BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER****

Pleasantly surprised by BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER, despite what felt like a raft of mediocre reviews.  Edward Berger's follow-up to his superb CONCLAVE has style to spare and a beautifully haunting examination of addiction, redemption and spiritual awakening. I am only docking it a star because I felt like the costume choices for Tilda Swinton's character were so outlandish as to become comic, and undercut the emotion and gravity of the story.

The Penguin's Colin Farrell stars as Reilly, a gambling addict and conman posing as an aristocrat in Macao.  He is desperate for a big win at the Baccarat tables and his only source of credit is a casino waitress/black market credit broker called Dao Ming (Fala Chen).  Meanwhile a British debt collector called Blithe (Swinton) is on his trail. He goes on an insane bender, forges a deep emotional relationship with Dao Ming, and arguably Blithe too, and suddenly his lucks comes almost miraculously good. The existential question is what he will do with that good fortune.

The film is showcase for Farrell's ridiculous acting talent and willingness to mine the very depths of human depravity and vulnerability. It's also a showcase for cinematographer James Friend and his stunning visuals of rainstorm-drenched Macao. I felt utterly immersed in this world, and utterly invested in Reilly's story.  I was rooting for him even as he self-sabotaged.  I also loved the thematics, but can't really discuss them here without spoiling the plot. Suffice to say that those familiar with certain genre of Chinese film-making will not be disappointed.

BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER is rated R and has a running time of 101 minutes. It is available to watch on Netflix. It played Telluride, Toronto, San Sebastian and London.

THE ROSES****

I was pleasantly surprised by Jay Roach's remake of the iconic late 80s black comedy about a divorcing couple sabotaging each other's lives. The Crown's Olivia Colman plays a talented chef who puts her career on hold to raise the kids while Benedict Cumberbatch (THE THING WITH FEATHERS) goes on to become a successful architect.  The tables are turned when a massive storm both destroys his latest commission and his career but drives a famous food critic into her humble crab shack.  He becomes a stay-at-home dad and she becomes a radically successful restauranteur.  The divorce only moves into view in the final 45 minutes or so, and allows for a deliciously brilliant cameo from Allison Janney as a fierce divorce lawyer. It's then that we get the gonzo sabotage that made up most of the original film.  

I loved everything about this film. The brilliantly nasty verbal sparring from the two British leads, much of which comes at the expense of their shocked, prudish American friends.  No surprise that the script was written by Tony McNamara who so beautifully mined marital bickering in his under-rated and hilarious TV series The Great. But what gives this movie so much more depth and relatability compared to the original was its willingness to explore contemporary marriage dynamics around gender norms. I loved seeing the husband and wife struggle to cope with his feelings of emasculation as she becomes the breadwinner, and the wife struggle with becoming a side-show in her own children's lives.  We may not all build multi-million dollar houses in the Bay Area, but I think a lot of these financial and cultural pressures on marriage resonate. It was wonderful to see them explored honestly on film.

THE ROSES has a running time of 105 minutes and is rated R. It was released in August.

FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS*

Bored as fuck watching FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS. No humour, no grand emotional revelations, no chemistry between the leads, hackneyed action scenes and scoring, unclear why it's in a retro-Jetsons world, wondering if it would have more fun to just watch reruns of The Jetsons.

In this reimagining of the unloved ginger stepchild of the Marvel universe, the ubiquitous Pedro Pascal (enough already!) plays astronaut turned mutant Reed Richards and The Crown's Princess Margaret, Vanessa Kirby, plays his fellow astronaut turned mutant and pregnant wife Sue Storm.  GLADIATOR 2's Joseph Quinn plays Sue's brother Johnny and the quartet is rounded out by The Bear's Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the poor fucker who spends the film playing a rock-like thing called... The Thing.  

As the film opens, earth is under attack from a generic Big Bad with an emissary called the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner). The screenwriters try to have some IRON MAN style witty fun with Johnny asking her if the surfboard is part of her body. It lands flat. The plot revolves around the Big Bad wanting the astro-human baby because Power, and the astro-human baby's mum being understandably reluctant to give him up.  But I never really felt the stakes.  The family are so popular it's not like the humans are coming with pitchforks to steal the baby.  I never felt like the baby was at risk. I never felt like the mum was at risk. Rumble rumble, the end.

What a waste of on-screen talent. Especially Natasha Lyonne.  Director Matt Shakman (Wandavision): do better.  I think it's interesting that there are seven accredited screenwriters on this film, although to be fair that includes its comic-book creators. Maybe that speaks to its lack of forward momentum, clear linear narrative and muddiness. I also wonder whether with a concept so brilliantly deconstructed, parodied, but ultimately enhanced with THE INCREDIBLES, cinema-viewers have just moved beyond the source material.

FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS is available to screen on Disney+. It has a running time of 115 minutes and is rated PG-13.

NUREMBERG**

James Vanderbilt, screenwriter on iconic films such as David Fincher's ZODIAC, stages his directorial debut with NUREMBERG, a film about the trial of the infamous Nazi leader Hermann Goering.  

While trying hard to hue close to the historical record, Vanderbilt's script has two fatal flaws - it is patronising and it is far too pleased with itself.  The former manifests in endless passages of ham-fisted exposition, assuming that the viewer knows nothing and it is too stupid to figure it out.  This extends both to the historic events AND their contemporary resonance. 

The latter manifests in clever-clever cuts between lines of dialogue that flatly contradict each other for comic effect.  We get dumb action movie lines like "Welcome to Nuremberg" (insert mike drop), from dumb caricature characters like John Slattery's military prison guard. We get the same character anachronistically referring to two psychiatrists as "mental health professionals".  We get a desperately harrowing courtroom scene of real Holocaust footage shown and then a smash-cut to a cool jazz club and our protagonist flirting with a pretty journalist. Just no.

So this is a tonally jarring, condescending and obvious film containing a central bad performance from Rami Malek as US Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelly. Why might it still be worth your time? A star each for Russell Crowe and Leo Woodall as Goering and Sergeant Howie Triest respectively. Crowe is absolutely magnificent as Goering - capturing his slippery charm, bonhomie, narcissism and at core his complete fanaticism.  It's a shame such a performance - Crowe's best in years - is wasted on this film.  And kudos to Leo Woodall, who recently impressed as the lead actor in TUNER.  As Howie, Woodall is the very moral and emotional heart of this film, far moreso than Malek's gurning shrink. Otherwise Shannon and poor Richard E Grant are mediocre in roles ill-written and under-serving their real life counterparts.

NUREMBERG is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 148 minutes. It played Toronto and San Sebastian. It was released in the USA last Friday and in the UK next Friday.

