film reviews
On the Road review - engrossing music documentary with a sly B-side
Demetrios Matheou

Michael Winterbottom has always been a mercurial director, moving swiftly between genres, fiction and documentary, keeping us on our toes. But with On the Road it’s time to mark the tiniest of trends.

24 Hour Party People is one of the best films about the music industry ever made, a riotous fictionalisation of the revolution in Manchester in the Eighties and Nineties that revolved around Tony Wilson’s Factory Records and the bands Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays. 9 Songs was a radical experiment, as the director presented a sequence of gigs as the backdrop of a sexually explicit love story.

Now music features again, in what appears to be the most traditional approach of a trilogy of music-related films, albeit one with a sly sleight of hand.

The heart of the film is a documentary account of a young band on the road, as Winterbottom and a no doubt skeleton crew accompany the up-and-coming London indie four-piece Wolf Alice on a nationwide tour to promote their debut album My Love is Cool.

From Dublin and Belfast, through the North to Glasgow and back towards London, we’re given a low-key, fly-on-the-wall view of the day-to-day of touring: countless miles on the cramped tour bus, arrival, unloading the kit, sound check, press and radio interviews, the concert, dismantling the stage, loading the bus, a party, back in the bus and all over again… This is the no-frills reality of the road, with none of the usual rock and roll clichés and histrionics that we’re accustomed to and that can, in truth, get all very tiresome.

Winterbottom is a master of detachment, who allows characters, actors, stories to reveal their own nuances

While Winterbottom wants to convey the repetitiveness and gruelling relentless of the tour, there’s nothing boring about it for the viewer: even in the short bursts of performance that we're given, the power and poetry of Wolf Alice comes across strongly. In between the gigs, as we slowly get to know the band members, they prove to be charismatic and likeable, bonded by their passion for music and an unspoken, no-nonsense professionalism.

There's also a gentle romantic thread to the film, between Estelle, a new member of the band’s record company, who is helping them with their promotional duties, and Joe, one of the roadies. Chalk and cheese – she from London, he an older Glaswegian, she confident, highly musical herself, he shy and a little morose – they nevertheless bond within the enforced intimacy of the tour bus.

If their eventual liaison seems rather risqué for a documentary, here is Winterbottom’s little twist, and the revelation that On the Road is a cunning addition to the vogue for doc-fiction hybrids. The pair are actually played by actors Leah Harvey and James McArdle, who were inserted into the real world of the band and crew, performing their characters' tasks for real, while playing to Winterbottom’s tune.

It’s not entirely necessary, for the endeavour would have worked very well as a straight-forward documentary. But it’s the kind of move that seems to keep Winterbottom interested. The chief benefit is that Harvey – a new young actress playing a tour newbie – serves as the audience's eyes and ears. Harvey also reveals some singer-songwriter chops of her own; she’s definitely a star in the making.

Another actor in the mix is Winterbottom regular Shirley Henderson, who has a cameo as Joe’s alcoholic mum, whom he briefly meets when the tour reaches Glasgow. But for the most part the band – singer Ellie Rowsell, guitarist Joff Oddie, bassist Theo Ellis and drummer Joel Amey – offer more than enough personality. They’re extremely endearing when following a number of performances with enthusiastic DJ sets for the same fans. And we feel their pain as they begin to fade towards the end of the tour, victims of their own commitment and the demands of the touring life.

All of this is viewed with highly distinctive ease. Winterbottom is a master of detachment, who allows characters, actors, stories to reveal their own nuances, without his help. And the result here is one of his most satisfying films.

@dem2112

Overleaf: watch the trailer for On the Road

The Glass Castle review - Woody steals the film by a wide margin
Matt Wolf

People who live in glass castles might be wary of throwing stones. That clearly was not the case with American magazine journalist Jeannette Walls, who made of her often harrowing childhood a best-selling memoir that has found its inevitable way to the screen. A would-be Daddy Dearest with a hefty dollop of Captain Fantastic thrown into the mix, what would seem to be a star vehicle for recent Oscar winner Brie Larson is in fact pretty much dominated by Woody Harrelson as the fearsome paterfamilias who lashes out and loves in equal measure. Or does the first as a perverse way of expressing the second. 

