Film Review: Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (15)

I'm sorry, kid. I'm just a terrible person, I guess.

Okay, let's start with the business of the film's title. A week after its release, Margot Robbie's star vehicle was rebranded Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey. Why? Because the original wittily rambling title was deemed a marketing disaster, misleading the cinema-going public with a lacklustre opening weekend the result. That whole critique makes sense. The character of Harley Quinn is more widely known than DC Comics' Birds of Prey crime-fighting all-girl trio, and this is a Harley-centric film, with the 'Birds' only connecting as a fighting force late in the day. On top of that, why would you do anything to dull Robbie's awards-baiting star power? Point is, the movie's box office has underwhelmed - sadly so, because whatever its name, this movie is really good fun.

You may remember Harley Quinn's DC Universe debut in Suicide Squad, as the Joker's chemically altered, bat-shit crazy and sociopathic girlfriend (one-time psychiatrist Harleen Quinzel). This time around she's split from her homicidal-clown boyfriend and is making a life for herself solo in Gotham City. Problem is she's chalked up numerous grudges against herself over the years and with Joker (her 'puddin') no longer there to supply protection, people are keen to act on said grudges in nasty ways. A particularly unpleasant nemesis comes in the form of Ewan McGregor's Roman Sionis aka Black Mask, a crime boss with a penchent for removing people's faces. With the prospect of having her life thus brutally truncated, Harley agrees to work for Sionis, specifically in tracking down a gemstone of unique significance. But mulitple factors including a relentless cop, an assassin with an agenda and a young pickpocket are going to complicate everything.

It's several years since the DCU abandoned their ideas of creating an integrated movie universe to rival Marvel's and the decision continues to pay off - creatively, if not in terms of box-office ker-ching. Directed with cohesion and flair by Cathy Yan, Birds of Prey puts to bed memories of Suicide Squad's messiness and allows Harley to exist in a crazy world all her own. Sure there are references to the Batman and Joker, but this is Ms Quinn's story first and last and she has a Gotham City to match her loopily criminal frame of mind. The location's traditionally grim aesthetic becomes a toxic carnival of colour, right from the point where Harley applies an explosive brand of closure to her relationship. The look is sustained throughout but never overdone, culminating in a showdown that's the perfect visual match for her character.

Harley Quinn is one of the roles Robbie was born to play (no wonder she committed so heavily on the production side) and she makes a lip-smacking meal of it. Given centre-stage and a fourth-wall breaking shtick similar to Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool, she's wickedly hilarious and gleefully violent (in a wham-kerpow cartoon sense), while still pulling 'endearing' and 'vulnerable' out of the bag too. So she's a psychopath - just maybe she's the semi-redeemable kind. Equipped with a great look, a flamboyant assortment of weaponry and the sharp-honed wit of Bumblebee writer Christina Hodson, she's got all she needs to bash an audience into giggling submission.

But front and centre though she is, there's more to this movie. We've got Ella Jay Sasco as the young jewel thief who reminds Harley of her younger self. Then there's Rosie Perez' determined law enforcer, Mary Elizabeth Winstead's lethal hit-woman and Jurnee Smollett Bell's conflicted gangster's moll. Combine them and there's the makings of a kick-ass girl gang I'd watch in their own adventure. (That they'll get their own outing based on current ticket sales seems an unfortunate long-shot.) Add a slew of entertaining bad-guys, headed up by McGregor's vicious kingpin - one scene goes alarmingly dark to set up his credentials as a worthy adversary - and you have a very enjoyable concoction.

That murderously grim scene aside, this is a storytelling riot. It's undeniably full of Cert.15/R-rated violence, but the quality matches the movie's Looney Tunes-inspired opening in sheer cartoon relish. The action scenes are tightly shot, the editing of a complex timeline mostly spot-on and there's sufficient breathing space to get to know our merrily-deranged protagonist a little bit better. Birds of Prey, Harley Quinn, whatever it's called - this is a good time at the movies. If last year's Joker gave us malevolent clowning, Harley - with the help of some unlikely friends - reminds us of the fun kind.