WICKED FOR GOOD**

WICKED FOR GOOD is the second part of John M. Chu's adaptation of the wildly successful Broadway musical. The action takes place a year after the first part. The genuinely magical Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) has scorned the fraudulent Wizard's offer to share power and is desperately trying to expose his lies.  Meanwhile, her childhood best friend Glinda (Ariana Grande) has fallen in with Madam Morrible's plans for propaganda against Elphaba, while still hoping to broker a reconciliation. Glinda remains in love with the dashingly handsome Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), and Nessarose (Marissa Bode) remains in love with Bok (Ethan Slater). Let's just say that Glinda takes romantic disappointment with more elegance than Nessa.

The problem with splitting the musical into two is that the first half contains the stronger music and all the fun.  This latter half is an almost uninterrupted downer. Oz is descending into authoritarianism policed by flying monkeys.  Almost everybody is romantically disappointed.  Worst of all, we so rarely see Glinda and Elphaba together on screen.  Whenever we do, the movie springs to life, grounded in their love for each other. The only genuine laugh of the film happens when they fight 90 minutes in. The only tears that threaten are when they sing of how the other has changed them "for good" in the final act.  When the film centres their story, and unites them, it is an altogether more engaging beast.  But when they are apart, boy, is it dull and dispiriting. Does anyone really care about Nessa and Bok, or catch any kind of romantic spark between Fiyero and Elphie? As for the Wizard and Morrible, while Jeff Goldblum is having fun indulging himself, I doubt anyone else is amused. And as badass as Michelle Yeoh is, she cannot sing.

So we twist the gears to our finale. If the first film was really Elphie's journey to self-actualisation and belief then this film is Glinda's.  I loved her arc, and the new song about a spoiled girl whose bubble probably should be popped was both beautiful and meaningful. And of course the whole thing is a technical marvel - beautifully costumed and designed.  But I continue to believe that it would have been better as one film with fewer songs and a more complete and balanced narrative arc. 

WICKED FOR GOOD is rated PG and has a running time of 138 minutes. It will be released on November 21st. 

LA GRAZIA**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 12

Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (IL DIVO) and actor Toni Servillo reunite for the seventh time for LA GRAZIA - a patient, melancholy drama about love and grief. Servillo plays an Italian President called Mariano.  His character is grappling with whether to sign a Bill legalising euthanasia. He must also sign whether to give a presidential pardon to a woman and a man serving sentences for murdering their respective spouses.  The first was escaping from a violent marriage, the second claims he was committing an act of mercy as his wife was suffering from Alzheimers.   It feels as though the President, a Catholic and a Jurist, is playing for time and running down the clock as he is in the final months of his term, much to the chagrin of his devoted daughter and fellow Jurist Dorotea. Meanwhile in his personal life, Mariano is grieving his wife Aurora, but gripped with suspicions that she had an affair forty years prior with his fellow cabinet minister.

The film takes a leisurely pace as Mariano derps around the Quirinale, pondering what to do, or distracting himself by listening to rap music. This creates a patient meditative feel that I enjoyed but I still feel that it was around 20-30 minutes too long. But to compensate, the film contains flashes of profound hilarity, such as the awards ceremony roughly half way through the film, and builds to a deeply moving and profound conclusion. Much is made of the fact that the Italian phrase La Grazia can mean religious grace, but also a pardon, and also compassion.  

The true joy of the film is just watching Toni Servillo give a masterclass performance full of warmth, compassion and occasionally mischief.  He won the Volpi Cup at Venice for the performance, and rightly so. He can convey more with a single eyebrow raise than most actors with a full fireworks show of histrionics.  Servillo is well matched in the first half of the film by Anna Ferzetti who plays his daughter, and also by Milvia Marigliano as the art critic and lifelong friend Coco Valori.  Coco is a fascinating character. Comic relief in the first half of the film but building toward something more profound and deeply moving. 

LA GRAZIA has a running time of 131 minutes. It played Venice, where Toni Servillo won the Volpi Cup, Telluride and London.  It opens in the US on December 5th.

100 NIGHTS OF HERO* - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Closing Night Gala

100 NIGHTS OF HERO is a wonderful graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg whose themes are feminist and queer and sex positive. In layered and echoing stories she tells us about a world created by a wonderful young woman called Kiddo until her dad, Birdman, turns into a tyrannical patriarchy. We hear about a beautiful young woman who gets pregnant by a man but transcends into a moon. We hear of a young bride abused by her husband - her washed bones made into a lyrical harp. Of beautiful sisters who secretly read and write and are murdered for this crime, their graves marked with stones. Again and again these layered stories recast well-known fairy-tales, biblical tales and myths and speak to a world in which bright women are subjugated and killed. 

And then we focus in on the story of Cherry and Hero. Cherry is an aristocrat and Hero is her maid but they are secret lovers. Cherry’s husband sets her up by making a despicable wager. His mate Manfred will have 100 nights to seduce her and prove that all women are harlots. This dastardly man tells her plainly he is going to rape her. So every night Hero tells Manfred a story so exciting that he forgets to rape Cherry, and leaves him on a cliffhanger. She is our Sheherezade for 100 nights. And not only for Manfred but the guards and the people of the town who also become hooked on the stories. So when at last our lovers are arrested and thrown from a tower in punishment, the town rises up and overthrows the patriarchy.  

The story is funny, profound, refreshingly sex positive and unnervingly relevant in these increasingly bigoted times. I love that Cherry and Hero feel no shame in their love. They both have intelligence and agency. Yes Hero is the more self-assured and infinitely resourceful but Cherry isn’t some passive whiny pathetic woman either. 

So imagine my horror at Julia Jackman’s new feature length adaptation of the novel, in which Cherry becomes a weedy pathetic simpering fool and there’s no sex, and half the stories are omitted or garbled, there’s no threat of rape, far from being hooked on the stories, the seducer is bored to sleep by them, and … and … it just all makes no sense. It’s all so milquetoast. Where’s the audacity and wonder and excitement? 

I also hate to rag on a film that presumably had a micro-budget but it just looks cheap. This should be a film set mostly at night in which the moon and stars are major characters. A film in which a big city full of people rises up in revolt. But no. This is all broad daylight and harshly reflective electric candles and aaargh! I am so frustrated at this milquetoast under-funded attempt at turning this wonderful book into a film. Pretty much the only thing it got right was the deadpan wit thanks to Emma Corrin’s hilarious reaction shots and Nicholas Galitzine’s line-readings as Hero and Manfred respectively.

100 NIGHTS OF HERO is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 90 minutes. It played Venice and London and opens in the US on December 5th.

