Julian Barnes’s 2011 novel The Sense of an Ending teased the brains of many a reader with its split time frame and ambiguous conclusion. It was the sort of thing that the interiorised world of fiction can do surpassingly well, and Barnes had handled it skilfully enough to carry off the Man Booker Prize.
film reviews
Jasper Rees
There have been plenty of films glamourising diamond geezers who live on the wrong side of the law. Some of them don’t even star Danny Dyer. In the history of British film, rhyming slang plus dodgy morals equals box office. Perhaps there is even a special source of European funding ring-fenced for low-budget films about cockney gangsters. The true story of the old lags who pulled off the biggest heist in burgling history was always destined to be dramatised. Someone probably tried to option it as soon as the news broke. The result is The Hatton Garden Job, directed by Ronnie Thompson.
A quick story recap. Two years ago four men broke into the underground vault of the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company and made off with diamonds and cash to the value of an estimated £14 million, possibly much more. It wasn’t just the scale of the job. It was also the fact that three of the robbers, who were caught within a month, were pensioners. Only one of them got away, a mysterious figure known only as “Basil” who has never been located let alone charged.
It’s from his fictionalised point of view that the narrative unfolds with generous dollops of knowing voiceover. Played by Matthew Goode with his usual blue-eyed swagger, he emerges from three years in prison fired up by a desire to pull off the big one, and sets about assembling his accomplices, who after statutory reluctance sign up. “Mental?” crows one. “It’s monumental.” In charge is a wheezing old con with a weak bladder called Brian Reader (Larry Lamb). Terry Perkins (David Calder), Danny Jones (Phil Daniels) and sozzled driver Kenny Collins (Clive Russell) make up the party. They set about planning - we are spared the months of meticulous gruntwork it actually required - and in due course alight on the Easter weekend to ill-get their gains. They call the quarry “tom”. “Tomfoolery, jewellery,” explains Goode. “The old timers love their word games.” At least someone does.
Thompson has managed to lure a cast who can relied upon to say the lines and not bump into the furniture, but his script somehow contrives to stumble into every British gangster cliché while syringing the last ounce of life out of every scene. The actors telecommunicate their own overpowering boredom through the lens. They break in to the accompaniment of an amazingly stillborn piece of noodly music on the soundtrack. When they start boring a hole through the wall of the safe deposit chamber, it can be taken as a visual metaphor. It takes almost literally forever. Even the sequence in which they amass their stash of cash and stones is extraordinarily dull. The prize for the most lurid performance goes to Joely Richardson (pictured above) as a Hungarian drug baroness with a cartoon Slavic accent who speaks even more slowly than everyone else. But she can be excused: the script gives her no room for manoeuvre.
It’s not quite a shame. There’s nothing redemptive in the story of some comedy codgers who were crafty enough to pull off the job but not enough to know how to fence their takings or evade capture. Collins even drove back to the scene of the crime in his own car, the plonker. Often in bank raid movies you find yourself rooting for the miscreants. Not here. On his voiceover Goode argues that his kind rob bankers not banks, as if that’s a good thing. From start to finish the whole project is dramatically and ethically bankrupt.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to The Hatton Garden Job
Nick Hasted
Arnie acts! Like “Garbo laughs,” there are some things you learn never to expect, and a credible, committed Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a grief-stricken construction worker is high among them. His role as a melancholy father dealing with his daughter’s impending transformation into a murderous zombie in Maggie (2015) was the first indication of a new direction.
Saskia Baron
The Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro is a chronicle of the pioneering writer and Civil Rights activist James Baldwin. Its director Raoul Peck mirrors the intellectual challenge that Baldwin set his audience: the film demands that you pay close attention and listen to a complex argument backed up visually with diverse social and cultural references.
Matt Wolf
Is there something about the recessive life of Emily Dickinson that defies dramatisation? I'm beginning to think so after A Quiet Passion. The Terence Davies film may attempt a more authentic take on the unrelievedly bleak, and also great, 19th-century American poet than the stage vehicle about her, The Belle of Amherst, now long past its sell-by date. But whether serving a film biography or a solo theatre venture, Dickinson seems somehow to elude aesthetic capture, or maybe it's just that she turns out to be as oblique as the landscape of her most enduring poems.