Gut Reaction: Gut laughter, high entertainment factor and loving the look of it all.

Memorable Moment: Harley's 'rescue' mission. 

Ed's Verdict: 7.5/10. Very satisfying popcorn with enough wit, style and personality (not least due to fab Margot) to warrant a second viewing. 

Netflix Review - The Two Popes (15)

God always corrects one pope by presenting the world with another pope... I'd like to see my correction.

The Gist: In 2005 Joseph Ratzinger is elected as pope (papal name Benedict XVI), the position having been contested by - among others - the liberal-leaning Argentinian Jorge Mario Bergoglio. The latter returns to his post as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, but becomes steadily more disenchanted with a conservative church plagued with revelations of financial corruption and the cover-up of child abuse. In 2012 he visits Pope Benedict in the Vatican to tender his resignation. What begins as a terse encounter between two men of vastly differing viewpoints, transforms into a fascinating dialogue - one that tussles with the role of faith in the world, both men's pasts and an entire church's future. It also leads to a surprising proposition for the man who will become Pope Francis.

The Juice: The central premise of this film may suggest dry theological conversations in Vatican ante-chambers, but this is a passion project by one Fernando Mereilles, the man who brought us searing Brazilian crime epic City of God. While it is more than anything a two-man chamber piece, the movie is never anything less than fully cinematic. Razor-sharp editing conveys the drama of the 2005 papal election in all its arcane intricacy, a soaring camera captures both the Vatican City's glories and the urban landscapes of Brazil and Bergoglio's flashbacks to young man's days is caught in the boxy black and white framing of the era. While Juan Minujin is convincingly conflicted as the young Bergoglio, however, this is all about two Oscar-nominated performances and how observantly the director captures them. Jonathan Pryce provides the through-line as the future Pope Francis - gentle-spirited, but with an undercurrent of liberal zeal. Anthony Hopkins meanwhile takes an ailing and curmudgeonly older Pope and invests him with nuance and humanity. They're an absorbing double-act, particularly when they open up about past failings (Bergoglio has one particularly painful confession to make about his response to Brazil's political past), and both prove worthy of those awards nods in a fascinating central dialogue.

The Judgement: 7.5/10. For some this will understandably not delve deep enough into the scandals which prompted Benedict XVI to stand down. It's also debatable whether the script does enough to convince regarding the ideological chasm that's bridged between the two. (Writer Anthony McCarten can only guess at what passed between the two and argualby makes it too easy.) But as stories of unlikely friendships are concerned, this is involving and charming in equal measure - due to Mereilles' consistently sharp direction and a central dynamic with the kind of understated power you'd hope for and expect. The soundtrack is moving and magnificent too. In dramatic terms at least you'll come away from both The Two Popes feeling thoroughly blessed.

Film Review - Emma. (U)

Everyone has their level.

Twenty-five years have passed since the great Jane Austen screen explosion of my lifetime. In 1995 Pride and Prejudice and Colin Firth's immaculate britches were the talk of UK television, while in that same year Emma Thompson received all manner of plaudits for her film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. Then twelve months later it was Gwyneth Paltrow who played the novelist's most infuriating and meddlesome creation, the eponymous Emma Woodhouse. Well Emma and Austen are back and in rude health, thanks to a visually rich and dramatically satisfying new adaptation by first-time feature director Autumn de Wilde. Whether it'll usher in a fresh tide of early 19th Century frocks and frills remains to be discovered - but on its own terms it's a lot of fun.

Emma, for those not acquainted with her, is the 'handsome, clever and rich' daughter of the widowed Mr Woodhouse and heiress to the Hartfield estate. Having no need for gainful employment, she amuses herself through the sport of match-making, working specifically on behalf of her naive friend Harriet Smith. Emma's social snobbery determines that the girl abandon notions of marrying a respectable local farmer, readjusting her affections towards Rev. Elton, a preening and affected clergyman. Her lack of judgement extends to affairs of her own heart, so that she risks attaching herself to a shallow village interloper and missing out on the man to whom she's most naturally suited - family friend George Knighley. Silly girl.