THE HISTORY OF SOUND* - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 11

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE failed as a film because director Mona Fastvold had no interest in the interiority of her characters. By contrast, THE HISTORY OF SOUND fails as a film because the characters are so deeply closeted that their interiority is deliberately withheld to a mere bat-squeak of emotion amidst a tediously attenuated 2hr plus running time.

Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor star as Lionel and David, two students at the Boston Conservatoire whose affair is interrupted by World War One.  Bespectacled Lionel returns home to his Kentucky farm to await David’s return from France, upon which they derp around New England recording folk music on wax cylinders. Soon after, the urbane David throws off Lionel and retreats to academia. A brokenhearted Lionel becomes a chorister in Rome and then Oxford, breaking the heart of a boyfriend and girlfriend in turn, before seeking out David once more. All of that is simple enough, but takes the better part of 100 minutes. 

Mescal and O’Connor are, of course, superb actors, and do the best they can with material that asks them to constrain their emotions.  Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Ben Shattuck take the same attitude with the context in which the characters exist.  We think the film might interrogate racism in post-reconstruction America with what might have been a more menacing and significant scene recording some black singers, but no, the film retreats.  We think the film might interrogate class prejudice toward Lionel with his intellectual girlfriend’s minted English family, but once again the film retreats. 

The result is a film about two closeted men that itself feels closeted and afraid. I think it was aiming at profound emotion and catharsis in its epilogue, but instead I was just bored and alienated.  The folk music is rather lovely, as recompense. But if you find that sort of thing enchanting you would be better off watching Bernard MacMahon’s AMERICAN EPIC.

THE HISTORY OF SOUND is rated R and has a running time of 127 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride and London. It opened in the USA on September 12th.

NOUVELLE VAGUE***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 11

NOUVELLE VAGUE is a film made by a film lover for film lovers about a film lover who made an iconic film that all film lovers love. So if you love film you will love this film.

Okay, so let’s be a little more descriptive here. Richard Linklater - whose superb BLUE MOON is also playing in this year's fest - has made a film about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s iconic French New Wave film BREATHLESS, starring Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo.  Filmed in black-and-white and in French, the film uses the rich historic record to recreate the chaotic, crazy but somehow genius creation of the cinema classic. The first forty minutes takes us through pre-production. All of Godard’s fellow critics at Cahiers du Cinema have made the leap to directing their own films, to great acclaim.  Godard is confident in his mission to make free, spontaneous cinema, but now’s the time to screw his courage to the sticking place and get on with it.  

The problems begin on the first day of filming when the cast and crew realise there is no script and that Godard does not care about such foundational concepts as continuity.  Jean Seberg, used to slick Hollywood productions, finds the whole thing ridiculous. Jean-Paul Belmondo, excited to be in his first film, is happier to go with the flow.  The producer, “Beau Beau” is pulling his hair out. And the two female editors complain that Godard won’t lose a single scene, but wants to micro-edit every scene in a manner that will seem choppy.

But somehow, somehow, as the inner team and Godard’s closest Cahier friends watch the Final Cut, they know it’s something special, even as they take the piss out of it.  And we cut to the closing credits, and the news that the film became iconic, and that this period of French cinema was ludicrously fecund - with over 130 directors making their first features in a three-year period.

There is nothing not to love about this scrupulous recreation of a moment of cinema history. Linklater’s film oozes love for the source material.  He uses the real locations and even the technical equipment that Godard actually used!  There’s also a lot of care taken to find good actors who look like the people they are playing - not just in the main roles but a massive cast of all the Cahier and Left Bank gang. Each gets a straight to camera shot, almost like a photograph, with a subtitle showing their name.  And this is a film that assumes you will know why they are important to cinema.  NOUVELLE VAGUE is kinetic, funny, voyeuristic and makes you fall in love with the act of film-making.  I love that Linklater will bring a whole new generation to the New Wave, especially as Netflix has bought the rights.

NOUVELLE VAGUE has a running time of 106 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride, Busan, Toronto and London. It goes on limited release in the USA on October 31st and on the internet on November 14th.

DIE MY LOVE**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 11

Lynne Ramsay (YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE) creates a claustrophobic, deeply unsettling, occasionally mordantly funny drama about a mentally fragile woman suffering severely from post-partum depression. It stars Jennifer Lawrence in a raw, vulnerable role as the dangerously unboundaried mother in question. She cannot write, her sex life has gone to shit, she has lost her tolerance for the banal bullshit people say to mothers. Some of her rude interjections are funny.  But as the film goes on it becomes more and more frightening. We realise that while post-partum is definitely a factor, Grace was not well from the start.  And we ratchet up to a finale that’s both poetic and devastating.  It’s a bravura performance from Lawrence, and shows us just what she is capable of when she makes the right choice of material - something that has been sadly lacking for pretty much the last decade.  Robert Pattinson is also good in the smaller role of Grace’s husband Jackson. It’s a tricky role because he could so easily be played as unfeeling or feckless but he’s just a young man out of his depth.

This is a film that is slippery and refuses easy answers.  We are never really sure if things are happening for real or in Grace’s fevered imagination.  Does she really sleep with a mysterious neighbour (LaKeith Stanfield) or is he just a man she meets in a supermarket and then projects her sexual frustration upon.  Most importantly, when Grace finally says “enough” is she leaving the baby that she clearly loves, in spite of everything, or is she going to take her own life?  Even the attitude of the people around her is tricky to parse.  How far was Grace’s mother-in-law (Sissy Spacek) aware of her mental instability from the start? Her attitude at the wedding appears to be one of suppressed shock. And at a social gathering later on in the film, one of covering up and enablement.

My only criticism of the film is that when you make something that claustrophobic and intense then the running time of probably needs to be shorter.  I think 100 minutes would have been ideal. But I loved the way Ramsay traps us in a world that threatens to suffocate us, most notably by using a 4:3 aspect ratio and essentially one location.

DIE MY LOVE has a running time of 118 minutes.  It played Cannes and London. It will be released in the USA on November 7th and in the UK on November 24th.

FRANKENSTEIN (2025)*** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 10

Guillermo Del Toro has been waiting all his life to bring FRANKENSTEIN to the screen, and as a result this film almost feels derivative of works that he made in preparation for this, such as CRIMSON PEAK.  The resulting film is wonderful to look at - a true spectacle - and worth seeing on the big screen rather than Netflix.  But other than a handful of moments, it isn’t a film that ripped my heart out, as this story should.

