★★★★

To weep or not to weep? It’s not so much a question as it is an inevitability in Chloé Zhao’s profoundly moving adaptation of Hamnet. Drawn from the equally affecting novel by Maggie O’Farrell, who takes joint credit for the film’s screenplay with Zhao herself, Hamnet draws woozily on the tragic 1596 death of the only son of William Shakespeare and Anne – here referred to as Agnes – Hathaway. In the sixteenth century, an opening epitaph advises, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable. Hamnet’s supposition has Hamlet a tragedie born of truth. There’s no doubting, at least, the film’s emotional honesty in its exploration of the loss.

Much of this is born, of course, of Zhao’s pitch perfect casting. Paul Mescal is Shakespeare himself, all lust, ambition and sorrow, but serves in support of an extraordinary Jessie Buckley, whose Agnes Hathaway ascends from earthly sprite to potent principal though the course of the film. Communicating the grief of her own maternal loss before we even know it is there – never mind the rollercoaster of motherhood that we do know lies ahead of her – Buckley delivers an Agnes of immediate, instinctive full realisation. It’s no wonder the Bard to be finds himself mesmerised at first sight. We all are.

Will is a tutor as we meet him – ‘teaching Latin to boys who will be nought but sheep farmers’ – at work in a terrifically recreated period Stratford. It is as his wards dully recite and repeat old Roman prose that Shakespeare spies Agnes, dressed in earthy red and at one with the wilderness. It is said locally she is the daughter of a forest witch and there’s no doubting the ethereality of her almost pagan herbalism. Agnes at first rebuffs the advances of Will, framed every bit the Prospero to her Ariel, but there’s thrill in the chase. What follows is a whirlwind romance in the court of nature; tender, naturalistic and unabashedly carnal.

From this woodland dalliance comes the immortal line: ‘the child in her belly, did you put it there?’ Three children follow. The first, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) is born in the forest itself and following the most remarkable of labour scenes. Zhao sits her camera on high in a hawk-eye view, and simply waits and watches. Buckley delivers in every sense of the word. It’s mesmeric and entirely typical of Zhao’s approach, which leans rather literally in Hamnet towards that Shakespearean understanding that ‘all the world’s a stage’. Interior scenes feel framed exactly thus. Outdoors, Zhao’s hand is freer but almost documentarian.

After Susanna, come twins Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), a spirited youngster with dreams of following his father to London and the great playhouse. It is no spoiler to note that these dreams go unrealised. When it comes, the sequence of Hamnet’s passing is as core-cutting as you might fear. Buckley’s raw, guttural scream haunts long into the credits, as does the moment mere scenes prior in which Hamnet crawls into his sister’s plague ridden bed, assuring her that he will trick death into taking him instead. It’s a heavily foreboded tragedy – from the lingering of a dark pit in the forest to Agnes’ vision that only two will stand at her own deathbed – but no less startling for it. The rest is silence.

In truth, Zhao is not always so successful in overcoming a labouring of her point. A Thames-side instance, for example, of Shakespeare self-soliloquising a dark ebb stands out for its inauthenticity. And yet, a finale act that threatens to boil well over the pan never does because, for the most part, all within earn the heightened emotional environment.

T.S.

★★★

It’s not fealty that’s bringing the crowds to Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, a film that often feels less like an Emily Brontë adaptation than organic entity in and of its own right. No, these are bathtub sperm and FOMO fuelled walk ups, attracted to Fennell’s unique brand of zeitgeist chic and conservative baiting. To this end, the film starts strong, with heavy breathing giving way to a memorably erotic hanging. The corpse gets an erection and Vicki Pepperdine plays an aroused nun. Mercy, me. Where Fennell’s Heights will fell students of literature, however, there is ample here for those of film to digest. Much here dazzles.

As vibes-based cinema, Fennell’s film is less tonally detached from Brontë’s original text that purists might have one believe. Certainly, it feels wholly appropriate, given the accusations of moral depravity levelled at Wuthering Heights in 1847, that a contemporary remake might seek to up the ante in pursuit of comparable reception from the modern day viewer. Retained, too, are Brontë’s gothic influences. Gallons of fog are spooled over the Yorkshire moors, upon which much of the action takes place, while fine but deliberate rain is retooled effectively as film grain. Naturally, Fennell cannot help but enhance her own gothic romanticism with an arch excess and eye for the high camp. The approach is as subtle as a brick to the head but delectable nonetheless.

Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper – of Adolescence renown – introduce the young Cathy and Heathcliff, the latter rescued from the streets of Liverpool by the former’s comically barbaric father (an excellent Martin Clunes). Feral wildlings each, the pair grow into one another across the windswept moorlands and are soon inseparable.  So it remains as, years on, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi – each impeccable in their accents – take on the parts. The thrust of all that follows lives and dies on the raw chemistry a petulant Robbie shares with the ruggedly muscular Elordi. Age inconsistency aside, this is pitch perfect casting.

It’s true that Fennell’s script wants for more scenes that outlast a sixty seconds – there can’t be more than a half dozen across the runtime – and the breathing space that such would afford her narrative. This comes to something of a head in a midsection reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby, complete with its Charli XCX penned soundtrack, but matures into a more tortured final third. The emotional register throughout throbs around the throngs of lust and longing, without ever delving so much further into the soul behind it. There’s ample carnal ferocity, and envy to fuel the fires of Hell itself, but not quite the substance required to find the humanity required.

Similar cannot be said of the film’s aesthetic quality, which proves splendid on every level. From the Heights itself, framed within imposing slate rocks, to the cavalcade of fashions afforded Cathy in her Linton era. If her wedding dress offends period norms, its elegant outreach looks no less extraordinary for it, processed as it is across the moss. No opportunity is missed in Wuthering Heights for the absolute melodrama of a potent visual to be thoroughly milked. Perhaps the best is the transition from an overhead shot of a grief stricken Cathy, a mass of blood red chiffon on a chessboard floor, to that of Heathcliff on horseback, framed against a raging umber sky. 

Even without the book’s latter half, and Brontë’s denser plotting therein, Fennell’s film begins to feel long as the finale nears. There’s only so much synthy scoring and rampant adultery anyone can take and Fennell hasn’t a naked Barry Keoghan in her back pocket to take this one across the finish. Instead, a flashback: ‘I’ll love you ’til the day I die, and after’. The extent of your heartbreak will depend on your buy-in to his and whether Fennell’s gorgeous widescreen has breadth enough for the minutiae within it.

T.S. 

★★

Was it the story that drew punters en masse to last year’s It Ends With Us or that story? Justin Baldoni’s emotional excoriation of abuse on screen or Blake Lively’s allegations of the same off it. One suspects the latter, Either way, the serviceable Colleen Hoover adaptation proved so barnstorming a success that more could not help but follow. What it is to have a sizeable back catalogue. Stephen King for a BookTok fandom. Regretting You lands first out of the blocks, from The Fault in Our Stars’ Josh Boone. Lacking the gravitational pull of star feuds, Regretting You must earn its chips entirely on merit. A pity, then, that it is little more than a tepid soap opera unto which soup is ladled from a shallow emotional pool into chasms of implausibility.

As was with Baldoni’s film, Boone’s battles two tones, attempting – failing – to simultaneously punch the gut and tug the heart. Juggled are the fall out of tragedy and betrayal and a multi-generational romcom, woozy amidst an autumn palette. The fit is only marginally less uneasy – It Ends With You balanced domestic violence with Lively launching a new hair care range – but so much more boring. Set aside a plot that relies on imaginative leaps in the logical imagination and what’s left is a script with nothing to say. With a narrative trajectory as obvious as it is uninspired, and emotional engagement contained at banal levels, what’s left? No judgement, no bite, precious little conviction.

Allison Williams is housewife Megan Grant, a woman seemingly defined only by the relationships in her life. She has no job and scarcely exists beyond her delineated domestic setting. Megan is mother to Mckenna Grace’s Clara, wife to Scot Eastwood’s Chris, sister to Willa Fitzgerald’s Jenny and unrequited love to Dave Franco’s Jonah. It’s a dynamic born of seventeen years but never feels grounded in any real sense of lived in experience. A flashback to the late noughties does well to de-age the leads but it’s hard to imagine a world, in this context, that they have actively grown into their later selves. The contrived central deviation of the story does little to help this.

