Film Review of the Week


Drama

A Complete Unknown (15)




Review: The tantalising air of mystery that once shrouded celebrities and made them untouchable has almost entirely evaporated thanks to voracious tabloid journalism and intrusive 24-hour social media. Eighty-four years young in 2025, singer-songwriter, painter and poet Bob Dylan remains a perplexing puzzle of his own design. As the title of director James Mangold’s handsomely composed biographical drama intimates, A Complete Unknown salutes an enigma without completely exposing the multi-faceted man behind the myth.

As depicted by Mangold and co-writer Jay Cocks, Dylan ruthlessly pursues his own agenda at the expense of personal relationships and is succinctly described as “a mysterious minstrel” by his first girlfriend because he shares nothing of substance with her. Another partner angrily throws him out of a hotel room because he only covets her company as inspiration for a new song.

Timothee Chalamet is scintillating as Dylan, singing live and playing various instruments to embody a roughly hewn creative genius, who bristles at the trappings of fame and courts deafening boos at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by daring to perform with a band playing electric guitars. He devours every frame, trashing friendships with those who aid his ascent, including Edward Norton’s awestruck mentor. As unlikable as Dylan becomes – girlfriends call him some choice names – Chalamet’s virtuoso dive into the dark waters of an unapologetic rabble rouser compels us to hold our breath too.

Nineteen-year-old Bob Dylan (Chalamet) arrives in wintry 1961 New York to visit his idol, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), in self-imposed convalescence with Huntington’s disease at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital. “I want to meet Woody. Maybe catch a spark,” Bob explains to Pete Seeger (Norton), who is also visiting the musician. An impromptu acoustic performance of a song that Bob has written for Woody propels his star into the ascendancy.

Pete invites Bob to stay with his wife Toshi (Eriko Hatsune) and their children until the prodigy finds his footing. An open mic at Gerdes Folk City in Manhattan’s West Village introduces Bob to singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), seeding a turbulent romance that repeatedly undermines his relationship with girlfriend Sylvie (Elle Fanning). Dylan leverages his newfound celebrity to spotlight sociopolitical themes in his music and he takes to heart the words of fellow firebrand Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook): “Make some noise, BD. Track some mud on the carpet.”

A Complete Unknown politely tracks mud over the 1960s folk scene in which Dylan operates as a poster child and an agitator. Chalamet’s transformative, idiosyncratic performance harmonises beautifully with Fanning and Barbato as the young women frustrated by his aloofness and disregard of their needs. Early in the film, Pete counsels Bob: “A good song can get the job done without any frills.” Mangold’s picture plays a tune of artful simplicity.



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Action

William Tell (15)




Review: Early 14th-century Swiss folk hero Wilhelm Tell has been repeatedly memorialised on the page and stage most notably in Friedrich Schiller’s play and Rossini’s subsequent opera Guillaume Tell, both of which fixate on the title character being forced to shoot an apple off his son’s head using a crossbow. Writer-director Nick Hamm’s sweeping film version opens in 1307 with the striking image of a freshly plucked apple trembling atop the head of young Walter Tell (Tobias Jowett) as his marksman father, William (Claes Bang), prepares to shoot the fruit clean off the boy’s noggin from 100 yards.

Failure or refusal to fire will render the title character childless, success will spare the lives of the close-knit Tell clan at the hands of bloodthirsty Austrian interlopers. Before the predestined miracle shot, Hamm’s script rewinds three days to trace tragic events that preface this demonstration of aerodynamic excellence. For the next two hours, we gallop between an array of characters whose fortunes collide on the battlefields of Switzerland, repelling soldiers loyal to Sir Ben Kingsley’s elaborately eye-patched Austrian tyrant.

Bang’s war-weary and dour embodiment of the title character is persistently at odds with the rollicking, old-fashioned yarn that Hamm and his creative team clearly aspire to make. While horseback riders charge into briskly choreographed battle sequences and Connor Swindells’ lip-smackingly boo-hiss antagonist sinks his teeth into every inch of scenery, Bang solemnly professes resilience (“We learn our lessons in failure”). The disconnect between the stoic and gloomy title character and other facets of this mud-spattered action adventure is distracting.