On the face of it, Dickinson might seem well-matched to Davies, the English writer-director whose penchant for penetrating studies of anguished women (The Deep Blue Sea, Sunset Song) ought to place Cynthia Nixon's performance in a recognisable spectrum, of distant voices and still lives.
Instead, Davies's screenplay is remarkable mostly for an archness and artifice only partially redeemed by several of the performances. To be sure, Nixon is entirely committed, but Jennifer Ehle is just as captivating as Emily's more spirited younger sister Lavinia. There is a grave beauty to the whole that approximates in visual terms to something of the poetry's eloquent formality. Here's just a taste of Dickinson's unyielding language, taken from the end of one of her most celebrated anatomies of trauma: "As freezing persons, recollect the Snow – / First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go – ".
One can imagine the frisson that might have been generated had Dickinson ever been handed over to the likes of Robert Bresson – and a younger Isabelle Huppert might have displayed just the right ascetic severity for the character. As it is, Nixon brings an indrawn intensity to the role of this housebound visionary who is heard at one point commendng poetry as "my solace for the eternity that surrounds us all". Not the sort of person, then, with whom you're likely to nip out for a digestif (or even a Diet Coke). 
Keith Carradine, The stultifying family dynamics find Nixon's ever-determined scribe attempting to hold her own alongside a feckless and uncomprehending brother (Duncan Duff) and a stern-faced father (pictured above, sporting killer sideburns). Only Lavinia seems to have a handle on her sister as both aesthetician and human being. Such filial warmth as exists cannot prevent Emily's retreat from the world, but not before she is seen clinging to grammatical propriety like some lone survivor of a typographic Titanic.
First encountered in school-age solitude (and played by Emma Bell) before Nixon assumes the role, this Dickinson is always the brightest person in the room. That's a major reason why you can't help but feel she would have been unimpressed by the faux-Wildean wordplay of her great friend, Vryling Buffam (Catherine Bailey). In the end, one is drawn primarily to the rigorous beauty of the European locations that stand in for 19th-century rural Massachusetts and to the power of Nixon when she can drop having to act Emily as a person in favour of simply living with her language. At such moments, we're gloriously reminded of that quintessentially Dickinsonian carriage that held "not just Ourselves", so the poem tells us, "but Immortality".
Overleaf: watch the trailer for A Quiet Passion
Tom Birchenough
Chilean director Pablo Larrain has described Neruda as a “false biopic”, and it’s a film that surprises on many levels in its presentation of Pablo Neruda, the great poet who is his country’s best-known cultural figure. It captivates for the scope of its invention, its ludic combination of reality and artifice, poetry and politics, as well as the contradictions of its central character.
Larrain's last film Jackie was also a biopic with a difference, but Neruda goes further in every sense. It’s also something of a departure from the director’s earlier works, such as No and Post Mortem, which were grounded in the very real context of Chile in the Pinochet years, or The Club, which showed how the inheritance of that totalitarian world endured after its actual circumstances had ended. Set in 1948, Neruda works as a prologue to that era: it was then that Chilean president Gabriel González Videla, who had come to power with a leftist agenda, realigned his loyalties away from Communism in a “sell-out to the empire of the North”.
This symbiotic relationship works very much in one direction
As well as his renown as a writer, Pablo Neruda was a Senator from the Communist Party, and his denouncement of Videla for this political change of tack made him an immediate enemy of the authorities. We first encounter him in the corridors of power, specifically an anteroom in the Senate that bizarrely seems to function as a combination of common room, urinal and bar (imbibing is plentiful throughout the film). That presents him as statesman, and though the epithet of “the most important communist in the world” may be an exaggeration, the poet’s international reputation, backed by Europe intellectuals including that other great Pablo, Picasso – who makes cameo appearances – gave him real importance in his world.
