The January films are coming thick and fast as awards hopefuls, star vehicles and year-end blockbusters all mixing on cinema listings. Here are my thoughts on a few of those films conveniently broken down into “Must See”, “Worth a Look” and “Not Worth Your Time”.
Must See!!
A Real Pain
Jesse Eisenberg’s sophomore feature was one of my favourite films of 2024 and an absolute must-see in cinemas. A Real Pain follows cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) who reunite on a holocaust remembrance tour around Poland paid for by their late grandmother in her will. The pair were once inseparable, but David has drifted into humdrum family life, while Benji is stuck in a vagabond existence.
Their trip quickly becomes a quintessential mix of the odd-couple and road movie genres, as the disorderly and spontaneous Benji quickly rubs against David’s OCD fussiness. Eisenberg and Culkin are a pitch-perfect comedic pair as they share a similar manic energy which makes them completely believable as cousins, but express this through the chalk-and-cheese introversion of David and extroversion of Benjii. The film is bursting at the seams with laughs both through its situational comedy and a succession of pithy one-liners from Culkin, of which “Money is like heroin for boring people” is a personal favourite.
However, amongst all the humour is a meditative and heartfelt look at grief and suffering that is entirely befitting of the film’s title. A Real Pain does not forget its sombre setting and reflects on pain in all its incarnations, from the greatest human tragedy down to the smallest daily sorrow. Eisenberg’s script handles all this with the utmost grace as it interrogates the human tendency to deny, ignore, or pretend our pain is somehow “unexceptional”. It’s a topic people are still far too reticent to discuss and Eisenberg does a commendable job tackling it here. He also showcases his deft directorial hand, never going for a cheap laugh or saccharine moment, and he gives his film the space it needs to breathe and resonate with audiences. A late-on visit to a concentration camp is where everything could have fallen off the rails, but Eisenberg navigates it with the gravitas it deserves.
Nickel Boys
Nickel Boys is one of the most experimental, experiential and formally inventive films I have ever seen. Based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 2019, it follows a black teenager Elwood (Ethan Herisse) who is wrongfully caught up in a car theft and sent to the reform school, Nickle Academy. There, he meets Turner (Brandon Wilson) and the two boys develop a close bond as they try to survive what emerges to be an abusive, corrupt and deeply racist institution. The Nickle Academy is based on a now notorious, but for decades secreted, reform school in Florida and the horrors alone we are confronted with make this a vital story and a shocking indictment of the American state.
However, director RaMell Ross (who makes his fictional feature debut) evolves the film further by shooting it predominantly through POV shots of his two leads, switching between them at crucial junctures in the narrative. It is an audacious filmmaking choice, yet Ross pulls it off with ease as he crafts a tactile and intimate masterpiece. Nickel Boys will both dazzle and draw you into its story on a sensory level, making its camaraderie and heartbreak all the more poignant. What’s more, it also captures the hazy but evocative nature of memory and trauma, as the camerawork creates a disorienting effect but threads this through a series of crystal-clear and oftentimes searing images.
There is also so much more to admire about Nickle Boys than one narrative device as the script, co-written by Ross and producer Joslyn Barnes, is mature and finely structured, weaving together different perspectives and time periods effortlessly. The cast are all phenomenal, especially considering the unusual filming methods, and Anjanue Ellis-Taylor is transcendent as Elwood’s grandmother, Hattie. However, the brightest star of this film is RaMell Ross, as his astounding cinematic vision seeps through every pore of the film, including one breathtaking timelapse of a train carriage. He has rendered a rageful tale of injustice and indifference into a beautiful and enthralling piece of cinema.
Worth a look 🙂
We Live in Time
Mispackaged as a pure mawkish melodrama about a couple collectively battling a wife’s cancer treatment, We Live in Time thrives best as a more traditional meet cute. It’s more Richard Curtis meets A24 than it is a teenage weepy. Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield will charm your socks off as Almut and Tobias, as they have about as much on-screen chemistry as any two actors I can recall. Their charisma and tension are through the roof, and I fear anyone currently caught in the quagmires of Hinge or Tinder may walk out of the cinema with a sickly mix of horniness, envy, and despair.
The sparks between them are flying so thick and fast that I fear they initially blinded me to the underbaked offering the film truly is. Director John Crowley has made a name for himself crafting mature, nuanced and honest works like Boy A and the Oscar-nominated Brooklyn. However, here he has decided to go full throttle on romantic cliches- packing in ice skating, our lovers leaning longingly on either side of a door, and the big romantic gesture of turning up out of the blue at a party after a fight. He sadly also sidelines any conflicts before the film can delve into them, and screenwriter Nick Payne has included a couple of tin-eared lines of dialogue only actors of Garfield or Pugh’s calibre could pull off. If it were not for their impressive double-hander, the film would likely have fallen apart into a doe-eyed, gawking mess. Fortunately, we do have them to rescue the film and, while nobody is offering up their best work here, it all makes for an enjoyably mushy watch.
