Cold War

seen on 5 December 2018

Paweł Pawlikowski directs Joanna Kulig as Zula, Tomasz Kot as Wiktor, Agata Kulesza as Irena and Borys Szyc as Kaczmarek, with Cédric Kahn as Michel and Jeanne Balibar as Juliette, in a film about two young Poles whose personal lives are complicated both by the innate tensions between them and by the pressures of the Cold War.

As in his previous masterpiece Ida (2013) Pawlikowski has composed his film in austere but luminous black and white; the early scenes in the wintry rural Poland of 1949 recall some of the atmosphere of the earlier film, with some quite breathtaking compositions of stark trees against the snow and an eerie vision of the white sky through a ruined church dome. But here, Wiktor and Irena are travelling through impoverished districts in a dilapidated bus under the supervision of Kaczmarek, a Party functionary; they are diligently recording folk songs.

Peterloo

seen on 2 November 2018

Mike Leigh directs a large cast including Maxine Peake, Pierce Quigley, Rory Kinnear, Karl Johnson and Tim McInnerney in an almost documentary style film about the build up to a popular march by the working classes in and around Manchester which took place in August 1819 to demand political reform and relief from the Corn Laws, which was broken up by armed and mounted soldiers and local yeomanry, acting after the Riot Act had been read on behalf of magistrates and the mill-owning gentry. 

Contemporary accounts emphasise that the crowd was good-natured and orderly, with many women and children present and dressed in their Sunday best; the organisers had eschewed the carrying of any implements that could be used as weapons (sticks, cudgels, or farm tools). Some 60000 gathered in St Peters Field, and the soldiers marched and rode in with drawn cutlasses once the fiery orator Henry Hunt began speaking, in order to support his arrest. Amidst the confusion and in the relatively confined space, about a dozen civilians were killed and perhaps 600 to 700 wounded.

The term 'Peterloo' was coined by the editor of the Manchester Observer (the newspaper which had promoted the meeting) in order to link the location (St Peters Field) with the Battle of Waterloo (1815) to point up the hideous irony that soldiers who had recently been protecting the nation were now being turned upon its own unarmed citizenry.

Bohemian Rhapsody

seen on 29 October 2018

A film with a troubled production history looks at the life and career of Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen, but it barely digs below the surface. Two surviving members of the band were executive music producers of the film; perhaps the desire to ensure wide circulation by having a '12A' classification (in Britain) prevented any chance of depicting Mercury's life style in anything but fairly anodyne terms. Brian Singer is credited as director, though actually Dexter Fletcher completed the job after Singer was sacked.

Nonetheless on its own terms it delivers the music in stomping good form, with convincing re-creations of various hits, and 'amalgamations' in the soundtrack (whatever that may mean). The film begins with Mercury (Rami Malek) walking on to the stage at Wembley for the Live Aid concert of 1985, then flashes back to the first meeting between him and drummer Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) and guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee). On the same evening (here) he meets Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) to whom he eventually becomes engaged, though their relationship founders as they have to come to terms with Freddie's sexuality.

The Children Act

seen on 10 September 2018

Richard Eyre directs Emma Thompson as Fiona Maye, Stanley Tucci as her husband Jack and Fionn Whitehead as Adam Henry in Ian McEwan's own adaptation of his novel about a high court judge (Thompson) who has to make a ruling as to whether a hospital can override the expressed wishes of a 17-year-old Jehovah's Witness (Whitehead) suffering from life-threatening leukemia who is refusing a blood transfusion. 

Since the eponymous Children Act explicitly gives her the responsibility to act in the child's interest, she rules that his life must be preserved, but the case is made deliberately complex by several factors: the boy Adam is nearly eighteen (but not quite) and so very soon outside the purview of the act; he is bright, articulate, and firm in his beliefs; the judge unusually decides to visit him in hospital before making her ruling, which sets up an unexpected bond between them; and she is also undergoing a marital crisis largely brought about by her unswerving devotion to the law and its demands on her personal life, signifying her withdrawal from the emotional commitments of personal relationships.

Though based on a real case known to the author, and keen to show the actual workings of the Family Court in the UK (as opposed to highly stylised and inaccurate presentations of courtroom dramas in film and on TV), the story does in fact stretch credulity because of the subsequent interactions between Adam and Fiona. The interactions are of course vital in developing the themes of personal choice and responsibility, and the perils of either engaging in or standing aloof from difficult encounters and relationships. But in the later parts of the film Adam's behaviour seems at times too schematic, a fact which even the excellent performance of Fionn Whitehead cnnot quite hide.

