Tom Salinsky

Killers of the Flower Moon

It’s awards season, and first up is Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon, bringing his two favourite actors together in front of his lens for the first time. This bum-numbing narrative probably could have been told at even greater length as a mini-series (the director falls back on a radio programme to deal with the aftermath, and gives himself a brief cameo) but which never bored me for a second. Clearly, this is a story made by white people and told from the point of view of white people, but as its purpose is to centre the selfish and cruel decisions made by those white people, I think this is legitimate, even if I’m left with a feeling that there was a whole other, less familiar, version of this story which I didn’t get, even at this length.

As usual, Scorsese doesn’t either judge his characters or manipulate the facts in order to generate a fake catharsis. Without giving too much away, I kept hoping for a moment of moral clarity from DiCaprio’s dim-witted Ernest, but in fact he just continues to be buffeted by the demands of people around him and his own shortsightedness. In other hands (or on another day) that might render the whole exercise slightly pointless, but the fact that this is a true story, the strength of the playing (Lily Gladstone is amazing), and the director’s expert marshalling of time and place and space combine to create an engrossing experience, which hugely benefits from the big screen experience.

How to Have Sex

Molly Manning Walker’s feature debut would lose less watched at home, but watched at the Curzon Soho, the more tense moments feel a little less escapable. This is a tricky exercise in tone. Too much hijinks and not enough pain and it might come across as trite and superficial. But turn the screw too far and we’re into soap melodrama, undercutting the blazing authenticity of the acting and filming. Walker, who also writes, finds this thin line with unerring accuracy and although Mia McKenna-Bruce is attracting all of the acting plaudits, the whole ensemble of terrifyingly young actors is faultless and the whole experience brilliantly grubby, joyful, horrifying, intoxicating, disturbing and life-affirming. While it’s unlikely to feature on anything like as many Oscar ballots as Flower Moon, a couple of nominations for, say, screenplay and one or two of the actors would be jokes.

Anatomy of a Fall

Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner arrives on these shores and represents a fascinating Euro-riff on the familiar US/UK courtroom drama, with a couple of neat twists. Chief among these is the fact that the continental legal process (which I can only assume is represented at least vaguely accurately here) is rather unlike the combative system we’re used to. Sandra Hüller is deliciously hard-to-read as the widow of the dead man and her last argument with her late husband, shared with the jury courtesy of a slightly ludicrous contrivance, is mesmerising stuff. Maybe because of the snowy Alpine setting (but not only because of that) this reminded me of the amazing and influential Force Majeure and while I don’t expect this to be followed with an American remake and a stage version at the Donmar Warehouse, it is  still compelling, engrossingly ambiguous stuff and I can understand entirely how it won.

The Marvels

And certainly unlikely to trouble Oscar voters much, the latest offering to fall off the Marvel production line does ask a considerable amount of viewers who are expected to simply know who all these various characters are (at minimum you need to have watched Infinity War, Endgame, Ms Marvel, WandaVision, Captain Marvel, Secret Invasion and ideally Hawkeye and Iron Man) but which gets by on the colossal charm of Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris and Iman Vellani, to say nothing of a very silly and very effective pantomime villain turn from Zawe Ashton. The other string to its bow is the near Rick and Morty commitment to bonkers space opera as we zip from orbiting space station to Skrull ghetto to Planet Jai-Ho where everybody communicates in the medium of song. But what’s really bonkers about this is that it’s the biggest box office success ever for a movie directed by a Black woman, and still a commercial failure which will end up losing Disney tens of millions of dollars. That’s your problem, right there.