Tom Salinsky

I don’t have a big investment in this property. I’ve never read the book and I didn’t see the Spielberg movie until a few years ago as part of my Best Pick project. Sitting down to watch this musicalised version (from the 2004 Broadway play), I realised that much of the previous movie had failed to stay with me. I remembered a couple of isolated scenes, a couple of characters and that was about all. Possibly a blessing as the twists and turns of the plot took me by surprise.

It’s not that I’ve got anything against this story, it’s just that it doesn’t mean much to me, so I’m unlikely to get cross if the creative team has made changes to the source material (or the source material of the source material). I can enjoy it – or not – on its own terms. And there is much to enjoy here. It all looks great, with outstanding production design from Paul D Austerberry, beautifully photographed by Dan Laustsen, and the story is as strong as ever. Does that story of rape, child murder, deprivation, spousal abuse, and general brutality work as a toe-tapping musical? Well, it doesn’t not work, and the best of the songs are suitably rousing, many of them gospel inflected.

But what’s weird about this is that it doesn’t really work as a musical film. My Fair Lady, for all its many virtues, is a bit of a slog, because it’s basically the entire text of Pygmalion with half of the dialogue reprised in song form, which means it takes far longer than is really necessary. This version of Alice Walker’s story has been carefully streamlined, winnowed to its essentials, so that even with around 16 songs, it actually runs slightly shorter than the 1985 version. (About a dozen more from the stage version were not ported over, which makes me think that the stage version might have been a bit of a slog too.)

But there’s no attempt to integrate the songs into the rest of the production. They’re almost all cut brutally short – less than two minutes. Once they’re over, they’re over – they never spill over into the next bit of dialogue, let alone the next scene. And there’s no hint in the rest of the action that this is a world in which people might start spontaneously singing and dancing. The songs never cover the moments of realisation, decisions made, corners turned, epiphanies experienced or relationships altering. All of that stuff happens between the musical numbers, meaning that this is a tale interrupted by songs, not a story told through music.

This is not a problem which seemed to affect other recent film musicals – it certainly isn’t an issue in the sublime movie version of Matilda for example, and nor did I notice it in the otherwise badly flawed Wonka. And I’m not saying that either the drama scenes or the musical numbers are bad – the best musical numbers are terrific (Miss Celie’s Pants was probably my favourite). But if you can go through your musical film and cut out all the musical numbers and have everything still work fine – which I reckon you could – then it does suggest that not all has gone according to plan.

The real pleasures here are in the performances. Top-billed Taraji P Henson is luminous as Shug, Colman Domingo (whose wry charisma enlivened many otherwise dull episodes of Fear the Walking Dead) is amazing as Mister – the character who arguably goes on the biggest journey. Danielle Brooks is a blazing, radiant presence, and when she’s crushed by incarceration, it almost feels like a death, until she finds her voice again (arguably a bit too quickly). But it’s movie debutante Fantasia Barrino as Celie who owns this film. Her wonderfully expressive eyes, her soaring voice, her fierce determination cover any number of structural issues – and she even tap dances at one point.

Ever find you just can’t remember the name of a film? I really enjoyed The End We Start From but whenever I wanted to tell someone about it, I couldn’t remember what it was called. Begin at the End? Starting at the End? Ending the Story? Finishing the Starting? So it was with Strange People, I mean All Strange Together, I mean The Strangers We Are, oh look, you know what I mean.

I have to confess that the prospect of watching this one struck me as the cinematic equivalent of eating my greens – Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal being gloomy for two hours, yay – but I was completely unprepared for how weird, off-kilter, lyrical and moving this ended up being. To examine it fully means spoilers, so I’ll dance around a few things in this brief review, but honestly – do yourself a favour and just go and see it.

Scott’s Adam is an isolated writer living in a terrifyingly uninhabited huge tower block, who reluctantly hooks up with Mescal’s Harry before a personal crisis takes him back to his home town, where he seemingly interacts with his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) who haven’t seen him since he was twelve years old, for the very good reason that that was how old he was when they both died in a car crash.