However, the courtroom scenes are sensitively and impressively filmed, giving an intriguing impression of the real theatricality of the proceedings, and the way in which this preserves the dignity of the court in the face of the human misery which surrounds and indeed creates the various cases. We are in no doubt that the issues are contentious, not to say controversial, and Fiona Maye is both conscientious and skilful in delivering her judgements. At the same time, there are always subtle indications of the toll this work is taking on her, even if at times she seems barely conscious of it.

The world view of the Jehovah's Witnesses is presented with as little prejudice as possible, though it is a hard one to sympathise with. However the integrity of the family involved is crucial to the ethical dilemma at the core of the film, and the line of questioning pursued by the hospital's barrister cannot help but appear demeaning in its rhetorical skill. But equally, the parents' barrister is scoring points as well; what is interesting is that the judge sees behind the legal wrangling into the heart of the matter. Her decision to visit Adam, quixotic as it may seem, reflects her keen belief that understanding - the application of intellect to difficult problems - is the way forward in even the most intractable situations.

The success of the film hinges upon the interaction between the judge and the patient, and their first meeting is beautifully acted by Emma Thompson and Fionn Whitehead. Indeed, Emma Thompson's performance as a whole is one of the finest she has done, portraying a fiercely intelligent woman facing a severe personal crisis and attempting to solve it as if it were only a professional problem. The magnetism between the powerful judge and the articulate but impressionable teenager undercuts her usual expectation of being in control, but at the same time shows the determined young Adam that there is much that he does not know. It's a wonderful stroke that the intense conversation between them about right and wrong, almost legalistic in its tension, should be followed by an apparently casual invitation to talk about music, in which adolescent enthusiasm bursts forth in Adam in quite a different way. But it is significant, too, that Fiona Maye often deflects a difficult problem by resorting to music herself.

The film raises profound issues, but the later parts of the story risks some melodrama, and the parallel plot of the marriage troubles is at times too cursory, leaving Stanley Tucci with a rather underdeveloped character. (It's actually rather interesting that the traditional roles of workaholic husband and dutiful but frustrated wife have been completely reversed here.) The intensity and sheer intelligence of Emma Thompson, and the heartwarming vulnerability of Finn Whitehead in their respective performances save the film from its occasional narrative clumsiness.

Leave No Trace

seen on 25 August 2018

Debra Cranik directs Thomsain Harcourt McKenzie as Tom and Ben Foster as her father Will in this adaptation of Peter Rock's book My Abandonment.


Tom and Will live on the margins - actually, at the opening of the film, they are camping in a remote public park, following a routine that is evidently both familiar and comprehensive in protecting their privacy. When Tom is inadvertantly seen by a ranger they areapprehended and placed under the care of social services, being given the use of a small house by a local logger. However, Will is unwilling to accept such interventions in his life; the reasons for his reluctance are unstated but fairly obviously due to PTSD. When Will insists on leaving, travelling north to the colder Washington State by bus and hitchhiking, Tom is staunchly loyal until the real fragility of their lifestyle is made plain when Will has a crippling accident in the forest. The final scenes show her making her own way as her father concedes her right to decide for herself.


This bald summary hardly does justice to the quiet authority of the film; the rituals of their lives are closely observed; the tensions between father and daughter merely the surface disruptions of a deep and almost always unstated love and trust; the well-meaning people they meet understandably concerned that there may be a dark side to the situation, but accepting Tom's assurances that nothig is untoward. It is a measured and beautiful revelation of a lifestyle in the United States that is totally at odds with the usual filmic depictions of family life (dysfunctional or otherwise). The two central performances are unfussy, with huge amounts of communication transmitted by quick glances, small twitches of the lips or cheeks, a code-like clucking, which achieve an enormous resonance as the film proceeds. By the end, when Will lets Tom return to the backwoods trailer-park community that she finds so congenial, almost nothing needs to be said in a parting that isboth heartrending and affirmative.


It's a great film.

Summer 1993 (Estiu 1993)

seen on 12 August 2018

Carla Simon directs Laia Artigas as Frida, Paula Roblas as her cousin Anna, and David Verdaguer and Bruna Cusi as Anna's parents Esteve and Marge in a film about six-year-old Frida's adjustment to living in the country near Girona after her mother has died of AIDS in Barcelona. Frida's grandparents and aunts, living in Barcelona, can no longer care for her and so she goes with her mother's brother to live with him, his wife and little daughter.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

seen on 2 July 2018

Ron Howard directs Alden Ehrenreich as a young Han Solo, Emilia Clarke as his friend Qi'ra, Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca, and Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian, with Woody Harrelson as Beckett, Thandie Newton as Val, Phoebe Waller-Bridge voicing L3-37 and Paul Bettany as Dryden Vos.