The next time we meet him is in a very different conext, at an almost bacchanalian party at the poet’s home, clearly a point of congregation for Chile’s own intelligentsia as well as off-duty public figures. The atmosphere is part fancy-dress fiesta – Neruda costumes himself as Lawrence of Arabia – part cultural salon, presided over by the poet and his wife Delia (Mercedes Morán, pictured below), the Argentine aristocrat whose acceptance of her husband’s philandering was only part of the unwavering support that she gave him. The contrast is highlighted when a Party delegation arrives to warn that he must go into hiding. In the portrayal of Luis Gnecco, an actor with a pedigree in comedy, the poet is a corpulent voluptuary, most unlike more typical revolutionary heroes; although he obviously does not "know what it is to sleep on the floor”, his writings and personality nevertheless inspire real devotion among Chileans.
In a nicely satirical scene, Neruda finds that his connections within the old Chilean aristocracy (which still really runs the country) are of no avail, while his attempt to flee abroad is halted at the border. At which point the film's “wild hunt” sets in. With the poet on the run, his pursuer becomes police inspector Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal, playing with nicely stylised verve), whom we have already encountered in voiceover. The communists may have initially debated whether the poet might be more valuable as a prisoner – we get a glimpse of what his fate in captivity would have been in a desert detention camp under the command of Augusto Pinochet, the nation’s future dictator – but now Party minders will be hurrying him and Delia from one safe house to another. Such furtiveness is alien to Neruda, who can’t resist reappearing at his old haunts, albeit often in disguise.
The trimly moustached Peluchonneau (pictured below) is a creature of fiction in every sense. In his own version he’s the illegitimate son of the founder of the Chilean police force and a prostitute, but actually his identity seems to develop as a product of Neruda's fantasy. The poet certainly seems to be in command of the pursuit, leaving a series of cheap detective stories – one of the writer’s fascinations – behind at each step of the chase (Larrain adds rear projections in Peluchonneau's car scenes, highlighting the detectve tropes). The ultimate indignity he feels is the suspicion that without his target he himself is literally nothing: Neruda may refer to him as “my phantom in uniform”, but it is clear that he is the one writing the script. This symbiotic relationship – “I dream of him, he dreams of me” – works in one direction.
There is rich comedy in the process, as at each stage the hapless Peluchonneau arrives too late, or is defeated by disguises (there's a very funny scene set in a transvestite brothel). His interception of Neruda’s first wife Maria, and attempts to involve her in the process, are brought to a hilariously bathetic conclusion, while his encounter with Delia, no longer following her husband in his escape, provides one of the film's most telling scenes.
The pursuit becomes increasingly frantic, culminating in a dramatic ascent into the snows of the Andean mountains. Those last scenes are beautifully filmed by Larraine’s long-term cinematographer Sergio Armstrong, who also catches the darker period cityscapes of Santiago and the bright colours of Neruda’s festivities – both imagined and not, they have a visual flare that Fellini would surely have relished – with distinction. Federico Jusid contributes a grandiose musical score that feels like a presence in its own right.
“I chased the eagle, but I didn’t know how to fly,” Peluchonneau admits poignantly towards the end. We know from history that Neruda will escape, and flourish in emigration: his pursuer faces the cold end of irrelevance. It's a wry conclusion to a wry film, one which in its playful self-referencing sometimes recalls the work of Peter Greenaway. Larrain may not have set out to "catch" his subject in any predictable way, but his film is certainly imbued with the poet's spirit.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Neruda
David Kettle
The harsh metallic rasp of a cigarette lighter; a glamorous, vulnerable prostitute in distress; a noble lone crime-fighter standing dejected in the rain. All the familiar tropes of noir are present and correct – in fact, almost self-consciously ticked off – in this entertaining thriller from Pete Travis (Dredd, Endgame). But they’re in a jarringly unfamiliar context: this is modern-day, grimy, multi-ethnic west London – located specifically with mentions of Scrubs Lane and Kensal Rise tube station – with its relentless gentrification, luxury housing developments sprouting all around, small-time drug dealing and hints of Islamic radicalism.