When Chris and Jenny both fall fowl of a car crash, a cavern opens unto Megan’s life, not to mention those of Clara, Jonah and the baby the latter left behind. The question no one was thinking, but the film asks us to, is why the pair were actually in the car together at the same time. It’s not a mystery we are long asked to dwell upon, nor does the reveal itself especially surprise or birth a compelling new direction for the film. 

More dynamic would be Clara’s burgeoning relationship with the coolest kid in school, Miller Adams, who is played by How to Train Your Dragon’s Mason Thames. We’re told Miller comes from a family of bad apples but this never really rings true to his catalogue good looks, twee relationship with his grandfather (Clancy Brown) and the random subplot he offers, concerning a long-term ploy to shift the city border a couple of miles. Thames does, at the very least, share a much needed chemistry with Grace and finds YA sparks in the scenes they share. It’s an odd fit to broader themes of grief and betrayal but does at least manage to feel like a plot strand that’s going somewhere a viewer may wish to follow.

There are flushes here of a more entertaining film. Depth is beyond the material but a crippling dinner party sequence squeals with awkward energy, while an earlier car park grounding finds Williams nailing the required comic timing. It’s all very pretty to look at and I’ve no doubt will divert the right crowd but don’t bother with the tissues this time – it’s dry eyes all round.

T.S.

★

Phil Johnston’s new take on The Twits – the first in a slate of animations from the now Netflix owned Roald Dahl Story Company – is revolting. Seriously so. If only that were a compliment. It should be. Dahl’s original was, after all, supremely revolving. In the very best way. Wormy spaghetti, gristly beards, warts and frogs, all packed into a brisk ninety-five pages. Perhaps, revolving is, then, the wrong word. Unwatchable. That’ll cut it.

To Dahl’s credit, Johnston’s film bares almost no resemblance The Twits you grew up with. It is a car crash of a flop, entirely of its own design, narrative and crass Americanisation. Relocated to the fictional city of Triperot, the film retools Mrs. Twit (Margo Martindale) as a mid-Western junkyarder, while bizarrely retaining Mr. Twit (Johnny Vegas) as an English northerner, and offers spurious plot expansion by gifting them stewardship over a ramshackle theme park. This is the immediately condemned Twitlandia, a woeful dump, powered by the tears of upside down Muggle-Wumps. There’s an orphanage nearby and two dispiritingly earnest orphans who will surely save the day.

Quickly boring of its own plot momentum – albeit not so quickly as the viewer – The Twits alts right towards lame satire. Swipes at Trumpist populism neither enjoy the sharpness warranted for the real world horror – ‘I think it’s high time we make some promises we’ve no intention of keeping’ – nor feel suitable for the target audience. Promising to make Triperot the fun capital of the world again, The Twits fleece the mindless locals – all grownups – and run for mayoralty.

In truth, malapropism is the least of The Twits’ worries. Johnston’s script, co-written with Meg Favreau, fails to raise so much as a solitary laugh from open to close. There’s a diarrhoea gag that comes close but is killed through excess labouring. Dull songs – by Talking Heads’ David Byrne – die in dismal execution, while the empathy message misses the point by a mile. The animation is technically proficient but artistically ugly. There’s just no redeeming this rubbish.

T.S.

★★★★

Already the subject of three landmark  documentaries – not least the BBC’s seminal 1989 short John’s Not Mad – the remarkable and often gut wrenching story of John Davidson finds dramatisation this week in Kirk Jones’ I Swear. All emotion lives here. The tears, both joy and despair, are constant. Sure enough, this is a film that grabs you by the heart with astonishing ease and offers little let up. A deeply human script from Jones himself is triumph enough but it’s the powerhouse performances before the camera that nail the landing.

Davidson’s role in the advancement of public awareness toward Tourette syndrome would eventually lead to his being awarded an MBE in 2019, courtesy of the late Queen Elizabeth II. It’s here that the film opens, mining an unhealthy mix of hilarity and agonising horror for a laugh and a gasp as Davidson cannot help but release a flush of treason. Immediately, Jones rewinds us some four decades to a 1983 unaware of all that will come. A familiar launchpad to a narrative that finds nuance and individuality at pace, the film evolving into less familiar and more rewarding territory than commonly found in the average biopic.