In flashback, we witness King Albrecht (Kingsley) dispatch sadistic Viceroy Gessler (Swindells) to extinguish pockets of rebellion in Switzerland, intimating that a potential union with his spirited niece, Princess Bertha (Ellie Bamber), may be the reward for success. She is nauseated by the prospect of sharing a marital bed with a chauvinistic brute. Anti-war hero William (Bang) proves a persistent thorn in the side of Gessler and the Austrian invaders.

Tell protects a peasant, Baumgarten (Sam Keeley), from swift justice for murder and joins his wife Suna (Golshifteh Farahani) and son Walter (Jowett) in the fierce rebellion led by good friend Stauffacher (Rafe Spall), holy man Furst (Amar Chadha-Patel) and Bertha’s secret Swiss paramour, Prince Rudenz (Jonah Hauer-King).

William Tell is an impressively staged throwback to gung-ho historical romps of yore, punctuated by protracted battle sequences accomplished using practical and digital effects. Bang’s sombre freedom fighter is a square peg forcefully hammered into the round hole of Hamm’s expansive vision, miraculously rousing the downtrodden masses into a chest-beating uproar of steely defiance. Swindells’ lascivious, snarling villainy is far more compelling. By the blood-soaked final stretch, I was rooting with every fibre for his spectacular downfall rather than William’s hard-fought victory.



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Horror

Wolf Man (15)




Review: Parents on two and four legs are hard-wired to protect their young. Fiercely, ferociously, selflessly, to the death. Leigh Whannell, director of The Invisible Man, explores the terrifying lengths one father will go to protect his young daughter from toxic masculinity and generational cycles of trauma in a contemporary reimagining of werewolf folklore, co-written by the filmmaker and Corbett Tuck. Wolf Man melds the full moon metamorphosis of An American Werewolf In London with the squelchy body horror of The Fly, slowly encasing lead actor Christopher Abbott in prosthetics and practical creature effects to portray an abomination of nature who retains flecks of his humanity beneath a mangy pelt. Co-star Julia Garner’s work-oriented mother feels less well defined.

In a neat stylistic move, cinematographer Stefan Duscio shoots key sequences through the eyes of the lycanthropic lead character, who possesses night vision and can see his prey in the dark as petrified phantoms with eerie, glowing eyes. Gliding back and forth between this haunting, otherworldly perspective and the conventional point of view of human prey is strikingly effective and mercilessly cranks up tension under a cloak of darkness.

San Francisco-based writer Blake (Abbott) receives a declaration of presumed death for his missing huntsman father (Sam Jaeger) along with a set of keys to his childhood home nestled deep in the woods of Oregon. His marriage to journalist wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) is under intense strain and Blake tentatively suggests some quality time in the wilderness with their young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) might help the couple focus on each other without unhelpful distractions. The fractured family travels north to Oregon in a moving van and approaches the vacant house at night, following directions from a kind neighbour (Benedict Hardie).

A strange bipedal creature, believed to be a missing hiker from 1995 who has gone feral with an acute case of hills fever, diverts the van off the road and subsequently attacks Blake, Charlotte and Ginger. The terrified trio sprint to safety and barricade themselves inside the vacant home as the beast circles the residence. Blake promises Ginger they will leave as soon as daylight comes but the injured father’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and Charlotte is compelled to make split-second decisions to protect herself and her daughter.

Wolf Man is a solidly entertaining but thoroughly predictable survival thriller. One suspenseful sequence is heavily indebted to Jurassic Park, trading a voracious velociraptor for a hirsute but equally hangry adversary. As depicted on screen, it’s hard to see what drew Blake and Charlotte to each other or why we should root for them to save their relationship. Nevertheless, heavy-handed screenwriting plucks a heartstring to engineer a pleasantly emotional resolution.



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