Romance
Bones And All (18)
Review: Love is thicker than blood for director Luca Guadagnino, who smears and spurts viscous body fluids over wood floors and white tiled bathrooms in his curiously poetic and moving romance. Adapted by screenwriter David Kajganich from Camille DeAngelis’s award-winning novel, Bones And All reunites the Oscar-nominated Italian filmmaker with his Call Me By Your Name muse Timothee Chalamet for a melancholic and murderous road movie in the vein of Badlands. The stomach-churning twist here is the doomed fugitives are fine young cannibals, or “eaters”, outcasts at the mercy of carnivorous desires, who can temporarily sate those urges with the taste of freshly torn human flesh and viscera.
Guadagnino eases us in gently with a close-up of teeth sinking into the knuckle of a finger. Once Mark Rylance’s menacing predator slinks out of the shadows, the use of horrific special make-up effects becomes more pronounced in unsettling scenes that recall the frenzied feasting of a zombie apocalypse. In the midst of carnage, lead actress Taylor Russell delivers a gut-wrenching performance as an afflicted teenager, who yearns for tenderness and meaningful human connections but cannot trust herself around other people. She catalyses smouldering screen chemistry with Chalamet and visibly sheds real tears in intimate scenes of regret and self-reflection.
Introverted 18-year-old Maren Yearly (Russell) first displayed cannibalistic tendencies at the age of three, fatally injuring a babysitter. Every night with her consent, father Frank (Andre Holland) locks Maren in her bedroom for his own protection but she yearns to belong and sneaks out after dark to attend a sleepover. The mood of giggling sisterly solidarity sours when Maren chews off a friend’s freshly lacquered digit, necessitating another change of location and identities. Faced with life on the run, Frank reluctantly abandons his daughter, leaving her an envelope of cash, her birth certificate and a cassette tape confessional.
Maren decides to track down her biological mother (Chloe Sevigny) in Minnesota to better understand her compulsion. On the road, she encounters similarly afflicted souls such as Sully (Rylance), who teaches her to appreciate the metallic, tangy scent of fresh prey, creepy rednecks Jake (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Brad (David Gordon Green), and alluring drifter Lee (Chalamet). “I don’t want to hurt anybody,” she meekly professes. “Famous last words,” snorts Lee.
Bones And All confidently walks a tightrope between aching beauty and brutality, a high-wire act impeccably photographed by cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan that demands a cast-iron constitution. I repeatedly winced in the dark. When Russell and Chalamet aren’t ripping our hearts, they are breaking them, trapped in the moral maze of Kajganich’s script. Running time is excessive – Guadagnino’s road trip could happily lose some narrative detours – but you can’t hurry fraught, young love.
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Comedy
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (12A)
Review: In Agatha Christie’s 1929 short story The Man In The Mist, detective Tommy Beresford astutely observes, “Very few of us are what we seem to be”. Writer-director Rian Johnson heeds those words in his deliciously gnarly and deceptive whodunnit sequel, deftly engineering more than one gasp-inducing twist as his Southern detective Benoit Blanc trades Massachusetts familial strife for avarice and betrayal on a sun-kissed Greek island. The original Knives Out was a blast, a tongue-in-cheek country house murder mystery that both honoured and distorted genre tropes with a starry A-list cast portraying the rogues’ gallery of shadowy suspects.
Glass Onion is an ingenious, self-contained puzzle, which is both funnier and sneakier than its predecessor (and 10 minutes longer) and explicitly references Christie’s most popular novels in its clinical dramatic set-up and skilful sleights of hand. The script is as tight as the dashing blue cravat knotted around Daniel Craig’s neck, returning to the fray as the quixotic sleuth who randomly splutters Halle Berry’s name when a splash of a hot sauce made by actor Jeremy Renner stages an aggressive assault on his taste buds. Celebrity name drops and cameos, including the final screen appearance of Dame Angela Lansbury, underline the playful spirit of Johnson’s elaborately choreographed dance of death. The identity of Blanc’s live-in lover is amusingly reduced to a glorious throwaway gag in flashback.
Eccentric billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton), co-founder of tech giant Alpha, sends ornate puzzle boxes as invitations to a murder mystery-themed party on his private island getaway. Recipients include Connecticut governor Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), Alpha scientist Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr), Miles’ former business partner Andi Brand (Janelle Monae), social media star Duke Cody (Dave Bautista), politically incorrect fashion designer Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson) and Benoit Blanc (Craig). Duke arrives with girlfriend Whiskey (Madelyn Cline) in tow while Birdie is shadowed by her exasperated personal assistant Peg (Jessica Henwick).
