THE SUBSTANCE*****

French writer-director Coralie Fargeat's THE SUBSTANCE is a body horror film that also works as social satire.  It is visually and aurally stunning and features a career-defining and award-worthy performance from Demi Moore that veers between MOMMIE DEAREST and heartbreak. It works all the better for Gen X viewers like myself because we have watched Demi's body-choices litigated over decades. Her buzz cut and ripped muscles for GI Jane.  Her Vanity Fair cover proudly showing her nude with a baby bump.  Her recent extreme plastic surgery. And there's an irony that she looks so good at 60 that she can play 50, but even good at 50 isn't good enough for Hollywood, or real life.

Moore's Elisabeth Sparkle is a preternaturally well-preserved middle-aged actress who now hosts a Jane Fonda-style aerobics show.  She is summarily sacked by her shark-like boss on her fiftieth birthday and turns to a black-market drug to remain attractive. The problem is that the brat-green injection doesn't restore your own body to youth but creates a younger, perkier avatar.  The avatar - "Sue", played by Margot Qualley - gets all the fame and adoration.  You, Elisabeth, become like the portrait of Dorian Grey, something abandoned, lonely, old, old, old.  And that's before you misuse the drug, stay longer as Sue, and reap the cost as Elisabeth.

There's a lot of stylish fun to be had in this film. It reminded me of Cronenberg and Vachon with its disciplined graphic design and willingness to push body horror to absurdity. Whoever did the sound design deserves an award. We hear and feel the grotesquery of every crunch of a prawn and every needle puncture. Dennis Quaid is game as the disgusting venal TV producer.  Moore and Qualley are courageous with their nudity and objectification. I laughed out loud a lot all the way through the film as well as having to look away and particularly gruesome scenes.

But there's so much more going on here.  Demi Moore is heartbreaking as Sparkle - a woman who by all standards is stunningly beautiful and youthful but is tormented by the giant billboard of Sue facing her apartment. There's a pivotal scene around half way through the film when Elisabeth tries to go out on a date and looks stunning to our eyes, but she is crippled by her internalised misogyny and ageism. It's tragic and credible and stunningly performed. She deserves an Oscar nomination for this career-best performance.

THE SUBSTANCE is rated R and has a running time of 140 minutes. It won Best Screenplay at Cannes 2024. It will be released in the USA and UK on September 20th.

APOLLO 13: SURVIVAL*****

Documentarian Peter Middleton has form. His prior films, THE REAL CHARLIE CHAPLIN and NOTES ON BLINDNESS are exceptional. And this new film, documenting the famous salvaging of the 1970 Apollo 13 lunar mission, is no exception.  Over 96 minutes, he gives us a minute by minute immersion into the mission, from successful take-off to miraculous re-entry. We know the beats from the iconic Hollywood movie.  The explosion two days into the flight, the venting of the oxygen, the transfer to the lunar module designed for only 2 people for 2 days, the manual transfer of data, the manual adjustment of the module's trajectory... Every moment filled with peril and terrifying odds. 

The film beautifully edits together NASA video and audio footage and contemporary interviews with many of the key players, from astronauts to family members to the iconic Gene Krantz at Mission Control. The resulting film is thrilling, even though we know the outcome, because we feel as never before the intimacy of being trapped in a tiny lunar module hundreds of thousands of miles from earth. And while the astronauts are preternaturally cool thanks to years of training and a rigorous selection process, we see the fear and concern on the face of wife Marilyn Lovell in still photographs and in her voice. 

I felt viscerally the relief when communications were re-established with the capsule as it came through the earth's atmosphere. Like the gathered crowds cheering in Grand Central Station, I felt catharsis and joy.  And then we see the men who got them back - the scientists and engineers back at Mission Control, four days into a crisis, still with their ties tied and their shirts tucked in.  It feels like another time and another way of being. There's no whooping or hollering. It's so contained. And all the more impressive for that. 