Scott Ellis Watson plays the young John, a painfully promising teen, growing up in the Scottish border town of Galashiels. He’s sporty, good looking, smart and not unlucky with the ladies. There’s talk of a football scholarship – John’s a whizz in goal – and the fast mover even manages to win a date on his very first day at secondary. The ticks start with relative subtly, head jerks mainly, but snowball all too quickly. Nowadays? Who knows. In 1983, Tourette’s is game over for young John. At home, he’s chastised by his mum (Shirley Henderson) for ‘acting the fool at the dinner table’ and prescribed ‘a hot bath and an early night’. At school, it’s a belt on the hand and accusations of attention seeking. And that’s just the teachers.

Neat transition shifts young, hopeful Watson into Robert Aramayo’s more world beaten, late twenties John, still living with mum and dosed high on perfunctory but psychologically bruising antipsychotics. A warmer film grows from the introduction of Maxine Peake’s Dotty – by name and nature – into John’s life. A mental health nurse by trade, and mother to an old school friend do John’s, Dotty oozes compassion, affording John to rediscover the joy in his life. Jones takes care never to laugh at John but is smart enough to allow the funnier side to his outbursts to be communally shared. Spunk for milk and all.

On point casting is the real coup here. Peake and Henderson make for a terrific binary pairing, each a complexly sympathetic side of the same coin, ably supporting Aramayo’s flash in the pan central turn. No scene resonates so much in I Swear as that in which Aramayo joins a fellow young sufferer in the back of a car, empowering her to release every ounce of the verbal tickery she’s been struggling to contain. Her parents stand awkwardly on side as the pair let rip. It’s immensely satisfying, gloriously rude and genuinely moving, as so much of the film proves to be. Comic inflections notwithstanding, Jones holds no punches in depicting the abuses of John’s life. 

Into his final swathe, Jones leans closer into the stylings of the documentaries that have inspired the film. An inclusive Tourette’s day – ‘we are the majority!’ – casts real life youngsters living with the condition and embraces the chaos. Hope springs, meanwhile, as one final jump into the future explores the medical advancement that is today revolutionising the experience of those still being diagnosed. It’s extraordinary but far from the end of the story.

T.S.

★★★

There are echoes of the Jordan Peele in Zach Cregger’s ascendancy from sitcom frequenter to horror messiah. Indeed, much as was the case for Peale’s Get Out, Cregger already finds himself proclaimed the voice of his jump scare generation after just one frightener. In some quarters, at least. That first round – a satiating palette teaser if ever one were – was 2022’s big-time over-performer Barbarian, AirBnb thriller and bidding war instigator. Indeed, Cregger’s sophomore potential lured even Peele himself from the woodwork. Peele’s failure to secure Cregger’s script proved so crushing to him that it would ultimately see him split from his management. Contentious stuff but perhaps unsurprising. More has been spent on Weapons than Barbarian made in profit. It’s not just the expectation that’s high with this one, then. 

For the most part, the film delivers. A fairy tale nasty with a killer hook and a clutch of terrific central performances. Each gets a turn in the spotlight, with a multi-chapter framework and perspective-driven photography allowing for a slow drip, if disparate, release of narrative truths and tension. Cinematographically speaking, Weapons proves Barbarian to have been no fluke. Cregger’s eye for the unnerving remains striking, with shot after shot cruising into the memory. There’s a thrilling nighttime long shot that holds firm as the foe draws in, while early footage of the missing children fleeing their homes can’t help but echo the distressing image of Vietnam’s Napalm Girl, mixed with a little of the Spielbergian innocence.

The visuals grow only more disturbing as the film’s first hour creeps into its second. Shared too, however, are the scripting construction flaws that held Barbarian back from the very upper echelons of horror. It’s all a little too self-conscious in design and, what with the haunted house, creepy kids and witchy undertones…perhaps too obvious? A melange of tropes, terrifically executed, but somewhat incongruous in deployment.