Oscar Isaac (STAR WARS’ Poe Dameron) stars as Victor Frankenstein, the spoiled rich aristocrat who studies medicine precisely to succeed where his hated father failed, in restoring the dead to life.  He walks around 19th Century Europe like Marc Bolan, all Cuban heels and flared trousers and a coquettishly angled fedora.  He creates a lab with the help of his guileless but practical little brother William (Felix Kammerer - ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT) and the unending funding of Christoph Waltz’ oleaginous and slippery Harlander. Frankenstein’s problem is that he is unimpressed with the mental capacity of his monster and so accords it no humanity. He cannot see that it’s just a child in need of patience and education.  He becomes as brutal and unyielding a parent as his own father was to him.  The monster and castle are torched, but as we know, the monster is unkillable.

In the second half of the film we see the story from the monster’s eyes. Jacob Elordi plays him as a gentle and melancholy giant, with an odd Yorkshire accent that presumably reflects Elordi’s preparation to play Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming WUTHERING HEIGHTS.  The monster is a hurt brooding emo teenager, brought to literacy by a kindly blind man, and lonely in his eternal purgatory.  He seeks out Victor to make him a mate and in doing so rekindles the mutual attraction with Victor’s compassionate sister-in-law to be, Elizabeth (Mia Goth). It’s a mutual attraction that makes Victor jealous.

As the film ends we are back on the Danish polar explorer marooned in ice, and we have a reconciliation of sorts between hard-hearted father and hurt son.  In an adaptation worth its salt this should have moved me to tears. It did not.  Even the scenes with David  Bradley’s old man, while sweet, didn’t truly get to me.  Only the scenes between Goth and Elordi carried any emotional weight. 

And so, while this film looked absolutely stunning, I didn’t capture my heart. I loved watching it and luxuriating in its beautiful sets and costumes but it won’t stay with me. I think the problem may well be that the exaggerated costumes and production design actually got in the way of me connecting with it emotionally. I think the beautiful and brilliant artifice was the problem.

FRANKENSTEIN has a running time of 149 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice, Busan, Toronto and London. It will be released on the internet on November 7th.

CHRISTY**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 10

Writer-director David Michod (THE KING) returns to our screens with a crisply told and powerful biopic of the first female boxing star in America, Christy Martin.  The directorial style is unflashy but we feel every punch and blow of the boxing matches. But the point here isn’t so much the drama inside the ring as the peril outside of it.  Because in her early twenties, Christy confirms to the expectations of bigoted early 90s West Virginia and marries a man who coercively controls her. He is a man 25 years her senior, her boxing trainer, and a total sleazebag. He lures her into the relationship with false promises of meeting Don King, and the offer of cover. They both know she is gay, and that the world won’t accept her for being gay.  This makes Christy uniquely vulnerable to Jim Martin’s predation. 

Over the course of the film we see Christy train and win, usually with a knock-out punch. When she finally does get that meeting with King she starts earning big and can afford a flashy lifestyle.  The film captures the awful haircuts and shoulder pads brilliantly.  But the pressure from her husband is unrelenting, and while I won’t say more at the risk of spoiling the story if you do not know it, the final half hour of this film is harrowing.

This is a film centred on two superb performances. The first is by Ben Foster, who I have always admired, and last saw in the London Film Festival playing the psychopath Lance Armstrong in THE PROGRAM. If anything, he is even more chilling here. But the performance than really anchors the film is that of Sydney Sweeney. I was first truly impressed by her acting in REALITY, and she announces herself as an actor of real intelligence and sensitivity in this film.  She bulks up with 35 pounds of muscle and is utterly convincing in the ring. More importantly, she manages to capture both Christy’s vulnerability and bravado.  I truly hope the prejudice against Sweeney does not preclude her from awards contention as this is a monumental performance. In the supporting roles, I really liked Merritt Weaver (The Bombing of Pan Am 103) as Christy’s bigoted, insidious mother, and Katy O’Brian as Christy’s boxing rival turned love interest Lisa Holewyne.

CHRISTY has a running time of 135 minutes. It played Toronto and London and will be released in the USA on November 7th.

NO OTHER CHOICE***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 9

Pantheon director Park Chan Wook returns to our screens with the darkest of black comedies and social satires. It’s hilarious and occasionally deeply moving and sends a dire warning to all of us wage-slaves. And all with his trademark audacious and assured visual and aural style. The film is the third that I have seen in as many days where a family patriarch is so ashamed at being unable to financially provide for his wife and kids that he turns to a life of crime. After the feckless and self-involved JB Mooney (Josh O’Connor) in THE MASTERMIND and the charming but rogueish Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) in ROOFMAN we now get Man Soo (Lee Byung-Hun) in NO OTHER CHOICE. After decades working in a paper factory, itself an obsolete industry, he is laid off by the new American owners who use the platitude that they had “no other choice”. A year later and his house is about to be foreclosed, his wife is supporting the family, and his daughter can’t have cello lessons. They’ve even had to give up the dogs! Every job opening has a bevy of over-qualified men applying. So Man-Soo grabs his father’s old service revolver and takes a KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS approach to his problems. 

There is nothing that I didn’t love about this film. Its 2hr20 min running time went by in a flash. I loved its clear-eyed, heartbreaking depiction of middle-aged men discarded by society and its dire warning of what a fully automated AI-powered factory would look like. I loved its clear depiction of the social pressures on men in a misogynistic patriarchal society, whether young or old. I loved all of the acting performances. Both Lee Byung-Hun (JOINT SECURITY AREA) and Son Ye-Jin as his wife are superb. But most of all this film works because of how Director Park handles comedy - especially absurdist physical comedy - and uses music. The first truly violent scene goes on forever and is set to overloud schmaltzy Korean pop music. It’s funny but it also tells us so much about the emotional psychodrama in the marriage it is depicting. This is cinema at its finest, its most complex, and its most entertaining.  

NO OTHER CHOICE has a running time of 139 minutes. It played Venice, Busan, Toronto and London. It does not yet have a commercial release date in the USA or UK but was released in South Korea in September.

RENTAL FAMILY**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 9

RENTAL FAMILY is a delightful, heartwarming and laugh-out-loud funny film that flirts with a social critique of contemporary Japanese society but is ultimately uninterested in anything gritty. Its message is rather trite: kindness and empathy matter and the families we make are sometimes more fulfilling than those we are born with. But if the message is simple and obvious, it still hits home, especially in such dark and divisive times. 

