Culture

Left-Handed Girl is a Taiwanese drama about a single mother who moves back to Taipei with her two daughters to run a noodle stand in the night market. It’s one of those films where the stakes don’t appear that high – will the mother make the rent this month?; will the littlest daughter settle at her new school?; what’s grandma’s game? – yet we become so attached to this family and their survival it will all matter a great deal. It also features an adorable pet meerkat, GooGoo, and I doubt you’ll see a better film starring an adorable pet meerkat called GooGoo this year. I’d bet my life on it.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein stars Oscar Isaac (Baron Victor Frankenstein) and Jacob Elordi (‘the creature’) and retells the basics of Mary Shelley’s story – man creates monster, man rejects monster, monster goes off on one – with high-camp sumptuousness. Del Toro’s spin is to include a redemptive arc, plus he throws in some invented characters. ‘The creature’, meanwhile, is portrayed with great sympathy, as a soulful, mistreated innocent. In other words, there’s no Boris Karloff lumbering around in that blazer a size too small with a bolt through the neck. It opens with a Danish expedition-ship stuck in the Arctic ice and the crew rescuing an injured Victor.

Scoop is a dramatised account of the events leading up to the BBC’s 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. The one he imagined would allow him to put Jeffrey Epstein behind him, but instead put Pizza Express (Woking) on the map, made us want to claw our own faces off with the horror of it, and led to the Queen stripping him of all his royal and military titles. (I think you know you are in trouble with Mummy when this happens.) Although billed as a ‘film’, this isn’t especially cinematic. It’s more like a bonus episode of The Crown but it is phenomenally cast (Rufus Sewell is a revelation) and you do get to claw your own face off all over again. If, that is, you have any face left.

Red, White & Royal Blue is a rom-com based on the LGBT bestselling novel by Casey McQuiston. Nope, me neither, but the New York Times reviewed it as ‘a brilliant, wonderful book’ and on Amazon UK it has garnered nearly 44,000 reviews, with an average of 4.5 stars, so let’s not be hasty. The romance here is between ‘America’s First Son and the Prince of Wales’, says the blurb, which does sound juicy, and it’s not a YA (Young Adult) novel but an NA (New Adult) one, apparently, aimed at a slightly older audience. I did consider reading it so that I could say this isn’t as good as the book, as is standard in these instances, but then realised that as an OA (Old Adult) life is too (frighteningly) short and I couldn’t be bothered. But my best guess? Not as good as the book.

Peter Pan & Wendy is Disney’s latest live-action remake (the animated version was in 1953) and it’s quite the sombre affair. It takes itself and its story so seriously that I kept waiting for it to be fun and it never was. There is an underlying sadness to J.M. Barrie’s original story, but it is also funny and joyous and exciting. Flying! Fairy dust! Ticking crocodiles! Pirates! That’s all here but somehow the magic is missing. Still, Captain Hook is played by Jude Law, who is at that stage in his career where he’s determined to have a good time and, from the look of it, he is definitely having a good time. At least one of us did (she says, resentfully).

Bank of Dave is the ‘true(ish)’ story, as this puts it, of Dave Fishwick, the Burnley businessman who wanted to set up a high street bank to help the local community. He was, Fishwick said in a recent interview, at home when the call came from Piers Ashworth in LA. ‘He’s the writer of Mission Impossible and he’d heard about my story and he said: “Dave, I want to make a Hollywood film about your life.” You get this a lot in Burnley, ha!’ I was made up for Dave, who seems like an excellent fellow, and this does have all the makings of one of those British underdog dramas I’m a total sucker for. (See: Calendar Girls, Kinky Boots, Eddie the Eagle, Phantom of the Open, etc.) But, alas, it’s not ‘true-ish’ as it’s barely true at all.