Architecton
This one is undoubtedly a harder sell- a largely wordless documentary exploring architecture and the building blocks of stone and concrete which underpin it. It all sounds like rather dreary stuff, yet director Victor Kossakovsky has crafted an astounding visual feat that deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible. He comprises hypnotic reverbed shots of limestone exploding from quarries and dancing across the screen alongside aerial shots of dramatic landscapes. We are also presented with ancient and modern ruins from Greece to war-torn Ukraine, which he converts into monoliths worthy of Kubrick himself. The experience of seeing these images is hard to quantify, and the closest parallel I can draw is to Johan Johansson’s 2020 film Last and First Men. Architecton takes us beyond architecture into the elemental forces of nature, and it is a film that one senses more than they understand. This is fortunate for Kossakovsky struggles to cohere his dazzling images into something more meaningful. Although each shot is scrupulously designed, they are thrown together randomly and lack a compelling narrative to bind them. An attempt is made to tie things up via a very wordy epilogue, but this still fails to satisfy. Nevertheless, one can simply marvel at the dazzling imagery being projected before them.
Better Man
It’s best to address the monkey in the room immediately with Robbie William’s new biopic Better Man. The Take That alum and former messy bad-boy of British music has elected to be portrayed by a monkey, a chimpanzee to be precise, portrayed by actor Jonno Davies. The reasons for this simian simulacrum are likely manifold. Most obviously it fits his cheeky chappy persona and also provides a metaphor (a rather heavy-handed one, I might add) about how the limelight can turn someone into a dancing monkey. I suspect, to be brutally honest, vanity may also be at play as it prevents Davies ever being closely associated with the Angel’s singer, and keeps Williams himself- who narrates the film and voices the chimp in his final scene- the star of the show.
The reasons put aside, what is undeniable is how well the conceit works, as not once did I ever find it strange to see the monkey-man interacting with a human cast. Instead, it livens up another entry into the increasingly saturated field of pop-biopics. Michael Gracy (The Greatest Showman) directs the film as big and brash as the man himself, giving us a plethora of punchy, CGI-tastic musical sequences. This includes a romping good number down Oxford Circus featuring his Take That bandmates who are being played by absolute dead-ringers for boys themselves. Better Man has all the subtlety of the human peacock that is Robbie Williams and even includes one Planet of the Apes style set-piece where he quite literally battles his demons. Yet, as excessive, self-indulgent, vanity projects, go this one is brilliant fun to watch- so sit back, relax, and Let It Entertain You.
2073
The latest documentary from Asif Kapadia (Amy, Senna) is a powerful call to arms needlessly dressed up in retro-dystopian drag. It blends fact and science fiction by framing a documentary about modern threats to democracy within a dystopian vision of 2073 ripped apart by “The Event”. We are guided through this world by “The Ghost” (Samantha Morton), a mute scrapper whose internal monologue tells us about her world and queues us back to our present crisis-ridden reality. The problem is that Kapadia’s 2073 combines an early noughts sci-fi aesthetic with some bulky Blade Runner-esque production design, which makes it feel more outdated than it does prescient. This mutes some of the documentary’s urgency by crafting a vision of the future that feels more like a relic of the past.
This is a shame as the actual documentary- which is broken into four sections analysing right-wing populism, the surveillance state, rapidly developing AI, and environmental catastrophe- is compelling stuff. It is an incisive look into a growing populist and technocratic rot within our world and the precipice it is teetering on. The sections examining the surveillance state and AI, which respectively focus on the Chinese government’s despotic treatment of Uyghur Muslims and confront us with possible data mining within the NHS, are by far its strongest and most terrifying. Despite its clunky narrative devices, and the occasionally overwhelming pace at which it throws out information, Kapadia’s film works well as a wake-up call for us all.
Not Worth Your Time!!!
Maria
This new biopic, which follows the final days of opera singer Maria Callas’ life in 1970s Paris, is sumptuous to look at. As with all his films, director Pablo Larrain has cloaked the screen in lavish production design and rich cinematography. Sadly, this doesn’t prevent the film from feeling drab and distant. Unsurprisingly, Angelina Jolie cuts an elegant figure as Callas, but there is something so alienating and frosty in her persona. This may well be true to life but it also means that unless you are a Maria Callas devotee, and I must confess I had never heard of her before, then there is not a lot to keep you engaged. This disconnect is also worsened by the film’s singing. Although Jolie did apparently do a lot of it herself, only resorting to miming when the prima donna’s lungs simply couldn’t be matched, this is not how it comes across on screen. The voice coming out of her mouth doesn’t seem connected to her body at all, and this adds to the feelings of vacuousness which pervade the whole film.
Mufasa: The Lion King
On the plus side, Mufasa: The Lion King partially overcomes the uncanny valley which plagued its 2019 predecessor. The film\’s feline stars look a bit more cartoonish, act a bit more theatrical, and have far more anthropomorphic faces. I am not sure whether this is thanks to advances in technology or a directorial choice from Barry Jenkins (who deserves far better than this film). However, it makes seeing a photorealist lion singing that little bit easier to digest, and less like watching David Attenborough on acid.
However, the same cannot be said for the rest of the film which is about as easy to swallow as a very dry cracker. Its story about how Mufasa came to be king of Pride Rock is as dusty and lifeless as the Sahara Desert. The songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda are decent, and a couple are fairly memorable. However, his close relationship with the House of Mouse means they now sound like bog-standard Disney tunes. There is also not one morsel of character or plot that necessitated this prequel and, if anything, its attempts to flesh out and humanise (or should that be lionise?) characters undercuts some of the original’s pleasures. The Lion King (1994) was a Shakespearian tragedy, quite literally adapted from Hamlet, with its characters firmly slotted into their silhouettes of good and evil. This prequel muddies the water, and not in an interesting way, to such an extent it makes me think Mufasa had it all coming all along.