film reviews
Goodbye Christopher Robin review - no escape for a boy and his bear
Markie Robson-Scott

“Isn’t it funny/How a bear likes honey?/Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!/I wonder why he does.” Those immortal words, said by the bear of very little brain in chapter one of Winnie-the-Pooh, don’t sound quite the same after watching a shell-shocked AA Milne (Domhnall Gleeson) react to bees buzzing when out for walk in the Hundred Acre Wood with his son (Will Tilston, making his debut, pictured below). Milne, known as Blue, is traumatised after serving in the battle of the Somme and various triggers – bees, champagne corks, bright lights, popping balloons – create flashbacks. “Bees are good, aren’t they?” says Christopher Robin, known to his parents as Billy Moon. Milne’s mouth twitches.

Directed by Simon Curtis (My Week with Marilyn) with a script by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the film is based loosely on fact. It’s frightfully full of clichéd stiff upper lips – “We don’t blub in this house,” declares Blue’s glamorous wife Daphne (a one-dimensional Margot Robbie) – and wry, suppressed smiles. And dimples: Christopher Robin’s are wearyingly prominent, along with his girlie haircut and clothes. “More smocks?” sighs the indispensable nanny (an impressive Kelly Macdonald) when Daphne hands her a to-do list before she swans off to London to check out the wallpaper collection at Whiteley’s. All too, too English for words (though accents do slip a bit, which is partly why Macdonald’s natural Scottishness is such a relief), and the East Sussex scenery looks enchanting.

Goodbye Christopher RobinMilne is a successful playwright, screenwriter and novelist but PTSD makes him long for peace and quiet in the countryside, where he plans to write the definitive denunciation of war. Daphne’s not keen, but they move from Chelsea to Cotchford Farm, a gorgeous 16th century house near Ashdown Forest (Brian Jones bought the house in the Sixties and drowned in its pool). But the PTSD isn’t so easy to escape. “You’re a writer. Write,” commands Daphne when Blue’s away from his desk again. “I had a baby to cheer you up. Nothing’s enough for you.”

Writer's block persists until the curse of Winnie-the-Pooh is cast when both Nanny, aka Nou, and Daphne are away. Blue is forced to spend time with his neglected son, making inedible porridge and inventing, somewhat stiltedly, stories about Tigger, Piglet, Eeyore and Winnie the bear – the Pooh bit comes later, when Milne and his illustrator pal EH Shepard, who is also suffering from PTSD after Passchendaele, decide that it’s satisfyingly “inexplicable” as a name (one of the more interesting revelations in the film).

Success is rapid after Vespers (“Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares!/Christopher Robin is saying his prayers”) is published in Vanity Fair (Daphne’s doing) and before we know it, the Milnes are on publicity tours in America and Winnie-the-Pooh is a sell-out. Billy Moon is roped in to do endless interviews (Phoebe Waller-Bridge plays a persistent journo) and photoshoots, including, shockingly, one in the bear enclosure at London zoo (end credits show the original photo). He is generally touted around like a show-pony, as Nou puts it before she dares to leave to get married. “Is there anywhere they haven’t heard of Winnie-the-Pooh?” he asks her wistfully. “Perhaps the Highveld,” says Nou, pointing to it on the atlas, and he decides that’s the place for him.

But the next step is an English boarding-school, which is bound to be hell for a long-haired young boy famous for his stuffed animals. Of course that doesn’t occur to his selfish parents. “Hush, hush, nobody cares, Christopher Robin has fallen downstairs,” is the cry from his schoolmates, and your heart does bleed for the child. By the time he’s a miserable, bullied young man (played by a hollow-eyed Alex Lawther, who was a young Alan Turing in The Imitation Game) who's longing for anonymity, the tables have turned. “You sold our hours of happiness,” Billy tells Blue. “Our games were just research.” But in the end, son-father bitterness is unrealistically (and inaccurately) overcome, and you’re left wishing for something more rigourous and less twee.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Goodbye Christopher Robin

Home Again review - Reese Witherspoon romcom is divorced from reality
Matt Wolf

A charming assemblage of performers are left pretty much high and dry by Home Again, an LA-based romcom so determinedly glossy that each frame seems more squeaky-clean and unreal than the next. Intended as a star vehicle for Reese Witherspoon, this debut effort from filmmaker Hallie Meyers-Shyer proves only that the apple can fall reasonably far from the tree.