Mescal and Scott are seemingly an odd pairing. Scott’s a very “busy” actor, and it’s greatly to his credit that I’ve never seen a performance of his collapse under the weight of tics and mannerisms. But cut Paul Mescal and he bleeds pure naturalism. Although also Irish, he sounds Manchester here, and it’s never distracting, and despite their differing approaches, this also never feels like a clash of acting styles. Foy and Bell are superb too, and the only other credited actors are Adam’s 12-year-old self and a waitress.

But don’t let that fool you into thinking that this feels like a play. Although it is mainly people talking in rooms, writer-director Andrew Haigh makes it all feel effortlessly cinematic. And given the premise, you’ll rapidly grasp that few if any of the conversations are in any way possible, and yet all of them feel completely convincing, detailed and relatable.

Things get further fractured, dreamlike and bizarre from there, but Haigh wants us to feel, and not to question. The final twist never feels like a Twilight Zone ending – further cementing a kinship between this and Mescal’s triumph in Aftersun. To me there seemed to be clues throughout that Adam had died in a fire basically as soon as the movie started, but there’s no Jacob’s Ladder-style pull-back-and-reveal and so I wasn’t left feeling unfulfilled because I wasn’t being offered a nice neat ending, rather I felt vaguely ashamed that I’d been thinking along such ploddingly prosaic lines.

I gather this was based on Japanese book by one Taichi Yamada whose oeuvre I am not familiar with. But if the very cursory synopsis on Wikipedia is any guide at all, it seems as if the novel would be the shit version of this idea, whereas the movie version is quite transcendent.

Spoilers are funny things. Sometimes you just guess what’s coming next, which I generally think is bad luck more than anything else. Whenever you’re being told a story, you’re guessing what’s coming next. Anticipation is part of the pleasure, and knowing what’s coming next isn’t necessarily a problem. But if something is supposed to come at you from left-field and on your first viewing, you are able to predict it half an hour out, that doesn’t make for the best viewing experience.

What about stories based on life? Does it harm your enjoyment of Apollo 13 if you know the crew were all safely returned to Earth? Will you refuse to see Napoleon because you know what happens at Waterloo? Anyway. If the phrase “Ferrari 1957” doesn’t stir memories in you, you might prefer to watch this film first, and read this review later, because I had no idea what was coming and in the middle of a crowded cinema, I audibly gasped “Jesus!” But, Michael Mann’s narrowly-focused biopic has problems besides – although a key one is the placement of this historic event.

Early on, Mann does very little hand-holding. About the first twenty minutes of this movie is anonymous people getting on and off trains, leaving one house to go to another, making calls in which one person we don’t know tells another person we don’t know that a third person we don’t know has done something whose significance is uncertain. A few introductory captions or a “new kid” to whom things could be explained would have helped a lot.

Eventually things come into focus, and it becomes clear that Enzo Ferrari is struggling to hold his business together, juggling two families and pinning all of his hopes on winning the famous thousand mile “Mille Miglia” race, the glory of which will regenerate his car manufacturing business. But there’s precious little drama in any of this, and bizarrely having cast passionate, explosive Adam Driver (nominative determinism strikes again!) he’s then encouraged him to greet every turn of events – whether fortuitous, disastrous, bizarre or mundane – with the same dignified glower. It deadens the narrative and is a frankly confounding choice.

Penélope Cruz and Shailene Woodley feel a little freer – but all of these American actors have been asked to do Chico Marx Italian accents (except Cruz who just sticks with her natural Spanish) which adds an additional layer of absurdity. So after two hours of planning, pontificating, organising and glowering (mainly glowering), it’s race time. And the tired old Hollywood sports movie structure would suggest that this is when Ferrari seizes victory from the jaws of defeat. However, the problem here is that victory is in the hands of his drivers and all Ferrari can do is offer futile advice from the sidelines.

What actually happens – as you very well may know – is that although one of his drivers wins the race, another one has a blow-out at 120 miles an hour and spins off the road into a collection of excited onlookers, in a devastating accident which left eleven people dead, one of them gruesomely bisected. Five of them children. It’s an astonishing moment, and the power of it does galvanise the rest of the film. But if you were hoping to discover the effect that this has on Ferrari – as engineer, as one-time race driver, as family man, as entrepreneur – then you’ll be disappointed because ten minutes later the credits are rolling. Why is this hideous turning point not positioned in the middle of the film, so we can deal with the aftermath properly? (Wikipedia tells me that the court cases rumbled on for years.)

