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B ased on Samuel D Hunter’s play of the same name, The Whale depicts the final week in the life of a morbidly obese man who has developed an eating disorder in the years following his boyfriend’s suicide. Charlie ( Brendan Fraser ) is confined to his apartment, subsisting on takeout and groceries delivered to him by his friend Liz ( Hong Chau ) while teaching online English classes. He keeps his laptop camera off, worried his students will be disgusted by his appearance. Realising his eating disorder is going to kill him, Charlie attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughter Ellie ( Sadie Sink ) who is still furious at him for leaving her and her mother Mary ( Samantha Morton ) years ago. Meanwhile, meek missionary Thomas (Ty Simpkins) comes across Charlie and begins visiting daily in an attempt to save his eternal soul. But Charlie is resigned to his fate. The past eight years have been a form of slow suicide. He punishes himself with food. He eats until he vomits and then eat...

F or all the arguing about the future of brick-and-mortar cinemas, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that people do indeed like the act of going to the movies — it’s just that we all wish it was a slightly better version of itself. The experience often leaves something to be desired, especially where ticket prices are concerned, the rates inflating to steep new highs that threaten to undermine the whole point of what’s supposed to be the cheapest, most widely accessible form of public entertainment. Marcus Markou has a plan. The independent filmmaker made waves today with a press release announcing an unusual distribution scheme designed to goose attendance for his latest feature The Wife and Her House Husband. So long as the title plays theatrically, tickets will only put buyers back a single pound, just like in the good ol’ days that the majority of currently living people were not around to see. The press release provides a cursory synopsis for the under-the-radar drama as “a ...

W riting can be a lonely pursuit, and authors must often rely on those closest to them for support and feedback as they attempt to navigate the process of constructing a story. So it goes for Beth (Julia Louie-Dreyfus), a novelist who has just finished her second book – a follow-up to her reasonably successful memoir. She has what she believes to be a good marriage therapist husband Don (Tobias Menzies), until she overhears him criticising her new novel to her brother-in-law Mark (Arian Moayed). Devastated by what she perceives as an emotional betrayal, Beth turns to her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) for advice about how she should proceed. Holofcener has built a career out of crafting intimate relationship studies (centered, more or less, on the white middle class) and it’s worth acknowledging as much if only to indicate that it’s remarkable she manages to create such rich characters within the framework. Perhaps it’s a case of ‘write what you know’ being genuinely good advice, b...

C harlotte Regan has long been a promising talent on the shorts and music video circuit, with her film Standby nominated for a BAFTA in 2017. She makes the leap to features with Scrapper – a charming, effervescent story about grief set on a housing estate in East London that turns the kitchen sink genre on its head, crafting a brightly-coloured world of possibility and hope. 12-year-old Georgie (newcomer Lola Campbell) lives on her own, following the death of her mother. She’s crafted an elaborate ruse to fool social services into thinking she’s living with her uncle, and spends her time with best mate Ali (Alin Uzun) nicking bikes to sell as scrap in order to put food on the table. She’s hard as nails and doesn’t need any help from anyone, thankyouverymuch – so when her estranged father Jason (Harris Dickinson) turns up on her doorstep, fresh off the plane from Ibiza where he was working as a club rep, Georgie doesn’t want anything to do with him. She’s particularly resistant to t...

F or a long time sci-fi films have depicted the possibility of an alien invasion of earth as something terrifying. Buildings will crumble, humans will be subjugated, and all will feel the wrath of our extra-terrestrial overlords. In a refreshing change of pace, M T Anderson’s Landscape With Invisible Hand – adapted here for the screen by Cory Finley) imagines close encounters of the third kind as something much more mundane: the replacement of one oppressive system (human capitalism) with another (alien capitalism). In a near-future, Earth has been colonised by a group of coffee-table-sized aliens called the Vuuv – it rhymes with love – who have brought with them incredible advanced technology…which is only available to those with the deepest pockets. For teenage artist Adam Costello (Asante Blackk) the Vuuv have had very little positive impact. Since their arrival his parents have split up, his mother (played by Tiffany Haddish) has lost her job as a lawyer due to alien advancement...