At 2:17 A.M. in the town of Maybrook, seventeen children from the same class simultaneously leave their homes and vanish. Only two remain. There’s young Alex Lily (Cary Christopher), wide eyed, shell shocked, saying nothing and claiming ignorance. Alex came to school as normal that day but, between his eccentric Aunt and darkened home, something feels decidedly off. The other survivor – early in the film, clear allegorical parallels are drawn between the children’s disappearance and the real world classroom massacres that belie justification for America’s lax gun laws – is Julia Garner’s gamine Miss Gandy. Thirty days on, angry parents cry fowl at her protestations of innocence, mobbing her appearances at the school and debasing her life outwit it.

Miss Gandy’s is the first, and most compelling, of the film’s pocketed perspectives. Fragility and fire drive her between the bottle and a compulsion to learn the truth. Other angles come from a philandering police officer (Alden Ehrenreich), a homeless drug addict (Austin Abrams), the school’s inept principal (Benedict Wong), and the father of one of the missing children (Josh Brolin). The conceit has perks but increasingly frustrates, stealing the audience of the opportunity to follow the mystery to its natural apex through the surrogacy of a central protagonist. Each chapter takes us a step back, with each new character less cognoscente of the progression than their predecessor.

Cregger plays his hand sooner than one might expect, bursting the mystery and thrusting his film down an entertainingly grim left field. It’s a kitchen sink approach that delivers big on schlock and nauseous thrill to the occasional expense of logic and a sharper sleight of hand. Having opened with such pointed potential, this can’t help but feel a shame, Cregger punching a mite lower than he might have been able to with a firmer hand on the rudder.

T.S.

★★★★

There’s a generation out there for whom a sequel to 2003 body swap comedy Freaky Friday enjoys the same nostalgia premium as did the return of Star Wars in 2015’s The Force Awakens to most of the then adult population. That shouldn’t be too surprising. The force is with few in Hollywood as it is with Jamie Lee Curtis. It was, as word has it, only pressure from Curtis that saved Freakier Friday from the same disservice of a streaming debut as befell 2022’s Disenchanted. And why should such sequels be relegated so? Throwing back to the sort of comedy froth that ruled the noughties’ multiplex, Freaky Friday belongs on the big screen. There’s an audience for it and you can bet they’ll show.

Freakier Friday benefits, too, from the logical delay in its gestation. A twenty-two year break has afforded Lindsay Lohan’s Anna Coleman time enough to herself become a beleaguered “teen mom,” with Curtis’ Dr. Tess every bit the heavily involved apex Granny you knew she’d be. It’s not just physical body swapping this time but organic and thoroughly satisfying for the mum’s and daughters reflected by a screen that’s aged with them. Director Nisha Ganatra – whose contribution to noughties froth came in the form of the Heather Graham romcom Cake – makes early hey with parallels that tease at the dramatic change in family dynamics born of two decades’ separation. Where Curtis literally removed Lohan’s bedroom door in 2003 – ‘privacy is a privilege Anna – Lohan daren’t enter her own daughter’s bedroom in 2025, with a door sign warning that any breach to this ‘safe space’ could be triggering. 

Playful digs ripple each way across the generational divide, with Facebook ‘a database for old people’ and a school bake sale mandating that each table accommodate a full panopticon of dietary preferences and intolerances. Admittedly, it’s the ageing gags that predominate in Jordan Weiss’ script, with a deeply game Curtis embracing joke after joke at the expense of her weakened pelvis, sluggish metabolism and inability to rise independently from a crouching pose. Given that Curtis’ infectious energy outpaces everyone else in the film, the jibes almost feel misplaced. It’s no fun getting old but you’d not know it for the riot she’s having here.

Lohan too seems to be enjoying her Netflix day release. Certainly, the film revels in her return, with references to much of Lohan’s back catalogue throughout – nods to Mean Girls (an October 3rd wedding) and The Parent Trap (a British ‘sister’) sit among the more obvious. Her daughter here is Julia Butters’ Harper, a beanie hatted surfer dude, as much at odds with the new British girl in school as her mother. That’s Lily, played with an unnecessarily plummy accent by Sophia Hammons. Her father is Manny Jacinto’s – an even worse accent attempt – Eric, high flying chef extraordinaire and pitch perfect match for the very single Anna. A hop, skip and a jump into the future and the pair are to be married. That’s whether their daughters like it or not. Worse still, the marriage threatens a relocation to London, where, Harper splutters in horror, you can’t surf.

