The side effect of watching too many films is that you develop a thick skin and become desensitised to the trivial joys of cinema. That’s a much bigger problem if you are a film critic. Thankfully, there are simple and effective gems like Benjamin that catch you off-guard, enabling you to reclaim these little pleasures.Simon Amstel’s charming new feature will appeal to LGBT romcom fans and the less romantic alike.
The titular protagonist (Colin Morgan) struggles with the post-production of his second feature when he lays eyes on a French heartthrob (Phénix Brossard) at a party. Both hit it off quite quickly and romance blooms. Benjamin finds out that the ultimate obstacle in his quest for love might be himself. The people around him, including his freewheeling publicist Bille (Jessica Reine), his ambitious screen partner Harry (Jack Rowan) and the struggling comedian bestie Stephen (Joel Fry) demonstrate that straight people too are grappling with such issues.
Benjamin is quite straightforward. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel. The plot consists of boy 1 meets boy 2, and boy 1 must sort his own personal mess before deep-diving into the romance. The characters are complex and fully fledged. The film offers a relatable version of London, which is also a love letter to the British capital per se.
In fact, Benjamin feels so real that it’s almost palpable. Anyone in the creative industry knows many Benjamins, Billies and Harries. Their insecurities and their awkwardness will ring a lot of bells. There is abundant cringe humour. So much that at times it feels almost like a tragedy.
Despite the gay love story at its centre, Amstell wants to talk to people of all sexualities about about the general apathy of contemporary relationships. The script was penned by the director himself, and it manages to reach the entire human spectrum in a seemingly effortless fashion and a confident display of strength.
The relatability of Benjamin makes it rise above other romcoms. In its quirks and off-beat punchlines, it reminds us as that, despite the confusion and the pain, it’s ok to laugh and at our perpetual search for love and our failures along the way. That’s complicity. That’s a comforting feeling. At the end of the day, that’s what romcoms are for.
Benjamin is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 15th. On VoD Monday, May 13th.
Eight-year-old Miles Blume (Jackson Robert Scott) is an adorable little boy. Born with fascinating eyes of different colours, with a huge intelligence and winning looks, he is the pride and joy of his mommy and daddy. He is so bright that mommy and daddy send him to a special school for bright little girls and boys like him. But there’s something rather unusual about Miles.
The trouble is that he has some rather strange habits. He mutters fluently in his sleep in a Hungarian dialect found only near the Romanian border; when another little boy won’t give up his place in the classroom, he beats him with a heavy spanner; he leaves broken glass on the stairway into the basement so that his babysitter cuts herself badly; he chops the family doggie up with specially sharpened scissorsand the way he looks at his poor mother (Taylor Schilling) is something frightful. Whatever is the matter with poor little Miles?
At the time of his birth, his soul was possessed by a very nasty man, who lived in rural Ohio, called Edward Scarka (Paul Fauteux), whose family came from Hungary near the Romanian border and had different coloured eyes. Mr. Scarkaalso liked cutting ladies’ handsand was shot dead by police just as Miles was being born. A nice man called Mr. Jacobson (Paul Fauteux) will regress Miles back to when he was born and discover why Edward Scarka has possessed him. Scarka has come back to life in Miles to finish off some business he hadn’t settled in this life. We don’t know what it is, but we are about to find out.This is as much as I will tell you without spoiling the movie.
This film is trailing the success of religious-themed horror classics with child protagonists, such as The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976). It has a number of good “jump out of your seat” moments. The performance of young Robert Jackson Scott is very creditable. I look forward to his future work. Taylor Schilling represents the concerned, conscientious mommy, and she is quite convincing. At the end of the day, however, this is another formulaic Hollywood horror. It will do perfectly good business. It will be eagerly watched by many after a hard day at the office. But that is about it. There isn’t too much dirt waiting to be unearthed.
The Prodigy is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 15th. On Netflix in January.
The War in Donbass is now five years old. In March 2014, protests by various pro-Russian and anti-government groups took place in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of the country, which are collectively described as the Donbass region. More than two thirds of the population of Donbass are ethnically Russian, and Russian is the de facto language of region. The protests quickly morphed into an armed conflict, and Moscow has been repeatedly accused of supporting the separatist struggle (something which they deny). Donbass is a fictionalised account of the conflict divided into 13 very peculiar and mostly unconnected segments.