Whereas her (now-divorced) parents, writer-directors Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, at least allowed shards of wit and emotion into such luscious property porn landmarks as It's Complicated and Something's Gotta Give, Home Again seems to have had all actual life leeched out of it. One bar into the Carole King song that gives the film its title, and is saved for the very end, and you experience in an instant the gutsiness and the gusto that have gone missing from the movie itself. Home AgainWitherspoon plays Alice, a putative interior decorator who also happens to be the daughter of an Oscar-winning director who has since died: hey, Freudian or what? On the outs from marriage to music biz mogul Austen (Michael Sheen), Alice has scooped up their two daughters and decamped from New York back to LA, where she readjusts nicely to life in the family manse, which happens to come with the kind of guest house that practically cries out to have three male 20somethings calling it home.

How convenient, then, that these three aspirational Hollywood musketeers (pictured above) strike up an acquaintance one night with a forlorn Alice at a bar and before long are crashing out at hers, which in turn paves the way for the tallest and most vacuous-seeming of the trio, Harry (Pico Alexander), to find his way into Alice's bed. Yes, there's a 13-year age difference between the two lovebirds, which Meyers-Shyer's script treats with the gravity you might afford a missile launch from North Korea. But Alice has a genial, apparently cooler-than-cool mum (Candice Bergen, looking especially airbrushed) who sees to it that the lads are able to call their Spanish-style digs home. All's well that ends well, or so you might think, until such time as Austen heads westward to see if he can put his relationship with Alice to rights. (Sheen and Witherspoon, pictured below)Home AgainI'm not sure I know too many women of any age who would so readily allow long-term accommodation gratis to three blokes they met on a boozy night out, but then again, it doesn't hurt that the chaps' collective skills extend beyond the carnal to include the sorts of computer and handyman-related talents on which, I well realise, you really can't put a price. Throughout all this, the two young daughters seem blissfully untraumatised as one after another man hoves into view, Meyers-Shyer stretching to breaking point an ancillary plot point as to whether the sweet-seeming writer George (a genuinely appealing Jon Rudnitsky) will make it to the eldest child's self-penned school play on time. (Between this and Big Little Lies, Witherspoon seems to be drawn of late to celluloid ventures involving theatre: is she hinting at wanting to try some stage work herself?) 

One could imagine the same material in more truly complicated, darker hands: I'd love to see what Todd Haynes, say, might have done with the same scenario. As it is, Witherspoon is likeable as ever in the kind of role that once upon a time would have gone the way of Cameron Diaz, and there's a genuinely hilarious Hamilton joke (as in the musical) that doubtless lands better Stateside than here, at least so far. But while everyone acknowledges that it's not really in the remit of such films to peer too long and hard at the world beyond its privileged portals, Home Again is an especially telling study in insularity: a film steeped in the film world but not for an instant engaged with life. 

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Home Again

Zoology review - the tale of a tail
Tom Birchenough

Russia has its own rich traditions of satire and the grotesque, but at first glance we may wonder whether in his new film Zoology Ivan I Tverdovsky, a director who, still to turn 30, certainly belongs to the new generation of that country’s filmmakers, has borrowed a leaf from another master of such forms, Franz Kafka. Not unlike the change experienced by Josef K in the Czech writer’s The Metamorphosis, the heroine of Tverdovsky’s film undergoes a grotesque physical transformation: she grows a tail.

Natasha (Natalya Pavlenkova, luminously vulnerable) is a harried single woman working in a deadbeat job in a provincial zoo at an unnamed small coastal town (if it was filmed in Sochi, Russia’s premier Black Sea resort has never looked dowdier or more autumnal). Her colleagues – all women, presented almost parodically as a cruel company of harpies – humiliate her at work, while her home life, living alone with her mother, is emptily routine (the two women, pictured bottom right). The closest she comes to contact is with the animals in the zoo, but stuck in their cramped cages they’re almost as forlorn as she is.  