W hen Andrea Riseborough ‘s name was called alongside her fellow Best Actress nominees at this past Tuesday’s Academy Award announcement ceremony, much of the chatter concerned the abruptness of the word-of-mouth campaign that seemed to take shape overnight mere days prior to the close of voting. Some cried foul that a system heretofore known to run on money and influence-peddling had been gamed, others were amused that these mechanisms had been placed in plainer view than usual, and a third faction was busy Googling “to leslie + movie + 2022 ?” From a deadpan conspirator in the comedy Mindhorn to a lovelorn metalhead in the hallucinatory Mandy to a shape-shifting assassin in the sci-fi brain-melter Possessor , few talents of her generation match her chameleonic ability to vanish into her roles. (A friend has suggested that everyone’s slow on the uptake about her being one of our greatest working actors because it’s often difficult to clock the person onscreen as Andrea Riseborou...

I n his 1920s-set Babylon , Damien Chazelle reprises La La Land ’s fascination with Hollywood. La La Land played homage to a bygone chapter of Hollywood history with its affectionate evocation of screen musicals, but Babylon is a brasher affair with an 18 certificate to prove it. Playing alongside it are two other releases that memorialise the era of analogue film; Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light and Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans . Hollywood’s enduring obsession with itself is well recognised, but Babylon, The Fabelmans and Empire of Light enter a more specific strand of cinema history: films that depict cinema going. Long before Empire of Light, Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso took audiences behind the scenes of small-town cinemas. Where Keaton plumped for the fantastical, using revolutionary effects to allow his projectionist protagonist to step into the silver screen, Tornatore and Mendes are concerned with the everyday. A jaunt throug...

W illiam Oldroyd’s searing 2016 period drama Lady Macbeth was a thorny tale of female repression and desire that made a star out of its leading lady Florence Pugh – it’s been a long wait for his follow-up, which arrives in the form of an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel Eileen. Similarly the narrative plays with an awkward young woman existing under the bootheel of the patriarchy, whose life is upended by a whirlwind love affair with disastrous results – in this case, the woman is Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) who works at a prison in 1960s Boston, living with her unpleasant, alcoholic father who constantly berates Eileen, comparing her to her older sister and her deceased mother. She struggles to form connections with her colleagues, until the glamorous Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) takes up a position as the prison psychologist. Instantly infatuated, Eileen begins to spend time with Rebecca, who encourages her out of her shell and takes her dancing. Eileen owes much to Todd Haynes’...

W atching films all-day, every day at a film festival can mean they all blur into a carousel of images until – suddenly – one cuts through and you’re in a daze outside afterwards searching colleagues’ eyes for signs they are equally moved. So it was with All The Beauty and the Bloodshed , a portrait of the artist Nan Goldin by the documentarian Laura Poitras, which did move my colleagues, yes, and also Julianne Moore’s jury which awarded it the 2022 Venice Film Festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion. Poitras is no slouch when it comes to securing industry plaudits for her work, as she has under her belt an Academy Award for Best Documentary for 2015’s investigative nerve-jangler, Citizenfour. It’s a film about America’s most wanted whistleblower, Edward Snowden, which combines the tension of a fictional spy thriller with an intimacy born of the Hong Kong hotel room setting where she, Snowden, and the journalist, Glenn Greenwald, worked to get his story out while under siege from US i...

I n the cut throat world of corporate trading, there’s little room for sentimentality. Young lovers Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) and Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) seem cognisant of this, even as they carry on a clandestine affair after falling for one another while serving as Wall Street analysts at the same hedge company. When the firing of a colleague creates a power vacuum, it’s assumed that Luke will step up to fill it, to the delight of the couple – until their boss Campbell (a woefully miscast Eddie Marsan) throws a spanner in the works by opting to promote Emily instead. While Emily promises to make sure Luke is next in line for a cushy project manager job, the new power imbalance in their relationship – along with the toll of keeping it a secret from their colleagues – puts considerable strain on the couple. In theory, this might set the stage for an interesting examination of gender and sexual politics in domestic and professional settings. How might Luke deal with feeling emasculated ...