The film has some very good moments. An angry mob humiliates an alleged “exterminator” tied to a lamppost in a town square in broad daylight. They punch him, they kick him, an old woman beats him up with a stick, they shout profanities. They demand answers, but the man simply refuses to speak. A woman dumps a bucket of faces on the head of a newspaper editor who wrote an article stating that she received a large bribe. She wants him to feel as dirty as she did (when the libel was published).
A German journalist is confronted about Hitler and his “fascist” past. The separatists too are often described as fascists. A well-dressed woman tries to convince her haggard mother to leave an overcrowded shelter in favour of a safe and salubrious dwelling, but she refuses to budge (presumably in solidarity with her people, or attachment to the land). The images of the filthy and jam-packed shelter, with the walls covered in mould, are very realistic. And so on.
The first two thirds of Donbass feel a lot like a documentary, until the movie descends into the farcical and allegorical in the last few segments. A very peculiar wedding takes place (pictured at the top). This is the ugliest and also most absurd part of the film. The ceremony is conducted under the flag of Novorossiya (literally, “New Russia”, a proposed accolade for separatist entity). The guests laugh. No one is taking the sacrament seriously, particularly the bride and the groom. It’s as if the director was saying: “a union between Russia and Donbass is laughable, hideous and extremely undesirable”. This is an anti-war movie and a very anti-Russian statement. Loznitsa is Belorussian by birth, but has studied and lived in Kiev most of his life, and his affiliation clearly lies with the Ukrainian government, who also helped to finance the film.
Donbass is interesting enough to watch, and the anti-war message is is very clear. But it also gets a little confusing. Nothing is contextualised (the information in the first paragraph of this review is not described in the film). It’s not always possible to determine which side is side. Perhaps I lack the cultural and political knowledge. Or perhaps the director intended to confounds his viewers in order to emphasise the pointlessness of war. I’m not entirely sure. One way or another, the outcome is a little disjointed and incoherent. At more than two hours of duration, the narrative gets jumbled up. Overall, Donbass lacks the lyrical excellence of Loznitsa’s previous film A Gentle Creature (2017). And it also lacks the punch-factor. The violence, the explosions and murder sequences feel a little contrived and banal.
Donbass won the Best Director prize of the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes International Film Festival in 2018. It is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, April 26th, and then on VoD on Monday, April 29th.
It’s 1994, it’s summertime and it’s hot in Edlington. The small town in South Yorkshire is sizzling with adolescent love and angst. Trevor (Tom Varey) likes to spend time at the Decoy Ponds calmly waiting for a legendary carp called Nessie to surface. Pogo (Esme Creed-Miles) loves compiling cassette tapes, and she goes around town with very own recorder trying to capture trivial events. Meanwhile, the good-looking Maurice (Abraham Lewis) and Cassie (Daisy Edgar-Jones) are deeply in love, and enjoy a kiss and an embrace in the reeds. Nerdy Malcolm (Angus Imirie) too is in love with Cassie, but his feeling is not reciprocated.
Not all hearts have reached their puberty yet. Dave (Ethan Wilkie) and Shane (Gianlucca Galluci) are about 10 years of age. Shane likes trying his mother’s stockings, in some of the film more hilarious sequences. The pair go around town shoplifting sweets and pulling little pranks. Or maybe catching a glimpse of a pair of boobs. Or peeking on Maurice and Cassie snogging in the green (which triggers an angry Maurice to chase Shane into the woods). Shane is bespectacled with huge curious eyes, like a boy anxious to come-to-age as soon as possible.
Edlington is a closely-knit community. It’s small and self-contained. A little bit like the ponds inhabited by Nessie. Its young dwellers have to find excitement in the mundane. Some of them dream of leaving, but at least for now they must adapt to their limited confinement.
Only 25 years have passed since 1994, yet the Edlington portrayed in Pond Life feels centuries away. It’s remarkable how technology has dramatically changed the way young people connect with each other. There were no mobile phones back then, and these young people had to engage face-to-face. That was the age of the romantic cassette tape. Each recording was cherished as a valuable fragment of life. Unlike nowadays. Our mobile phones have so many files (written, audio, visual, or anything else) that the emotional value of each individual piece of information becomes diluted and redundant.
