Drama
The Lost Daughter (15)
Review: In an early scene from actor Maggie Gyllenhaal’s magnificent directorial debut, a scholar (Olivia Colman) shocks an expectant first-time mother by confiding “Children are a crushing responsibility”. Those words set the discomfiting and melancholic tone of The Lost Daughter, an exquisitely observed study of parenthood and self-preservation based on Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s 2006 book.
Drawing on her experience in front of the camera, Gyllenhaal coaxes a powerhouse central performance from Oscar winner Colman as an emotionally volatile woman of learning, who by her own anguished admission is “an unnatural mother”. The character’s mood swings, sparked by innocuous questions about her grown-up daughters, are deftly navigated by Colman, keeping us at arm’s length from a protagonist who never fully lowers her emotional guard and always seems to be hiding something from a world that barely notices her.
Flashbacks to salad days when her younger incarnation (Jessie Buckley) coolly contemplates abandoning her girls and marriage for an affair with a charismatic professor (Peter Sarsgaard) is a stern test of the actress’s ability to walk a tightrope between spiky selfishness and tearful desperation. Gyllenhaal’s lean script upends expectations, notably in a tense final act when the few chickens that come home to roost risk having their necks snapped.
Forty-something language professor Leda Caruso (Colman) rents a cottage for a month in a small fishing town in Greece. Property manager Lyle (Ed Harris) regrets offering to carry her suitcase filled with books before he leaves Leda to her own devices and painful reminiscences of her two daughters, Martha (Ellie Blake) and Bianca (Robyn Elwell), and husband Joe (Jack Farthing). On the local beach, Leda clashes with menacing matriarch Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk) and her husband Vassili (Panos Koronis) by refusing to move her sun lounger to accommodate the couple’s disruptively rowdy clan. “Don’t do things like that,” beach attendant Will (Paul Mescal) advises Leda. “They’re bad people.”
Unperturbed, Leda is drawn to Callie’s sister-in-law Nina (Dakota Johnson), who is visibly struggling to raise a three-year-old daughter, Elena (Athena Martin), without interference from Callie. An unspoken bond is forged when Elena goes missing and Leda stumbles upon the toddler playing in the undergrowth and returns the child to a deeply grateful and shocked Nina.
Shot on location on the picturesque Greek island of Spetses, The Lost Daughter builds tension gradually as Leda unravels psychologically before our eyes and the consequences of her actions ripple across the coastal community. Colman and Buckley are mesmerising as two incarnations of a troubled heroine, who is crippled by the guilt of having to choose between family and career. Both can be spitefully savage and Gyllenhaal doesn’t flinch from showing open wounds when their words cut deep and to the bone.
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Action
Spider-Man: No Way Home (12A)
Review: According to whip smart Midtown School of Science and Technology student Michelle Jones aka MJ (Zendaya), inflicting the minimum self-harm as you ride the bucking bronco of life can be distilled into one affirmation: if you expect disappointment, you will never be disappointed. After all the feverish online speculation and hype, fans braced for disappointment from Tom Holland’s third tour of duty as the web-slinging superhero are going to be disappointed because Spider-Man: No Way Home is a thrillingly wild ride that should leave every face mask in the cinema sodden with freshly spilt tears.
Returning screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers graduate with honours by striking a whoop-inducing balance between spectacular action sequences and gut-wrenching tragedy that proves in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, history repeats through a glass darkly. Director Jon Watts has been safely installed behind the camera since Holland first swung into solo action in Spider-Man: Homecoming after his big reveal as an ally of Tony Stark in Captain America: Civil War. The Colorado-born filmmaker sets pulses racing from the vertiginous opening scene of Spider-Man (Holland) and MJ swinging through the streets and subways of New York after Peter is exposed to the world as the boy behind the red mask.
A breathless chase between the eponymous hero and Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) through the Archimedean spirals of a Mirror Dimension that recalls the folding cityscapes of Christopher Nolan’s Inception is another adrenaline rush, and a showdown at the Statue of Liberty fully flexes the digital effects team’s abilities to render brutal combat in mid-air and on tumbling scaffolding. Plot twists are plentiful and none will be distilled here for fear of summoning dark forces from the multiverse. However, your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man would strongly urge you to stay seated until the very end of the credits.