Everything is shot with Mann’s customary style and energy, and this did a decent job of teaching me about a bit of history I had no knowledge of. But it’s weighed down by poor choices in the fundamental organisation of the material, and a hugely disappointing turn from the magnificently talented Driver.

I don’t quite know where to put The Holdovers. Alexander Payne’s style isn’t the rigorous near cookie-cutter filmmaking system of Wes Anderson, which constantly threatens to subsume the material (and often succeeds). But Payne’s recent output does show a sameyness which, sure, is the mark of an artist with something to say, but I left this film having had a decent enough time, but slightly baffled at the rapturous reception this has received in some quarters. Nothing like as vinegar-sharp as Election, this is more in the same vein as The Descendants, Sideways or Nebraska, in which grumpy middle-aged men grouse about life’s petty indignities until the external structure of the story brings them into land.

It all looks lovely, and so seventies, I assume it was shot with mahogany cameras on film made of bri-nylon. At my screening, there was even a (fake) British Board of Film Censors card giving it an “AA” rating. And a walleyed Paul Giamatti (who is being very coy about how this look was achieved) is on suitably splenetic form. Much attention is given early on to prize jackass Teddy Kountze, who is the standout asshole in Mr Hunham’s collection of lonely students who have to suffer Christmas at school. But, thanks to a conveniently-deployed helicopter, it ends up being only Dominic Sessa’s Angus Tully who is left behind, and we only have some harsh sun reflected off the ski-slopes by way of karmic retribution for Kountze.

Over time, Giamatti and Sessa’s relationship ebbs and flows, they learn a little more about each other, confess some secrets and reveal some vulnerabilities. The acting is splendid with great turns also from Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Carrie Preston. But what’s it all for? And haven’t we seen a lot of this snotty-kids-from-fancy-Academies-learn-a-thing-or-two-about-life-from-a-crochety-yet-charismatic-ersatz-father-figure before in films like Good Will Hunting, Scent of a Woman, Dead Poets Society and more besides?

I admire all the care and craft that’s been poured into this, and the script (an original by David Hemingson) is full of choice one-liners, but it feels as if the director was so keen to evoke a time, he forget to evoke all that much meaning.

The End We Start From couldn’t be more different. If Alexander Payne’s film is a warm bath slowing growing tepid, then Mahalia Belo’s is a blast of cold water in the face. And that’s more or less what happens to Jodie Comer’s young mother whose onset of labour is interrupted not by her waters breaking but by flood waters crashing through her bay windows. Plotted like a disaster movie (script by Alice Birch from the novel by Megan Hunter), this focuses not on the devastation of the UK by unstoppable storms, but on the human fallout. And like all good survival films, the biggest problem isn’t the climate disaster / erupting volcano / hoards of zombies / cordyceps infections / man-eating plants – it’s your fellow survivors and their moral weaknesses.

Indomitably trudging through this bleakness, tiny baby strapped to her chest, Jodie Comer is outstanding, and given great support by Katherine Waterston as the similarly blessed friend she makes along the way. Whether by choice, or as a consequence of the kind of limited budget generally afforded British films, the editing is lean to the point of choppy, with very few scenes allowed to linger, but the score by Anna Meredith (with occasional overtones of John Carpenter) knits the whole thing together, and the result is a harrowing tale which feels all too believable, but which crucially doesn’t forget the power of a good laugh every so often. “Do we really have nothing left to eat?” asks Comer at one point. “Only these delicious babies,” responds Waterston.

None of the characters have names, which I almost didn’t notice until moments before the end, but this gives a dark hint that this could happen to anyone. And all the details of how different people and institutions might react to such as disaster are well-worked out. With strong themes of family, duty, home and belonging, this remarkable film effortlessly transcends its pulpy premise, and adds another to a string of sensational performances from Comer who is surely one of the very best actors working in Britain today.

This has suddenly become one of my dinner party / weekend cook-ahead / feeding a crowd staples. Super-delicious, not difficult to make and vegetarian (or at least this version is).

Prep time: 1 hour. Cook time: 40 minutes. Feeds 6-8.