To explore such depths of pain is somehow to transcend them 

But there’s something remarkable in Pavlenkova’s features, her ability to turn an emotion almost on a pin: she conveys simultaneously a sense of being utterly run-down and depressed, while at the same time admitting a hint that something better may be around the corner. The appearance of her tail – an ugly, pronouncedly phallic protuberance that hangs from the bottom of her back – is as perversely exciting as it is confusing. She visits the doctor, treated there as if nothing is out of the ordinary: the main thing is to stop it wiggling when she is sent off for X-rays (pictured below). That’s despite the fact that rumours are going around the neighbourhood that there’s a new devilish presence about, distinguished by exactly what Natasha is trying to hide under her clothes.

The only remotely sympathetic person she encounters is a hospital X-ray technician, Petya (Dmitry Groshev). Though he must be two decades or so younger than her, an attachment begins, as he introduces her to his own private excitements. There’s lovely scene in which they use tin trays to slide down a derelict concrete slope that looks like it’s left over from some cosmic programme, as we witness Natasha’s overwhelming fear about doing something new and unfamiliar change into delight. Inspired by that experience, it only takes a new hairstyle and some new clothes to change her completely, turning that haggard face into something youthfully coy.  ZoologyThey have one date in a disco so desolate that it looks left over from Soviet days, which ends badly when the concealed tail flops out on its own accord. Another time they attend a self-help group, but leave in hysterics at its overwhelmingly ponderous atmosphere (the attendees are a cast of those who have lost their way in life, vulnerable to any new psychic trend, as was indeed the case in Russia in the Nineties). In another nicely nuanced scene she visits a fortune-teller, trying to discover whether Petya’s attachment is serious. The answer to that comes in a night-time zoo scene late in the film, which desolately confounds her expectations even as it disorients ours. What way out can there be? Tverdovsky closes his film with an abrupt cut, as brutal as it is sudden.

We are left to guess at the director’s own position. Is Zoology, as its clinically scientific title might suggest, a coldly objective indictment of Russia today, a human landscape in which the desperate individual is left with nowhere to turn? Significantly one of the places to which Natasha looks for comfort first is religion, but the priest rejects her (her mother is a fervent believer too, equally unable to comprehend, let alone accept anything “different” with any degree of sympathy). The state of the Russian Orthodox Church today, as an hierarchic structure more caught up in its own pomp than engaging in any real sense with its flock, is a frequent enough motif in Russian cinema today (it was touched upon in Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Student).

ZoologyExcept in so much as it portrays a society in which the idea of anything like a “national ideology” is bewilderingly irrelevant – ironic, perhaps, that Zoology nevertheless received state funding – Tverdovsky’s film doesn’t engage with politics directly, in the way that Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan did so potently. Rather it leaves the impression that the sickness portrayed is an exclusively human phenomenon (which actually comes closer to what Zvyagintsev treats in his most recent film, this year’s Loveless). Such variations on alienation come up a lot in contemporary, loosely arthouse Russian cinema, often winning international festival acclaim (though not always UK distribution): Zoology took the Karlovy Vary special jury prize this year, and Tverdovsky’s feature debut Corrections Class was also a winner there in 2014.

The question that must surely be asked of such films is: “Does it have any sense of life?” Do we feel anything, even as we register a bleakness of subject and an often sardonic directorial point of view. Tverdovsky is not immune on the latter front, the only hint at counterpoint he offers here coming from the film’s light and limpidly beautiful piano score. But finally any redemption in Zoology comes from the sheer accomplishment of Natalya Pavlenkova’s playing. To explore such depths of pain is, perverse though it may seem, somehow to transcend them.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Zoology

On Body and Soul review - terrible beauty, and beasts
Tom Birchenough

Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi’s On Body and Soul (Testrol es lelekrol) opens on a scene of cold. It’s beautiful, a winter forest landscape, deserted except for two deer: a huge stag and a small doe react to one another in the snow, a tentative interaction of eyes and noses, nothing more. There’s a tenderness to what we see, the vulnerability of the female set against the power of the antlered male, but also a sense of somehow icy withdrawal.