This is another 'fill-in-the-gaps' movie (see also Rogue One), concentrating on the young Han Solo as he escapes a life of child-slavery but fails to toe the line, and so becoes enmeshed in shady dealings with endless opportunities for derring-do and sharp one-liners. Central to the story, in terms of the wider Star Wars franchise, are three significant events: meeting Chewbacca, meeting Lando Calrissian, and 'winning' the Millennium Falcon, and all are more than satisfactorily dealt with.

Ehrenreich gives an engaging performance, wide-eyed innocence concealing the beginnings of a more cynical outlook, with a disarming grin, an uncomplicated self-belief, and a daredevil inclination to improvise. The villain is hardly villainous enough - Paul Bettany failing to chew the scenery or exude much menace - and the older hand not really sufficiently grizzled - Woody Harrelson a little too bland to be a serious role model for the later Han's roguishness as embodied by Harrison Ford - but there is an interesting development for Emilia Clarke's engimatic Qi'ra.

Good fun but not earth-shattering.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

seen on 14th May 2018

Mike Newell directs Lily James as Juliet Ashton and Michiel Huisman as Dawsey Adams, with support from Penelope Wilton, Tom Courtenay, Jessica Brown Findlay, Katherine Parkinson, Glen Powell and Matthew Goode, in this oddly-titled film based on a novel of the same name.

The Society was invented on the spur of the moment by some islanders caught out after curfew during the German occupation of the Channel Islands in World War Two, and then became a book club. After the War, one of its members, the farmer Dawsey Adams, writes to Juliet Ashton in London, having found her name and address written into a book that the society had read.

Juliet, a successful but unsatisfied young author, is involved with a wealthy American and agrees to marry him just before going to Guernsey to find out more about the Society, with a view to writing an article for the Sunday Times. But when she arrives she finds the group wary of publicity, and there turns out to be a mystery about Elizabeth, one of its founding members, who was deported during the War. The natural reserve of the islanders makes it harder for Juliet to piece together what happened, especially as her censorious landlady plainly disapproves of her connection with the book lovers.

It is all too obvious how the romantic element of the story will play out, with the quiet but decent farmer pitted against the brash rich American (even though they only meet for a few minutes of screen time). In the meantime, the revelation of Elizabeth's story proceeds in awkward jumps as Juliet gradually wins the confidence of the different members of the Society. This means that we constantly have our interest in Elizabeth's story disrupted by Juliet's difficulties in winkling it out of the locals. 

Considering how unpleasant and divisive the German occupation was, our sense of it is fatally muted by its presentation - children being stoically evacuated, soldiers marching down a street, soldiers requisitioning some pigs, some silent depictions of slave labourers, almost all the nastiness occurring off-screen. The poisonous effects of collaboration and betrayal are mainly concentrated on one hapless individual now shunned by the community at large, while the landlady is a stock figure of religious bigotry. Elizabeth is presented as a free spirit, and luckily for her reputation among her friends the German she falls for is a really nice guy.

You can, I'm afraid, see the cliches overwhelming whatever summary of the plot one attempts to write. The film looks good - some lovely coastline - though it is completely unclear why, in such a pretty town as Juliet first sees, there is no accommodation (the hotel being closed), and so she is delivered by horse and cart to a remote cottage. All this does is allow more scenery; and in general the geography of the houses of the characters is very confusing. There is some attempt at period authenticity, at least visually, but the sheer grimness of Britain in the late 1940s does not bite very deep.

The film is a pleasant enough diversion, but not very much more.

Love, Simon

seen on 23 April 2018

Greg Berlanti directs Nick Robinson as Simon Spier in a film based on Becky Albertalli's coming of age novel Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda. It's basically an American high-school rom-com with the interesting twist that Simon, the main character, is gay but has not yet told anyone in his family or in his circle of friends. He is, however, exchanging emails with the mysterious 'Blue', another gay student at the school in a similar position.

The emails become increasingly flirtatious, though each boy is comfortable with the anonymity (Simon has also chosen a nom de plume). Matters are complicated when Simon leaves his secret gmail account open on a library computer and Marty, another classmate, reads and photographs the correspondence. Soon Simon is being blackmailed to assist Marty to befriend Abby, one of his close friends.

Phantom Thread

seen on 17 February 2018

Paul Thomas Anderson directs a film concerning Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day Lewis), a (fictional) 1950s fashion designer whose personality and intense concentration on his work exists in a world buttressed by the steely efficiency of his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville). Into this carefully managed terrain comes a new model, Alma (Vicky Krieps), whom Reynolds meets by chance in a country inn where she is waitressing, and who rapidly becomes his new and indispensable muse. The power plays and shifting attitudes of these three form the major interest of the film.