Pond Life rescues the vitality of a puerile youth. It’s both refreshing and nostalgic, in equal measures. It’s gentle and bittersweet, like a teenage dream. It’s very well cast and acted. It’s a work of love, gingerly handmade (like the handwritten names of the characters popping up on the screen when they are first introduced). It’s a real delight to watch because it reminds us of the simple pleasures and pains of our halcyon days. A past not so distant, and yet strangely detached from of our present reality.
This is Bill Buckhurst’s very first film. I would hazard a guess he has a bright future ahead. Pond Life has a peer in the music world. The song Teenage Love by Saint Etienne is the perfect companion to the movie. Both the film and the song celebrate adolescent love, desire and deception with a masterful touch.
Pond Life is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, April 26th. On VoD on Monday, August 19th.
This immediately plunges the audience into confusion: you really don’t know where you are. The viewer is overwhelmed by a barrage of chaotic images the sense of which will only become clear during the course of the narrative. It’s also one of those movies which starts off in an alien, parallel or mythological universe only for that to give way to Earth about 10 minutes in to the proceedings.
So, a landscape littered with debris of wrecked craft. Characters in strange costumes bearing weapons. And star Brie Larson’s character Vers in the middle of it all, trying to comprehend as are we what’s going on as she takes part in a commando style raid to rescue a spy on an alien planet, is captured and subjected to a machine which probes the deep recesses of her brain in the form of her memories, escapes and crashes to Earth (i.e. the US) in the 1990s straight through the ceiling of a Blockbuster Video store.
Overall, the plot is punctuated by the requisite, thrilling intermittent fight scenes and augmented with state of the art special effects technology. It involves Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) regular Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and fellow S.H.I.E.L.D. agents including Coulson (Clark Gregg) and Keller (Ben Mendelsohn), a hero warrior race called the Kree of whom Vers is a member, at least to start with, and their sworn shapeshifting, terrorist enemies the Skrull. The Kree are led by Yon-Rogg (Jude Law).
The film has been pitched at the public as the first MCU film to have a super-heroine rather than a hero as its central character. In the comics, there have been several different Captain Marvels of whom the Carol Danvers (Vers’ name on Earth) is one of the later ones. To make that work on the screen, you need an actress with some considerable presence. Ever since seeing Larson in Short Term 12 (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2013), where she plays a counsellor in a short stay home for difficult teenagers, I’ve thought she was extremely gifted and her work in Captain Marvel mostly confirms that.
“Mostly” because there are moments where Vers/Carol Danvers is fighting men (or at least male aliens) and giving as good as she gets somehow doesn’t quite work on the screen. I accept that the plot gives her a superpower derived from being in the path of an explosive blast involving an experimental aircraft drive, so she should be more powerful than everyone else around her, but there’s part of my brain that just won’t accept that. And it’s something about this particular film: I never had this problem with, for example, Scarlett Johansson playing Black Widow in the Avengers movies.
More convincing is the idea of Carol Danvers and her African American work colleague and friend Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) being female test pilots in a man’s world. Likewise, when the Kree take her to commune with their Supreme Intelligence, the AI which helps them make all their decisions, that entity appears to her in the form of someone she’ll readily accept – a grey-haired Annette Bening who later appears as a darker-haired mentor from way back in Carol’s life. This is very clever. The film plays on the notion that women are generally much better than men at networking. The little girls who play Maria’s 11-year-old daughter Monica (Akira Akbar) and the briefly seen young Carol at 13 (Mckenna Grace) and six (London Fuller) years of age also impress.
That said, we’ve only come so far – Fury is (obviously) male and both the groups of Kree and Skrulls represented here are led by males. The Kree at least have one more operative besides Larson’s Vers in the form of sharp shooting Minn-Erva (Gemma Chan) although the Skrull womenfolk and children are kept out of harm’s way while the men do all the fighting.