Brendan Fraser, last seen at the London Film Festival in a devastating performance in THE WHALE, now plays Phillip, an American out-of-work actor in Tokyo. Finally he finds a steadily paying gig being rented out to customers as a husband or father or friend. These rental families are apparently big business in Japan, affording lonely people solace, but also papering over social bigotry. A lesbian pretends to marry Phillip so she can leave Japan with her actual lover. A single-mother hires Phillip to be father to her child for an admissions interview at a snooty school. Neither would be necessary in a more liberal society but the movie is only glancingly interested in this. The film also draws a parallel between the actors providing emotional release and Phillip using a sex worker for physical release, and even goes so far as to humanise her. But it’s interesting that she’s the only character with whom Phillip has no resolution. Perhaps that would have been a little too much reality. 

As Phillip, Brendan plays to his public persona as a kind, sweet, charming, schlubby middle-aged man. In fact pretty much every character in this film is kind, sweet and charming. The exception might be legendary Japanese actor Akira Emoto who plays an old and retired actor suffering from dementia. That guy has a rogueish swagger all of his own and earns both the biggest belly laugh and creates the most emotional scene of the movie. 

Writer-director Hikari (Beef) and her co-writer Stephen Blahut do a serviceable job with plot and direction although most viewers will guess the plot twists. The whole point of this film is NOT to shock and awe but to delight, and in that end it succeeds. It’s just a shame it hadn’t dared to be a little spikier.

RENTAL FAMILY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 103 minutes. It played Toronto and London. It opens the US on November 21st and in the UK on January 9th.

COVER-UP***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 8

I have been reading Seymour “Sy” Hersch’s investigative journalism for just over 30 years. His reporting on the My Lai massacre was assigned to me at 17 as an A-level history student. Whenever I fell into a conspiracy rabbit hole, it felt like there was a Sy Hersch book that would confirm my worst suspicions about the inherent violence of the world’s superpower, a continuous flaunting of the Constitution by those in power, and a pattern of cover-up. I followed Hersch’s missives in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books (he had long since resigned from the New York Times when I came to my reading adulthood). And I have since followed him to Substack. This is the man who uncovered the US military’s massacre of children in Vietnam - who helped shepherd the Watergate and Pentagon Papers to public consciousness - who exposed the abuses at Abu Ghraib and continues to expose the war crimes in Gaza. He continues to fight for liberal democracy and accountability and the US Constitution. His method and message have never been more urgent.  

This new documentary by Laura Poitras (ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED) and Mark Oberhausen (a producer on the investigative show Frontline) was many years in the making because Hersch resisted it. He is prickly and angry and brutally funny about resisting the process even while agreeing to it. He is scrupulous about not revealing his sources, which in a Q&A he described as table stakes for a good journalist. But he is even resistant about describing why people trust him. Evidently, after the My Lai reporting, he was a famous name, and maybe not just a trustworthy name but also a glamorous name for people to confide in. But his key skills seem to be a talent for the written word, but more importantly a dogged tenacity, curiosity, and not giving a fuck about what people think or say about him. He might also add, as he does in this documentary, his talent for picking the right life partner, a wife who allowed him to grow up, and supported him through the dark emotional places that his reporting took him to. 

The documentary does a phenomenal job of surveying Hersch’s monumental career and giving a fair assessment of its importance and flaws. The first 45 minutes of the 2 hour documentary is a play by play of how he put together the My Lai reporting. This is where you see the skill and character required to put together a ground-breaking piece like that. Then we get a 15 minute biographical essay that shows you Hersch’s childhood in a working-class black neighbourhood where his Latvian Jewish immigrant father withheld any kind of information about the extended family’s fate in the Holocaust. By a stroke of luck and his own talent, Hersch was plucked from a mediocre Junior College and given a chance to study at the University of Chicago by a teacher who spotted his talent. He was ready for that moment because he had devoured books as a child. He says of his childhood “I lived through books: they taught me to think.” God bless those assiduous and wonderful teachers everywhere who spot talent and give it a chance. In a film where Hersch alternates between irritation and anger for much of the running time, he only ever gets sentimental on two subjects: his wife and that teacher. 

Act Three brings us through the 80s and 90s. Hersch finally quits the New York Times when they start blocking his reporting on corporate malfeasance at Gulf + Western. It’s kind of amazing to me that you can take on the CIA or the US President or the military, but somehow a company finally balks at you investigating another company. It’s also funny to think how contemporary readers think The Gray Lady has lost her courage and kowtowed to Trump but even back in the 70s, the NYT didn’t want to publish first on anything controversial. This section also covers Hersch’s mistakes, and they are grave indeed. First, a potentially career-ending error of judgment about some fraudulent letters between JFK and Marilyn Monroe. Second, giving a hideously nasty Syrian dictator the benefit of the doubt. 

The final act brings the story home to more recent investigative successes: exposing Abu Ghraib and the more recent work on Gaza. And then we are back to how the people who perpetrated My Lai got away with it. The message is very clear. There is a pattern of extrajudicial violence, cover-up and getting away with it at the heart of the American Republic. This may be depressing, but it’s no excuse not to continue to fight for accountability. If it’s not clear already, I absolutely loved this film. I am delighted that it has distribution with Netflix. To be honest, there’s nothing in here that I didn’t already know - although it was good to see Hersch’s career summarised and organised in such an effective and impactful way. I just really hope lots of younger viewers watch it and realise just how important supporting investigative journalism is.

COVER-UP played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and London. It does not yet have a commercial release date. It has a running time of 117 minutes.

ROOFMAN**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 8

Derek Cianfrance (BLUE VALENTINE) returns to our screens with ROOFMAN - a rather melancholy, occasionally funny, but ultimately rather whimsical and moving true crime story.  The weird thing is that the dayglow poster and goofy plot set-up make you think you are walking into a gonzo crime caper.  And yes, the film may have elements of that, but it has far more depth and emotional heft. 

Channing Tatum (MAGIC MIKE) stars as the titular Roofman - a demobbed soldier with a talent for observation and charm to spare.  Without the cash to spoil his wife and kids, he turns to armed robbery, knocking off 45 fast food restaurants.  His kind heart and general goofiness get him caught, but his aforementioned observational smarts also allow him to plot an audacious prison escape. And all this is in the first forty-five minutes of the two-hour-plus film!  The balance of the film sees Jeffrey in a kind of purgatory: out of prison but on the lam and unable to spend time with his actual family. So, he ends up hiding out in a Toys’R’Us for literally months, hacking the security systems. Even more audaciously, he ends up making friends at a local church, and romancing local single mother and employee Leigh (Kirsten Dunst).  Jeffrey now has a new identity where he is the good guy, John, and everybody loves him - even Leigh’s emo teenage daughter. The problem is, he makes the same mistakes again and again: trying to buy people’s affections.