Enyedi is too subtle a director to treat this opening scene as a metaphor for what follows, the human dimension of her film, although its story is indeed of the tentative interactions between a man and a woman. And that sense of cold continues. Our feeling of withdrawal increases as her second scene proceeds: its setting is a slaughterhouse, cattle waiting, penned but not frightened – their eyes, again, enormously expressive. Then they are stunned with shocks of electricity, and the process of dismemberment begins: carcasses reduced to slabs of meat before our eyes, all accomplished mechanically, human involvement limited to the operation of machinery.

You emerge from it, soul scoured, in silence

It’s a remarkable, doubly alienating opening – remote beauty, immediate cruelty. We sense from its abattoir setting that this film is not going to be an optimistic one, our feelings somehow established by its penumbra of mood. One that is particularly East European, perhaps: Enyedi takes us close to desolation in On Body and Soul, although the darkness is not wilful, and it’s leavened by scenes of sparing bleak humour.

Her slaughterhouse protagonists are Endre (Geza Morcsanyi, a non-professional in his first screen role) and Maria (Alexandra Borbely). He is the company’s finance director, overseeing its operation from a professional but benevolent distance; the fact that one of his arms is paralysed somehow emphasises that. She is newly arrived, a quality inspector who grades the meat, a job that involves an exactness of reckoning that almost goes beyond the human.

And although never made specific, Maria is different, uneasy in human interaction and unable to appreciate humour or nuance: her blond beauty isn’t the only thing that recalls The Bridge’s Saga Norén. Maria inhabits a private world in which distinctions are absolute, very different from the one that surrounds her, where they are all too blurred. It’s a society where low-level corruption appears endemic, and may just be the fabric that keeps things together at all (any visit by officialdom to the abattoir invariably ends with a bag of choice cuts pressed into the hands of whoever may be signing off on the forms).

On Body and SoulEnyedi is laconic about all of that, and there’s certainly no playing-for-laughs in her depiction of Maria. But, unlikely though it may seem, comedy is not far away. When a theft is discovered from the slaughterhouse veterinary store – bovine aphrodisiac of all things, why it is there at all a typical story – procedure dictates that a psychiatrist (Réka Tenki, very sassy) be brought in to interview staff. No subject is off-limits for her questioning, from earliest sexual experiences to last night’s dreams.

That ushers in the crucial development of Enyedi’s script, and puts the accompanying forest scenes in context: Endre and Maria, too tentative to express feelings to one another in life, are dreaming the same dreams, existing together in a parallel cervine night world (pictured above). That hackneyed line, “See you in my dreams”, becomes for them literally true.

The second half of On Body and Soul has the director negotiate the impact of that contact. Enyedi’s command of detail is exquisite, and best left to speak for itself. Suffice it to say that it can be both excruciating and curiously mundane. Moods move from the desperately comic – imagine Saga Norén forcing herself to feel anything, no matter whether it’s physical sensation or emotion – to the simply desperate, as we approach those iceberg expanses of desperate loneliness (the film’s closing track, Laura Marling’s “What He Wrote”, rings just right).

Ildiko Enyedi emerged on the cinema scene in 1989 with the hugely ambitious My Twentieth Century, for which she won the Camera d’Or prize for best first feature at Cannes that year. On Body and Soul is the first film she has made this century (she worked earlier this decade on the Hungarian version of HBO’s In Treatment, an experience which seems to have been in every sense therapeutic). On Body and Soul won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale, its mood somehow in tune with the distinctive flavour of that festival. It would be an illusion to expect every viewer to be receptive to this remarkable film, but for those who are it sticks in the mind like a shard of broken glass, a jag of ice. You emerge from it, soul scoured, in silence.    

Overleaf: watch the trailer for On Body and Soul

Borg/McEnroe review - Wimbledon face-off is entertaining if incomplete
Matt Wolf

A spate of tennis-themed films gets off to a vivid if incomplete start with Borg/McEnroe, which recreates the run-up to the Wimbledon Men's Final in 1980 with often-thrilling clarity and (as much as is possible for those who will of course recall the outcome) suspense.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle review - too much of everything
Adam Sweeting

Take one off-the-wall spoof spy thriller that becomes an unexpected hit. Add a bunch of gratuitous guest stars (mostly American). Stretch formula to 140 minutes. Stand clear and wait for the box office stampede.

mother! review - Darren Aronofsky dares, frustrates and bores
Nick Hasted

Breathing through an oxygen mask with a busted diaphragm and rib after shooting a single scene in mother!, Jennifer Lawrence had rarely suffered more for her art. Nor have we.