For the red sauce

• Three medium onions
• Three cans chopped tomatoes
• 2 tbsp tomato paste
• 1 tbsp dried mixed herbs
• 4-6 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp sugar/honey/maple syrup
• 1 tsp balsamic vinegar
• Salt and pepper

For the white sauce

• 250g ricotta cheese
• 50g parmesan
• 1 medium egg
• 150g double cream
• 50g fresh basil

For the pasta

• 500g rigatoni or other tube-shaped pasta
• 20g parmesan
• 250g mozzarella

To make the red sauce, finely dice the onions and gently fry in olive oil until soft. Add the garlic and if your basil has nice-looking stems, you can finely slice those and add them too. Add the tomato paste, canned tomatoes, herbs and sugar/vinegar/salt/pepper to taste (depends how sharp your tomatoes are). Simmer for twenty minutes until thick.

While the red sauce cooks, boil the pasta until it has just begun to soften, about 6-7 minutes. Drain and splash over some olive oil so it doesn’t stick together.

To make the white sauce, beat the egg and combine with the ricotta, cream, chopped basil and finely grated parmesan. It probably won’t need salt because the parmesan is salty, but you can add some pepper if you like.

When everything is ready, combine the pasta, red sauce and white sauce. Spoon half the pasta mixture into the bottom of a baking dish, and dot with half the mozzarella, cut into little cubes. Spoon the rest of the pasta mixture over and then top with the remaining mozzarella, the extra grated parmesan and a light sprinkling of olive oil.

Cook in a medium-high oven for about 40 minutes until crisp on top and bubbling.

Serve with a fresh green salad and some nice bread rolls, with more basil and parmesan to sprinkle over.

Two British films drawn from reality about stiff-upper-lipped Englishmen stoically doing the right thing, simply because it’s right. There’s more texture to Oliver Parker and William Ivory’s The Great Escaper, simply because Michael Caine’s decrepit old buffer causes all sorts of consternation back home when he does a bunk from his care home, and therefore it’s possible to attribute negative motivations to his actions. This film also benefits from keeping its stars (Caine and Glenda Jackson) centre-stage for much of the running time – the flashbacks to young Caine are kept to a minimum.

It doesn’t outstay its welcome, but it does feel like it’s running on rails, and ends up reaching for a catharsis which seems forever out of its reach. Its most interesting moments are those when Bernie takes a different path – visiting a comrade’s grave and missing out on the big show which was his ostensible reason for going. Spare a thought for John Standing and Victor Oshin who do nice work but get no plaudits. For one brief moment, as Bernie shares a salute with equally decrepit Germans who were firing machine guns at British troops during the Normandy landings, there’s a flicker of something much deeper, more profound and incredibly moving. But Parker swiftly moves back to the feelgood old-folks charm.

I remember watching the episode of That’s Life in which Esther Rantzen surprised Nicholas Winton with an audience full of the now grown-up children whose lives he’d saved by arranging their escape from occupied Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. It’s practically impossible to watch without bursting into tears. If you want to watch it, a YouTube search will bring it up. Or you could watch One Life which plods its way towards the same endpoint.

Anthony Hopkins is the big ticket here, but the 1930s stuff is vastly more interesting, where we have to make do with Johnny Flynn (hilariously broad in the West End as Richard Burton at the moment), but get consolation prizes in the form of Helena Bonham Carter and Romola Garai. There’s fine evocation of time and place in these scenes, but I was left waiting for Hopkins to come back and then bored by much of what he was doing. As a hymn to the virtues of stubbornness, politeness and diligent paperwork, this is suitably stirring, but nothing can ever come close to the impact of watching that BBC broadcast, despite the best efforts of cast and crew.

Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennot continue the promise they showed in the rather more low-key Shiva Baby. With Sennot now sharing scripting duties, this is a wild, raw, bonkers, coming-of-age story, which faultlessly finds its own unique loopy tone as it plays with the cliches of high school movies and turns them all inside out in short order. In front of the camera, Sennot is joined by Ayo Edebiri, who is having quite the moment after her far more contained and intense performance in The Bear, and her hilarious and all-too-brief cameo in Theater Camp. Both are pushing 30 but manage to pull off the emotional energy of anxious teens without effort. Rounding out the trio is Ruby Cruz who brings a definite Ally Sheedy vibe, appropriate for a film which picks up where various John Hughes movies left off.