T he day has finally come: Hollywood has allowed Gerard Butler to play a Scotsman again. He’s so giddy about it, in fact, that within the first 10 minutes of Plane – Jean-François Richet’s latest actioner – his flight captain Brodie Torrance manages to sneak in the words “neeps, haggis and tatties” in a conversation, followed shortly by a cheerful but firm slander of the English. Things are all jolly until Captain Torrance’s titular plane gets trapped in a storm, with violent turbulence quickly evolving into a full-blown disaster. This being Gerard Butler, of course, obliteration is averted with seconds to spare, quickly followed by an even more haunting scenario: passengers and crew realise they are stranded on a war-torn island in the Philippines, with all communication systems burned down in the storm. A tightly-paced action thriller, Plane competently delivers on the deliciously formulaic tropes of the genre. Yes, hunky Captain Brodie Torrence is a widowed single father trying ...

“I gotta say, it sounds like I was born in the wrong time.” Uttered by human lie detector Charlie Cox, these lines might as well refer the actor who plays her: the throaty-voiced, wild-haired Natasha Lyonne. Lyonne’s coolness lies in her resistance to trends – high-waisted jeans, vocal fry, she’ll have none of it – and, paradoxically, that’s the source of her versatility. There is no “wrong time” for Lyonne. One imagines she would be as comfortable, or coolly uncomfortable, in a Cassavetes film or a 1930s comedy of remarriage as she proves to be in a mind-bending time-travel dramedy on Netflix. When Lyonne’s talents are pooled with those of showrunner Rian Johnson, a writer-director constantly referencing, looking back toward, or playfully burning down Hollywood legend, the result is bound to be a media-literate blast. Poker Face is Lyonne and Johnson’s first collaboration, and it is a gratifying throwback to the network howcatchem (as opposed to the prestige whodunnit), as reinve...

A t the beginning of January, a porter (Samuel Finzi) and an Old Man (Iossif Surchadziev) while away their time eating walnuts and doing a crossword as they await the return of their boss Petar Motorov. The clues of the crossword concern world literature, global geography and international cuisine – in other words, about a whole universe beyond these men’s immediate, enclosed environment in a snowbound cabin near the woods. The porter only occasionally ventures to enter the adjacent, abandoned Soviet-era hotel, its ruins decorated with fallen portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Brezhnev. There he refuels the generator that keeps the lights and heat on in this otherwise dark midwinter. They might as well be waiting for Godot. For as the horse-drawn sleigh returns with not Petar Motorov but a frozen wolf, and as a succession of visitors: twin brothers (Zachary Baharov and Svetoslav Stoyanov) whose snowplough has broken down nearby; a muscly tattooed priest (Leonid Yovchev); a smiling...

Z oe (Mamma Mia darling Lily James), a documentary film-maker, is looking for her next project and is met with a wave of unenthusiasm from her investors. Suddenly, her neighbour Kazim (Shazad Latif) announces he is getting his parents to find a wife for him. As a successful doctor, a catch universally acknowledged by any mosque match-maker, his willingness to take the plunge and marry a woman with whom he has only video called and exchanged an awkward conversation, is jarring. Yet the stars align for Zoe: she has a new project, and she has an excuse to probe the alien concept of “assisted marriage” as they call it these days. As someone who always picks wrong’uns, the lens turns both ways, and Kazim questions her inability to commit as much as she questions his eagerness to do so. Though this contrast of dating apps and dowries is well-intentioned, and the burgeoning chemistry between the stars is sweet, the script is too basic to account for their equally irrational approaches to ...