Victoria and Abdul review - Judi Dench's Queen Victoria retread battles creaky script
Matt Wolf

The charm quickly palls in Victoria and Abdul, a watery sequel of sorts to Mrs Brown that salvages what lustre it can from its octogenarian star, the indefatigable Judi Dench. Illuminating a little-known friendship between Queen Victoria in her waning years and the Indian servant, Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), whom she invited into her inner sanctum, the busy Stephen Frears and his screenwriter Lee Hall could use considerably more of the incisiveness and wit that made Frears's similarly royalty-minded The Queen soar. 

Instead, we get a characteristically deft character portrait from Dench, marked out by an utter lack of vanity, that is compromised by the faintly risible approach of a screenplay that treads with a heavy step indeed.

Is it because the movie has an understandable eye on the overseas market that the Brits on view all wander about saying "top hole" and "bloody hell" at every opportunity, even as Karim is given a sidekick (Adeel Akhtar) whose attempted levity mostly makes one cringe? (At least Akhtar's ever-sceptical Mohammed knows a good mango when he sees one.) Few would dispute the plea for tolerance and acceptance implicit in every frame – a monarch befriending a Muslim: imagine! – but greater rigour all round might have added a spine which Dench alone supplies.Britain's most beloved senior actress became a movie star, of course, on the back of Mrs Brown, which launched an Oscar-friendly film career. This Victoria redux finds the queen older and starchier and in need of the easy warmth and amity proffered by Abdul, a 24-year-old (and married) clerk who in 1887 gets dispatched from Agra to Britain to present Victoria with a newly-minuted mohur, or ceremonial gold coin. 

The two lock eyes at a formal banquet and something is kickstarted deep within the heavily cloaked royal, who is given lines like "we're all prisoners, Mr Karim", lest we fail to appreciate that presiding over an empire isn't necessarily great fun. So while her family and retinue bitch and moan about how this isn't the done thing (Olivia Williams's Baroness Churchill dismisses Abdul as "the brown John Brown"), Victoria makes of Abdul her munshi, or secretary-cum-teacher. Before you know it, the two are walking arm-in-arm and old Vic is proving a dab hand at Urdu, leaving her son and heir, Bertie (Eddie Izzard, pictured above), to furrow his brow with such intensity that you wonder whether Izzard's face might seize up altogether. 

One senses beneath it all the rebuke to Brexit-era Britain that courses through the depiction here of high society at its most straitened and blinkered, Victoria an expansive-looking visionary engulfed at home by bigots. As anticipated, Dench does brilliantly by her big set piece late-on, in which she defends her sanity while cataloguing the various other qualities and infirmities that she may or may not possess. (Were this a play, the moment would generate spontaneous applause.)Elsewhere, the movie seems determined to be a sort of de facto "This is Your Life" for its star, who gets to revisit not just the queens she has assayed over time, Elizabeth 1 and Cleopatra included, but is given a jolly Room with a View-style jaunt to Florence. While there, she and Abdul encounter Simon Callow, no less, having a high old time as Puccini, and Dame J does her best to trill a phrase or two from Gilbert & Sullivan. 

In casting terms, no one besides Dench gets much of a look-in, the sweet-faced Fazal, a Bollywood star at home, functioning mainly as an enabler for his senior colleague and not much else. The English supporting cast includes such notables as Michael Gambon, whom it is always nice to see onscreen given that he no longer works on stage, playing a tetchy Prime Minister, not to mention the late and much-missed Tim Pigott-Smith as Henry Ponsonby, the queen's private secretary (the two men pictured above). But the movie such as it is belongs to Dench, who at this point in her storied career deserves better, and when Frears's camera homes in on the queen breathing her last, one is reminded anew of the gifts of an actress whose talent, happily, remains timeless. 