I actually knew Walls slightly during her formidable tenure at New York Magazine, where she was a gossip columnist on the rise and I was a journalism intern. Warm, engaging, and glamorous to a fault, the Walls with whom I intersected one long-ago summer gave no evidence of having been born into the nomadic, artistically minded but also largely dysfunctional family portrayed here. Director Destin Daniel Cretton's film may insist upon a glutinous ending, but the reality of events in the Walls household – or, more likely, the journey, as they set out once again on the road – was clearly far rougher and messier than so tidy-seeming a celluloid adaptation is prepared to acknowledge. The Glass CastleThere's nothing safe or reined-in about Harrelson's unbridled portrait of a man facing down personal demons, starting with drink, and clearly wanting to do right by his artist-wife (Naomi Watts, above left) and their numerous children, of whom young Jeannette would appear to be the most ambitious. There's tough love and then there's parenting that finds mum Rose Mary more interested in her latest canvas than in feeding her burgeoning family, who at one point take to dining on a mixture of butter and sugar in order to survive. 

Harrelson's Rex, meanwhile, is an inventor and philosophe who spouts life-enhancing maxims – "You learn from living, everything else is a damn lie" – when he isn't teaching a young and terrified Jeannette to swim by dropping her this way and that into a pool. In thrall to a temper one sense frightens even himself, Rex justifies his actions as planting a fire in his daughter's belly, and if ever there were a case of success being borne out of rebellion, that scenario is on view here. Harrelson to his unceasing credit never soft-pedals behaviour that simply won't be confined. But just when the audience is putting its head in their collective hands alongside the onscreen Jeannette, Rex pulls himself up by his occasionally gallant rhetorical bootstraps, and you find glimpses of the visionary he might very well have been. 

The Glass CastleThe flashbacks to the child-woman that is Jeannette, glimpsed alongside the parental bohemians who will in time join the ranks of New York's homeless, score pretty strongly throughout, leaving the contemporary sequences involving Jeannette's occupancy of 1980s New York society to land with a thud. We first encounter an indrawn Larson (pictured above) as the adult Jeannette fibbing her way through an important dinner alongside a boyfriend (Max Greenfield) who seems hardly worth the fuss (his arm-wrestling encounter with Rex seems too stagey by half), and it's surprising that so little is made of Jeannette in the hardscrabble magazine world workplace – an environment, one assumes, for which life with father might well have prepared her in its way.

From torment to triumph, or so Jeannette's life reads, at least in material terms. The truth, one imagines, is far more knotted, as family ties so often are.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Glass Castle

LFF 2017: Breathe review - overdosing on good intentions
Adam Sweeting

The curtain-raiser for the 61st  London Film Festival was Breathe, not only Andy Serkis’s debut as a director, but also a film based on the family experiences of its producer, Jonathan Cavendish. It was the story of how his father Robin, a tea broker in Kenya in the late 1950s, met and married Diana but then contracted polio, which left him paralysed.

Blade Runner 2049 review - powerful but needs more soul
Adam Sweeting

Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner from 1982 stands as an all-time sci-fi classic, so anybody trying to make a sequel (even 35 years later) needs galaxy-sized vision, an army of high-powered collaborators and balls of steel. Is director Denis Villeneuve the man for the job?

The Reagan Show review - engaging but frustrating
David Kettle

The Reagan administration produced as much video content as the previous five administrations combined. That’s the claim early on in The Reagan Show, an engaging but ultimately frustrating documentary compiled entirely from archive footage by co-directors Sierra Pettengill and Pacho Velez. So remorseless was the administration’s taping of carefully staged scenes or managed press conferences that it even got its own name – White House TV.