The Mercy

seen on 12 February 2018

James Marsh directs Colin Firth as Donald Crowhurst, Rachel Weisz as his wife Clare, David Thewlis as the press agent Rodney Hallworth and Ken Stott as the banker Stanley Best in a film written by Scott Z. Burns based on the ill-fated attempt of Crowhurst, an amateur sailor, to enter a round-the-world sailing race in 1968.

Crowhurst, running a small company inventing various navigation aids, and something of a romantic dreamer, decided to enter the race being sponsored by the Sunday Times, and found himself unable to back out even when it was plain that he was not ready for the challenge. He had commissioned a trimaran to be built to his own specifications, but it was almost entirely untested (at least in the version presented in this film) by the end of October 1968 by which time any contestant hoping to participate had to have started. Having signed away the deeds of his house as collateral should he not take part, and swayed by the blandishments of his press officer, he duly sailed out of Teignmouth Harbour on 31 October.

Wonder Wheel

seen on 4 February 2018

Woody Allen directs Jim Belushi (Humpty), Kate Winslett (Ginny), Juno Temple (Carolina) and Justin Timberlake (Mickey) in a film set in Coney Island in the early 1950s. The period is lovingly re-created - Allen is as always excellent at evoking New York life in earlier decades - and beautifully shot by Vittorio Storaro.

The story is narrated by Mickey, a handsome young man putting himself through college after war service in the Pacific and taking a summer job as a lifeguard. He introduces Carolina, a young woman returning unexpectedly to her father's and stepmother's home behind the Coney Island fairground as she is in hiding from the Mob after turning State's evidence against her husband. Humpty, her father, is initially furious but he takes her in and she begins working at the same clam restaurant as Ginny. The household has to withstand several resentments - Carolina has had to swallow some pride, Ginny is protective of her own young son from her first marriage (a boy with a worrying propensity to set fires), and Humty is trying to stay on the wagon and failing to cope with his stepson.

The Post

seen on 22 January 2018

Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks star as the owner (Katharine Graham) and editor (Ben Bradlee) of The Washington Post in this film directed by Steven Spielberg concerning the crisis of publishing the Pentagon Papers in June 1971.

The film opens with Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) taking part in a night sortie in Vietnam as an 'observer'; later while flying back to the US he is summoned to give an opinion to Secretary of Defense Rob McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), who apparently uses his answer as support for disengagement, but in a press conference gives a contrary endorsement that all is going well. This, we are led to suppose, provokes Ellsberg to photocopy the entire report (7000 pages) which McNamara had commissioned, which clearly showed that consecutive US administrations from Truman onwards had misled the public about the government's intentions in Vietnam.

Call Me by Your Name

seen on 5 January 2018

This is the third of director Luca Guadagnino's films about aspects of love and desire. It is based on a novel by André Aciman about the relationship between the 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and the 24-year-old Oliver (Armie Hammer), a graduate student working with Elio's father (an archaeologist and classicist) and staying with the family in Italy during the summer of 1983. The film is shot in Guadagnino's home region (not, apparently, the setting of the novel).

At first Elio is wary of Oliver, resenting his laid-back American manner, while Oliver is bemused by Elio's prickliness as much as by his precocious knowledge - typically, the teenager is an expert in anything that really interests him and is not particularly shy of showing up the young man's ignorance. But eventually the attraction between the two becomes stronger, and romance blossoms.

The subject matter is potentially awkward, but the treatment is unfussy and non-judgemental, with no hint of homophobia and no real sense of exploitation (Oliver's reservations on this point are blithely dismissed by Elio). Elio's parents seem unworried, even approving of the special friendship between their son and the visitor, and none of the other people in their lives is shown to be in a position to have a real opinion about what is going on. To that extent, the film is perhaps unrealistic.

However, in its own terms, it is a beautifully composed evocation of the first awakening of passionate love in a sensitive teenager - the performance by Chalamet is both charming and intense, catching the precocity and the vulnerability of a youngster in equal measure. The summer attractiveness of Italy - even of a region not especially well-known to the general viewer - provides a marvellous backdrop for the slow development of the relationship in a milieu where everyone seems to have all the time in the world for such things.  Elio's experience is bound to be transitory and therefore painful - Oliver only visits for one summer - and yet he is blessed with a father (Michael Stuhlbarg) who seeks to impart sympathetic wisdom where many parents would have been either at a complete loss, or just appalled.

It's a great film about its subject, worthily complimenting the first film of the (loose) trilogy, I am Love (from 2009). I can't speak of the second film, A Bigger Splash (2015) as I have not seen it.