You may already have read early reviews of Netflix’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion saying it’s ‘the worst adaptation ever’ as well as ‘mortifying’ and ‘a travesty’, but I know you won’t believe it unless you hear it from me, so here you are: it is truly horrible. I would also add that everyone involved should probably be sent to prison. Not for life, but until we could be confident they’d learned the error of their ways and there was minimal risk of reoffending. A probation officer would possibly be required to keep a close eye, just to make sure. Better safe than sorry. There are ways to adapt Austen for a contemporary audience, but those ways are not this way, and I say this not as a purist.

This year the Oscar for best film went to the drama Coda – ‘Child of Deaf Adults’ – but the ceremony will now probably only be remembered for Wsscrfmhw (‘Will Smith Slapping Chris Rock For Mocking His Wife’). And we thought that mix-up over envelopes was exciting! But back to the film, which beat the favourite, The Power of the Dog, although Jane Campion did win best director, making her the third woman ever to do so. That’s three women in 93 years of the awards. If we carry on at that rate, by the turn of the next century it may even be five. Coda is only viewable on Apple TV+, the first streaming service to scoop the big prize.

As there are no stand-out films this week aside from Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Death on the Nile — is that the one where they all did it? Or is that the train one? — I thought I’d alert you to a film that may have slipped under your radar: After Love. It was released last year. It’s a small film, tiny. I don’t know what the budget was but it wasn’t $90 million. Yet it’s already won many awards, rightly, and has just been nominated for three Baftas and is staggeringly confident and powerful. I guess we’ll now never know who did it on that boat. Unless they all did it? This is a first feature from English-Pakistani filmmaker Aleem Khan.

Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog could also be called The Power of Benedict Cumberbatch, as he’s so spectacular. He plays a ruggedly masculine cowboy with an inner life that isn’t written, but that we somehow still see. It is also clearly Campion’s best film since The Piano or my own favourite, An Angel at My Table (as for Bright Star, we said we’d never talk of it again — why did you even bring it up? We all have our off days). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRDPo0CHrko If Cumberbatch doesn’t win every award going, I’ll eat my hat, but probably not his ten-gallon one The film is based on the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage that was praised to the skies when published but sold very few copies, unfathomably.

The Forgotten Battle is a Dutch feature film commemorating the desperate and relatively little-known Allied assault on the Scheldt estuary in October and November 1944. When I went to the battlefield decades later with veterans of 47 RM Commando, they told me it was worse than D-Day because the Germans knew they were coming and had prepared stronger defences. Nearly 13,000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded (about the same as the German casualties), half of them Canadians. It has been a long time since I watched a half-decent second world war movie, mostly because they hardly bother making them any more.

This week, an excellent film (Moving On) and a film that isn’t at all, but is entirely worth it as it’s one of the super bad ones that don’t come along too often. It’s the kind that, if it were any better, it would actually be a terrible pity. (See also: Cats.) It’s Diana: The Musical and it’s two hours of ‘whaaaaaat?’ and pinching yourself that this is really happening. (After two hours I was black and blue, with the pinching.) I don’t know what the best lyric is but ‘Harry, my ginger-haired son, you’ll always be second to none’ has to be up there. (Also: ‘It’s the Thrilla in Manila but with Diana and Camilla’ has to be in the game. The top spot is highly contested.

Some Kind of Heaven is a documentary set in The Villages, Florida, which is often described as a ‘Disneyland for retirees’ — it, too, has its own faux-historical town centre — and is the fastest-growing metropolitan area in America. (Current pop: 130,000.) The vibe is, I would say, cruise ship, but with golf. Hell, in other words, unless, that is, I’m going to be left to rot in a nursing home, in which case: I can learn golf! This is a film by Lance Oppenheim, who lived in The Villages for several months. It is a fascinatingly weird place and the film is worth seeing if only to get a sense of that. It is self-contained, with its own (uniform) houses plus banks and cinemas and restaurants and churches, and there are more than 3,000 clubs you can join.