Goodbye Christopher Robin review - no escape for a boy and his bear
Markie Robson-Scott

“Isn’t it funny/How a bear likes honey?/Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!/I wonder why he does.” Those immortal words, said by the bear of very little brain in chapter one of Winnie-the-Pooh, don’t sound quite the same after watching a shell-shocked AA Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) react to bees buzzing when out for walk in the Hundred Acre Wood with his son (Will Tilston, making his debut, pictured below). Milne, known as Blue, is traumatised after serving in the battle of the Somme and various triggers – bees, champagne corks, bright lights, popping balloons – create flashbacks. “Bees are good, aren’t they?” says Christopher Robin, known to his parents as Billy Moon. Milne’s mouth twitches.

Directed by Simon Curtis (My Week with Marilyn) with a script by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the film is based loosely on fact. It’s frightfully full of clichéd stiff upper lips – “We don’t blub in this house,” declares Blue’s glamorous wife Daphne (a one-dimensional Margot Robbie) – and wry, suppressed smiles. And dimples: Christopher Robin’s are wearyingly prominent, along with his girlie haircut and clothes. “More smocks?” sighs the indispensable nanny (an impressive Kelly Macdonald) when Daphne hands her a to-do list before she swans off to London to check out the wallpaper collection at Whiteley’s. All too, too English for words (though accents do slip a bit, which is partly why Macdonald’s natural Scottishness is such a relief), and the East Sussex scenery looks enchanting.

Goodbye Christopher RobinMilne is a successful playwright, screenwriter and novelist but PTSD makes him long for peace and quiet in the countryside, where he plans to write the definitive denunciation of war. Daphne’s not keen, but they move from Chelsea to Cotchford Farm, a gorgeous 16th century house near Ashdown Forest (Brian Jones bought the house in the Sixties and drowned in its pool). But the PTSD isn’t so easy to escape. “You’re a writer. Write,” commands Daphne when Blue’s away from his desk again. “I had a baby to cheer you up. Nothing’s enough for you.”

Writer's block persists until the curse of Winnie-the-Pooh is cast when both Nanny, aka Nou, and Daphne are away. Blue is forced to spend time with his neglected son, making inedible porridge and inventing, somewhat stiltedly, stories about Tigger, Piglet, Eeyore and Winnie the bear – the Pooh bit comes later, when Milne and his illustrator pal EH Shepard, who is also suffering from PTSD after Passchendaele, decide that it’s satisfyingly “inexplicable” as a name (one of the more interesting revelations in the film).

Success is rapid after Vespers (“Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares!/Christopher Robin is saying his prayers”) is published in Vanity Fair (Daphne’s doing) and before we know it, the Milnes are on publicity tours in America and Winnie-the-Pooh is a sell-out. Billy Moon is roped in to do endless interviews (Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays a persistent journo) and photoshoots, including, shockingly, one in the bear enclosure at London zoo (end credits show the original photo). He is generally touted around like a show-pony, as Nou puts it before she dares to leave to get married. “Is there anywhere they haven’t heard of Winnie-the-Pooh?” he asks her wistfully. “Perhaps the Highveld,” says Nou, pointing to it on the atlas, and he decides that’s the place for him.

But the next step is an English boarding-school, which is bound to be hell for a long-haired young boy famous for his stuffed animals. Of course that doesn’t occur to his selfish parents. “Hush, hush, nobody cares, Christopher Robin has fallen downstairs,” is the cry from his schoolmates, and your heart does bleed for the child. By the time he’s a miserable, bullied young man (played by a hollow-eyed Alex Lawther, who was a young Alan Turing in The Imitation Game) who's longing for anonymity, the tables have turned. “You sold our hours of happiness,” Billy tells Blue. “Our games were just research.” But in the end, son-father bitterness is unrealistically (and inaccurately) overcome, and you’re left wishing for something more rigourous and less twee.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Goodbye Christopher Robin

Home Again review - Reese Witherspoon romcom is divorced from reality
Matt Wolf

A charming assemblage of performers are left pretty much high and dry by Home Again, an LA-based romcom so determinedly glossy that each frame seems more squeaky-clean and unreal than the next. Intended as a star vehicle for Reese Witherspoon, this debut effort from filmmaker Hallie Meyers-Shyer proves only that the apple can fall reasonably far from the tree.