At dinner on the first night, Miles reveals that he will play the murder victim and cryptic clues hidden around his Aegean paradise can be pieced together to deduce his killer. The first person to solve the dastardly crime wins. When the sound of a real gunshot reverberates across the island, Blanc is perfectly positioned to peel back layers of deceit and expose at least one blackened heart.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery goes down as sweetly as the hard kombucha (fermented by Jared Leto), which everyone drinks on Miles’s retreat. Craig and co-stars are clearly having a blast – Norton, in particular, relishes his self-congratulatory corporate titan, who couldn’t pour water out of a wellington boot with instructions on the heel. Johnson flatters and deceives, making mirth from murderous intentions with grand theatrical flourishes. The knives are out and they cut sweetly to the funny bone.
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Musical
Roald Dahl's Matilda The Musical (PG)
Review: In 2010, director Matthew Warchus scored top grades for his euphoric staging of Matilda The Musical in Stratford-upon-Avon as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Christmas season. The show transferred to London’s West End the following year and continues to send terrific tykes to the Chokey. Warchus reunites with composer and lyricist Tim Minchin and scriptwriter Dennis Kelly for a swashboggling, phizz-whizzing screen adaptation that retains the acidic tang of Roald Dahl’s beloved 1988 children’s novel and elegantly expresses the loss and reclamation of childhood innocence in barn-storming song and dance numbers choreographed with breathless abandon by Ellen Kane.
Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical trims 20 minutes from the stage production’s lesson plan by expelling Matilda’s dim-witted older brother, Mrs Wormwood’s flamboyant ballroom dance partner Rudolpho and a few songs to maintain a vice-like grip on attention spans. Warchus savours the opportunity to expand his playbox from stage to big screen. Minchin’s whistle-stop tour of the alphabet in School Song (“You will soon C/There’s no escaping trage-D”) is no longer confined to Rob Howell’s Olivier and Tony Award-winning set and gallivants energetically through classrooms and hallways.
The barn-storming anthem Revolting Children expands its deafening chorus to the entire student population of Crunchem Hall led by Charlie Hodson-Prior’s chocolate cake-guzzling Bruce Bogtrotter. Bigger and shinier isn’t always better. The empowering When I Grow Up, memorably sung on stage by daydreaming pupils on soaring playground swings, loses some of its lump-in-the-throat emotional wallop when digital trickery allows pint-sized cast to ride a motorcycle or take to the skies in an acrobatic fast-jet. Sometimes, a musical should reject the need for speed.
Bookish wunderkind Matilda (Alisha Weir) has the misfortune to be raised by garish used car salesman Mr Wormwood (Stephen Graham) and his monstrous wife (Andrea Riseborough). The precocious youngster escapes into fantastical worlds on the shelves of a mobile library run by Mrs Phelps (Sindhu Vee). Matilda harnesses dormant telekinetic powers when she enrols at Crunchem Hall under hulking headmistress Agatha Trunchbull (Emma Thompson), a former world champion athlete who performs an exemplary hammer throw over the school gates using one unfortunate girl’s pigtails. Thankfully, caring teacher Miss Honey (Lashana Lynch) recognises Matilda’s genius and encourages her gifted ward to soar higher than the unfortunate and airborne Amanda Thripp.
Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical confidently combines sweet, salty and sour flavours, juxtaposing the cuteness and steely determination of Weir’s spirited heroine with the comic grotesquerie of Thompson’s tyrant. Warchus overloads our senses in exuberant musical set-pieces, maintaining a rip-roaring pace until the film’s new song Still Holding My Hand allows a curtain to gently fall over quietly contented characters. Aristotle spoke the truth: the roots of education are bitter but the fruit is sweet. Warchus’s picture is a peach.
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Thriller
She Said (15)
Review: On February 24, 2020, a New York jury of seven men and five women found Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein guilty of a criminal sexual act in the first degree and third-degree rape. He was subsequently sentenced to 23 years in prison and has recently been granted the chance to appeal his conviction. The road to the court began publicly on October 5, 2017, when New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published a story entitled Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades. The expose prompted more women to come forward and added fuel to the flames of the “me too” movement.