If that all sounds familiar, memories of the original grow only stronger with the entrance of hokum psychic – and business card manufacturer – Madam Jen (Vanessa Bayer), whose palmistry antics at Anna’s bachelorette do lead to a four-way body swap at the strike of twelve. This gives rise to the funniest sequence of the film – a freaky realisation that echoes and, indeed, trumps the first – and a chaotic roll call of sequences that befuddle and entertain by equal measure. Timescales and logic are thrust from the rear view as Ganatra races through material like a director possessed. It’s frenetic, sometimes too much so, but frequently nails the laughs; some big, some hearty.

Much as the show belongs to Curtis, it’s the reunion itself that seals the deal. There’s no doubting Curtis’ chemistry with Lohan, now more worn in from years of maintained contact, but the maintenance of that same magical 2003 energy impresses. Sure enough, between the two, this legacy sequel earns its nostalgia premium.

T.S.

★★★

It’s hard not to feel for Henry Cavill on watching James Gunn’s revitalised Superman, freshly rendered, as it is, in the sort of bright hues that have proven anathema to the character since 2013. As other turns attest, Cavill has charisma and charm aplenty but sprawled terribly across a decade of moribund self-indulgence. His last turn, a bum note cameo in Dwayne Johnson puff project Black Adam, was meant to herald production on a long-gestated Man of Steel sequel. Alas, it was but ill conceived clickbait and soon followed by Cavill’s unceremonious shelving. His replacement is the younger, less seasoned but more baby-faced David Corenswet. On this debut alone, we might hope for a more dignified run. Gunn’s Superman is quite notably flawed but at least knows its raison d’etre: to entertain.

The film’s style is familiar. It’s Gunn’s penchant for pulp that powers proceedings, guiding a narrative set snugly at the intersection of crowd pleasing populism and omnipotent geekery. On the former count is broad humour, a cute super-powered dog and mewling alien baby. In the latter lies a half dozen unexpected cameos, winning callbacks to John Williams and Hans Zimmer in a stirring score from Johnny Murphy and David Fleming, and nerdy nods to fan favourite comics and bygone in-jokes. Devotees are hard to please and this review offers no insight as to how Gunn’s Superman will go down with the best versed of fans. As for the masses, likability contends with ensemble overcrowding and a certain aimlessness to the whole. Those less invested in the eight decade long antagony linking Superman with Lex Luther might well find the latter’s motivations somewhat petty.

It is, nonetheless, a judicious call that sees Gunn skip through the Clark Kent origins story, a witty opening sprawl cutting to the chase by cutting through the chaff. Further detail is thread through Gunn’s script with nuance that feels admirable in a film that also includes a punch up to Noah and the Whale’s ‘5 Years Time.’ As we open, Clark Kent is already a bespectacled – they’re hypno-specs, apparently – and unreliable reporter for The Daily Planet. He’s already loved up with Lois Lane and already known the world over as America’s premier caped vigilante. It’s not easy to pull off blue tights and oversized panties but Corenswet nails it.

He’s also, as things begin, just lost a fight for the first time. Three minutes earlier, specifically. It’s neither here nor there who he was fighting – an immediately forgettable foe – but it is notable how refreshingly fallible Corenswet’s Superman proves to be. Certainly so after years of Cavill’s dull impenetrability in the face of heavy punching. Corenswet’s Kryptonian bleeds, bruises and often screws up. He suffers too from insecurity and something of a savour complex. 

What’s more, the film enjoys greater humanity than was ever the case under Zach Snyder’s stewardship, courtesy of an approach to heroism in which every life counts. Corenswet frequently goes out of his way to rescue innocent souls from falling buildings and giant alien feet, even pausing to save a squirrel in one nimble footed set piece. Such moments prove infinitely more impactful than the requisite city-pocalypse that lands with a predictable thud come the final act.

None of this to say that the film is entirely devoid of DC’s now trademark pomposity, albeit in its own particular guise. Take the weight of franchise origination carried by the film. One longs for the days when a superhero film could blockbuster on its own terms without need for broader world building. Superman is chockablock with other so-called ‘metahumans’ and cannot help but set up next year’s Supergirl.   This closing two hours full of superfluous canon additions and overstuffing. 