Emma. shares none of the narrative re-framing witnessed in fellow period adaptations Little Women and The Personal History of David Copperfield. This is pure linear storytelling (something perhaps suggested by the full-stop in the title), but director De Wilde puts a definitive stamp on proceedings nonetheless. With a successful career in US music video behind her, she brings an outsider's eye to all the period English frippery, making this a brisk, neatly observed and consistently funny retelling. Admittedly the whole weight of Brit heritage cinema is brought to bear with lavish production design and costumes by Oscar-snagging Alexandra Byrne (these characters are swathed in some seriously OTT Regency clobber); but there's a fresh, modern sensibility for all that, along with a noteworthy youthfulness in the casting.

At the heart is Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma. With cult horror The Witch, two M. Night Shyamalan films and Peaky Blinders on her CV, she has the experience combined with a peculiarly wide-eyed exoticism to make this heroine sympathetic. Emma, as protagonists go, is pretty appalling for much of the running time; however there's nuance to spare in Taylor-Joy's performance, allowing for a sense of growing self-awareness beneath a haughty, arrogant surface. There's wisdom too in casting Vanity Fair's Johnny Flynn as a younger version of Mr. Knightley, so that his responses to Emma comes across more as frustrated passion than paternalistic disapproval. (This also makes for the most erotic interactions possible while retaining a U certificate.) And as lovelorn Harriet, Suspiria's Mia Goth is less rural bumpkin, more childlike innocent in an endearing, regularly scene-stealing turn  - one that rivals Taylor-Joy for who can well up most spontaneously on camera.

Bill Nighy and Miranda Hart provide older counterpoints as the loveably hypochondriac Mr. Woodhouse and tragi-comic Miss Bates respectively, but there's also casting in depth here. Much of Austen's most potent humour came from her minor players and de Wilde has an eye for them all, drawing out fully hilarious moments from everyone down to the line-bereft Hartfield footmen. Her on-point comedy timing helps with a sense of modernity; this comedy of manners may be set two centuries in the past, but the sharpness of Austen's wit and heightened visual comedy brings it fully into 2020.

Jane Austen was, perhaps, too resigned to the inequalities of her time to present stories with full 21st Century resonance. Her stories tend towards benign social comedy rather than full-on satire. (Fans of her novels, feel free to argue with me here.) This adaptation grasps the novel's key intentions and tells a gloriously amusing, sexy love story, one that's visually arresting with a contemporary cinematic edge. Plus its score, combining classical strains with stirring folk melodies, provides more of a social sweep than you might expect. Emma. mightn't quite achieve Thompson's Sense and Sensibility greatness, but it comes within the wave of a lace handkerchief. JA's most exasperating heroine is back - and in spite of everything, you might just fall for her.

Gut Reaction: Properly ravished by the look of it, properly tickled by the comedy and... not unmoved by the sentimental bits.

Memorable Moment: Austenian dirty dancing.

Ed's Verdict: 8/10. A highly talented new feature director in de Silva, scintillating performances from young and old and a period flick that's both irreverent and respectful. What's not to love?

Netflix Review - Uncut Gems (15)

This is my fuckin' way. This is how I win. All right?

The Gist: Adam Sandler (bear with me) is Howard Ratner, a gem dealer in NYC's jewellers' district with a scheme to cancel out the host of financial worries that threaten to engulf him. A compulsive gambler, Howard is striving to outrun some scary creditors, whose patience is running low. But a rock full of uncut Ethiopian opals may just be his salvation. That's if he can hold onto it long enough to sell it for serious profit - while keeping himself afloat, pacifying enemies and friends alike and untangling his disastrous personal life. For Howard it's a week that starts off 'fraught' and then goes places that word couldn't begin to describe.