Tommy Akhtar (Riz Ahmed) is a small-time private investigator – "I deal in the lies people tell and the truths they don’t," he mutters in one of the film’s sporadic voice-overs. He’s approached by high-class hooker Melody Chase (Cush Jumbo) to investigate the disappearance of her friend and co-worker Natasha, but things take a darker turn when he discovers a dead body in the Paddington Basin Holiday Inn, and he sends his young protégé Avid (Mohammad Ali Amiri) to check out the possible involvement of the dodgy-looking Islamic Youth League.
There’s an awful lot going on, and it sometimes feels like writer Patrick Neate, who adapted the script from his own 2005 novel, has just too many targets in his sights to do them all justice. But, slickly paced by Travis – despite a brief dead patch in the middle – it’s an entertaining, thought-provoking ride nonetheless, and one that maintains its sense of humour (often very self-aware in its subverting of genre cliches) despite its seedy subject matter.
Where the film diverges from genre – and, it has to be said, sometimes strikes a slightly jarring note – is in Tommy’s back story: how a tragic episode from his teenage years infiltrates today’s events, kicked off when he unexpectedly encounters school mate Lovely (an oily James Floyd) at the centre of the film’s property scheme. Travis’s tender flashback sequences do raise the question, however, of how the sensitive, damaged teenage Tommy ended up as a streetwise gumshoe with a mean right hook.
Riz Ahmed is wonderfully watchable, however: smouldering, simmering but vulnerable, too, and with sudden glimpses of steely determination behind his determinedly sullen exterior. Billie Piper (pictured above) seductively slurs her way through her performance as Shelley, Tommy’s former illicit girlfriend now turned high-class hostess, and Cush Jumbo as Melody Chase is fragile but fiery. Felix Wiedemann’s restrained cinematography is a joy – colour-sapped for his grimy London exteriors, but suddenly blinding with lurid hues in the film’s pounding club scenes.
The film’s miraculously happy ending might feel a touch unconvincing, and ultimately pulls back from delivering on some of the intrigue that’s been set up. But City of Tiny Lights is a captivating offering all the same – although one that’s more absorbing in its impeccably delivered atmosphere, rather than truly suspenseful.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for City of Tiny Lights
Markie Robson-Scott
“What if I’ve made a terrible mistake?” Angie (a flirty, engaging Elizabeth Moss) is about to give birth to psychiatrist RD Laing’s baby, and you have to agree that it’s not the wisest plan. She’s confiding in one of the disturbed residents of Kingsley Hall, Laing’s experimental psychiatric community in east London where therapists and patients lived communally, anti-psychotic drugs and ECT were outlawed and LSD (and going to the pub) was part of the cure.
Nick Hasted
Ben Wheatley’s sixth film in a prolific, unpredictable career is a shoot-‘em-up in the most literal sense. Setting a superb international cast led by Brie Larson and Cillian Murphy down in a big, grim warehouse, he lets them blast bits off each other for 70 of Free Fire’s 90 minutes. After Wheatley’s most obviously ambitious film, his J.G.
Tom Birchenough
A decade ago Romanian director Cristian Mungiu took the Palme d’Or at Cannes for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a gruelling abortion drama set in the dying days of the Ceauşescu dictatorship. The cold intensity of that film made it a key work in the remarkable movement that came to be known as the Romanian New Wave, which directed a pitiless eye at the reality of the country as it struggled to throw off the burden of decades of Communism.
Back at Cannes last year with his new film Graduation (Bacalaureat), Mungiu won the Best Director award. Graduation is set in the present day – even if not much has changed in the bleakly monotone world Mungiu depicts, mobile phones excepted – and allows us to guess at the director’s verdict on the intervening period. It’s a far from optimistic prognosis: his experience has made him sad.
To say that there is little new in Mungiu’s world is to highlight its sotto voce tragedy
At least that is the impression we receive from the hero of his film. Romeo Altea (Adrian Titieni) is a middle-aged hospital physician, tired beyond his years, brought down by the everyday business of living. He is in a relationship with a younger woman but struggles to end his unhappy marriage to wife Magda (Lia Bugnar), who looks like a catatonic wraith (Adrian Titieni with Lia Bugnar, pictured below). The only beacon of hope – clearly one Romeo has been tending for years – is their daughter Eliza (Maria Drăguş).