What’s more, Gunn lands a country mile from unsubtle in his external reference points for the film, with transparent inspiration drawn from only the front pages of current affairs. A conflict in the Middle East? Misinformation? Immigration phobias? Social media bots? All present and correct. Superman has no meaningful comment for any of these matters, instead risking the appearance of smugness in its righteous handling. As Cavill found to his super-peril, walking the walk is never quite enough on its own. Reference is not relevance alone. There’s fun to be had here but going the distance will want for more.

T.S.

★★★

There’s a nostalgia premium to the Pixar original experience these days. It’s in the combination of formula familiarity, winsome messaging and – for the grown ups at least – the reminiscence of a bygone era in which Pixar could do no wrong. Uniform commercial and critical acclaim has long evaded the Disney-owned studio, with no Pixar original enjoying box office success since 2017’s Coco. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that their latest attempt at reasserted relevance recalls that particular Mexican favourite in more ways than one. Where Coco mined themes of belonging, familial fracture and loneliness from the Land of the Dead, Elio seeks the same in taking its hero to the cosmos and into a space where no one can hear you reach for your hankie.

From Turning Red director Domee Shi and first time featurist Madeline Sharafian, Elio dabbles somewhere in the remits of E.T., Close Encounters, and Hitchhiker’s Guide. It’s a little bit Spielberg and a lot Douglas Adams. Yonas Kibreab is Elio Solis, spirited tween, trauma tinged orphan, and endearing space-mad oddity.

As we find him, Elio’s in the care of wing-clipped aunt Olga (Zoe Saldaña), an Air Force major with astronautical ambitions, grounded by Earthly responsibilities. The desperate sadness of Elio’s grief needs little signposting but there’s admirable restraint in the film’s depiction of a grieving sister, derailed, and hopelessly out of her depth when it comes to cracking through the hardened shell of her nephew.

Success comes only during the pair’s visit to a space exploration museum, in which an absconding Elio stumbles upon the story of Nasa’s Voyager 1 space probe, which launched in 1977 and continues to gather interstellar data to this day. He’s entranced – and so might you be. It’s certainly a dazzling introduction to the great beyond, brilliantly realised and splendidly three-dimensional in its rendering.

For Elio, born is a universality of new possibilities, most potently that there may be someone out there capable of loving him, as did once his beloved parents. Conflated is that very human anxiety that we may actually be alone in the Universe with a young boy’s fear of navigating a great big world without his mum and dad.

Much that such themes are easy fodder for the Pixar machine, Elio struggles somewhat to fully engage in its opening third. There’s a sense that the film Sharafian and Shi actually want to make is the friendship-driven romp that is born of Elio’s transition to outer space and that the Earthbound exposition preceding it is but an inconvenient delay. A lot of pieces must be arranged before Elio’s much-longed for alien abduction can occur and the setting up itself can’t help but feel rushed. Your capacity to bridge the drag may depend on your love for the pay off. As things proceed, Elio morphs into a film of a great many delights; funny, thrilling and thoroughly heart-wrenching.

Abducted to the Communiverse, Elio is mistaken for the leader of Earth and offered Ambassador status if he can first prove his mettle. It’s in the process of doing so that he befriends happy go lucky Glordon (Remy Edgerly), a giant alien maggot with more teeth than sense and a web-yarning rear. He’s also the son and heir to Brad Garrett’s heavily-armoured Lord Grigon, a vengeful warlord with intergalactic destruction on his globular mind. Let battle commence. Battle, that is, for both the Communiverse and for a child’s right to live the life they choose, rather than that which is expected. It’s extra relatable, extraterrestrial stuff.

Pare back the noise, not to mention a slew of gleeful gags about breath mints and make-believe languages, Elio mines charm in the simplicity of its own familiar core. The Pixar premium. Elio and Glordon are buddies in the grand tradition of winning twosomes from Buzz and Woody to Ember and Wade, and all those in between. It’s what they do well – well, and often. If there’s little surprise in the film’s ultimate destination, the oodles of fun along the way make for a jolly good ride.

T.S.