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Victoria and Abdul 

Insyriated review - claustrophobic terror in a Damascus war zone
Tom Birchenough

It doesn’t take long, I think, to work out the associations of the title of Insyriated: we are surely being presented with a variation of “incarceration”, one tinged by the very specific context of the conflict that has ravaged Syria for six years now. But there’s a certain ambiguity at the centre of Belgian director Philippe Van Leeuw’s film about a Damascus family confined in their apartment as civil war goes on around them – they have not been literally locked up by anyone, rather their temporary self-confinement, presided over and enforced by the powerful matriarch Oum Yazan (Hiam Abbass), is their best, perhaps only chance of survival.

It forces us to appreciate a situation tragically played out in the Syrian conflict, although it could equally well apply to any such war zone. Outside is a place of peril, a courtyard where any movement can be caught by snipers. Inside, the curtains are drawn, the door is heavily bolted, and at moments of bombardment – or any other physical encroachment – the only retreat is a corner of the kitchen, away from windows, behind yet more locks (the family hiding-place, pictured below). In between sporadic moments of drama, the challenge is to maintain an illusion, any illusion of normality, simply to carry on living.

Then the violence of the outside world suddenly intrudes 

Though claustrophobia is certainly an element, what Insyriated captures best are the long pauses, the moments of protracted limbo that come between the film’s eruptions of action. Van Leeuw opens his film – and closes it, too – with the image of an old man smoking, complete with a tranquillity that seems almost outside time. In the early morning light Virginie Surdej’s camera pans slowly around the spacious room in which he sits, revealing pictures on the walls and long shelves of books: this is clearly the home of a family from the intelligentsia. In a bedroom, a young couple are discussing their chance of escape, how they can travel to Beirut that night. For their baby child, Halima (Diamand Abou Abboud) knows that it is an opportunity that must be risked, even as her husband Samir admits that leaving his homeland makes him feel, in the most curious way, ashamed.

Then the violence of the outside world suddenly intrudes. On his way to sort out some last things before their departure, Samir sprints across the courtyard, but is caught by a sniper’s bullet; his body thrown behind a burnt-out car, it’s unclear whether he’s alive or dead. Delhani (Juliette Navis), the family maid, witnesses the shooting, and hurries to tell Oum Yazan. Any attempt to retrieve the body impossible during daylight, the latter resolves to keep the news from Halima, a decision that will later create incremental conflict.InsyriatedAs the day starts, the rest of the family – two daughters, Yara and Aliya, and son Yazan – appears and interrelationships become clear. Halima and Samir are actually neighbours: their upstairs apartment damaged, they have been welcomed into this home. Another visitor is Kareem, Yara’s boyfriend, who had unwisely come to visit her and is now unable to return home until the situation outside calms down. The old man is Oum Yazan’s father-in-law Mustafa (Mohsen Abbas); her husband is expected back, but attempts to make contact with him prove fruitless.

The film is carried by the sheer force of Abbass’s performance, the haggard strength of her face revealing an unspoken conviction that life must be kept going somehow, even as it barely conceals the turmoil behind her features. Explosions outside are followed, only moments later, by her insistent phrases of reaction – “Now, some more dusting”, “Lunch is ready” – that highlight the desperate incongruity of the situation. It’s an anxiety that will come close to hysteria when, the sanctum of the apartment breached, the film’s central scene brings the horror of the outside world, in its cruellest sense, into this domestic environment. Surdej’s cinematography helps to raise that sense of tension into something close to terror, while the film’s sound design jolts us back and forth between external and interior spaces, the latter world also defined by Jean-Luc Fafchamps’s minimal score, all piano chords and strings.

The actuality of its subject is bound to make Insyriated powerful, and it leaves a lasting impression, even if, with hindsight, there’s also a certain sense of the formulaic. The only professionals in the cast are Abbass, Abboud and Navis (who is a French actress), the remaining parts played by Syrian refugees in Lebanon, where the film was made. It is nothing less than chilling that the world on screen is so close to their first-hand experience: Insyriated is an urgent film that forces us to confront the desperate human consequences of conflict.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Insyriated

IT review - killer clown is kids' stuff
Nick Hasted

Stephen King’s IT attempted ultimate terror, cutting far deeper than a killer clown. It idealised childhood friendships and their adult honouring even as one of those kids was forced to eat shit by sadistic bullies, and their idyllic small-town of Derry had a stream of child-killing evil running through its sewers.