The Juice: Let's say straight off that this is a movie for everyone who'd forgotten Sandler can seriously act. (Even those of us who remember him in 2002's Punch-Drunk Love may have begun to lose faith.) His morally dubious dealer is a remarkable character creation, bouyed up by a pith-and-profanity-packed screenplay for sure, but brought to vivid life by a central performance that drives this crime drama juggernaut all the way to its frantic end. Howard is a study in venal desperation - hustling night-and-day around the city in a frenzy of (very possibly deluded) positivity, trying to pull the unravelling strands of his life back together. With his adveraries closing in and his addiction kicking into high gear, there's no principle or loved-one he won't betray. And yet somehow, possibly due to his sheer tenacity, you end up rooting for the poor bastard. Kind of.

The intensity of Sandler's performance is matched by what co-directors the Safdie Brothers have created here. Their movie is a hard-paced odyssey through the seamier side of the gem trade with a near-relentless soundtrack, crowded spaces and overlapping dialogue - much of the latter rapid-fire and angry. This is a gratingly noisy landscape, one in which Howard (along with us) fights to hear himself think and where oases of silence are few and short-lived. It's a full-on sensory assault, one that given time really does a number on the viewer's mind. In this crazed mix comes a host of memorable support performances - Idina Menzel as Howard's jaded wife, newcomer Julia Fox as his devoted employee-mistress, NBA star Kevin Garnett in a key role as himself... plus some truly chilling potential nemeses. They all contribute to the escalating insanity of one guy's life.

The Judgement: 8.5/10. Uncut Gems is a treatise in greed and addiction, the opening scene confronting us with the true exploitative nature of what we're about to see. There's an element of pain brought by the movie's jarring wall of sound and accompanying sense of anxiety (levels of which only mount as Howard's life spins out of control). It's worth the exhausting trip, however, most of all to witness that central self-mortifying tour de force. Forget Happy Gilmore, forget Little Nicky, forget both Jack and Jill. Howard Ratner is a whole other proposition - a character with whom you'll likely associate Chandler forever after. Welcome to the nerve-jangling chaos of his world.

Film Review - Parasite (15)

You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan. No plan at all.

As I write this review, director Bong Joon Ho and his associates are probably still partying post-Academy Awards. For the first time in Oscar's ninety-two years, the Best Picture award has gone to an international (non-English-speaking) feature film - and Parasite is its name. This South Korean movie is the reason I haven't posted a full Oscar feature yet; it only opened locally the past weekend, right as its awards-buzz was peaking. Did any film deserve to win over 1917, which in turn has been pushing out Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood, my favourite feature of last year? Could it even be expected to? And how could I preview the ceremony with nothing to say on the new major player? Well having finally seen it - and for all my love of those other titles - I don't begrudge Parasite last night's success. Not one iota. Those gongs were truly earned.

I was lucky enough to watch this film as its director intended - virtually cold, and I recommend the experience. So feel free at this stage to leave and come back post-viewing to compare notes. If you're sticking around, well... Parasite is a story of two families - the Kims, who live in a cramped 'semi-basement' flat in one of Seoul's more down-at-heel districts, and the Parks, the wealthy owners of a gated uptown mansion. Times are at their tightest for the Kims, small-time scam artists, none of whom have regular employment. That's until the son, Ki-woo, gains an interview for a job tutoring the Parks' high-school age daughter. It's a posting into which he has to lie and forge his way, but once he has a foothold, his family follow suit - insinuating themselves one by one into the luxurious world of the Parks. The ensuing class collision goes places neither they nor we could have predicted.

