Paddington 2

seen on 29 December 2017

This sequel to Paddington (released in 2014) re-unites many of the original cast in a new story about the experiences of the ever-optimistic Paddington Bear in London. Michael Bond's creation has been faithfully served by the cast and technical team directed by Paul King. Paddington himself is once again voiced with superb charm by Ben Whishaw, while Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins provide sterling performances as Mr and Mrs Brown. But the limelight also goes to new friends and enemies.

Paddington's aspiration to send his Aunt Lucy a book about London inspires him to get a job first as a barber's assistant (disastrous) and then as a window cleaner - cue several amusing scenes of a bear cleaning windows. When a particularly valuable pop-up book he has his eyes on is stolen, he tries to catch the thief in a great chase along the Regents Canal, but when the thief vanishes he is himself arrested and an unsympathetic judge sends him to prison. In a ridiculously implausible but beguiling sequence, his ability to make marmalade sandwiches saves him from the rigours of prison life, turns the curmudgeonly prison chef Mr Nuckels (Brendan Gleeson) into a softie, and transforms the prison cafeteria into a sugar-rush heaven. Meanwhile the dastardly Phoenix Buchanan (an excellent Hugh Grant) must be foiled ...

Once again the atmosphere is resolutely safe, so that the perils are real but not insuperable - though an underwater sequence lasts far too long without breaths being taken, stretching the limits even of a story like this - and the cast excel at having fun without condescending to the children in the audience, while peppering the scenes with sophisticated jokes and allusions for the accompanying adults. It's a great Christmas treat.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

seen on 18 December 2017

Rian Johnson directs Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Daisy Ridley, Kelly Marie Tran, Laura Dern, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Domhnall Gleeson and many others in his own screenplay for the latest episode in the Star Wars saga.

"A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away ... " Well - almost 40 years ago, and, somewhat incongruously, in Florence on a rainy February afternoon in 1978, my travelling companion and I, overloaded with the Renaissance glories of the Uffizi Gallary, the Pitti Palace and the Palazzo della Signoria, decided to go to a cinema to see the latest American blockbuster "Guerre Stellari". It was raining, and the queue stretched along the street outside the cinema, hardly moving as the time approached for the afternoon screening. Eventually, we were inside the foyer, but the screening must surely have started by the time we bought our tickets. Indeed it had - we entered an overcrowded auditorium to find the film well under way. My companion searched for a seat downstairs, while I went upstairs and found myself kneeling in front of the front row of the balcony, watching Alec Guinness dressed as a desert monk, and listening - to Italian dialogue. By the end, I thought I knew what had happened, but when we met again after the credits, we agreed that we should delay returning to the rainy streets outside. Instead, we found comfortable seats and prepared to watch the start of the film. When we got to the point where we had first come in, we just looked at each other, nodded, and watched it all again.

My Italian was less than rudimentary, but I grasped the story easily, and a later viewing in London confirmed that I had not missed very much (except, unsurprisingly, the caustic cynicism of Harrison Ford's Han Solo). Whether such easy comprehension could be gleaned from a dubbed version of the new Star Wars film, episode VIII, is very doubtful. The issues are more complex and the story more nuanced, not least in proposing that derring-do is not always the best approach to winning a gruelling struggle, even though it does at times have its place. Also, the whole issue of 'the Force' and its relationship to heroism is put under scrutiny, and the comfortable notion of appealing to traditional saviours, to representatives of a family line of heroes, to solve current problems is dismissed as lazy and inappropriate.

Though the political lessons are thus more subtle, the new film maintains the tradition of exciting set-piece battles (the derring-do is still shown, even as it is shown not always to work), classic confrontations between good and evil, unsurprising revelations of the moral bankruptcy of profit-seekers, and teasing cliffhangers about the true loyalties of key characters. There is much to enjoy in the hi-jinks even as the story develops in interesting ways and leaves several enticing trails into future episodes.