The shapeshifting Skrulls allow for them to appear as anyone at anytime – always a great plot device – here giving rise to a number of scenes where someone isn’t who the appear to be. It also gives rise to the film’s one serious misstep, when and old lady on a train is identified as a Skrull and battles violently with Brie Larson in the carriage. An enthralling surprise and a gripping action sequence indeed, but hardly appropriate as an image of older people who are generally more vulnerable than most.
Otherwise, while the action sequences are enjoyable and the plot strong enough to satisfy the MCU audience and profit margins, the film’s real pleasures are to be found elsewhere, in the relationships of the characters in the parts where the action slows or pauses enough to explore them. Doubtless this is not why most of the audience are there, but it makes for an altogether more convincing film.
For a while Captain Marvel even manages to pull off the trick of Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) whereby a good portion of the audience are wondering whether the friendly cat tagging along with sympathetic human characters is in fact an alien. And for true MCU geeks, there are not one but two little expository scenes at the end. Although Captain Marvel is a standalone film, these scenes link it to the upcoming Avengers: Endgame (2019).
Finally, curiously, no-one in the film ever refers to the central character as Captain Marvel. Although that’s clearly who Vers/Carol Danvers is.
Captain Marvel is out in the UK on Friday, March 8th. Watch the film trailers below:
No matter what you try and do, there will always be people who tell you it’s impossible. Tracy Edwards learns this the hard way. A school dropout working in a bar in Greece, she finds herself immersed in the world of sailing. But no male crew wants her. It’s the ’80s, women aren’t accepted into their macho crews. Nevertheless, she persists, working as a cook as they participate in a round-the-world sailing contest. Yet her dream is not in cooking, which by her admission, wasn’t very good. She wants to commandeer a ship herself, fighting against the odds to participate in the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race with an all-female crew.
The result as narratively engrossing as it is genuinely uplifting, a mixture of the survival documentary and sporting inspiration tale. It shows the best way to prove naysayers wrong is through action. Edwards has quite the uphill task. Not only does she partake in a two hundred day race from the UK to Uruguay, Uruguay to Australia, Australia to New Zealand, New Zealand to the USA, and back to the UK again, but she must fight against a sexist culture that disbelieves her at every turn. It show that feminist progress is not something we should take for granted as an inevitability of progress but a constantly uphill battle built upon the back of gruelling labour.
This is stressed by the enormity of the task Edwards has set herself. The dangers of the sea are apparent from Maiden’s first shot of roiling waves, accompanied by Edwards stating that, “The ocean’s always trying to kill you. It doesn’t take a break.” Whether it’s the freezing temperatures of the Southern Seas, or the turbulent, endlessly rocky seas around the Falklands, their Maiden boat is always up against the might of the deadly ocean. Footage shot from the ship itself during those times helps to illustrate this terrifying aspect. Edwards is completely humanised here, either from her own testimony or others, her headstrong devotion to success pushing her mind and body to the absolute extreme. A truly feminist icon (even if at the time she didn’t identify as one), Edwards’ ambition is simply incredible to witness.
Not only do these women prove themselves capable of voyaging, but after winning a couple of legs, are in with a real shot of claiming the top prize themselves. This gives Maiden a thrilling narrative sweep, the film’s keen editing of talking head recollections and news footage allowing us to be a part of the race itself. For those, such as myself, who don’t know the final result of the race, it brings to mind classic sports documentaries such as Hoop Dreams, her eventual success becoming so much more than just a question of sporting prowess.
More effort could’ve been expended into the nuts and bolts of sailing itself. While the story is terrifically motivating, it doesn’t serve as much of a blueprint for anyone wishing to copy Edwards. One also senses a stranger and more crazy story than the one we are presented with. Funding for the ship is provided by none other than King Hussein of Jordan, a bizarre fact of history that isn’t really expanded upon. Additionally, nearly everyone involved seems to be a hard drinker, landing at port and instantly guzzling a bottle of champagne. The highs must have been higher and the lows lower than any documentary could bring to life. If any documentary was ripe for a fictionalised retelling, Maiden has one of the most engaging storylines any adaptation screenwriter could hope for.
Maiden is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 8th. On VoD Monday, September 30th.