Whereas her (now-divorced) parents, writer-directors Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, at least allowed shards of wit and emotion into such luscious property porn landmarks as It's Complicated and Something's Gotta Give, Home Again seems to have had all actual life leeched out of it. One bar into the Carole King song that gives the film its title, and is saved for the very end, and you experience in an instant the gutsiness and the gusto that have gone missing from the movie itself. Home AgainWitherspoon plays Alice, a putative interior decorator who also happens to be the daughter of an Oscar-winning director who has since died: hey, Freudian or what? On the outs from marriage to music biz mogul Austen (Michael Sheen), Alice has scooped up their two daughters and decamped from New York back to LA, where she readjusts nicely to life in the family manse, which happens to come with the kind of guest house that practically cries out to have three male 20somethings calling it home.

How convenient, then, that these three aspirational Hollywood musketeers (pictured above) strike up an acquaintance one night with a forlorn Alice at a bar and before long are crashing out at hers, which in turn paves the way for the tallest and most vacuous-seeming of the trio, Harry (Pico Alexander), to find his way into Alice's bed. Yes, there's a 13-year age difference between the two lovebirds, which Meyers-Shyer's script treats with the gravity you might afford a missile launch from North Korea. But Alice has a genial, apparently cooler-than-cool mum (Candice Bergen, looking especially airbrushed) who sees to it that the lads are able to call their Spanish-style digs home. All's well that ends well, or so you might think, until such time as Austen heads westward to see if he can put his relationship with Alice to rights. (Sheen and Witherspoon, pictured below)Home AgainI'm not sure I know too many women of any age who would so readily allow long-term accommodation gratis to three blokes they met on a boozy night out, but then again, it doesn't hurt that the chaps' collective skills extend beyond the carnal to include the sorts of computer and handyman-related talents on which, I well realise, you really can't put a price. Throughout all this, the two young daughters seem blissfully untraumatised as one after another man hoves into view, Meyers-Shyer stretching to breaking point an ancillary plot point as to whether the sweet-seeming writer George (a genuinely appealing Jon Rudnitsky) will make it to the eldest child's self-penned school play on time. (Between this and Big Little Lies, Witherspoon seems to be drawn of late to celluloid ventures involving theatre: is she hinting at wanting to try some stage work herself?) 

One could imagine the same material in more truly complicated, darker hands: I'd love to see what Todd Haynes, say, might have done with the same scenario. As it is, Witherspoon is likeable as ever in the kind of role that once upon a time would have gone the way of Cameron Diaz, and there's a genuinely hilarious Hamilton joke (as in the musical) that doubtless lands better Stateside than here, at least so far. But while everyone acknowledges that it's not really in the remit of such films to peer too long and hard at the world beyond its privileged portals, Home Again is an especially telling study in insularity: a film steeped in the film world but not for an instant engaged with life. 

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Home Again

Zoology review - the tale of a tail
Tom Birchenough

Russia has its own rich traditions of satire and the grotesque, but at first glance we may wonder whether in his new film Zoology Ivan I Tverdovsky, a director who, still to turn 30, certainly belongs to the new generation of that country’s filmmakers, has borrowed a leaf from another master of such forms, Franz Kafka. Not unlike the change experienced by Josef K in the Czech writer’s The Metamorphosis, the heroine of Tverdovsky’s film undergoes a grotesque physical transformation: she grows a tail.

Natasha (Natalya Pavlenkova, luminously vulnerable) is a harried single woman working in a deadbeat job in a provincial zoo at an unnamed small coastal town (if it was filmed in Sochi, Russia’s premier Black Sea resort has never looked dowdier or more autumnal). Her colleagues – all women, presented almost parodically as a cruel company of harpies – humiliate her at work, while her home life, living alone with her mother, is emptily routine (the two women, pictured bottom right). The closest she comes to contact is with the animals in the zoo, but stuck in their cramped cages they’re almost as forlorn as she is.  