This tight, ninety-minute comedy is stuffed full of good jokes, has just enough genuine emotion not to feel like a sketch show and expertly manages the escalation from fairground teasing to punching in the school gym to… well, that would be telling. Succession’s Dagmara Domińczyk and SNL’s Punkie Johnson are somewhat thrown away, but Seligman and Sennot have the sense not to screw up the film’s lean propulsive momentum by wandering off down backstories for tertiary characters. This is the blood-soaked, feel-good movie of the year and marks Seligman out as a major talent.

Yorgos Lanthimos follows up his smash hit The Favourite with this bizarro riff on Frankenstein, from the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray. We’re introduced to childlike Bella Baxter through the eyes of earnest young medical student Max McCandless, but before he accepts her ersatz-father’s offer to marry Bella, she’s spirited away by rakish Duncan Wedderburn. As usual, Lanthimos adheres to the motto “too weird is never weird enough”, so Willem Dafoe is caked in geometrically-crenelated latex as the hideously benevolent “God”, Kathryn Hunter makes a memorable cameo festooned with tattoos, Bella’s home is surrounded by a bizarre menagerie of cut-and-shut barnyard animals, and various seemingly random shots are given an extreme fish-eye lens treatment.

This is also one of those movies where everyone’s doing a voice. American Ramy Yussef manages to let his stiff English accent imbue the character with a naïve earnestness which works well. Dafoe’s Scottish accent seems to ebb-and-flow, but he’s such a bonkers creation that this is a minor concern. The biggest issue by far is with Mark Ruffalo, who probably would have seemed miscast if he had been allowed to use his own accent, but he’s so far away from the caddish Wedderburn to begin with that the strangulated and inconsistent dialect only compounds the problem. Presumably Jason Isaacs was too busy pretending to be Cary Grant?

But the movie belongs to Emma Stone, who not only fully integrates a flawless cut-glass accent into her performance, but flings herself into the infantile aspects of the role, and precisely tracks Bella’s evolution from feral force of nature, to wilful sex maniac, to bleeding heart handwringing liberal, to effortlessly compassionate master of her own destiny. It’s a stunningly ego-less performance, and Stone’s bad luck that she’s likely up against Lily Gladstone at this year’s Oscars.

What’s it all about though? Well, somewhere under the wacky camera angles, ripe performances, storybook production design and discordant score, there’s a parable about childhood, feminism, socialism and the nature of romantic love. But if this a feminist empowerment film (written by a dude, directed by a dude, based on a novel by a dude), it’s one of those feminist empowerment films in which empowerment is achieved largely by the shedding of clothing. If you’ve ever had cause to wonder what Emma Stone’s nipples look like – wonder no longer. And yet, for all the odd choices, eccentric casting and dodgy accents, there are images and ideas and sequences here which will stay with me. I preferred this to The Lobster, which for all its bracingly flat oddness ran out of ideas in the last third, but it’s not as viscerally engaging as The Favourite, which also has the very fact that it’s about royalty and ruling to give it a bit more thematic ballast.

Good Grief dropped quietly on Netflix just after Christmas. There are so many movies and TV series coming to this streaming service in particular, that it’s not even hard to keep up any more – it’s hard to notice. For some reason, this one caught our eye, and we decided to give it a spin. Dan Levy (who also writes and directs) plays illustrator Marc whose husband of some years is suddenly killed, and he ends up with best friends Thomas (Himesh Patel) and Sophie (Ruth Negga) in Paris, trying to make sense of it all.

For the first third, this is almost too well-done, a hauntingly accurate portrayal of what a life cut short looks like, and it was almost a relief when the plot took a turn for the slightly more melodramatic in the middle. Be warned, we’re leaving Schitt’s Creek a long way behind. And the story continues to be engrossingly told, keenly observed and well acted, even if it never bubbles over into anything more profound, moving or insightful. Levy keeps his David Rose tics under control, Patel underplays and probably could have stood to do a bit more, as he gets a bit lost. But MVP is Ruth Negga who (allowed to use her natural accent for once) has a whale of a time with the free-spirited Sophie who lights up every scene she’s in, even – or especially – when making terrible life choices.