She is the apple of the family eye, and her father is almost over-protective of her. Now on the cusp of independence, Eliza has won a scholarship to study in the UK (Cambridge, no less), which will realise her parents’ dreams about her finding a place in a better world, and leaving the dour reality of her homeland behind forever.
All that remains is for her to get the necessary grades at her school exams, which should be a formality. But cruel circumstance – I’m not sure if in Mungiu’s world that’s exactly the same thing as “fate” – intervenes. The day before, she’s attacked outside school and narrowly avoids being raped. Badly shaken, her right arm in plaster, her future suddenly looks less assured: the shock may cause her to fail the tests. Her father is distraught – he didn’t drop her off in the usual place, and in some way feels partly responsible – and will resort to anything to assure his daughter’s future.
That means resorting to all the ruses of corruption offered by the world in which he lives; given his position as a doctor, they are plentiful. He’s close friends anyway with the police inspector investigating the case, which offers a natural referral to the deputy mayor – he’s in urgent need of an operation – who in turn is owed a favour by the school’s headmaster (so persuading the examiners shouldn't be a problem).
But Altea faces an inexorable choice. By going down that route, relying on such connections (and involving his daughter in the process), he’s negating all the values he has instilled in Eliza. There’s double cruelty in the fact that there is no other way out: the scholarship just can’t be held over, regardless of what has happened. And double irony given that such string-pulling was the natural way in the old, communist order, when you battled the system – it was how the doctor himself escaped military service in his youth, we learn. Now, even without any money changing hands, it’s the kind of corruption that the regime has set out to eradicate (recent street protests in Romania remind us how real such concerns are there). As the immediate ramifications of Eliza’s exams gain wider prominence, even the anti-corruption investigators admit to Altea that he isn’t really their target (they are the first to admit that as a doctor he doesn’t take bribes, or “incentives” as they are referred to at one point).
It’s a deeply forlorn canvas, as if Mungiu, a generation after 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, confirms that his protagonists just can’t escape the rites and habits of the world that formed them. It achieves extra poignancy when Romeo and Magda remember how they returned home – we presume, from abroad – in 1991, the year in which Romania received its new constitution, with a conviction that they could contribute to building a new way of life in their homeland (“we thought we’d move mountains”).
That idealism may have long disappeared, but at least their conviction that something different was available to Eliza elsewhere remained (even if their faith in Britain as such an ideal world seems a tad naïve). That disillusionment, somehow intricately connected to middle age, is compounded by Romeo’s shattering, yet somehow unacknowledged sadness that he must leave his marriage behind. His wife knows all about Sandra (Malina Manovici), the younger woman with whom he has found some new happiness, but has herself chosen to postpone any resolution of that question until after their daughter’s departure.
To say that there is little new in Mungiu’s world is to highlight its sotto voce tragedy. Graduation is his first film with cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru, but the muted colours look familiar, as are the depressing exteriors of a world that is somehow untended (the film’s opening shot shows a dug-up street: we wonder whether Mungiu is preparing to delve deeper into his world, or has already dug its grave). The director adheres to his past credo of using music only when it is actually playing on radio or CD, his chosen register the luminous melancholy of the countertenor repertoire, devastatingly expressive when we encounter it in Handel’s “Ombra mai fù” or Purcell’s “Cold Song” (a Mungiu title, if ever there was one).
And yet… Eliza may yet confound her parents’ expectations (and fears). The final graduation photograph shows a bunch of young people not so different from any other (pictured, above: Eliza, below centre): the director even allows a popular Romanian song to accompany his closing titles. The playing throughout is superb, which speaks for so much in itself: Graduation has a paradoxical poise in its execution that just can’t be entirely groundless. If Mungiu’s tool, like that of his medical hero, is a scalpel, hope remains that the operation may not prove in vain. But what a gruelling journey.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Graduation