To explore such depths of pain is somehow to transcend them 

But there’s something remarkable in Pavlenkova’s features, her ability to turn an emotion almost on a pin: she conveys simultaneously a sense of being utterly run-down and depressed, while at the same time admitting a hint that something better may be around the corner. The appearance of her tail – an ugly, pronouncedly phallic protuberance that hangs from the bottom of her back – is as perversely exciting as it is confusing. She visits the doctor, treated there as if nothing is out of the ordinary: the main thing is to stop it wiggling when she is sent off for X-rays (pictured below). That’s despite the fact that rumours are going around the neighbourhood that there’s a new devilish presence about, distinguished by exactly what Natasha is trying to hide under her clothes.

The only remotely sympathetic person she encounters is a hospital X-ray technician, Petya (Dmitry Groshev). Though he must be two decades or so younger than her, an attachment begins, as he introduces her to his own private excitements. There’s lovely scene in which they use tin trays to slide down a derelict concrete slope that looks like it’s left over from some cosmic programme, as we witness Natasha’s overwhelming fear about doing something new and unfamiliar change into delight. Inspired by that experience, it only takes a new hairstyle and some new clothes to change her completely, turning that haggard face into something youthfully coy.  ZoologyThey have one date in a disco so desolate that it looks left over from Soviet days, which ends badly when the concealed tail flops out on its own accord. Another time they attend a self-help group, but leave in hysterics at its overwhelmingly ponderous atmosphere (the attendees are a cast of those who have lost their way in life, vulnerable to any new psychic trend, as was indeed the case in Russia in the Nineties). In another nicely nuanced scene she visits a fortune-teller, trying to discover whether Petya’s attachment is serious. The answer to that comes in a night-time zoo scene late in the film, which desolately confounds her expectations even as it disorients ours. What way out can there be? Tverdovsky closes his film with an abrupt cut, as brutal as it is sudden.

We are left to guess at the director’s own position. Is Zoology, as its clinically scientific title might suggest, a coldly objective indictment of Russia today, a human landscape in which the desperate individual is left with nowhere to turn? Significantly one of the places to which Natasha looks for comfort first is religion, but the priest rejects her (her mother is a fervent believer too, equally unable to comprehend, let alone accept anything “different” with any degree of sympathy). The state of the Russian Orthodox Church today, as an hierarchic structure more caught up in its own pomp than engaging in any real sense with its flock, is a frequent enough motif in Russian cinema today (it was touched upon in Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Student).

ZoologyExcept in so much as it portrays a society in which the idea of anything like a “national ideology” is bewilderingly irrelevant – ironic, perhaps, that Zoology nevertheless received state funding – Tverdovsky’s film doesn’t engage with politics directly, in the way that Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan did so potently. Rather it leaves the impression that the sickness portrayed is an exclusively human phenomenon (which actually comes closer to what Zvyagintsev treats in his most recent film, this year’s Loveless). Such variations on alienation come up a lot in contemporary, loosely arthouse Russian cinema, often winning international festival acclaim (though not always UK distribution): Zoology took the Karlovy Vary special jury prize this year, and Tverdovsky’s feature debut Corrections Class was also a winner there in 2014.

The question that must surely be asked of such films is: “Does it have any sense of life?” Do we feel anything, even as we register a bleakness of subject and an often sardonic directorial point of view. Tverdovsky is not immune on the latter front, the only hint at counterpoint he offers here coming from the film’s light and limpidly beautiful piano score. But finally any redemption in Zoology comes from the sheer accomplishment of Natalya Pavlenkova’s playing. To explore such depths of pain is, perverse though it may seem, somehow to transcend them.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Zoology

On Body and Soul review - terrible beauty, and beasts
Tom Birchenough

Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi’s On Body and Soul (Testrol es lelekrol) opens on a scene of cold. It’s beautiful, a winter forest landscape, deserted except for two deer: a huge stag and a small doe react to one another in the snow, a tentative interaction of eyes and noses, nothing more. There’s a tenderness to what we see, the vulnerability of the female set against the power of the antlered male, but also a sense of somehow icy withdrawal.