This is a film that floats along with mild good humour and a lot of warmth, thanks mostly to Channing Tatum’s innate charm and the fact that while he may be feckless he at least he owns his mistakes. It makes for an interesting contrast with JB Mooney, the lead character in Kelly Reichardt’s THE MASTERMIND.  Where Jeffrey is a loveable rogue who takes accountability but just can’t help himself, Mooney is an entitled prick.  They are both simultaneously brilliant and stupid.  But the former actually cares for his kids, and indeed seems to be a rather warm-hearted individual more generally.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film, not least for its heavy 1990s nostalgia and a lovely pair of cameos from Peter Dinklage as the dickish store manager and Ben Mendelssohn as the parish priest.  Kirsten Dunst brings so much heart and warmth and intelligence to everything she does, and Tatum is so charming, that it’s just a fun two hours.  Not a rollicking comedy as the marketing campaign would have you believe, but perhaps more worth your time for all that. 

ROOFMAN has a running time of 126 minutes. It played Toronto 2025. It was released in the USA last Friday.

IS THIS THING ON?**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 8

IS THIS THING ON? is an absolutely delightful romantic dramedy based, rather improbably, on the life of Liverpudlian stand-up comedian John Bishop. Safely transposed to contemporary America, the movie stars Lego Batman Will Arnett and JAY KELLY’s Laura Dern as an unhappily married couple and parents of two sparky ten-year old boys.  As the movie opens they call time on their marriage: she stays in the suburban marital home with the dogs and the kids and he moves to an apartment in the city. Both are good people. In fact everyone in the movie is good people.  Yes they were unhappy and they split but there was no infidelity and there’s very little meanness.

What separation gives them is the chance to discover their identities as middle-aged people separate from each other and their identities as parents.  Who are they when considered on their own terms and in isolation?  She filled the void after retiring from sport with having a family but now goes back to coaching. He walks into a bar and is too cheap to pay the cover charge so ends up doing an open mic stand up slot. He discovers a whole new side of himself as well as a wonderfully welcoming and inclusive community of comedians.  And suddenly, both happy, the couple can be happy with each other.

This is a movie that could be sentimental and twee and obvious but it’s actually rather finely balanced and beautifully observed. Given that it was written by three men and based on an autobiography of a man, I was surprised by how well it captured the emotions of a middle-aged woman who sacrificed her career to raise a family. Bradley Cooper’s direction is assured and unshowy except for one bravura scene that takes us from an argument in an attic into a stand-up show.  The acting is universally good although perhaps the two leads were a little too old for their parts. Bradley Cooper has an hilarious and scene-stealing supporting role as a struggling actor. I also really loved how Cooper captured the energy and excitement and friendship of the stand-up scene.  He seems to have an authentic and love and appreciation of stand-up comedy and it shines through.

In a sense, this film is the lighter comedy counterpart to AFTER THE HUNT. It’s  a grown-up nuanced film about grown-ups with real marital issues but that shows how real marriages endure and even thrive on honesty and forbearance.  More of this please!

IS THIS THING ON? is rated R and has a running time of 124 minutes. It will be released in the USA on December 19th.

ANEMONE** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 7

ANEMONE is a decent three and half star 95 minute drama trapped inside  a dour, dull two hour plus two-star film. It's all style over substance, as if a blue colour palette, smash-cuts to super-loud music and super-slow push-ins on Daniel Day-Lewis' face can make up for a lack of plot progression.

Here's what we learn at painstakingly slow pace over the first hour and a quarter:  Jem (Sean Bean) and Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis) are ex-British soldiers raised by a harsh father. Ray was sexually abused by a priest as a child and having knocked-up his girlfriend Nessa (Samantha Morton), ran off to live off-grid in Yorkshire and has never seen his son Brian (Samuel Bottomley).  Nessa then raised Brian with Jem, and they are profoundly religious, whereas Roy remains angry at the Church.  The events of the film are kicked into gear when Brian goes absent without leave from the Army, having kicked the shit out of another boy. He has suffered taunts about Roy his whole life and now appears deeply depressed and withdrawn. Nessa asks Roy to finally connect with Brian and prevent any further harm. 

The two lead actors are good although Sean Bean only really gets any lines after an hour, and DDL is mostly emoting in big fat sweary monologues. Poor Sam Morton is definitely in a "kind empathetic girl" role. The most perplexing bit of casting or perhaps directing is that of Samuel Bottomley as Brian.  Sean Bean's Jem describes him as a natural and charismatic leader with heft to spare. I know the character is deeply depressed when we first meet him but there is no sense that this is something he is capable of.

Overall this is a pretty turgid film that wants to seem important but is just way too long and too formal and too self-important for its content. Such a shame and such a waste of a DDL performance.

ANEMONE is rated R and has a running time of 121 minutes. It was released in the USA on October 3rd.

THE MASTERMIND*** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 7

Kelly Reichardt’s THE MASTERMIND is an odd film. As one would expect, it is formally beautifully constructed and has her typically restrained, measured tone with the subtlest hints of humour. But its central character is so selfish, smug and feckless, it’s hard to know what to do with the film’s requirement for us to engage with his story. 

The movie takes place in the early 70s in smalltown America, with society divided between the successful, conventional middle class family to which our protagonist belongs, and the young hippies protesting Vietnam. Josh O’Connor plays an art school drop out turned failing cabinet maker essentially bankrolled by his wealthy mother (Hope Davis). He is married with two young sons and as the film opens we are in media res: he is casing a local art museum for a heist. We quickly realise that he is a man of little moral worth: he uses his sons as cover and smuggles out a stolen figurine in his wife’s purse while letting them go through security on his their own. Later in the film he will claim he did it for them: the LFF audience guffawed at that. 

Josh O’Connor (CHALLENGERS) is brilliant as the “mastermind”, JB Mooney, in a thankless role. This is basically his film - he is in every scene - and if he were any less personally charismatic the film would be unbearable. Alana Haim’s role as his wife is even more thankless as her character is emotionally withdrawn. It’s a real relief when we get a great cameo from John Magaro (PAST LIVES) who at least brings some warmth and humanity to the film. 

Reichardt’s lensing and colour palette are beautiful. There’s a particularly elegant bravura shot that goes 360 degrees in a motel room. I was genuinely curious how the third act would play out. But the real star behind the lens is composer Rob Mazurek who gives us a kinetic jazz score that propels act one - the heist - and act two - the concealment. It is notable that as that score, and the action, falls away in act three, the movie really loses its energy. 

THE MASTERMIND is rated R and has a running time of 117 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride and London. It will be released in the USA on October 17th and in the UK on October 24th.