Auteur director Bong has tussled with the theme of class division before, namely in his futuristic fantasy Snowpiercer. Parasite is just as innovative an exploration in its way - with a story as unpredictable and precariously twisty as a rugged mountain pass. It shifts genres too, like smooth upward gear changes along that road. What begins as a vaguely unsettling crime comedy shifts to horror-tinged suspence mode, before opening into full and powerful social critique, every plot-beat and hiatus in between matched by Jaeil Jung's constantly evolving score. And yet the narrative through-line stays clear and coherent as the crisp images on display, tying neatly - despite all intervening madness - at the end. 

It's not just in genre terms that this film is hard to pin down. Whatever Bong's satirical intentions, he allows for no easy caricatures of lovably roguish poor and their smugly entitled rich marks. Instead there's something insidiously creepy about the Kims' latching on to their new wealthy benefactors, while the Parks seem insulated and naive rather than genuinely unpleasant. The warped circumstances into which they're all placed stem from factors that reach far beyond either family unit. Each role is played with a depth of humanity, not all of which is easily likeable. But then Alfred Hitchcock showed long ago that characters needn't earn our full sympathy to command our fascination. And every one of these leads - regardless of class - proves fascinating. The identity of the real 'parasite' isn't as easy to guess as you first think.

It may just be, however, that the most memorable characters are the locations. The Kims' poverty-stricken basement is ironically rich in detail, every meticulously placed clue to their lifestyle captured in the film's glorious widescreen. And the family's wider neighbourhood serves as a telling commentary on the daily grind of Seoul's deprived class. Then there's the Park residence - an avant garde grand design, sleekly beautiful and detached quite literally from wider reality. Its infiltration by the Kims makes for an intriguing dissection of how the wealthy live. There's an edge to this movie as cold and cutting as one of the Parks' state-of-the-art kitchen utensils, and the cinematography captures it shot by pristine shot. 

I'm not yet ready to say - not on a single viewing - that Bong Joon Ho's movie has the jump on Sam Mendes' sublime war epic. The final act is a head-spinning rush and I need another turn around both up- and downtown blocks to see if it all fits together as well as I think it does. By any stretch, though, this is immaculate, imaginative, gripping cinema and a testament to the director's career. I love a passion project, especially one that marries bold artistic vision with a story the like of which you've never been told before. And Bong's unique vision is all of that. I'm glad of Parasite's Academy gongs, if only for all those people who'll now be convinced to go see it. Word to the wise - be one of them.

Gut Reaction: It took around twenty minutes' set-up and then - bam! - it had me. What it did with me was a unique emotional combo of amusement, tension and awe that's going to stick around a long time.

Memorable Moment: Water, it transpires, runs downhill.

Ed's Verdict: 9.5/10. Parasite is a dark genre-splicing delight that never does what you (give up trying to) predict. It's a marvellously crafted black-comic drama and there's molten anger at its core.

Film Review - A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (PG)

I'm here to interview you, Mister Rogers.

I was channel-hopping on a family holiday to Florida, when I first encountered Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. What was a UK teen to make of this show and its presenter - a cardigan-wearing guy who strolled on-set and amiably mumbled an upbeat song to camera, while putting on canvas sneakers? The whole thing seemed so weirdly creaky and unfashionable that it made me laugh. Little did I realise that I was watching a solid gold American TV icon. Fred Rogers - an ordained minister with a line in child psychology, who for decades hosted a show dedicated to helping young children process all the turbulent emotions that were brewing within them at that early age. To many he was more than a presenter - he was a gently-spoken super-hero and that cardy was his cape. (He'd have hated being labelled a 'super-hero' too.)

(The real Mister Rogers.)

Marielle Heller's A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood - the title is lifted from that upbeat song of Fred's - is more ingenious than the biopic you might have expected. Inspired by an Esquire magazine article by Tom Junod, the film tells the story of the fictional Lloyd Vogel, an embittered journalist whose job draws him into Fred Roger's extraordinary orbit. Welsh actor Matthew Rhys plays the emotionally frayed Lloyd, a man burying himself in his work at the expense of his family life, while harbouring deep resentment towards his feckless dad. When instructed by his boss to write what he dismisses as a 'puff piece' on Mister Rogers, he can't help but approach it as a kind of expose. Can the beloved children's host really be that nice a guy away from the camera? Then Lloyd meets Fred (played by Tom Hanks) and despite all his hard-wired cynicism, his world starts to transform.

