The world loves telling teenage girls what to do with their own bodies – don’t wear this, don’t take that, if you end up with another life inside you then you absolutely must have it. If you were being glib and reductive, you might call NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS the anti-JUNO, but it’s so much more than that. Naturalistic and raw and moving, we are kept sometimes uncomfortably close to Autumn (the incredible Sidney Flanagan) as we follow her and her friend’s gruelling journey from Pennsylvania to New York to have an abortion without her parents finding out. This never feels anything less than completely real, standing in for so many young women’s painful experiences, their distress at being deprived of choice. If the “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” scene doesn’t get you, then you’re made of stone. SSP
Review in Brief: Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)
Planet of the Apes Movies Ranked
Review in Brief: His House (2020)
HIS HOUSE tells a familiar enough haunted house story but filters it through the real experience and plight of refugees and is all the sadder and hard-hitting for that. The lead performances of Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku are raw, the atmosphere pervasive and the way the film visually represents a blurring boundary between real and supernatural nightmares really stands out. You get all the usual jump scares and jolting soundtrack that comes with a classic haunting but as PSD trauma gives way to present trauma and then without warning everything gets consumed by delirious, beautiful fever dream imagery you realise this is so unlike any film it might share a passing similarity with. As distinctive feature debuts go, director Remi Weekes couldn’t ask for a better one. SSP
Review in Brief: My Octopus Teacher (2020)
Nature documentary makers are told never to interfere with the natural order of things, to be neutral observers only. MY OCTOPUS TEACHER is the magical story of a man with a camera forming an unlikely and unbreakable bond with another living creature. We follow Craig Foster’s developing relationship with a female octopus over a year, documenting the trials of being such a creature trying to survive in a South African kelp forest, hunting and being hunted. Memorable and moving sights captured by the pristine underwater photography include the first hesitant hand-to-tentacle contact, the octopus’ daring escape from a hungry shark by riding it and their bittersweet farewell. This is a moving and personal take on the natural world and how we interact with it. SSP
Review in Brief: A White, White Day (2019)
A WHITE, WHITE DAY is a film, like its protagonist (a craggy, mesmerising Ingvar Sigurdsson), utterly consumed by grief. The imposing Icelandic landscape blurs the line between life and death, beauty and bleakness, memory and reality. Little moments of quiet wisdom, like “Kids don’t think about what adults or old people are doing” and fairly frequent black comic beats keeps the film alive and the performances are all excellent, layered and challenging. The film begins with one of the most beautiful time-lapse sequences in ages where we see seasons pass and a vacated dwelling slowly being made habitable once more. From here Ingimundur splits his time between DIY, looking after his granddaughter and investigating the infidelity of his late wife. Aside from the loving devotion to his family he’s not the easiest guy to like, especially with his deplorable actions as an emotional ex-cop later on, but if you treat the film as a dark modern fable it ends up being rather moving, even life-affirming. SSP
Review in Brief: Ainu Mosir
The Ainu are the aboriginal people of Hokkaidō, Japan’s large northern island. Following centuries of oppression, discrimination, cultural invalidation, the Ainu were officially recognised as indigenous people of Japan in 2008. AINU MOSIR (after the Ainu name for Hokkaidō) tells the story of an Ainu boy (Kanto Shimokura) in search of his own identity apart from his ancestry. The film is naturalistic to the point of feeling like a documentary; we see Kanto’s desire to leave his village, which is a popular attraction for Japanese and overseas tourists alike, and his further confusion at being asked to take part in the upsetting Iomante animal sacrifice ritual by his surrogate father figure (Debo Akibe). The film is captivating, quietly emotional and very beautiful, the Ainu’s bond with nature reflected in stunning landscape photography, their culture and traditions presented with reverence and without judgement. This understated gem of Japanese cinema is now available on Netflix so seek it out. SSP
