Film

A Monster Calls is a fantasy drama about a young boy whose life is crap, basically. His mother is sick. His father has scarpered. He is being bullied at school. He may also have an itch he can’t get at, for all we know. (Always hateful, that.) But he finds an ally when the ancient yew tree he can see from his window morphs into the giant tree monster who’ll take him on a journey of ‘courage, faith and truth’. This has its visually wondrous moments, and the lead (Lewis MacDougall) is a true find, but there’s too much bark, too little bite. This is no Pan’s Labyrinth, for example.

Comfort and joy. That’s what the song talks about, and that’s what the classic Christmas movies deliver. Whether it’s Die Hard (1988) or It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Home Alone (1990) or White Christmas (1954), we enjoy these films, in part, because they are so comfortable. Time and tradition have made them as familiar as carols, mince pies, woolly jumpers, and avoiding the lancinating gaze of your least favourite aunt over the sprouts. But, at the end of 2016, perhaps we can upset the usual way of things. The Christmas holiday should also be a time for Christmas Holiday, Robert Siodmak’s chilly noir from 1944. It starts as it continues:

A United Kingdom is based on the greatest love story you probably didn’t have a clue about. I know I didn’t. It’s based on the true story of Seretse Khama, heir to the African kingdom of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), and Ruth Williams, a typist, who fell in love in 1940s London and married despite everyone and everything trying to separate them, including a vicious colonial British government. But this, sadly, is not the greatest film about the greatest love story you didn’t have a clue about. It’s OK. It does the job. It’s serviceable. It won’t be the biggest disappointment in your life. The story’s too good for it to

Indignation is an adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2008 novel and amazingly, for an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel — see the recent dog’s dinner that was American Pastoral, for example — it may even be worth two hours of your time. (Depending on what you would otherwise be doing with that time; I wouldn’t wish for you to cancel that hip operation or similar.) It stars Logan Lerman as Marcus Messner, a 19-year-old Jewish boy from Newark who, in 1951, escapes the Korean war and the over-anxious clutches of his parents by winning a scholarship to a college in Ohio. Marcus, at the outset, is a good Jewish boy

Forty years ago this month a film appeared, so prescient I wonder if its author, Paddy Chayefsky, saw the 2016 American presidential election campaign in a crystal ball. It was called Network and it foretold the rise of Donald Trump. The plot is King Lear appears on Newsnight: a newsman run mad. The protagonist is Howard Beale (Peter Finch), an anchorman at a failing network. The year is 1976, and America is embattled with inflation, depression and the end of the Vietnam war. It is not a time for American heroes, to paraphrase Chayefsky’s acolyte Aaron Sorkin writing in The West Wing. Beale’s ratings are low. He is fired. He

I shall never forget my first encounter with Abel Gance’s Napoleon. I saw it under the most unpromising circumstances — fragments of the great original, shown on a home projector, 25 years after its original release. Yet those fragments changed my life. I was 15, still at school in Hampstead, and already obsessed by the cinema. My parents had given me a projector for my 11th birthday. Since the only films available to me were silent films, I found myself immersed in the rarefied atmosphere of a forgotten art. As home movies were being abandoned in favour of television, I found a surprising number in London’s junk shops. Among the

As a documentary-maker, Werner Herzog is a master of tone. His widely parodied voiceovers — breathy, raspy, ominous — are cunningly ambivalent. The interviews he conducts are seldom less than strange, often shocking, and the pacing and tenor of his films are subtly modulated. Never more so than here. Lo and Behold is divided into chapters. The first is a fairly conventional documentary about the beginnings of the internet. Herzog talks to the people in California who made the first computer-to-computer connection in 1969, asking them reasonable questions and generally making them seem like comfortable, all-round good guys. This is then subverted by the appearance of Ted Nelson, a cyber-pioneer

As a general rule, I would not wish to spend nearly three hours in a mini-van with young people who turn up the music real loud. As a general rule, being the age I am, I would go to any lengths to avoid such an experience. But American Honey is a film by Andrea Arnold and even though it does require you to spend nearly three hours in a min-van with young people who turn up the music real loud, you will not, in fact, regret it. Or at least not regret it entirely. A bit, perhaps, but you’ll get a good two hours regret-free. This is the first American

You will surely have seen the posters for The Girl on the Train with Emily Blunt staring from a train window beneath the question: ‘What did she see?’ I don’t know …buddleia? Bindweed? The occasional abandoned supermarket trolley? That is all most of us see from trains and while it’s true that buddleia, bindweed and the occasional abandoned supermarket trolley would make for a very dull film, it could scarcely be any duller than this. And that is the truth. This is an adaptation of the thriller by Paula Hawkins; a thriller that, I would venture, attained bestseller status largely because it was touted as ‘the next Gone Girl’ and

Free State of Jones is an American Civil War drama ‘inspired’ by the life of Newton Knight, who led an armed rebellion against the Confederacy in Jones County, Mississippi, and one rather wishes that that was all it was about. Directed by Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, The Hunger Games), and starring a whiskery, leathery Matthew McConaughey, it tells that story, then thinks: while you’re here, might we tell another story? And another one? So you are fully educated in all matters? In the end, such is the weight of all these stories that you won’t lose the will to live exactly, but you will find it has been significantly weakened. The

I can’t say I care for zombies particularly or even understand them — OK, they’re the living dead, but what do they have against the living living? Why do they always want to bite their faces off? — and I can’t say I cared for The Girl With All the Gifts either. This is an adaptation of the dystopian horror novel of the same name by Mike Carey, who also wrote the screenplay. I have not read the book, I confess, as I don’t do much that’s dystopian if it doesn’t involve Margaret Atwood, but I know it was critically well received as well as hailed as ‘an original and

Bridget Jones’s Baby is the third outing for our heroine as played by Renée Zellweger, whose cosmetic work to face has received more media attention than the film itself, but we will try to counteract that here. So, on this occasion, Bridget finds herself pregnant but does not know if the father is our old friend, uptight lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth, who is not as young and dewy as he was at, say, 32, perhaps because he’s now 56), or the American dating magnate Jack Qwant (Patrick Dempsey, 50, who may have let himself go a bit, but then he has had three children, so fair’s fair). And now

I had been wondering where Gorgeous George Galloway might pop up next. Defenestrated from his seat in Bradford West, humiliated in the London mayoral elections — where he received 1.4 per cent of the vote — and no longer apparently an attractive proposition to the reality TV producers, his public life seemed sadly to be drawing to a close. But nope, here he is with a film about the person all left-wing people hate more than any other, Tony Blair. It’s a good film, too, in the main. The Killing$ of Tony Blair was partly crowdfunded and it may well be that the only people who watch it will be