Film

August is known as ‘dump month’. It’s when the most forgettable films are released on the grounds that people don’t go to the cinema much in the summer. But maybe they don’t go because the films are so forgettable? Either way, the best film you probably won’t go and see this week is Widow Clicquot. You may wish to make a note of that. Shall I go on? With this film you probably won’t see? Better had. This space won’t fill itself. Some weeks I wish it would. But we all have our crosses to bear – plus it’s hardly coal-mining.

In the Alien films, a xenomorph is a monstrous, all-consuming life form that exists only to make more and more copies of itself. Once the first xenomorph appears, it’s only a matter of time until all those gleaming chrome walls will be covered in creepy black goo and the humans suspended lifeless from the ceiling in webs of slime with their chests ripped open. The xenomorphs are not curious about the world. They don’t care that they’re in a spaceship in the middle of outer space. As far as they’re concerned, we’re all just warm bodies in which to incubate their young. The only thing they want to do is make more and more and more and more of themselves.

My resolution this summer was to see how far into the Olympics I could get without watching an event. It’s harder than you think. Especially when you’ve got kids calling constantly from the sitting room: ‘Dad, Dad, it’s Romania vs Burkina Faso in the finals of the women’s beach volleyball and there’s been a tremendous upset…’ Rogan is marketed as an edgy alternative to the mainstream media. He is about as edgy as Banksy I jest. I actually do know what happened in the finals of the women’s beach volleyball. It was the first thing I watched because that was what was on when I walked into the room and broke my duck. Italy beat the long-standing champions the United States, which delighted me enormously.

Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is a new version of the 1979 Caligula that is still banned in some countries (Belarus). The most expensive independent production of its time, it was intended to prove an adult film could be a Hollywood hit – but not everyone received it in that spirit. ‘Sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash,’ wrote the late, great critic Roger Ebert, who walked out before it finished. Although this version is still violent and sexually explicit, it’s been reworked to show that, handled right, it had all the makings of a masterpiece. There are whippings and sex swings and I think I saw someone doing it with a swan In your dreams, pal. There’s no masterpiece, here.

Didi is a coming-of-age drama by the Taiwanese-American writer-director Sean Wang. It’s set in the summer of 2008 and based on his own adolescence – and here’s the bottom line: it’s an absolute joy. It’s funny, moving, authentic and takes you right back to being 13. (Agh!) The main character here is Chris (Izaac Wang), who is called ‘Didi’ by his family as that’s the Chinese for ‘little brother’. He is 13, lives in Fremont, California, and is about to start high school. There’s no father in the picture as he’s working back in Taiwan. His flustered, put-upon mother, Chungsing (the magnificent Joan Chen), can’t comprehend her children’s American ways and dispenses the kind of advice that no self-respecting teenager would ever take on board.

About Dry Grasses is the latest film from Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan and it had better – I thought to myself as the lights dimmed – have a great deal to say about dry grasses that is fascinating and insightful, given it has a formidable running time of 200 minutes. (That’s nearly three and a half hours in old money.) It is, needless to say – with a title like that, few will mistake it for a Marvel flick – one of those films where the story unfolds obliquely and meditatively and may say everything or nothing, it’s hard to know. All I can tell you for sure is that I wasn’t ever bored even if dry grass doesn’t make an appearance until three hours and nine minutes in. A spoiler, yes, but best to be clear, so you don’t complain later.

Fly Me to the Moon is a romantic comedy starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum set during the 1960s space race but, unlike Apollo 11, this isn’t going anywhere we haven’t been before. The extent to which the film does take flight is largely thanks to Johansson’s charisma, even though I couldn’t help shake the feeling they’d fired up a Maserati for a job that basically required a pootle to the shops and back. Tatum, meanwhile, doesn’t have to do much but stand around and look beefy – but he does excel at beefiness. (The shoulders on this fella!) Tatum is 82 per cent shoulders,18 per cent neck. (This is aguess; don’t hold me to it) The film opens in 1969 with Johansson as Kelly Jones, a Madison Avenue marketing genius.

