inisherin: a magnificent cinematic metaphor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRu3zLOJN2c The In Bruges writer-director Martin McDonagh has made another film starring Colin Farrell and Brendon Gleeson which, this time, is set in 1923 on the tiny Irish island of Inisherin. Colm (Gleeson) and Padraic (Farrell) are lifelong pals and drinking buddies until Colm abruptly decides that’s it, friendship over, and he’s deadly serious. If Padraic so much as approaches him he’ll cut off one of his own fingers.