Alliteration-loving Daily Bugle hack J Jonah Jameson (JK Simmons), who makes mischief with his TV broadcasts claiming that Spider-Man murdered Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) in cold blood, would gleefully report that Peter Parker picks a peck of particularly pressing personal problems in this third chapter. The media swarms when Peter is exposed as Spider-Man and he tries (unsuccessfully) to ride out the storm with Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and Tony Shark’s former chauffeur Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau).
When the people he loves are penalised for associating with him, Peter entreats master of mystic arts Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to cast a spell with ancient runes in the Sanctum Sanctorum to make the world forget his secret identity. The incantation is botched and fissures in the multiverse allow five of Spider-Man’s most fearsome adversaries – Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), Electro (Jamie Foxx), Lizard (Rhys Ifans) and Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) – to converge on this refraction of New York City.
Spider-Man: No Way Home puts the characters – and in turn us – through the emotional wringer to underline the great responsibility that comes with great power. Holland delivers those sucker punches with aplomb as his web slinger stands on the precipice of noble yet tumultuous manhood. Strong supporting performances across the multiverse serve both fans and the narrative. McKenna and Sommers’ script is playfully self-referential, swinging towards an uncertain future that rests in the black claw of a third Venom film.
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Drama
The Tender Bar (15)
Review: Based on the best-selling memoir of JR Moehringer, The Tender Bar is a sweet, engaging but dramatically thin coming-of-age drama seen through the rose-tinted spectacles of a fatherless boy from humble yet hearty beginnings in 1960s Long Island. Director George Clooney makes light work of entertaining, lightweight material, adapted for the screen by William Monahan, who won an Oscar for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. The only wise guys on screen here are boisterous patrons of a bar managed by the boy’s uncle – a surrogate father figure, who warmly dispenses sobering truths in between lessons on five-card stud. “Don’t try to play sports and don’t think your father is going to save you,” he cheerfully counsels his nephew.
Ben Affleck is handsomely cast as the straight-shooting avuncular sage and savours the film’s showiest role as JR’s profanity-spewing cheerleader and protector. On-screen chemistry with Daniel Ranieri and Tye Sheridan, who play JR at different ages, is warm and cosy, complemented by a colourful supporting turn from Christopher Lloyd as a slovenly grandfather, who scrubs up well and turns on the charm when required. It’s an apt analogy for Clooney’s film, which knows which emotional buttons to gently push to sustain an air of wistful reflection.
JR is abandoned by his disc jockey father, aka The Voice (Max Martini), at an early age. The curious youngster grows up in Manhasset, Long Island, surrounded by his determined mother Dorothy (Lily Rabe), grandparents (Lloyd, Sondra James) and warm-hearted uncle Charlie (Affleck), who manages The Dickens. The pub is a focal point for community life and Charlie proffers words of wisdom from behind the bar, such as when JR is deliberating which subjects to take at Yale to realise his mother’s dream of him becoming a lawyer. “Always take philosophy. You always do well in that because there are no right answers,” pontificates Charlie.
When JR reaches the halls of residence as a Yale scholarship student, he faces snobbery because of his background, most notably when he spends a chilly Christmas in Connecticut with his girlfriend Sidney (Briana Middleton) and her well-to-do parents. “My mother wants me to be a lawyer,” JR politely explains to his hosts over breakfast. “She sounds like a very intelligent woman, if a trifle optimistic,” coldly retorts Sidney’s mother (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) with a withering stare that could curdle every egg on the morning room table.
The Tender Bar doesn’t raise the bar on nostalgic portraits of tainted childhood innocence. Clooney’s picture firmly hits emotional beats in that sweet spot where gentle humour intersects with JR’s fitful self-awakening. Ranieri and Sheridan exude natural liability as they clamber over obstacles in JR’s path, with occasional bunk-ups from Affleck, who carries the film for prolonged periods.
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