(The Movie Mister Rogers)

Heller took on the project because, she said, 'it's a movie that we need right now'. It's easy to see her point. Mister Rogers' philosophy is antithetical to the mean-spiritedness that the USA and other nations are currently embracing from the top down. Of course A Beautiful Day... could have turned out a sickly shmaltz-fest, which is why the director of last year's deliciously caustic Can You Ever Forgive Me? was the perfect person for the job. Mister Rogers' world may be one of bright pastel colours, but Lloyd's is resolutely gray and there's an edginess to his early encounters with Fred that undercuts any tendency towards Lifetime Movie sentimentality. Heller knows that the emotion within this story is innate; there's no need to draw it out artificially - just give it room to breathe. And that's precisely what her film does.

The creativity breathes here too, in the delightfully meta way that Lloyd's story merges with the Mister Rogers TV show. To elaborate too much might spoil that delight, so let's just say the narrative form is left-field and a touch bizarre (with one burst of the totally surreal), but delivered with a straight face that makes it all the more touching and amusing. The structure is thematically clever too, a reminder that it's not just Rogers' young demographic who need constructive ways of processing pain and anger.

Helping steer the project to a place as mature as it is moving are Hanks and Rhys. The former was a safe pair of hands for Rogers - someone older audience members will trust with this beloved figure from their youth. It's not that Hanks is physically similar to the real guy, nor does he attempt any kind of impersonation. What he does achieve is a remarkable stillness of spirit that gets right to the core of the man people said they knew. (Watch Netflix's Fred Rogers documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? if you're in any doubt of that - it's really worth your time.) The zen-like quality of his manner is quite transfixing. Rhys is more than a foil for him, as a man who will draw on your sympathies and at times frustrate. There's a comic delight in watching how disconcerted he is in Fred's company, his presumptions founding on the rock of the man's radical kindness. 

Credit also to those who flesh out Lloyd's family drama is a way that's both gritty and affecting. Susan Kalechi Watson (Beth from This is Us) brings depth to the wife who initially pleads along with Rogers' audience fans 'Don't ruin my childhood'. And Chris 'Quality Guaranteed' Cooper humanises the erring father to touching effect. But make no mistake, this is the Tom and Matt show, with Tom stealing it. But then he does get to use hand-puppets.

To have grown up with the fictional 'Neighborhood' will no doubt enhance the viewing experience. This film does a fine job, however, of inviting in those of us who never properly knew Mister Rogers, letting us grasp what you might call the 'Rogers effect'. You know, love, kindness and the healing power of forgiveness - particularly for the one doing the forgiving. In a politically toxic age where vindictiveness and bullying are sometimes paraded as virtues, that's a message of incendiary power and this movie conveys it without ever threatening to get mawkish. The world need people like Fred Rogers right now. It needs us all to be a bit more - well - neighborly. And to think when I first saw him, I thought he wasn't cool...

Gut Reaction: It surprised me from the start and made me laugh quite a lot, sometimes the teary kind of laughter. And it made me feel just a little bit of hope for humanity.

 

Memorable Moment: Lloyd, meet Daniel Tiger. He'll change your life.

 

Ed's Verdict: 8/10. A wonderful counter-intuitive follow-up for Heller, who by the way wasn't lying. This is completely the movie we need right now.

Film Review - Queen and Slim (15)

Thank you for this journey, no matter how it ends.

Each filmic calendar year is a combo of the 'Most Anticipated' (which may or may not live up to expectation) and those movies that jump you from out of nowhere. Queen and Slim, feature debut from TV and music video director Melina Matsoukas, ambushed me that way last weekend. I'd seen the poster, but it gave me little idea what to expect - aside perhaps from something pretty cool. As it turns out, 'cool' doesn't begin to express what this movie has to offer.