It all starts in 2013. Sao Paulo students take to the streets in order to demand that a R$0.20 (circa £0.04) price hike in the bus fare gets slashed. These young people are part of broader movement called MPL (Free Pass Movement, in free translation), which demands that transport is free for all. The protests quickly grow and take place in virtually every corner of Brazil. Suddenly, millions of Brazilians are out on the streets. The movement culminates in the peaceful invasion of the Brazilian Congress. In response to the national commotion, president Dilma announces that 50% of oil revenues would be spent in education.
The outcome of such political activity, however, was double-edged. On one hand, young people felt more energised, ready to demand better education and equal opportunities. On the other hand, many ugly beasts are let out of the cage. Reactionary movements seized the opportunity in 2013 and joined the protests with a very different agenda. They were not concerned about the R$0.20, education and equality. Instead, they wanted to remove president Dilma and the Workers’ Party from power, and to implement an ultra neo-liberal agenda. We learn that shortly after the 2016 coup d’état that removed Dilma from office in 2016, education and healthcare spend was frozen for 20 years.
Your turn focuses on the continuous activity of the student movement since, in the country’s largest state of Sao Paulo. It follows the footsteps of three students activists and union leaders Lukas Koka Penteado, Nayara Souza and Mariana Jesus as their struggle against the state’s authoritarian and oppressive establishment. They occupy one, two and then suddenly thousands of schools and universities in protest against the education expenditure freeze. A corruption scandal involving school lunches is also at the top of their agenda. Their encounter police violence, get beaten up and humiliated along the way. Stun bombs are constantly thrown at at the studente. Each bomb represents 500 school lunches. Throughout the film, we see more than 16,000 school lunches “being exploded”.
The duality of grassroots activism is exposed in Your Turn. The government and the media attempt to present these young revolutionaries as violent vandals and troublemakers. The images beg to differ. The violence is invariably carried out by the police. And the activists do not destroy any of the buildings occupied. They are claiming what belongs to them, and demanding “a better future”. Race, gender and sexuality is also a central topic. These people believe that their body is central to their struggle. “Body freedom is a revolutionary act”, we are told. Marginalised Brazilians – women, Blacks and LGBT – are at the frontline of the battle.
The incarceration of young Brazilian – particularly the Black and poor – represents a major challenge. The number of prisons in Sao Paulo quadrupled between 2008 and 2015. Similarly to the US. This did not have a positive impact on crime rates, which continue to soar. Brazil now has the third highest prison population in the world, while also being in the top 10 most violent countries. Something clearly isn’t right. Lukas, Nayara and Mariana believe that the solution is building more schools, instead of more prisons.
The film montage is exquisite. Talking heads interviews are blended with street and television footage, and part of the film is narrated almost like a funk song, with electronic beats and strings. Your Turn is energetic and young at heart.
The final message, however, is bleak. We are reminded that extreme right wing Jair Bolsonaro became Brazilian president this year, and that he vowed “end all types of activism” in his first day in office. A sequence in the middle of the movie epitomises its tragic closure. A woman is bleeding the floor after being clubbed down by policemen. It looks like she’s about to die, presumably due to a concussion. Those around her try to console: “you survived the military dictatorship”. She then laments: “I can’t believe it’s happening again”. Images of the military are then shown.
There is also a message of defiance. The movie title itself is a call-to-action. Now it your turn to take to the streets and fight against fascism!
Your Turn premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019, where it won two prizes: the Amnesty International Film Award and the Independent Peace Film Prize. Stay tuned for UK dates. It shows at the Sheffield Doc Fest in June.
Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a doting kindergarten teacher in New York. She is married with two children. Her relationships at home are entirely functional, yet devoid of passion. Sex with her husband Grant (Michael Chernus) is extremely sporadic and easily interrupted. The teenage kids Josh and Lainie are slowly drifting away, with the latter often confronting her mother and challenging both her parental and her intellectual stills.
Lisa’s main venting outlet is a poetry club led by Simon (Gael Garcia Bernal), but her writings are dismissed as trivial and unoriginal. Overall, Lisa lacks both inspiration and excitement in her life. Until one day she realises that one of her five-year-old pupils has a gift for poetry. She overhears Jimmy (Parker Sevak) reciting a poem that he wrote himself and becomes profoundly impressed. She takes the poem to the poetry club as reads it as if it was her own. Simon and the others too become impressed, presuming Lisa authored the writings herself.
