I’m Thinking of Ending Things ends in a giddying gusher of weirdness, the steady drip of earlier oddness finally bursting its narrative banks, till a horror scene becomes a Gene Kelly ballet, and an Oklahoma! tune is sung in bitter valediction by a male lead now resembling elderly Charles Foster Kane. It’s a Charlie Kaufman overdose, trashing convention to alienating effect. And yet this also stays his simplest chamber piece, about a young couple driving to meet the boyfriend’s parents in the country one snowy night.Later, you forget the first sight of Lucy (Jessie Buckley) as she lets a Read more ...

Originally due to premiere back in March, Sleepless – a musical version of the winning 1993 movie Sleepless in Seattle – now acts as a test case for the return of fully staged but socially distanced indoor theatre, AKA Stage 4 of the Government’s “roadmap”. Though a musical adaptation premiered in the States in 2013, this is billed as a new work, with a fresh book by Michael Burdette and score by Brits Robert Scott and Brendan Cull. Bravo to all involved for bringing audiences back safely and enthusiastically, even if the show itself, contrary to its title, is a tad more somnolent than might Read more ...

The emotional rawness of Xavier Dolan’s films reflects a rare humanity and empathy. For someone still only 31, the French-Canadian writer and director displays an uncanny sense of the passionate turmoil that animates his characters. The subtle shifts in moods he achieves may often be sustained through an unusual talent for picking the right music or song, but the tone is never set in a way that manipulates the audience. This makes for a movie that feels powerfully authentic and for this reason deeply touching without ever being sentimental.The central story of his eighth film focuses on the Read more ...

Musings on the agonies of adolescent love fall like dead weight in this wearying if well-acted adaptation by writer-director Richard Tanne of the 2016 Young Adult novel Our Chemical Hearts by Krystal Sutherland. 17-year-old Henry Page (Austin Abrams) falls hard for Grace Torn (Lili Reinhart, from TV's Riverdale), the indrawn new transfer student at his New Jersey high school who walks with a cane and speaks of needing her sins erased.Henry craves experience and gets rather more than he bargained for from the anguished Grace, with whom he bonds over Pablo Neruda sonnets and shared work on the Read more ...

We’ve already had The Last Five Years in lockdown; now, we get a digital production of American composer Jason Robert Brown’s earliest work. A series of wistful pop/jazz numbers loosely linked thematically, rather than narratively, this 1995 abstract musical features various characters responding to a moment that upends their lives. Formally, it’s another Brown show that suits our current circumstances, since the songs are mainly standalone solos, and the performers’ various homes work fine as background; no need for a helicopter or falling chandelier in this one.The central idea also speaks Read more ...

At a point in the early noughties, every third film was a teen comedy about a road trip to lose one's virginity. It’s a genre most were glad to see the back of. What a pleasant surprise Come As You Are is then, which brings much needed heart and relevancy to this tired trope.Based on a true story, we follow Scotty, Matt and Mo as they travel to Montreal to visit a brothel. But this isn’t some sleezy trip – each of the characters has a physical disability, and with their parents as their primary carers, having an active sex life has been nearly impossible. So, with the support of driver/nurse Read more ...

The movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights was meant to hit cinemas this summer, but, in response to Covid-19, has been put back to 2021. Instead, we get the early release on Disney+ of Miranda’s Hamilton – filmed, NT Live style, with the original Broadway cast at three performances in June 2016, and now available to a wide audience for the first time. Who could say no to this? Stage director Thomas Kail also helms the film, and the result is an exhilarating, immersive experience of this dynamic musical about America’s forgotten Founding Father, who travels from Read more ...

This Icelandic film begins in the titular land of steam, as rain and mist envelop an erratic car which soon tumbles to its doom. The wife of rural policeman Ingimundur (Ingvar Sigurdsson) was driving, and the mystery of her death and open, infinite wound of their love consumes him during the course of this gripping dissection of damaged masculinity and desperate devotion.Ingimundur’s relationship with his 8-year-old granddaughter, Salka (the director’s daughter, Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir, unsentimentally superb, pictured below) just about anchors him in the present. So too does his affectionate Read more ...

A musical featuring two people who are physically separated? Jason Robert Brown’s work is a shutdown natural – as this new digital theatre version demonstrates. Lauren Samuels and Danny Becker, who play doomed lovers Cathy and Jamie, recorded their parts entirely in isolation, with Samuels (previously starring as Cathy in 2011 at Chiswick Playhouse) also directing.The result is a piece that firmly retains its theatrical DNA – in contrast to the Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan-starring movie adaptation, which changed up the format to have the characters sharing space. Of course, current social Read more ...

Like an asp eating its own tail, the National Theatre's 2018 production of Antony and Cleopatra, streaming on YouTube until 14 May, begins as it will end. Director Simon Godwin's first tableau is the play's finale: Cleopatra (Sophie Okonedo) lies in queenly repose, a snakebite on her neck; her servants, Charmian (Gloria Obianyo) and Iras (Georgia Landers), slump around her. How did this triple suicide come to pass, ask thwarted Caesar (Tunji Kasim) and Agrippa (Katy Stephens), before answering their own question: behold, and see.It's a neat trick for Godwin, a National semi-regular since 2013 Read more ...

Only those who really love you can deliver the hard truths, and for filmmaker Elizabeth Sankey, that one love is romantic comedies. Better known as one half of band Summer Camp, Sankey is a self-confessed romcom expert, having watched nearly every film from the 80s onwards. It was her happy place, but in this new visual essay on MUBI, she breaks down the huge number of problematic tropes that fill the genre.There are certain rules that nearly every romantic comedy abides by. There are the female-led films, with straight, middle-class, white women defined by their weight and career, until they Read more ...

Featherweight is one thing, brainless is another. Can You Keep A Secret?, the romcom adapted by screenwriter Peter Hutchings from the 2003 novel by Sophie Kinsella, uneasily straddles the two until a conclusion that goes off the rails altogether and tumbles into the ludicrous. Alexandra Daddario plays Emma, one of these insecure chatterboxes you'd run a mile from in real life but whom we’re here apparently meant to find irresistible.That's certainly the effect Emma has on Jack (Tyler Hoechlin, stuck in the role of a walking pin-up), the smiling, hirsute stranger whom Emma ends Read more ...