Film newcomer Jodie Turner-Smith and Get Out's Daniel Kaluuya are the Queen and Slim in question, two contrasting souls, who meet on a less than successful Tinder date. The night gets momentously worse, however, when he drives her home and they're pulled over by a cop. A tense encounter escalates wildly out of control and when disaster occurs, these virtual strangers end up on the run together, the objects of a nationwide police hunt. But as the odd couple head for the southern border, they realise something has been triggered that goes far beyond their own perilous situation.

I've used the phrase 'film for our time' already this year, but sue me if it doesn't apply to this one. If 2018's The Hate U Give was an intelligent teen-aimed exploration of racial tensions in modern America, Queen and Slim is the grown-up version in more ways than one.  Described early on as 'the black Bonnie and Clyde', these title characters are a far cry from all that those monikers imply. They're unassuming types, whose lives are irreversibly transformed by a single and calamitous moment in time. Victims of a racial climate that extends well outside themselves, their instantly high media profile feeds back into the conflict. To some they're criminals, to others heroes in a vital political struggle - even though to us they're just two ordinary people dealing with the fallout of a uniquely disastrous first date.

As the not-quite-lovers-on-the-run Turner-Smith and Kaluuya both excel. It's a smart move to have them not connect initially, so that the trauma and exhaustion from their altered circumstances is further complicated by how much they plain irritate each other. Ironically it's their enforced road trip that allows them time to discover each other properly. The melting of acrimony, rising tide of erotic feeling and embracing of the moment (in more ways than the purely sexual) are all played with a conviction that's total and touching. Kaluuya's depth and range is already cinematically tested (check him also in Black Panther or Widows), but ex-model Turner-Smith matches him, her inital poise and aloofness gradually ebbing away till vulnerability and a new passion for life are revealed.

There are further memorable performances here, most notably Bokeen Woodbine as Queen's flamboyant Uncle Earl. However the other main player is the look and mood of the film itself. While the screenplay by Lena Waithe is by turns romantic, comedic and provocative, the overall word that strikes is 'haunting'. Queen and Slim is a gorgeously shot road movie, all grainy beauty courtesy of cinematographer Tat Radcliffe. It begins with a diner scene reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting and loses none of that stillness as the story progresses. Much of the journey is shot in pale dawn or twilight, evoking a weird limbo between the couple's erased former lives and their possible capture. There are moments of high tension, but this journey is characterised more as a poignant dream-state. Queen and Slim aren't alone in their struggle, but the border - their only hope - seems frustratingly out of reach...

The story's pacing is maybe a touch too deliberate in the latter stages, but this flaw is minor in light of Matsoukas' first-feature achievement. Both complex and confrontational, her film is an affecting drama, a political slap in the face and a work of art reminiscent of Barry Jenkins' Moonlight - in both its muted aesthetics and mesmerising orchestral score. (There's a kick-ass soundtrack too, accompanying the unplanned roadtrip.) In a winter movie-season more about big-name Oscar contenders, I found myself enamoured by this new cinematic pretender. Queen and Slim is a hugely promising debut, but it's also a fine film in its own right.

Gut Reaction: Lulled by the hypnotic beauty much of the time, although some moments of this film had me almost literally on my back.

Memorable Moment: Dance on. You're among friends.

Ed's Verdict: 8.5/10. Essentially relevant subject-matter - often powerfully and exquisitely made. Another film that deserved attention from Oscar and Co but didn't get it. Why not, people? What's that about?

Film Review - The Personal History of David Copperfield (PG)

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

Despite the enduring popularity of Charles Dickens' novels, it's relatively infrequent that his stories are adapted for the big screen. His fiction - densely populated and thick with intertwining plotlines - lends itself more naturally to multi-episode TV productions than cinema. David Copperfield is one of the writer's lengthier and more episodic tomes, a test of any screen writer tasked with paring its 600-plus pages into two hour's worth of film. But that's exactly what Armando Iannucci and his regular co-writer Simon Blackwell have attempted with their re-telling. And it works chiefly due to one clever (and very meta) twist on the tale.

