Wonder Woman was the film that defied all the predictions: a big-budget superhero movie directed by a woman which managed to please not only the feminists and their daughters but also the boys who love DC and Marvel. In its slipstream comes Professor Marston and the Wonderwomen, written and directed by Angela Robinson, best known for her work in TV on The L Word. It's surrounded by some controversy as it claims to be a based on a true story but there's not a lot of corroborative testimony from the central characters to justify its narrative.
It’s the tale of Harvard psychology professor William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans), who together with his brilliant, spiky wife Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) designed a prototype lie-detector machine in the 1930s. We meet him lecturing and flirting with his all-girl class on his theory that male-female relations are based on dominance and submission. His argument is that women should play more of a dominant role upon occasion in order for the mental health of both sexes to thrive (Hall and Evans pictured below).
Watching his bravura performance at the lectern throughout is his wife, but Marston's eye is particularly drawn to Olive (Bella Heathcote), a student whose doll-like prettiness (and an aunt and mother who are pioneer feminists) intrigues him. His desire for Olive is briefly thwarted when she demonstrates that she’s more interested in snogging his wife than him, but they soon settle into a scandalous sexy threesome and Marston is forced to leave the university.
Churning out pop psychology articles doesn’t really pay their household bills or promulgate his theory, so Marston turns to comic book creations and launches Wonder Woman on the world with the help of DC Comics. The kinky costume and barely concealed bondage and spanking themes that run regularly through Marston's comic strips see him hauled up in front of a decency committee while his home life (he had children with both women) causes local scandal.
Angela Robinson has bathed the entire film with a nostalgic glow
Writer-director Angela Robinson cuts back and forth between scenes of Marston being interrogated by a decency committee and the three-way romance. It's a rather clunky narrative device. She has bathed the entire film with a nostalgic glow reminiscent not of the actual 1940s but of a 1990s Armani advertising version of the era. The much-hyped sex scenes are so wholesome as to be almost farcical.
Cutting through this schmaltz is a laser-like performance from Rebecca Hall, whose intelligence and line delivery is entertaining if anachronistic. Did women in that era, no matter how smart, really say things like, "When are you going to stop justifiying the whims of your cock with science?" Or describe someone as a "Grade A bitch"? Hall makes the other two players in her ménage à trois look like Ken and Barbie dolls; her performance just about saves the film, but it's a bit of a wasted opportunity to tell what was a remarkable story. The end credits contain a moving sequence of photographs of the two real-life women, who carried on living together for decades after Marston's death.
Overleaf: watch the official trailer for Professor Marston and The Wonderwomen
Paddington 2 is that rare thing, a sequel that is more engaging than the original by dint of having a far better baddie. In the first film Nicole Kidman’s villainess was a bleached rehash of Cruella De Ville or Morticia – and it was far from her finest hour. She simply didn't convince as an evil taxidermist intent on giving Paddington a good stuffing.
The sequel replaces Kidman with Hugh Grant, who steps into the kind of role that the late Alan Rickman once made his own. Grant plays Phoenix Buchanan, a neighbour of the Brown family living in the same chintzy crescent. Buchanan is a washed-up actor reduced to starring in dog food commercials, given to lamenting the lack of decent stage roles and hectoring his agent. The plot revolves around Buchanan and Paddington pursuing the same hand-made pop-up book but for very different reasons.
While the bear wants to buy the book as a gift for his centenarian aunt back in Peru, Buchanan knows that it contains secret clues that will lead to a treasure trove of cash. Paddington gets into comic scrapes doing odd jobs to earn enough money to purchase the book, the dastardly thespian deploys all the costumes in his closet to steal it, framing Paddington in the process. Grant (pictured above) is clearly having a whale of a time with the silly accents and outfits; his dancing finale is well worth the ticket price.
The film is something of a rest home for British actors, all of whom provide predictable performances. The returnees include Hugh Bonneville as bumbling dad, Sally Hawkins as kindly mum, Julie Walters as salty housekeeper and Peter Capaldi as the local xenophobe. The novelty acts are comfortingly familiar – Brendan Gleeson (pictured below), Tom Conti, Joanna Lumley, Jim Broadbent, Imelda Staunton and Eileen Atkins all muck in. It must have been like a drama school reunion in the canteen. But one wonders if writer-director Paul King has consciously decided to avoid the criticism Richard Curtis regularly receives for all-white casting; there are also very decent cameos for Richard Ayoade, Sangeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal and much diversity among the minor roles.
Prettily made with some nifty animation and some very enjoyable slapstick gags, Paddington 2 is ultimately an insidious advert for the capital. This is a fantasy city made up entirely of Instagram-friendly locations – it becomes a game ticking off sightings of Primrose Hill, Little Venice, the Regent's Canal, Portobello, Albert Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral. In King's version of London, even a newspaper vendor can afford to live in a pastel-hued Victorian terrace and (nearly) everyone is essentially nice. It’s ironic that a tale of an illegal immigrant from Peru dreaming of bringing his elderly dependent relative into the UK will convince even more tourists to come and enjoy theme park London. If only it also included instructions about which side of the escalator they should stand on…
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Paddington 2
At first glance, the meetings between heart surgeon Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) and a 16-year-old boy, Martin (Barry Keoghan), lead one to fear the worst for the kid. Their stilted exchanges in public places, during which the man gives the teen expensive gifts, don’t suggest a family connection, or a mentor-student relationship, but a secret intimacy that can only be, in some way, dreadfully wrong.
And so the mini-boom in motor racing movies continues, this time with a look back at the history of Ferrari and the intense on-track battles of the 1950s, a decade in which the Scuderia won four of its 15 Formula One World Drivers Championships.
It's not every day that an actor breaks your heart playing a character who surrenders his. But that's among the numerous achievements of Timothée Chalamet's knockout performance in Call Me By Your Name. Playing a culturally savvy and articulate 17-year-old American who comes of age sexually in sun-dappled northern Italy in 1983, Chalamet's work is a thing of wonder. As is the film, by turns ravishing and wrenching.
Forget the ersatz experience of Sergey Eisenstein's mighty silent films accompanied by slabs of Shostakovich symphonies composed years later. This collaboration between the London Symphony Orchestra and Kino Klassika is as close as we can ever come to hearing the massive score composed by Austrian-born Edmund Meisel for the greatest of the master's 1920s films. It was intended for large-scale screenings of October in Berlin and Moscow, which never took place in the expected format.
It’s a challenge to review this film without resorting to adjectives like “plucky” and “well-meaning”, and its mainstream comfiness made it a strangely cautious choice for the opening night of the recent London Film Festival. Breathe is not only Andy Serkis’s debut as a director, but also a film based on the family experiences of its produce
Who is the real Grace Jones? This is the central question that drives Sophie Fiennes’s documentary, Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami. After 115 minutes, you might be less sure of the answer than when you go in. The title is Jamaican for a recording booth’s red light and bread, the substance of life. It’s appropriate for a film which juxtaposes the abstract visual feast of Jones’s live show with her modest upbringing in Jamaica.