Directed by Maria Schrader, She Said powerfully dramatises the newspaper’s far-reaching investigation into Weinstein and the psychological toll on the journalists responsible for gathering testimonies and documentation. In one shocking scene, Twohey receives an anonymous phone call from a man who says he is going to rape and murder her then dump her body in the Hudson River. Screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s methodical and largely chronological approach recalls 2016 Oscar winner Spotlight, neatly distilling events with occasional cutaways to Kantor and Twohey’s home life.
Following the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the White House, New York Times investigations editor Rebecca Corbett (Patricia Clarkson) encourages her team to ask uncomfortable questions about the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in the workplace. “Interrogate the whole system,” she firmly suggests. Writer Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) picks up the scent of impropriety in Hollywood. She elicits advice and help from fellow NYT writer Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan), who had fiery exchanges with the Trump camp during the election, and the two women meticulously shape a story about Weinstein under the guidance of Corbett and unflappable executive editor Dean Baquet (Andre Braugher). Actresses Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow share stories about Weinstein but neither is willing to go on the record.
“People have tried to write this story before. He kills it every time,” despairs former company assistant Zelda Perkins (Samantha Morton), who believes the article is much bigger than one man. “This is about the system protecting abusers,” she adds. Another former assistant Laura Madden (Jennifer Ehle), who is battling breast cancer, bravely recalls her ordeal. “It was like he took my voice that day, just when I was about to start finding it,” she confides. Kantor and Twohey give Madden a voice in their article.
She Said underlines the power of investigative journalism to spark vociferous debate and catalyse lasting change. Kazan and Mulligan both deliver impassioned performances but the words of Weinstein’s on-screen accusers are the gut punches. We feel them long after the end credits roll.
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Animation
Strange World (PG)
Review: There are many strange and wondrous sights in the world imagined by Don Hall’s rollicking adventure, co-directed by screenwriter Qui Nguyen. Luminous pink terror-dactyls soar over lizard-shaped inflatable clouds while lolloping transportasauruses shed healing orange orbs to counteract damage inflicted by tentacled beasts called reapers. Perhaps the strangest of them all is that it has taken almost 100 years since Walt and Roy Disney co-founded their studio for an openly gay character to be at the emotional heart of a feature-length animation. It’s a long overdue, small step forward for diversity and LGBTQ+ representation in mainstream family-oriented media, treating a boy’s sweet and goofy crush on a male classmate with the same humour and sensitivity as any other adolescent romance, as it should be.
Love is many-splendored, especially in animation, a medium that invites us to swoon at the courtships of a bookworm and a beast, a mermaid and a prince, two lonely robots on 22nd-century Earth and a princess and a frog. Strange World harnesses its warmth and power from relatable family dynamics and a spirited odyssey that splices together an original story with strands of creative DNA from Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, Fantastic Voyage and Jurassic Park. Tear ducts get a light workout compared to recent Disney offerings such as Encanto but action and comedy trade backslaps throughout in a similar fashion to Hall and Nguyen’s previous collaboration, Raya And The Last Dragon.
Searcher Clade (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a 40-year-old farmer in the kingdom of Avalonia, who tends a sprawling plot to provide for his crop-dusting pilot wife Meridian (Gabrielle Union) and teenage son Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White). There is little excitement in Searcher’s life beyond the harvesting of pardo, an electrically-charged green crop which supplies power to every home and business in the realm. Searcher discovered this miraculously plant-based energy source 25 years ago during an ill-fated expedition with his explorer father Jaeger (Dennis Quaid), who disappeared attempting to scale the ring of snow-capped peaks that encircle Avalonia.
Out of the blue, the Clades receive a visit from Callisto Mal (Lucy Liu), the leader of Avalonia. She desperately needs Searcher’s expertise to avert ecological disaster. Meridian, Ethan and the family’s three-legged dog Legend join Searcher on a daredevil descent into uncharted territory, where the clan befriends an amorphous blue entity they affectionately christen Splat.
Strange World assuredly navigates three generations of father-son relationships in a futuristic setting that allows animators’ imaginations to run amok. Visuals are ravishing and exquisitely detailed especially the movement of hirsute characters on two and three legs. Nguyen’s script pokes fun at Disney’s corporate model (an Avalonian crew member encounters Splat and giggles, “It’s so cute, I want to merchandise it!”) while addressing serious issues of climate change and sustainability in an easily digestible manner for young audiences.
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