Look out also for The Crown’s Emma Corrin, national treasure Celia Imrie and Luke Evans who has the mighty task of making us fall in love with Oliver in the ten minutes of screen time he has before his fatal accident.

Paul King is a superbly accomplished filmmaker. As if it needed demonstrating, Paddington 2 proved that Paddington was no fluke. He has wonderful visual flair, a warm sense of humour, an enviable address book of British comedy and acting talent, and a keen eye for storytelling. But Willy Wonka is not Paddington Bear and the approach which worked so well in his two smash hit ursine masterworks doesn’t suit this character nearly so well.

This is something of a disappointment. Wonka The Early Years was always a terrible pitch, but not everyone had faith that resurrecting beloved children’s character Paddington Bear would prove successful in the era of TikTok, iPhones and Brexit, and that worked great in the right hands. However, the problems inherent in the very idea of returning to Wonka’s origins turn out to be insurmountable and they gang up to tear in half this slender and not-nearly-funny-enough movie, which is too silly for adults and quite likely too boring for many kids.

In Roald Dahl’s story (and the 1971 film adaptation starring Gene Wilder, to which this film is almost more indebted) the central character is an ordinary child, and the mysterious, reclusive, magical, dangerous, unpredictable and mercurial Wonka is kept carefully at arm’s length. Having him as the protagonist means making him prosaic, outgoing, amiable, understandable and knowable, all of which are terrible ideas. This conflict between the needs of the character and the requirements of the plot drives a series of fatal contradictions through every beat of this film.

So, Wonka, who is utterly impoverished, is capable of magically producing endless supplies of chocolate from thin air – with a single trip to procure giraffe milk being the only time that any thought is given to the need for ingredients, which he never seems to need to pay for. No, I don’t want my beguiling fantasy wizard to be sending invoices to suppliers, but then I don’t want an entire movie built around his financial fortunes either, so it’s definitely the movie’s fault and not mine that I’m asking these questions. When absolutely at his lowest economic ebb, he is able to whisk up an ingenious Oompa-Loompa trap, despite the fact that he has been plagued by this antagonist for literal years, and has never thought to do this at any previous point, when it would no doubt have been far easier.

Wonka is both given an inability to read, and is required to solve a subplot by identifying the letters on a signet ring and working out what they stand for. His imprisoning by Oliva Colman’s Mrs Scrubbit does far more to solve his problem of not having anywhere to sleep, and also furnishes him with a ready-made gang of acolytes than it does to inconvenience him in any way. His endless chocolate-making is fuelled by  cocoa beans which he stole from Loompa-land where they are in very short supply (why not visit somewhere where they grow in abundance then?). He is able to transform a derelict shop into a chocolate palace overnight and seemingly without effort, but is unable to repeat the trick when it catches on fire. Customers desert him in droves when his chocolate causes bizarre transformations, but this is completely forgotten about in the climax when everybody accepts free candy from the man who wrecked their appearance. And so on, and so on, and so on… What’s weirdest of all is that in the Dahl/Wilder version of the story, chocolates were for kids, as you might expect. Here they’re almost exclusively for adults who are nostalgic for their childhood. And desire for chocolate is horrible and leads to vile obesity if you’re a bad adult, but is a magical and delightful experience if you’re nice.

Of course, this is still a Paul King film, so things aren’t all bad. There’s the usual roster of familiar telly faces, with such luminous talents as Sally Hawkins, Sophie Winkleman, Charlotte Ritchie and Isy Suttie all in micro-roles, and meatier parts for the likes of Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Grant, Keegan-Michael Key, Jim Carter, Rakhee Thakrar and Matt Lucas. The songs by Neil Hannon are perfectly serviceable, although shown up by the reprised Leslie Bricusse/Anthony Newley classics. But, even though the Paddington films took place in an artificial world, the basic strategy of an innocent bear in a familiar environment worked, and grounded the stories, so that when King wanted us to feel something, we did. Here, everything is a candy-coloured cartoon, nothing feels real, and when I’m supposed to feel something for moppety Noodle, it’s impossible because she’s made of sugar and pixels, and when I’m supposed to feel something for Wonka, I fundamentally don’t want to. All of Hugh Grant’s best gags are in the trailer, too. Bugger.