Enyedi is too subtle a director to treat this opening scene as a metaphor for what follows, the human dimension of her film, although its story is indeed of the tentative interactions between a man and a woman. And that sense of cold continues. Our feeling of withdrawal increases as her second scene proceeds: its setting is a slaughterhouse, cattle waiting, penned but not frightened – their eyes, again, enormously expressive. Then they are stunned with shocks of electricity, and the process of dismemberment begins: carcasses reduced to slabs of meat before our eyes, all accomplished mechanically, human involvement limited to the operation of machinery.

You emerge from it, soul scoured, in silence

It’s a remarkable, doubly alienating opening – remote beauty, immediate cruelty. We sense from its abattoir setting that this film is not going to be an optimistic one, our feelings somehow established by its penumbra of mood. One that is particularly East European, perhaps: Enyedi takes us close to desolation in On Body and Soul, although the darkness is not wilful, and it’s leavened by scenes of sparing bleak humour.

Her slaughterhouse protagonists are Endre (Geza Morcsanyi, a non-professional in his first screen role) and Maria (Alexandra Borbely). He is the company’s finance director, overseeing its operation from a professional but benevolent distance; the fact that one of his arms is paralysed somehow emphasises that. She is newly arrived, a quality inspector who grades the meat, a job that involves an exactness of reckoning that almost goes beyond the human.

And although never made specific, Maria is different, uneasy in human interaction and unable to appreciate humour or nuance: her blond beauty isn’t the only thing that recalls The Bridge’s Saga Norén. Maria inhabits a private world in which distinctions are absolute, very different from the one that surrounds her, where they are all too blurred. It’s a society where low-level corruption appears endemic, and may just be the fabric that keeps things together at all (any visit by officialdom to the abattoir invariably ends with a bag of choice cuts pressed into the hands of whoever may be signing off on the forms).

On Body and SoulEnyedi is laconic about all of that, and there’s certainly no playing-for-laughs in her depiction of Maria. But, unlikely though it may seem, comedy is not far away. When a theft is discovered from the slaughterhouse veterinary store – bovine aphrodisiac of all things, why it is there at all a typical story – procedure dictates that a psychiatrist (Réka Tenki, very sassy) be brought in to interview staff. No subject is off-limits for her questioning, from earliest sexual experiences to last night’s dreams.

That ushers in the crucial development of Enyedi’s script, and puts the accompanying forest scenes in context: Endre and Maria, too tentative to express feelings to one another in life, are dreaming the same dreams, existing together in a parallel cervine night world (pictured above). That hackneyed line, “See you in my dreams”, becomes for them literally true.

The second half of On Body and Soul has the director negotiate the impact of that contact. Enyedi’s command of detail is exquisite, and best left to speak for itself. Suffice it to say that it can be both excruciating and curiously mundane. Moods move from the desperately comic – imagine Saga Norén forcing herself to feel anything, no matter whether it’s physical sensation or emotion – to the simply desperate, as we approach those iceberg expanses of desperate loneliness (the film’s closing track, Laura Marling’s “What He Wrote”, rings just right).

Ildiko Enyedi emerged on the cinema scene in 1989 with the hugely ambitious My Twentieth Century, for which she won the Camera d’Or prize for best first feature at Cannes that year. On Body and Soul is the first film she has made this century (she worked earlier this decade on the Hungarian version of HBO’s In Treatment, an experience which seems to have been in every sense therapeutic). On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale, its mood somehow in tune with the distinctive flavour of that festival. It would be an illusion to expect every viewer to be receptive to this remarkable film, but for those who are it sticks in the mind like a shard of broken glass, a jag of ice. You emerge from it, soul scoured, in silence.    

Overleaf: watch the trailer for On Body and Soul

Borg/McEnroe review - Wimbledon face-off is entertaining if incomplete
Matt Wolf

A spate of tennis-themed films gets off to a vivid if incomplete start with Borg/McEnroe, which recreates the run-up to the Wimbledon Men's Final in 1980 with often-thrilling clarity and (as much as is possible for those who will of course recall the outcome) suspense.