T he pandemic seems to have been a period of introspection for some of our most revered filmmakers with the cine-memoir becoming a recurring theme. James Gray chose to make a film about his experience growing up in New York City during the turbulent 1970s in Armageddon Time , while Richard Linklater ’s Houston childhood inspired his Rotoscope feature Apollo 10½ . Now it’s the turn of Steven Spielberg, who charts his coming-of-age in Arizona and the dissolution of his parents’ marriage as counterpoint to his blossoming relationship with cinema. For a director whose entire career has engaged with the concept of storytelling and mythmaking, it’s fitting he would finally tackle his own life with this same playful perspicuity. When we meet Sammy Fabelman, he’s queuing for his first ever trip to the cinema with his mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and father Burt (Paul Dano). Sammy is apprehensive about The Greatest Show on Earth, but his parents reassure him he’s about to have the most ...

W hen Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) learns that she is pregnant, her husband Jamie (Douglas Booth) purchases a celebratory bottle of alcohol-free Prosecco from the corner store, unwittingly picking up a trio of violent thugs who follow him back home and break into the couple’s London apartment. Overwhelmed and viciously beaten, Jamie is left to watch helplessly as Maya is also attacked and fails to take an opportunity to stab the gang’s taunting ringleader. Only the arrival of the police saves them. Cut to a little under nine months later, and the couple, still rattled by this harrowing event, moves to the idyllic Irish countryside, where Jamie has inherited a house from his recently departed Aunt Maeve. Like its new owners, the house is in a state of disrepair, but there is hope here for building a better future. The local pub’s landlady (Niamh Cusack) warns that an offering of meat must be left in their back garden every night to keep at bay the far darrig – mythical little people in...

2 022 was an exceptionally tricky year for Oscar prognostication, with a larger-than-usual number of maybes and only a scant handful of locks jockeying for the ten spots in the Best Picture race. And even as this morning’s announcement of the nominees for the 95th Academy Awards narrowed the field to a final lineup, the final outcomes remain anyone’s guess in an unpredictable mix of populist favorites and well-regarded prestige. Not so surprising was the domination of Everything Everywhere All At Once , which led the pack with a hefty eleven nominations, clinching key placements in Best Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay, along with a quartet of acting nominations for Michelle Yeoh , Stephanie Hsu , Jamie Lee Curtis , and Ke Huy Quan . Close behind with nine nods apiece are The Banshees of Inisherin , which also got individual citations for its four main actors, and Netflix’s remake of All Quiet on the Western Front , combining an International Feature Film nod with across-...

I f you were on the internet in 2017, you probably at least heard about Cat Person. The New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian set the internet ablaze, praised for its searing insight into heterosexual power dynamics and the perils of modern dating – and was swiftly optioned to be turned into a film, written by veteran screenwriter Michelle Ashford and directed by Susanna Fogel of The Spy Who Dumped Me Fame. While it’s possible to tease out a feature-length project from a short story (recent shining examples being After Yang and Burning ) it’s often an uphill battle; what might work as a short, sharp shock in prose doesn’t always translate onto screen. In the case of Cat Person, the brevity of the source material is thinly-stretched into a two-hour runtime, padded out with tedious subplots and a new, excruciating ending which undermines the initial point of its creation. Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun are poorly cast as 20-year-old Margot and 33-year-old Robert, who meet at...

T o say he’s 6’4 with the bone structure and physique of a Rodin statue, Alexander Skarsgård plays a loser exceptionally well. We’ve seen glimpses of this talent in The Kingdom Exodus and The Diary of a Teenage Girl , but it’s more common to see him play the role of, say, a vengeful Viking princeling , or a hot brooding scientist , than it is for a filmmaker to utilise his uncanny ability to subvert stereotypes and amp up the pathos. Brandon Cronenberg is perhaps like his father in that regard, who turned handsome devils James Spader and Viggo Mortensen into snarling strangelings. It’s difficult to avoid comparing Sr. and Jr. full-stop, given that they both make full-tilt body horror that plums the depths of human depravity. Yet where David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future was a twisted, darkly comic look at ‘surgery as the new sex’, Brandon Cronenberg’s third feature takes a more nihilistic line: death is the new life. Compare father and son all you like, but Brandon has more th...