Deborah Ross

Champions is an underdog sports movie starring Woody Harrelson as a baseball coach forced to take on a team with intellectual disabilities. But the main thing you need to know is it is so formulaic I could have written it, you could have written it, it could have written itself. Heck, it’s so predictable it could have also directed itself –  though, hopefully, it would never have been able to trash itself or I’d be out of a job. This is so formulaic I could have written it, you could have written it, it could have written itself Billed as a ‘hilarious and heart-warming comedy’, this is a remake of a Spanish film (Campeones, 2018).

The Belgian film Close, written and directed by Lukas Dhont, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes and is up for an Oscar, is a coming-of-age-story that’s exquisite and heart-breaking. Take tissues, and probably not just the one box. I was deeply touched by their little white vests, purchased no doubt from the Belgian equivalent of M&S Dhont’s starting point was psychologist Niobe Way’s book Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, which is based on hundreds of interviews and showed that boys have deeply intimate, confiding friendships until adolescence when they are socialised to withdraw from one another. (Just to be on the safe side I asked my adult son if this was his experience. ‘Yes’, he said.

With a title like Cocaine Bear you’ll probably be happily anticipating one of those B-movie cultural moments. It’s a bear! On cocaine! Sign me up! You go to a film like this in the spirit of trash-loving glee. It’ll be fun. It’ll be 90 minutes of low camp entertainment rather than a four-hour Oscar-contending head-scratcher – and that can be a relief. But, in fact, and despite the publicity blitzkrieg – it’s a bear! On cocaine! – this is a standard animal-on-the-rampage affair. The cocaine doesn’t even bring much to the party. (Kids: take note.) Quite what I was expecting, I don’t know. Maybe the bear would become euphoric and chatty and stay up until the wee hours before becoming paranoid and crashing? That would have been more interesting, surely.

Women Talking, which has received Oscar nominations for best picture and adapted screenplay, is one of those films that, on paper, is a hard sell. It is women talking, and talking and talking, after enduring the most horrifying experience at the hands of men. All of which sounds barely cinematic and even less entertaining. But as written and directed by Sarah Polley, it is compelling, gripping, powerful, as tense as a thriller. Think of it this way: it’s like Twelve Angry Men, but in this instance it’s Eight Angry Women (in a hayloft) who must reach a unanimous decision. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

I can’t work out if Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, which stars Brendan Fraser as a man weighing 600lb – that’s 42 stone in real money – is ‘abhorrently cruel’, as some have said, or a film of ‘rare compassion’, as others have said. Either way, it is compelling, although whether that’s for the right reasons or wrong reasons, I also can’t work out. You certainly can’t take your eyes off Fraser, much as you’d sometimes wish to. Is this really sweet, klutzy ‘George, George, George of the Jungle (watch out for the tree!)’? After years in the wilderness, Fraser has now been nominated for an Oscar. So what we can agree on is that Aronofsky has done for him what, for example, Tarantino did for John Travolta.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?

There can’t be anyone anywhere who hasn’t somehow been touched by a Steven Spielberg film. Some of us, for example, haven’t  dipped their toe into the sea for going on 40 years now. (Thanks for that, Jaws.) He has thus surely earned the right to finally turn the camera on himself, as he does with The Fabelmans, a memoir based on his childhood and discovery of filmmaking. This could have been sentimental and soggy, a ‘magic of the movies’ endeavour. There is some of that, but this is more than that. It’s about family, and the complexity of family, and it’s intensely personal, moving, absorbing and full of love. He is a master storyteller, and I say that even though I’ve seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, unfortunately.

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.

Todd Field’s Tár stars an insanely glorious Cate Blanchett – if she doesn’t win an Oscar I’ll eat my hat – as a world-famous orchestral conductor about to record Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. There is also Elgar’s Cello Concerto in this film, and a bit of Bach, but it’s not about music. To say it’s about music would be like saying Citizen Kane is about tobogganing. It’s about power: how you attain it, what you do with it. We enter the world of cancel culture and identity politics and address that old chestnut: can you separate art and artist? It’s basically everything you are certain will bore you to death, but it doesn’t here. It’s riveting. The film is 157 minutes long and doesn’t drag for a single second. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, which he wrote as well as directed, is billed as a ‘love letter to cinema’ although, alas, in this instance cinema does not appear to love him back. The magic of film-going is the theme but there is almost no film-going in it and what there is isn’t magic. Peculiarly soulless, pedestrian and plodding, it is, however, wonderfully shot by Roger Deakins. It also stars Olivia Colman so now we can deal with that all-important question: can Olivia Colman save any film she’s in? No, is the answer. But it is probably a hundred times better than it would have been without her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Corsage is a biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria who was prized for her beauty and fashion sense and may have been, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say, the Princess Diana of her day. But then disaster strikes: she turns 40. I know, but in 1877 that is old. That is past it, for a woman. What purpose does she serve now? This isn’t yet another film about a woman being done over by bad royals. It isn’t Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette or Pablo Larrain’s Spencer. It’s more a take on celebrity culture and no longer being what is wanted. It’s mesmerisingly sad, and Vicky Krieps, who won the best actress award at Cannes, is superb. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