Review in Brief: I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS is challenging, elusive, indulgent, alienating – a Charlie Kaufman film, in short. Like pretty much all of his work, reality is brought into question minute by minute, nobody ends up playing exactly the same character they were at the beginning and some may never have been there in the first place. If that last sentence doesn’t make sense then I’m only trying to replicate what the film does. Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons play a couple visiting parents in the country as a snowstorm closes in. After we meet the strange parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) even stranger things begin to happen to the passage of time, characters’ identities and backstories and reality itself. Don’t even get me started on the school janitor. Don’t be surprised by ballet interludes or the quoting of an entire Pauline Kael review. It won’t be for everyone, in fact it’s probably not for many, but it is unique, mesmerising and awkwardly amusing. SSP
Review in Brief: Rocks (2019/20)
The wonderful ROCKS completely broke me multiple times. It is the most loving tribute to friendship and the collaborative process of filmmaking. Thanks to director Sarah Gavron’s process involving classroom-based intensive workshopping and invaluable, grounding input from the young cast, this may become the only way to film a truthful school story in future. What the cast really manage to bring across is what’s great about being a teenage girl (hanging out with friends) and what’s not (falling out with friends) and the challenges so many experience every day (neglect, poverty, trying to avoid the attention of social services). I don’t think I’ve seen a better film about friendship, and particularly the damage caused by petty school arguments since WE ARE THE BEST! The cast of non-professional actors are excellent across the board (Bukky Bakray as the title character and Kosar Ali as her best friend stand out and have to do most of the dramatic heavy lifting) and any of them could be looking at a promising future in the industry should they want to pursue it. Rocks is hard-hitting but feel-good, frank and funny and always honest. SSP
Review: Tenet (2020)
Turn the music down when people are talking Nolan – you’ve been told before! TENET is perhaps Christopher Nolan’s most elusive film after MEMENTO, and not always for the reasons intended. Strap yourselves in for a thrilling, but frustrating ride.
The Protagonist (John David Washington) is recruited by a collective of secret agents to take down an arms dealer (Kenneth Branagh) who appears to somehow be using temporal reversal technology to bring about World War III.
Let’s get the obvious, and the good stuff out of the way first. The set pieces are stunning – muscular, visceral and as real as you can get while time keeps flipping backwards and forwards. You’d expect nothing less from the man who flipped an 18-wheeler nose-to-tail because he could. From a BOURNE-riffing kitchen scrap complete with lethal cheesegrater usage to to crashing an entire jumbo jet through a hanger, no one does big action quite like Nolan. This is the reason to see Tenet on a big screen, but perhaps not enough of one to keep cinemas open solely for.
Anyone can enjoy the spectacle, the scale and ambition of a piece like this. But how are you meant to understand the mechanics of how or why anything is happening? Suspension of disbelief is essential to enjoy any time travel film (which this is, even if Nolan doesn’t seem to like it being reduced to such in conversation) but if the characters seem just as bewildered by events as we the audience are how can anything connect dramatically?
The time reversal (sorry, entropy reversal) aspect of the set pieces achieved through a combination of complex stunt rehearsal and reversing footage is eye-catching, but unfortunately it can come across as unintentionally hilarious. Nothing like thinking of that backwards episode of RED DWARF to ruin the tension of the final battle between two teams of heavily armed operatives moving the opposite way through time.
The lead character known only as the Protagonist seems a sly comment on the way this and many other kinds of story are told – he’s doing what he’s doing because he’s the hero and that’s what heroes do. As Robert Pattinson’s Neil continually stresses to the Protagonist and the audience about how the time travel works here, “don’t worry about it”. It becomes clear that fate or something similar has a part to play, that the Protagonist is being guided along a particular path whether he wants to be or not. As the story progresses and more timey-wimey shenanigans pulled, you do have to ask whether everything we witness was predetermined by fate, even if we’ll never understand how.
Tenet is missing time and attention on characters and motivation, relationships and emotion. He’s sometimes described as a cold and distant filmmaker, but at least Nolan’s INCEPTION and INTERSTELLAR had people acting like people with wants and needs to back up their reality-and-physics-defying spectacle.
The money is all on screen, all the performers do their jobs well and you can’t fault Nolan’s ambition regarding scale and concepts, but this is a film impossible to truly engage with because you’re not made to feel anything. The characters are (intentionally or not) cyphers, the plot frequently breaks its own convoluted logic and you don’t get the impression all this time and effort amounts to anything meaningful. After seeing Tenet you’ll be dazzled, but you may well also be exhausted and not all that satisfied. SSP
SSP Thinks Film 