★★★

There’s little in Wicked, Jon M. Chu’s unjustifiably long adaptation of the eponymous musical’s first act, likely to convert the unconverted. It’s a fitfully spellbinding affair but not quite transformationally bewitching. Those who love Wicked, will embrace the film in kind. It boasts excellent performances, extravagant set pieces and frankly extraordinary attention to detail. Those who do not, take heed: in spite of a runtime almost as long as the entire Broadway show, intermission included, Chu’s Wicked only manages to reach the show’s infamous half-time banger, “Defying Gravity”, by the roll of its credits. Part Two is twelve months from release. It’s a Jacksonian split either agonising or frustrating, dependent on personal inclination. Both, really.

As something of a twice-viewed agnostic, both of the show and its success, the flimsy politics and semi-forgettable tunes – only a couple truly fly outwit the theatre – lean me generally toward the latter camp. That’s my bias. When it comes to the film, an hour of superfluous padding cannot possibly resolve the core plot failings. Animal activism is, no doubt, a worthy thoroughfare. Its use as a tool to critique populism, meanwhile, will prove particularly resonant to a late 2024 audience.

And yet, Wicked’s execution is blunt and the handling of unconvincing character arcs muddled. Such has not, of course, perturbed the legions of fans who have propelled Wicked from Broadway to global sensation. The musical is second only to Disney’s Lion King in the all time rankings. A film adaptation has long felt inevitable.

The story, drawn from Gregory Maguire’s original 1995 novel, rewrites L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz through the prism perspective of the witches of Oz. Cynthia Erivo plays Elphaba, Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West and Maguire’s tragic heroine. She’s tremendous and burns with the pain of long suppressed hurt. Pop-megastar Ariana Grande is fine enough Glinda – initially known as Galinda – the golden girl of Oz, reimagined as magically castrated and comically conceited. The two meet at the prestigious Shiz University, early enmity evolving into sincere friendship on their learning that each has much to learn from the other. Fellow students include Ethan Slater’s Boq, who yearns for Glinda’s attention, and Jonathan Bailey’s dashingly metrosexual Fiyero, who can’t get away from it.

Elphaba’s magical prowess is obvious but so is the singularity of her pea green skin. Flashbacks to a troubled childhood forebode the bullying Elphaba will experience at Shiz and the ostracism she will ultimately face when outcast as the so-called Wicked Witch. Handpicked, however, by school sorceress supreme, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), Elphaba soon finds herself invited to meet the Wonderful Wizard himself (Jeff Goldblum doing Jeff Goldblum).

All is not so peachy as it seems. The animal folk of Oz are being scapegoated, silenced and caged – no prizes for guessing who by. It’s a similar plot to the more recent Zootropolis but with a touch less impact. Peter Dinklage delivers a nice turn as goat historian Dr Dillamond but insufficient attention is paid to actively making audiences care about the fate of any other talking animal.

More time is gifted the film’s many musical numbers. It is in these sequences that Wicked really comes to life. Chu has form on exquisite musical direction, having delivered 2021’s criminally underrated In the Heights, and nails the same exuberance here. It’s exhilarating stuff and meticulously executed. Still, there are niggles here too, not least in the film’s aggrandised sense of self-importance. This felt not just in the elongated length but in Wicked’s severe and severely maudlin approach to colouration, light and grading, the desaturation of which proves ill-befitting to its vibrant choreography and costumes.

Only occasionally are Galinda’s pinks and Elphaba’s greens permitted to truly pop, and only when they are able to overcome Chu’s unaesthetic interest in backlighting. The conclusion of Grande’s “Popular” routine sees the star bathed in a rush of fabulous pink. It’s a rare hint of the camp might have been.

Indeed, lacking is an engagement with the fantastical side of Oz. The technicolour wonderment that widened Judy Garland’s eyes. Even as a stream of superfluous suffixes lodge themselves upon the end of character dialogifies, these occur a little like a Mike Leigh directed take on Dr. Seuss. From here, a more dour second half awaits, for better or worse. With fewer opportunities for fun in part two, it’s hard not to fear the drag ahead. Only when the two are whole, however, can success truly be judged. A long wait for a dedicated fan, then. I’m just not sure I’m that guy.

T.S.