Iannucci's film begins with the mature David (Dev Patel) reading his memoir before a theatre audience - and commencing with the opening line of the novel as quoted above. He steps into his own life at the moment of birth and from there we're introduced to a kaleidoscope of eccentric characters - some benign, others brutal or calculating. Brought up by his widowed mother, his life takes a dark turn when she remarries into the formidable Murdstone family and a darker one still when he's put to a distinctly Victorian form of child labour. But there are points of light as well - the family housekeeper's seafaring family in Yarmouth, his abrupt but golden-hearted great-aunt Betsy Trotwood and Agnes, the warm and clever daughter of a family lawyer. These are the lights that help guide him through life's numerous reversals of fate.

Copperfield the novel is a densely plotted story of interconnected friends and villains; this adaptation does a creditably ruthless job of scything it down into a functional two-hour drama. It's streamlined to a fault - zipping from one scenario to another with deft character portraits on the hoof. The pace is almost too much at first, like a breath-stealing race through Dickens' pages, until that is you grasp what the film is doing. It's David's memories through which we're tumbling, ones that he captured along the way on scraps of paper that ultimately were patched into the story of his growing up.

This is, above all, a story about the writing process and the power of words to immortalise a whole gallery of characters. In that regard it connects significantly with Greta Gerwig's Little Women. There it was Saoirse Ronan's Jo March character effectively embodying author Louisa M. Alcott. Here we have Patel as both David and by extension Dickens himself (Copperfield more than any other protagonist was a surrogate for the author), spinning elements of his experience into an extravagant and life-affirming tale.

This journey within the writer's mind isn't Iannucci's only daring touch. The movie's multi-racial casting - a stumbling-block for some literary purists - combines with the period setting to balance traditional and contemporary elements and provide the story with real freshness. (Dickens' stories are have such a strong fantastical element anyway that the leap to ethnic diversity is a short one.) Additionally we find the writer's brilliant prose dovetailed with the spiky wit and immaculate comic timing of the team that brought us The Thick of It, Veep and The Death of Stalin. It's Dickens for sure, but not as we've experienced his work ever before.

Of course it's the cast that helps sell these innovations. Patel makes for an exuberant David, constantly in motion, but able (as he proved so admirably in Lion) to slow down and access depths of emotion. He's backed up by an ensemble that's been precision-cast. Stand-outs are Tilda Swinton's indomitable Betsy Trotwood, Peter Capaldi's financially precarious Mr Micawber and Ben Whishaw's odious yet sadly pathetic Uriah Heap. But special praise is due for Hugh Laurie as Aunt Betsy's permanent house-guest Mr Dick. More than any other adaptation this one explores the character's struggle with mental illness in what - short of personal friendships - would have been an unforgiving era for the sufferer. It's a beautifully judged tragi-comic performance and a true highlight.

Topped off by Christopher Willis' exhilerating score, this Copperfield is a zesty and uplifting couple of hours. While it does carry some dramatic weight, several of the darker character outcomes are sidestepped in favour of warmth and comedy. Overall it's an unapologetically frothy introduction to the world Charles Dickens premiered back in 1850. And from the director whose comedy has trashed politics on both sides of the Atlantic for the past fifteen years, it's refreshingly cynicism-free. This was a memoir worth creating.

Gut Reaction: Interest (it was one of my 2020 Most Anticipated), adjustment to the style and increasing bursts of laughter - leading to a warm glow on leaving the theatre.

Memorable Moment: Let's go fly a kite.

Ed's Verdict: 7.5/10. Troubled times require stories where open hearts and optimism triumph over the darker angels of human nature. This is one such tale - and it's a good'un. Thank you Messrs Dickens and Iannucci.