Complex thoughts on AFTER THE HUNT***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 6

Director Luca Guadagnino redeems himself after a run of mid films, not least QUEER and CHALLENGERS, with the adult, nuanced, tricksy and provocatively brilliant AFTER THE HUNT.  It’s based on a script by Nora Garrett and deals in shades of grey and ambiguity. It reminded me of the best of those ethical dilemma dramas that Woody Allen made in the mid to late 80s, not least because Guadagnino pays homage to Woody with the style of his credits.  It also reminded me of the iconic ALL ABOUT EVE in its depiction of a rather spiky marriage and the disruptive interloping of a young rival.

It is far from a perfect film. I felt that Andrew Garfield's performance went from depicting an obnoxious character to just being obnoxious. Whenever he's faced with a choice he always tends to go too big.  I also didn't feel the epilogue was necessary or additive. So why have I given the film five stars?  Because I have spent much of the hours following the screening discussing its choices and themes and debating what was actually happening. I love it when films provoke debate and withhold easy answers.  I also think that Nora Garrett has pulled off a rare feat in so evenly balancing the accusations that Gen Z and Gen X have of each other. 

The movie is essentially a four-hander battle of the wits between two generations.  In the older cohort we have Julia Roberts’ Alma, a Yale University Philosophy Professor who specialises in teaching virtue ethics.  Alma is cool and calm, perhaps too well-put together and unflappable. Her sense of style is assured and unique and easily aped.  Early on we discover that she has some kind of secret from her youth, and that she withholds a lot from her husband.  We feel that it must be traumatic and yet she seems to regard its artefacts with fondness. The deepest level of the film is concerned with uncovering her attitude to this event. 

In contemporary life, Alma seems to attract acolytes, and has a dangerously unboundaried relationship with her star students and her younger colleague Hank.  She somehow holds this all in a fragile equilibrium that the movie will shake. The fascinating and unresolved side-issue that we get no clear answers on is whether Alma has a problem with drug addiction or if she really is just treating excruciating pain. Did the drugs cause the ulcers or the other way around?  What we do know is that Alma is a career woman and deeply ambitious. She wants tenure. She has battled her way through the misogynistic world of academia and wants her just desserts.  

This may well be the role of Julia Roberts’ life, and certainly it’s her greatest role and performance of her later career.  She is on screen for almost every scene and she carries the film. Alma is enigmatic, infuriating, arrogant, makes terrible choices, and yet I found her to be real and sympathetic. 

Alma is married to a psychiatrist called Frederick, played by the always wonderful Michael Stuhlbarg.  It's a small role, even a cameo, but as in CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, in some ways it's Stuhlbarg's character that carries the emotional heart of the film. Frederick can be theatrical and immature and petulant. But he truly loves his wife and understands something profound about her childhood trauma that she cannot see. He also understands something profound about her relationships with Hank and Maggie.  He is flawed but wise.

In the younger cohort we have adjunct professor Hank who is also battling for tenure.  His students love him, he flirts with everyone, and he is an obnoxiously large character, played to the limits of largeness by Andrew Garfield. I suspect some of this is a necessary choice. His career will be ruined by a graduate student, Maggie, who accuses him of sexual assault right after he accuses her of plagiarism. We will not know if he did it, but we have to see his largeness, his physical presence, his lack of self-control, to feel that he might have done.  It's a slippery role. His first reaction is hurt and entitled and arrogant. That does not mean he did it, of course. 

And finally, in real opposition to Alma, we have The Bear's Ayo Edibiri as Maggie, her young PHD student, acolyte, and mentee.  She is a young black female philosopher at Yale, so one might imagine she is already on the back foot. But screenwriter Nora Garrett complicates Maggie by making her incredibly wealthy: the daughter of major donors.  Does Alma suspect she is a plagiarist? Is she? Yes she does dress like Alma.  Did she steal her mother's Bulgari ring to wear as a pendant, copying Alma? Is her accusation of trauma replicative of Alma's?  Is the accusation an attempt to discredit Hank? Is she dating a trans man for the optics?  It's a good performance from Edibiri, every now and then hinting at satisfaction at getting a certain reaction from Alma, but I felt that of the four actors she was the weakest. Perhaps because this is by far the largest and more complex dramatic role she has been given.

The wonder of this script and film is that both Maggie and Alma are right. Maggie is right to say that Alma has let her down, both in her reaction to the assault but more broadly.  Maggie is right that first-wave feminists did not adequately support the struggle of women of colour, and too often tried to get what they could within the existing patriarchal structure rather than challenging it. Alma's life has been one of not compromising her ambition by upsetting the apple-cart. Maggie wants to destroy it.  But Alma is also right in how she skewers Maggie's generation for its virtue-signalling progressive illiberalism: its need for the safety of a lukewarm bath when university in general, and a philosophy class in particular, should be all about debating uncomfortable subjects. 

Like I said, this is far from a perfect film. But it is an ambitious and provocative film. I love that it centres a middle-aged complex woman and is willing to confront and interrogate shifting inter-generational attitudes to difficult issues. The running time is long but I was not bored for a minute.  This is grown-up cinema at its best.

AFTER THE HUNT has a running time of 139 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice and London. It opens in the USA on October 10th.

HAMNET***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 6

HAMNET is the story of a happy loving family, heartbroken by grief, and allowed to find some kind of catharsis through art.  It just so happens that the family are Will and Agnes Shakespeare, married for love in Stratford, parents to three wonderful children.  While Will is in London putting on his latest play at The Globe, the bubonic plague strikes, and takes away his young son Hamnet.  In her desperate grief, Agnes lashes out at Will, and he gives his son another life in the tragedy of what would have been seen as the same name in that era.  A grieving mother can see her son full-grown, and acting out his dream of being on the stage. It’s a moment of wonderful emotional release.

Writer-director Chloe Zao (NOMADLAND) has created an utterly beautiful, sensitive and heart-breaking adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s critically acclaimed and beloved novel Hamnet.  She has a sure visual sense and an eye for hauntingly beautiful staging. This is, however, a movie that showcases performances above all. AsJessie Buckley has been raw and vulnerable and brilliant for years, but with Agnes she has finally found a big mainstream movie that could see her get her flowers.  This is her movie and my god she is its very heart and soul.  But let’s not discount Paul Mescal as Will Shakespeare.  The scene where he breaks down backstage at The Globe is just heart-wrenchingly well done. And finally, a massive amount of praise is due to young Jacobi Jupe who plays Hamnet, and in a master-stroke of casting is the real-life younger brother of the actor who plays Hamlet.  

I cannot say any more than that I would not change a single frame of this film. I loved the book and love this adaptation.  It is a deceptively pure and simple tale, told with restraint when needed, and full-throated emotion for impact. It is a stunning piece of work.