Nomadland won multiple Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, and if there’d been an award for Best Film In Which The Woman In Her Sixties Isn’t The Least Developed Character In The Screenplay, Hallelujah, About Time, it would have scooped that too. Not much competition, regrettably, but you have to admire the film just for that, plus there is much to admire generally. It is based on the non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by the journalist Jessica Bruder, who spent months living with older Americans who, out of economic necessity, eke out a living while travelling from place to place for seasonal employment.

Black Bear is one of those indie dramas that is meta on so many levels you can either sit with it afterwards or, if you’re weak like me, you’ll immediately turn to the internet for an explanation and may even find yourself buried deep in one of those Reddit threads that will make you wish you’d had the strength to just do the sitting. This is a compelling film in its way, and it’s well performed, with a surprising reset midway through, and you don’t have to fully understand a film to enjoy it. But if I’m honest? I do feel a little bit cheated when an interpretation or ending isn’t fully nailed down. My limitation, I’m sure.

Promising Young Woman is a rape-revenge-thriller that has already proved divisive but is a wonderfully clever, darkly funny, stomach-knotting — my stomach may never unknot — exploration of what #notallmen seem to get: it isn’t OK to have sex with a woman who has had a few too many and isn’t in a position to give consent. Unless, of course, she is also out late at night and wearing a short skirt in which case: asking for it. We all know that. This is written and directed by the extraordinary polymath that is Emerald Fennell, who was head writer for the second series of Killing Eve, has collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber on his forthcoming Cinderella, and is a novelist and actress.

In the summer of 2018, when film-maker Lee Isaac Chung was on the brink of giving up filmmaking and had accepted a teaching job, he found himself writing a list of what he remembered growing up as a Korean-American in rural America in the 1980s. These ‘little visual memories’ included, for example, the lunch pails his parents would take to their jobs at the chicken factory, or the minari — a herb used in Korean cookery and medicine — his father planted on their farm. This list became the film Minari, which lately won a Golden Globe and has been nominated for six Oscars. It is a work of extraordinary delicacy, poignancy and tenderness. Whatever else, teaching’s loss is entirely our gain. Alan S. Kim is as cute as a button.

Ammonite is writer-director Francis Lee’s second film after God’s Own Country, one of the best films of 2017, and possibly the best film about a closeted gay Yorkshire sheep farmer falling for a migrant worker ever. This is another unlikely romance, but set in the 19th century between the real-life palaeontologist Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) and real-life Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan), whose wealthy husband had an interest in geology. Mary and Charlotte were friends yet there is no historical evidence they had an affair. This is all poetic licence but told so poetically you will substantially buy it, albeit with a few reservations. Plus it’s Winslet and Ronan and while I’m not usually a sucker for BOGOF offers, you’d surely be crazy to turn this one down.

The premise for the unsnappily titled Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is this: a Hungarian neurosurgeon meets a fellow Hungarian neurosurgeon at a medical conference, falls in love, and gives up her shiny life and career in America to be with him in Budapest. They had agreed to meet on one of the city’s bridges. He doesn’t show. She tracks him to the hospital where he works. He says he’s never met her before. And now we are on board. Now we have to know: is he gaslighting her? Is she crazy? How is this going to play out? This is one of those films that has you in the palm of its hand right from the off.

Judas and the Black Messiah is a biopic about Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, but it’s not your regular biopic because it’s told as crime thriller, through the eyes of a snitch, who may be found out at any minute. This film says what it has to say — about race, injustice, police brutality — but excitingly, thrillingly and non-formulaically. It’s the best film of the year so far, which may not be saying much, given how few films have been released, but you get the sentiment. (The Bond film No Time to Die has been postponed so many times I fear none of us will see it in our lifetimes.) Directed by Shaka King, and written by King, Will Berson, Kenny Lucas and Keith Lucas, the film is based quite accurately, as far as I can fathom, on true events.