If you’re of my generation, I expect your first encounter with D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the (well-thumbed) book passed around school and then maybe Ken Russell’s full-frontal, hut-shaking, 1993 television adaptation starring Joely Richardson and Sean Bean at his most Sean Bean. (‘I wan’ yer, m’lady.’) But this Netflix version doesn’t play it as high-toned smut or as a pop-culture joke. It’s more in keeping with Lawrence’s alternative title for the novel, Tenderness, and it’s more a gentle, affecting, immersive love story than a sex story although there is plenty of sex in it. You’re not about to be short-changed there, m’lady. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

If you’re planning on seeing The Last Flight Home at the cinema, don’t make any plans for afterwards as you’ll be completely done in. I soaked the top half of my jumper with the crying, and then needed to race home to wring it out. It’s an unflinching documentary from film-maker Ondi Timoner following her father in the last days of his life right up to the moment he dies. Old age is no place for sissies, Bette Davis once famously remarked, and neither is this film. But it is also about how to live, how to be a mensch, and so full of love and respect. Plus, the older you get, the less of a sissy you can be. (Or so I find.)  Ondi Timoner (Dig!

The Menu is a comedy-horror-thriller set in an exclusive restaurant on a private island and it gives the rich a good kicking, like The Triangle of Sadness, except here they manage to keep their food down, mercifully. (At $1,200 a head, you’d hope so.) But the diners are not spared otherwise, and it’s nastily fun, if not pure evil, and should possibly come with a warning: after this, you will never, ever wish to dine anywhere that isn’t Nando’s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_uTkUGcHv4 The film is directed by Mike Mylod with a screenplay by Will Tracy and Seth Reiss. (Both Mylod and Tracy have worked on Succession.) The opening sees the group of diners waiting to take the boat over to the island where the restaurant, Hawthorne, is located.

Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is, first and foremost, a wonderful film. More than this, you don’t need to know but I’ll tell you anyway. Panahi, an Iranian filmmaker, was banned from making films by the Iran government in 2010 yet has persisted clandestinely. One of his films (This Is Not a Film) was smuggled to the Cannes festival on a USB stick buried inside a cake. No Bears was wrapped in May this year; Panahi was arrested in July, and now he’s serving a six-year prison sentence for ‘propaganda against the system’. To make a film, any film, against such odds, is astonishing, but one as truly wonderful as this? Mind-blowing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Living is a remake of one of the great existential masterpieces of the 20th century, Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), which didn’t need remaking, many will grumble, but once you’ve seen this you’ll be glad that it was. It is as profoundly and deeply felt as the original and as heartbreakingly tender. It asks the same question – what makes a life meaningful? – but this time with Englishness, bowler hats, the sweet trolley at Fortnum’s and Bill Nighy. Really, what more could you want? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2L8CP31-14 The film is directed by Oliver Hermanus with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, who first mooted the idea.

The latest film from Ruben Ostlund received an eight-minute standing ovation after its screening in Cannes and also won the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, and this has left me entirely baffled: what, the film I’ve just seen? The one where every scene is far too long? The one billed as a ‘satirical black comedy’ even though the targets are easy and it doesn’t say anything and I didn’t laugh once? That film? I should add, it’s not for the emetophobic. One of the scenes that goes on far too long involved so much vomiting that I could only watch the bottom 5 per cent of the screen. Ostlund needs someone like my mother in his life to tell him it’s not clever, it’s not funny, pack it in.

My Policeman is a forbidden love drama starring both Harry Styles – whose bid for movie stardom continues apace – and his naked bottom. The bottom is good. Ten out of ten for the bottom, particularly during a scene in Venice when the light from the window casts it in a golden, buttery glow. But otherwise, this is an average, meek and soporific endeavour which hits quite a few bum notes of the kind that aren’t ideal. It is based on the novel by Bethan Roberts, which in turn was inspired by the romantic life of E.M. Forster, who had a long-term relationship with a married policeman who suffers a stroke and is nursed by his wife, May. (Big shout out for May, I think.

The life of Emily Brontë is an enduring object of fascination. So small, the life, so sparse, so limited. Yet it delivered those magnificent poems and Wuthering Heights. How could this be? Genius, I suppose, paired with a vivid interior life. But as neither of those are cinematic, Emily imagines what could have led her to write as she did. It’s a ‘speculative biopic’, and modern, but there’s no Billie Eilish on the soundtrack or breaking of the fourth wall or jokey intertitles or any of those larks, which is a mighty relief. Instead, it’s daring, and ravishing. If you’d asked me if Emily might have ever tried opium, or had a passionate affair with a sexy curate, I’d have laughed in your face. But here I absolutely bought it.