HAMNET has a running time of 125 minutes. It played Telluride, Toronto and London. It opens in the USA on November 27th and in the UK on January 9th.

An incomplete review of HEDDA* - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Official Competition

Tessa Thompson (Westworld) gives a career-endingly bad performance in the title role of this risible adaptation of Ibsen.  It was so bad I gasped after her first sentence, committed myself to seeing if it settled down, but simply left after thirty minutes of aural torture. I am not sure what she was going for. Maybe Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret in The Crown? It is so affected and so arch I can only assume it was an actual choice but Christ alive why did none of the British cast members say anything?

What else can I say about my brief interaction with this film?  I am not entirely sure why it was updated from Ibsen’s original period and setting to 1950s Britain, as opposed to, say, a contemporary setting. It allows for some lovely frocks.  But maybe writer-director Nia DaCosta (THE MARVELS) was on the verge of saying something interesting about the sexual and cultural mores of the time? Who can tell.  She certainly did NOT seem to be interested in interrogating the presence of a rich, nepo-baby black woman in white society in the 30 minutes I watched.  And I suspect, given the flashy superficial mise-en-scene, that recasting Hedda’s former lover as a woman (Nina Hoss - apparently scene-stealingly brilliant) was more stunt than nuanced take on queer love in the fifties.  As soon as they started dancing to a version of Bjork’s It’s Oh So Quiet I made my move.  This is not the film for me. I am afraid I just could not get passed the horrific fake accent.

HEDDA is rated R and has a running time of 107 minutes. It played Toronto and London and will be streaming on Amazon Prime on October 29th.

HAIR, PAPER, WATER…* - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Official Competition

Trương Minh Quý and Nicolas Graux’s documentary HAIR, PAPER, water… is a proper art house movie, which means that I am really pleased that it exists and has an audience, and I am sure there people out there who will adore it, but that it’s a bit too left-field for my taste.  The film focuses on a real-life great-grandma who lives in thickly-forested rural Vietnam with her extended family, speaking a vanishing dialect and practising homeopathic medicine. It’s rather lovely derping around with her and seeing a world we would not normally have access to - her reactions to seeing people living in high-rises is particularly acute.  But the fun all turns sour when we see her recommend breathing in botanically scented steam as a cure for Covid, or her great-grandson lament that without learning to read and getting an education he will be trapped. Despite its short running time, the film tried my patience.  I think the directors are making a point with their 16mil lending, trying to create a feeling of intimacy and organic filming?  But I really would have enjoyed luxuriating more in the visuals and less of the ancient wisdom that is hard to swallow in these RFK Jr infected time. Your mileage may vary on that score, admittedly.

HAIR, PAPER, WATER… has a running time of 71 minutes. It played Busan and London 2025, where it is has been selected for the Official Competition.

THE CHORAL*** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 5

THE CHORAL is an earnest, often twee but ultimately rather moving film about a fictional choir in a Northern town putting on a performance of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius in the midst of World War One.  Death looms over the entire film. It opens with a young lad delivering telegrams to mothers and wives reporting the death of their loved ones at the Front.  The Choral has to recruit new men to take up the places of those fighting, or worse, killed. The pianist leaves to join up.  We see men carried off to war on one train, and invalids return on the next.  In this context, one might ask about the relevance of a libretto focussed on an old man dying and a fight for his immortal soul.  And so the choirmaster recuts and recasts the oratorio as the story of a young soldier killed in France, with the angel beckoning him to Paradise recast as a young nurse calling him home.

The film is taken at a measured pace that I occasionally found too languorous. It is handsomely directed by Nicholas Hytner but I found the production design rather Farrow and Ball - curated to within an inch of its life - all eggshell blues and taupe.  Similarly, while the film is handsomely acted by an ensemble cast led by Ralph Fiennes and Roger Allum, I often felt that the script didn’t give them enough to do.  I would have loved to have seen the love story between the choirmaster and the pianist developed a little more. That said, there is a rather smashing cameo from Simon Russell Beale as a bloviating Elgar.  And among the younger cast members I was particularly impressed by the young actor playing the lead tenor whose name I cannot find on IMDB.  It’s also worth saying that the music is beautifully done, including a bravura fifteen minute compressed version of the concert by George Fenton.  Truly, to quote the choirmaster Dr Guthrie, “art does come from art”.

The script is by the legendary national treasure Alan Bennett, and features his trademark wry and often deadpan wit.  There are plenty of chuckles.  I was, however, surprised by just how frank this film is about sex. One of the choristers is a prostitute, and unsurprisingly a couple of the young lads going to war are obsessed with losing their virginity before they go.  This side of the film sometimes sits awkwardly with the more “heritage” tone of the rest of the piece, but I think that’s the point. These are just young lads, then as now.  And we sent them off to die.  It’s hard not to get caught up in the emotion of that final scene. 

THE CHORAL has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated R. It played Toronto and London. It opens in the UK on November 7th and in the USA on December 25th.

DIAMONDS IN THE SAND**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025

Filipino director Janus Victoria is nominated for the Sutherland Trophy for debut feature for her film DIAMONDS IN THE SAND. It’s a low-key, low-budget, utterly charming dramedy that takes us into a world we might never have otherwise encountered.  

The iconic Lily Franky (SHOPLIFTERS) plays Yoji, a deeply lonely middle-aged salary-man in Tokyo.  He is shocked into action when he one day discovers his neighbour’s decomposing remnants - apparently a tragic end so common in Japan that it has its own terminology and specialist cleaning services. And then his aged mother passes away, apparently warning him of his own sure fate. So when he forms a tentative friendship with his late mother’s carer, Minerva (Maria Isabel Lopez), he throws caution to the wind and follows her back to the Philippines for a holiday.  While there Yoji discovers a ramshackle, poor but friendly neighbourhood full of casual invitations to supper and real community spirit.  He meets Minerva’s newly graduating daughter Angel, and the rogueish gambling addict Uncle Toto. 

There’s always a tension in the film as to how transactional the relationships are.  Yoji is clearly much wealthier than his newfound friends. And Angel laments the futility of studying when she will earn more as a carer in Japan.  Meanwhile Minerva regrets that whoever is in power in Manila, the drug-related violence and corruption endures. Despite the harsh reality and uneasy cross-cultural tensions, DIAMONDS IN THE SAND retains its optimistic belief in the power and indeed desperate importance of human connection.  It is a film that is full of a nuanced understanding of the world it is depicting, and is full of compassion. Kudos to the director and all involved in so vividly realising memorable people and a sense of place on a micro budget.

DIAMONDS IN THE SAND has a running time of 102 minutes.