Film

I can’t watch films anymore without looking at my phone. If I watch a film on my laptop, I’ll be scrolling throughout – reading Wikipedia, checking group chats, looking up filming locations on IMDb. To properly watch a film, I have to take myself to the cinema. Luckily, and perhaps as a direct result of our scrolling habits, London’s indie cinema scene is having an ascendent moment. I recently ventured down to Peckham for two screenings at the Ivy House, a pub with a cinema room where films play on a stained pull-down projection screen. Both screenings were organised by Deeper Into Movies, which puts on arthouse films at cinemas across London. On both occasions, they were screening a niche American indie film that hasn’t had a UK release.

If you want to see Guillermo del Toro’s no-expense-spared adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein this Halloween, you’ll have to hope that you’re living in a major city with an arthouse cinema. That is because, as part of the Faustian deal that Netflix strikes with the filmmakers whom it gives blank checks to realize their dream projects, the pictures that they make get only the most token of cinematic releases before they are sent onto the streaming service, there to become part of the algorithm for all eternity.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is a biopic of ‘the boss’ starring Jeremy Allen White. It is not cradle to grave and do not expect the usual crowd-pleasing beats. There isn’t a single montage. Instead, it focuses on 1981, the making of his sixth album, Nebraska, and his mental troubles at that time. This will doubtless satisfy the completists. But non-completists – I could have named only two of his songs, tops – may wonder if it’s that interesting. Also, as White’s performance isn’t a million miles from tortured chef Carmy in Disney+’s The Bear I kept expecting him to put down his guitar and go tweeze micro-herbs on some fancy dish. This may be a problem. ‘I know who you are,’ says a fan. ‘That makes one of us,’ he replies.

Ballad of a Small Player opens with Lord Doyle, played by Colin Farrell, hiding from security in his trashed casino suite in Macau. After they’re gone, he slips into the corridor and sees a trolley holding a bouquet of flowers and a knife. I kept my eyes on the knife, expecting the jittery, paranoid gambling addict to grab the weapon. Instead he places a white rose in his green velvet lapel. Director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front, Conclave) enjoys playing these games of misdirection. It feels appropriate. Casinos – with their chandeliers, gaudy frescoes and croupiers in black tie – are contradictory places. Opulence in these temples of luck is both a way of hiding the brutality of emptying bank accounts, and a show of deference to the gods of fortune.

One feature of President Trump’s second term in office is that when he says he’ll do something, he usually does it, no matter how outlandish or cockamamie it might seem. So it has proved with his threat to impose 100 percent tariffs on any films that have been filmed outside the United States. He first said that he would do this in May, and many industry pundits rushed to say that his scheme was impractical, unworkable, etc. Yet veteran Trump watchers would know that once he has an idea, it will not rest. He has now repeated himself, with greater vigor, writing on Truth Social that “our movie making business has been stolen from the United States of America, by other Countries, just like stealing ‘candy from a baby.

Dead of Winter is an action thriller starring Emma Thompson and you have to hand it to her. Has such a thoroughly ordinary, sixty-something-year-old woman (no superpowers) ever carried an action thriller before? Not that I can think of. That’s not to say it’s devoid of clichés. I think we all know that it’s best to steer clear of cabins miles from anywhere. But it’s well made, tense, fun, and if you’ve longed to see an ordinary, sixty-something-year-old woman brandish a gun or put a claw hammer through someone’s foot you will not be disappointed. Directed by Brian Kirk, from a script by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb, it’s set within the vast, wintery landscape of Minnesota (though actually filmed in Finland).

A middle-aged woman wearing what looks like Princess Diana’s infamous ‘revenge dress’ and a balaclava from an IRA funeral approaches the hole in the floor. The raccoon that lives there, clearly used to her presence, looks up expectantly. Sure enough, the woman empties a bag of dry food into the hole. The scene is framed by the intricate fluted wainscotting of the room’s door frame. I am not exaggerating when I say I believe it to be one of the great scenes of modern cinema. The vignette comes from Grey Gardens, the Maysles brothers’ cult documentary, which turns 50 this autumn. Like many great documentaries – from Tiger King to  The Imposter to The Queen of Versailles – the film’s purpose changed over the course of filming.

This Is Spinal Tap is now such a deserved comedy behemoth that it’s easy to forget how gradual its ascent to generally agreed greatness was. Only over the years did so many lines and scenes from a low-key 1984 mockumentary about a heavy-rock band (amps that ‘go to 11’, a tiny Stonehenge, a classically inspired piece called ‘Lick My Love Pump’) become part of our lives. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, by contrast, comes amid a loud fanfare – which may be part of the problem, because the result certainly doesn’t live up to expectations that are inevitably sky-high. Then again, the sad truth is that it mightn’t have lived up to lower ones either.

The Roses is a remake of The War of the Roses (1989), the diabolically funny black bitter comedy that was directed by Danny DeVito and starred Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas as a couple who start out in love, then hate each other like poison, and once their battle is under way it’s no holds barred. You remember the dinner-party scene and what he did to the fish course? You remember him sawing the heels off all her shoes and her serving him that liver pâté on crackers? (Let’s just say: no pets were spared.) Of course you remember. Will you remember this ‘reimagining’ in 36 years? It has an excellent director, an excellent scriptwriter, an excellent cast (Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivia Colman) but no, you probably won’t.

Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, which is set in a retirement village and features pensioners solving murders, was a publishing sensation. (There are now four books in the series, with combined sales of more than ten million copies.) I’ve never read it. ‘Cosy crime’, as it’s called, is either your bag or it isn’t. This adaptation, however, feels exactly like the book that I haven’t and would never read. I hope Mr Osman et al. will take this as praise. In other words, the film knows what it is doing, who it is for, and fans will, I’m convinced, be delighted. It’s reminiscent of Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five, but at the opposite end of the age spectrum It’s not cinematic.