Lisa becomes obsessed with Jimmy. She insists to his father that he allows his young boy to explore his artistic gift. He’s some some of Mozart of poetry, she argues. The father is very dismissive, as he believes that poetry isn’t a serious labour. From this point on, Lisa starts to descend into a downward spiral. She has a sexual encounter with Simon, but nothing fruitful comes out of it. Her frail relationships at home collapse. And she is willing to resort to desperate measures in order to explore the full talent of the child “genius”.
The Kindergarten Teacher, which is the remake of the eponymous 2014 Israeli film Nadav Lapid (who just won the Golden Bear for this year’s Synonyms), purports to be a study of intellectualism, but it fails enormously at doing so. The outcome is mostly pretentious and hardly plausible. Sevak isn’t particularly strong at reading poetry. His diction is not on a par with the complexity of the poems, and his delivery of the self-written literature is just bizarre. Finding good actors at such young age is of course very difficult, yet excellent results can be achieved with a good helping hand from the director and coaches. A fine example of superb child acting (even younger than Sevak’s Jimmy) is in the Spanish film Summer 1993 (Carla Simon, 2018).
Plus, there are several holes in the plot. For example, why isn’t Lisa ever able to record Jimmy’s poetry in time, as he recites it? She always try to jot it down on paper. I wonder why it never occurred to her that she could use a mobile phone in order to capture the audio. Another problem is that the characters (except for Lisa and Jimmy) are both flat and redundant. The relationships are not explored in enough detail, and it’s never very clear what their function is. The film ending is particularly awkward, and you might leave the cinema with a big “WTF!” questions hanging above your head.
Some people might choose to laugh at The Kindergarten Teacher, and interpret it as comedy. I think, however, that these people are reading against the text as this was not intended to be a comedy.
Not all is bad about The Kindergarten Teacher. On the positive side, Maggie Gyllenhaal is a delight to watch. She conveys femininity, maternity, sexuality and existential angst. It’s never entirely clear the sort of attraction that Lisa feels for little Jimmy. Is it maternal, is it romantic, is it intellectual, or a mixture of all three. Maggie Gyellenhaal manages to sustain the narrative and deserves credit for a heartfelt and credible performance, despite a clumsy script and character conception.
The Kindergarten Teacher is in cinemas on Friday, March 8th. On VoD Monday, July 8th. On Mubi in November (2020).
Joni Mitchell was a welcome participant in the crepuscular closer The Last Waltz, a compassionate collective cheering farewell to the methodologies of the late 1960s. The sparse “Coyote” reflected Robbie Robertson’s pictorial ballads. Demonstrative drums aided her voice as Rick Danko and Richard Manuel paired in harmonious richness. It’s a memorable moment in a set list that includes Neil Young, Van Morrison, Ringo Starr and Bob Dylan. Over 19 albums, Mitchell’s output flourished with the detail and description a painting would deliver. Dividing her work between art and music, Mitchell’s trajectory covered themes of unvarnished emotion, Woodstock and Big Yellow Taxi a perennial cover inviting singers to the bygone, but envied, 1970s. Fittingly, this film celebrates her career, modelled on Martin Scorsese’s musical epic.
It doesn’t quite match the bar set by the band, but Mitchell is ably celebrated by singers contemporary and youthful delivering her life’s work. The stage welcomes Chaka Khan, Rufus Wainwright, Seal, Brandi Carlile, Glen Hansard, Emmylou Harris, Norah Jones,Diana Krall; Kris Kristofferson, Los Lobos with La Marisoul, Cesar Castro & Xochi Flores, delving with adaptations faithful to the transformative (Both Sides Now comes across as a very different beast under Seal’s luxuriant tones).
Graham Nash dedicates a number he wrote half a century ago and Déjà Vu’s Our House sounds more personal given the backstory Nash attributes to this standard. James Taylor strums the delicious “River”, undoubtedly aware of his muse in the song’s creation. The celebration culminates with all the stars performing and presenting Mitchell with a birthday cake on stage, who otherwise takes a more reclusive stand during the concert.