Raya and the Last Dragon has everything you might want nowadays from a major Disney film — feisty kick-ass heroine, non-white representation, a narrative that isn’t hung up on romance — but no one involved appears to have asked themselves: do we have an interesting story? Do we have any fresh ideas? Is it fun? This may please very small kiddies who don’t know any better, and there are plenty of them about, but Raya’s not a classic in the making. It’s gorgeously depicted, needless to say, but disappointingly unanimated in all other ways. While this film may please small kiddies, remember: they are not to be trusted.

Pelé is a two-hour documentary about the great Brazilian footballer — the greatest footballer ever, some would say — who played in four World Cups (a record) and was one of the first global sporting superstars. But while there is plenty of footage showing his astonishing talent, if you’re interested in what made him tick, or what his life was like off the pitch, or how adulation might ultimately mess with your head, then move on, nothing to see here. Or, to put it another way, if, like me, you’re the sort of person who goes straight to ‘Personal life’ whenever you look someone up on Wikipedia, it’s as if that section has been excised. However, if you are not that sort of person, you may come away more satisfied and less bored.

I Care a Lot is a deliciously dark comic thriller that You’ll Enjoy a Lot. It’s heartless. It’s vicious. It’s savage. It’ll make you dread old age even more than you already do, if that’s possible. It’s horrible in so many ways — cruel? Did I mention it’s also cruel? — yet it is also smart, stylish and such a fun watch. Written and directed by J. Blakeson (The Disappearance of Alice Creed), the film stars Rosamund Pike as Marla Grayson, who runs a business ripping off old people. Or, to put it more formally, she is a court-appointed legal guardian for elderly wards — or ‘marks’, as she calls them — whose assets she then seizes perfectly legally.

In this line of business you receive many emails from PRs ‘reaching out’ about their particular film, which I really must see, as it wowed a festival in Bulgaria. But the other day, a PR reached out to boast excitedly about a film because it had been savaged, which was a first. ‘The film has absolutely enraged Hollywood critics,’ this person wrote, with obvious pride, before quoting the following from reviews: ‘insanely poor taste’, ‘wildly misjudged’, ‘tone deaf’, ‘gross’. What’s more, this person continued, while critics hate it — it has a critics’ score of 25 per cent at Rotten Tomatoes, the review- aggregator site — audiences are loving it (93 per cent).

Rams is an average film with a better film trying to get out, and you may already have seen that better film. It’s the Icelandic one, of the same name, released in 2015, on which this Australian version is based. That was played as a spare, stark, bitterly dark comedy set amid ice and blizzards and featuring men with unkempt beards, whereas this is sunnier and more kempt and therefore significantly blander. You may even, at various points, feel as though you’ve been trapped in an overlong episode of All Creatures Great and Small (nothing against All Creatures Great and Small, but two hours of it?).

Just before the outbreak of the second world war a discovery was made in a riverside field at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. It was an immense buried boat, dating from the 7th century, and it yielded gilded treasure after gilded treasure, thereby wholly changing our understanding of the Dark Ages. ‘They weren’t dark… by Jupiter!’ as one archaeologist puts it here. It is a fascinating story that could have been told as a full-on thriller. But instead the film employs a delicious, graceful restraint, paying as much attention to deeply buried feeling as to what’s buried deeply in the earth. It’s remarkably moving. By Jupiter, I even cried by the end.

The White Tiger is adapted from the Booker-prize winning novel (2008) by Aravind Adiga. It is directed by Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, 99 Homes) who also wrote the screenplay. It stars Adarsh Gourav, otherwise a songwriter and singer. It’s a rags-to-riches story set in India but it’s not at all a typical rags-to-riches story set in India. Those are some of the things you probably should know, but there is only one thing I want you to know: it is wonderful and, even though the subject matter is often chilling, and there’s simmering rage, and murder, it’s still two hours of boisterous, dazzling, swaggering fun. I watched it once and thought: I could easily watch that again. So I did. Unheard of. And one last thing I want you to know: Bahrani may be a genius.