The Nature of Love is a French-Canadian film about an academic who considers herself happily married but then encounters a builder and sparks fly. I’ve made it sound like one of those Confessions... films, or an airport novel, but it isn’t. It’s sly, sexy and smart and, even though it’s billed as a romantic comedy and skips along nicely, it also asks some important questions, such as: once a relationship becomes humdrum has it moved to a deeper plane? Or is that the lie we tell ourselves? To compensate? Written and directed by Monia Chokri, the film stars Magalie Lépine Blondeau as Sophia who, like Glenn Powell’s character in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, is a philosophy professor.

Horizon: An American Saga is a Western directed by Kevin Costner. It also stars Kevin Costner and is co-written by Kevin Costner and has been bankrolled by Kevin Costner – so if it’s Kevin Costner you’re after, happy days. This is Chapter One, and there are three more chapters to come, so even though it’s a whopping three hours long it’s only a quarter of a film. Sienna Miller doesn’t get to do much except look golden. She deserves better, I think Now I have to say something positive about it because, you know, Costner re-mortgaged his house to fund it and everything. Sienna Miller is a positive. I liked the way that, even when her character was under extreme duress (in 1856), she still looked like she’d just come from an appointment at Toni & Guy.

Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders is based on the book by photojournalist Danny Lyon, first published in 1968, about his years embedded with a lawless motorcycle gang in Chicago. Nichols (Take Shelter, Mud, Loving) has imposed a fictional narrative arc and while it’s bogus in some respects and the arc quite familiar to anyone acquainted with stories about male subcultures – the fatal flaw of loyalty etc – it is well-crafted, stylish, has some potent scenes and a fantastic cast. The film stars Tom Hardy, Austin Butler and Jodie Comer, who manages to wipe the floor with both of them.

Freud’s Last Session stars Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode and is a work of speculative fiction asking what would have happened if Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis had met to debate the existence of God. What if two of the greatest minds of the 20th century had the chance to thrash it out? Thrash it out they do but, alas, they cannot thrash any life into this film. If you are planning to see it at the cinema, a few espressos beforehand may not go amiss. It is directed by Matthew Brown, who co-wrote the script with Mark St Germain, on whose play it is based. It takes place on 3 September 1939, the day Chamberlain declared war after Hitler invaded Poland. Freud, an atheist, has invited Lewis, a man of deep Christian faith, to his Hampstead home.

Richard Linklater’s Hit Man is a minor Linklater but a minor Linklater is still an event. Also, after all those contemplative, existential films (Boyhood, the Before trilogy), who can blame him for letting his hair down with a sexy rom-com thriller that’s not concerned with deep questions. Though the film doesn’t add up to much, it is ‘based on a somewhat true story’ and it is a fun ride – somewhat. The ‘somewhat true story’ is extraordinary, even if it’s only the starting point. The person it’s based on is Gary Johnson, who died in 2022, just before filming began. He was a Houston college professor (psychology) who also worked part-time for the police as an undercover (fake) hit man.

This week, a horror film – and with it, a whole load of alien spider insanity. If you’ve been hankering after a whole load of alien spider insanity, then Sting will hit the spot. As a rule, I avoid this genre, as I still suffer from nightmares after bunking off school to see The Exorcist (aged 12), but this is playful, B-movie horror rather than horror horror. It’s 90 minutes of silly, daft fun. I think I’ll leave a shorter gap between these films in future. Maybe every 35 years rather than every 40? I think I’ll leave a shorter gap between horror films in future. Maybe every 35 years? It’s from writer-director Kiah Roache-Turner and it’s set in an apartment building in Brooklyn. If it’s not a cabin in the woods, it’s an apartment building.

Action films are boring. This isn’t really an opinion, it’s just demonstrably true. Try it for yourself: put on any high-octane, orange-and-teal action movie from the last 15 years and see how long it takes before you start automatically fiddling around with your phone. I can usually make it about five minutes. This is weird. I can deal with all the incredibly sedate cinematic vegetables just fine, but as soon as there are gunfights or chases involved I get distracted. I think I know why. The real betrayal of this Mad Max sequel is that it’s full of talking Action directors know that they’re competing with the sensory equivalent of a crackpipe in every pocket, so they do whatever they can to make their films as attention-grabbing as possible.