Nora Jones is much less reclusive, delivering the show-stealing rendition of Court and Spark a haunting essay of despair, vibrating over Jones’ low hanging voice. Behind her, a plaintive piano posits itself with rehearsed ease, denying other tracks a certain inspired live energy, but maintaining a standard of consistency among artists. In Mitchell’s absence, musical directors and bandmates Jon Cowherd and Brian Blade keep the ship in check. Between the sets, singers allow themselves a moment to praise Mitchell and the influence she has bestowed their careers.
Mitchell is missed, yet the film ably shows the imagination of her penwork, the variety of her songs, the steadfast nature of her art and the power one songwriter holds on generations of singers. Rather than wrap a period forever sought after, this is a waltz that invites its viewers to join in.
Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration is in cinemas across the world on Thursday, March 21st.
The media group World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) gets a lot of heat these days from die-hard professional wrestling enthusiasts for appealing to the mainstream, for tailoring its programming to attract the more ‘casual fan’ – the type of fan who, out of childhood nostalgia, tunes in to WWE around the time of the Royal Rumble, sticks around for WrestleMania hoping their favourite, semi-retired superstars will make a one-off return on “the Grandest Stage of Them All”, then withdraws from the world of wrestling until the following year’s Rumble.
Given it’s co-produced by WWE Studios, it’s unsurprising that Fighting with My Family is also tailored towards mainstream appeal: writer-director Stephen Merchant and executive producer Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (who also plays himself, appearing sporadically, much like his current WWE schedule) apply a familiar sporting underdog structure to the career of former Divas Champion Paige (whose real name is Saraya-Jade Bevis, played here by Florence Pugh).
Merchant doesn’t completely shy away from the unpleasant aspects of the wrestling business. The loneliness, substance abuse and heartbreak that characterise Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 The Wrestler are all there, though to a much lesser degree). The director is clearly aiming for a charming, feel-good crowd pleaser.
It’s understandable, though, that wrestling die-hards (or “smarks” as we both love and loathe to be called) would approach a film made with general audiences in mind apprehensively. Merchant has been forthcoming about his unfamiliarity with professional wrestling prior to Fighting with My Family, even going so far as to distance his wrestling movie from “the graps” by suggesting “there’s a universality to this story that’s not just about wrestling”. Wrestling fans, with our replica title belts and oversized Becky Lynch t-shirts, are already looked at funnily – as Paige is early on – so the hope is that Merchant gets it right and does pro wrestling justice.
Fighting with My Family might be too predictable to be something special, but for the most part Merchant does get it right, particularly in his focus on the relationship between Paige and her brother Zak (Jack Lowden). Both WWE hopefuls from a young age, Paige and Zak’s relationship fractures when the former is signed to WWE developmental brand NXT and the latter told he has no future in the business. Pugh and Lowden stand out, especially when sharing the screen together, though Lowden perhaps has the more compelling material to work with, Zak’s arc being one of self-destruction as opposed to Paige’s arc of self-discovery. Pugh does well with what she’s given, but the individual scenes Lowden is granted (a despondent pub brawl; pulling drawing pins out of his back post-match) are difficult to contend with. Nick Frost and Lena Headey flesh out the main roster, expertly delivering Merchant’s crass witticisms and bolstering the winning family dynamic.
Where Merchant nearly botches it, though, is in the final act, with Paige promoted to the main roster and given a shot at the Divas Championship against holder AJ Lee (real-life wrestler and manager Zelina Vega). The matchup is billed as a legitimate unscripted sporting contest, Paige thrown into the deep end and overcoming the odds to unexpectedly defeat Lee. In reality, both Paige and Lee would have worked out out the finish to the match between themselves. This backstage element of pro wrestling – a fascinating, sometimes nasty, politicking that bleeds into the fictional story lines – is largely ignored in order to make Paige’s underdog triumph more unexpected. It’s a mischaracterisation likely to confuse non-wrestling fans and frustrate those familiar with such procedures.
In many ways, Fighting with My Family is a microcosm of WWE programming: it’s frustrating at times, occasionally goes in the wrong direction and over relies on part-timer cameos. But when it works, it’s affecting, captivating and, most of all, fun.
Fighting with My Family is out in cinemas across the UK on Wednesday, February 27th.