APOLLO 13: SURVIVAL has a running time of 96 minutes and was released on Netflix on Friday.

FIREBRAND****

Karim Ainouz's FIREBRAND is the story of Henry VIII's sixth wife, Catherine Parr.  Fair warning, this is a highly fictionalised account of her life, as told by screenwriters Jessica and Henrietta Ashworth and based on a novel by Elizabeth Fremantle.  The real Catherine did not apparently know and admire the radical preacher Anne Askew (the marvellous Erin Doherty - the best of the Princess Annes in The Crown).  And what happens in the final act stretches credulity.  And yet I do feel that this earnest and handsomely made film gets to a deep truth about the aged Henry and Catherine.

From what we can tell, Catherine does appear to have been fiercely capable, a generous educator and mother to Henry's various children, and an intelligent religious thinker. Her influence on England through shaping the thought of the young Princess Elizabeth is profound.  As played by Alicia Vikander she manages to make herself quiet and amenable but also has the courage of her religious convictions AND the ruthlessness to humiliate a younger rival.  She is a power player within the bounds that society allows her. 

And from what we can tell, the aged Henry was a deeply unhealthy, spoiled and irascible man, capable of cruelty and tyranny. Indeed, the lens through which this film tells the marital story is one of domestic abuse. We have a wife who must watch her words in order to pacify a terrifyingly quick-tempered husband.  Her every move is designed to preserve her own life and enable religious reform.  But she is physically terrorised, doubted for her loyalty, not just to Henry as a man and but to the Crown.  He loves her - we think - as much as he has loved any of his wives - but he will viciously physically attack her if provoked. 

All of this adds up to a claustrophobic and horrific atmosphere at court.  The forces against Catherine are variously the male relations of Henry's children, jockeying for power, and Bishop Stephen Gardiner (Simon Russell Beale) who is against religious reform. And then there is Henry himself, as played by Jude Law, obese and sneering but with the odd flash of charm that makes us see why Catherine may well have convinced herself she is in love with him. This is truly a fantastic performance from Jude Law.

But the really pivotal relationship in this film turns out to be between Catherine and Anne. It is Anne who urges Catherine to action and holds her to account, and Anne who sheds a tear for Catherine's lost soul in a deeply moving final act. 

A film - and performances - not to be missed.

FIREBRAND is rated R and has a running time of 121 minutes. It played Cannes 2023 and was released in the USA in June. It opens in the UK this weekend.

SKINCARE* - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Preview

SKINCARE is a film that doesn't know what it wants to be. Its star, Elizabeth Banks (CALL JANE), is playing it straight as an aesthetician being driven out of business by a stalker/corporate saboteur.  But Lewis Pullman is playing it like he's in a spoof or a social satire as her wannabe boyfriend slash life coach. Meanwhile the needle drops and lighting make it feel like the film wants to be a sleazy 80s thriller.  None of it hangs together.

Instead what we get is a frustrating film about someone we are meant to believe is a hustler businesswoman but who relies on men to get her out of difficulty.  Whether it's a newscaster who can give her promotional airtime on his channel (Nathan Fillion) or a local mechanic who can fix her slashed tires or the aforementioned life coach, our heroine responds to societal misogyny by being a helpless damsel in distress. And don't get me started on Pose's MJ Rodriguez, criminally wasted in the faithful friend sidekick role.

It's the kind of film with uninteresting female characters that one can only imagine being written by three men with little screenwriting experience. And so it comes as no surprise to discover that this is Austin Peters' fiction feature directorial debut based on a script co-written with debut feature screenwriters Sam Freilich and Derring Regan.

I am not sure what this film is doing in the festival. It's very weak.

SKINCARE has a running time of 96 minutes and is rated R. It was released in the USA in August and will play the BFI London Film Festival 2024.

BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE**

Director Tim Burton has set himself a high bar in making a sequel to his beloved black comedy BEETLEJUICE. It was a film that blended live action and animation - a heartbreakingly wholesome couple and a ghoulishly dysfunctional family - macabre jokes about suicide and an iconic possession sequence set to Harry Belafonte. How do you top the inventiveness, the zaniness and the hilarity of Michael Keaton's titular performance? How do you make us love characters in the way that we loved Lydia Deetz and wanted to protect her just as the Maitlands did?

Sadly, except for a couple of flashes of brilliance, the sequel fails to live up to the original. We waste a good half hour simply catching up with characters and it must be 45 minutes before The Juice Is Loose.  Over thirty years have passed.  Lydia (Winona Ryder) is now a schlocky TV presenter with an oleaginous TV producer love interest (Justin Theroux). Her stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) is now fantastically successful as an artist, but in mourning for her beloved Charles. Delia and Lydia have made a kind of peace since the original film, but Lydia now has problems with her own teenage daughter (Jenna Ortega).  The family gathers at the original house for Charles' funeral. Shenanigans ensue.

What's to love?  Michael Keaton, underused, but fantastic. Monica Belucci and Danny DeVito criminally underused.  Catherine O'Hara's occasional killer line, especially playing off Justin Theroux.  A fantastic flashback played as a foreign-language black-and-white melodrama. A brilliantly funny use of Richard Marx' Right Here Waiting. But too much of it was plodding through character catch-ups. Not enough of it was funny. Are we really surprised by the silly sandworms as deus ex machina? No. There are no stakes. There are no feelings. What's it for?

BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 104 minutes. It played Venice and is on global release today.

THE PERFECT COUPLE*

How many shows can we watch where Nicole Kidman plays a beautiful, uptight, brittle, rich woman trapped in a miserable marriage but struggling to hold on to her perfectly manicured life? Enough already.

In this latest iteration she plays a successful murder-mystery writer living in a gorgeous summer house in Nantucket with her handsome husband (Liev Schreiber), hosting the wedding of her second son.  The night before the wedding, the bridesmaid is found drowned and the wedding is cancelled.

Whodunnit? We discover in short order that the bridesmaid was pregnant by the paterfamilias, that the first son is a feckless trader in financial trouble, and the bride is actually in love with the groomsman.  And that's just the first couple of episodes. The set-up is that of a classic Agatha Christie mystery where lots of family members have motives that we have to untangle.  Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman is both a master of PR and selling books, but also trying to move away from her image as part of the "perfect couple".  Her best-selling novels feature a crime detecting couple similar to Christie's Tommy and Tuppence - an alliterative crime-busting perfect husband and wife, and the author's marriage is part of the marketing drive.

The six-part TV show is handsomely cast and handsomely filmed in a lavish Cape Cod mansion. Everyone looks the part.  And yet something about the script and performances feels flat. The show just never takes flight. I never cared. Also, if you know your Christie, the solution is pretty easy to figure out. (More on that in the spoiler section after the release information.)

I think the problem is that while director Susanne Bier is great at creating context and a luxury lifestyle on screen, a murder mystery has to be more than Nora Ephron lifestyle porn. It has to hook us in.  And the modern audience demands more of its murder mysteries, especially those set amongst the super-rich. In a post WHITE LOTUS world, THE PERFECT COUPLE just feels plain vanilla - too straight - too dull - too obvious.  Only the wonderful Dakota Fanning seems to be in a different show and to really be having fun with it.  

THE PERFECT COUPLE debuted on Netflix this week. 

SPOILERS - I have not read the source novel by Elin Hilderbrand but understand that the solution is far more ambiguous in the novel. It tells you everything you need to know about how plain vanilla the adaptation is that they decided to give you a proper murderer and motive and then to tie everything up by having a resolution between the author and the bride too.  The lone attempt to spice things up with the author's sketchy backstory feels very shoehorned in. It didn't cohere.

LEE**

Lee Miller was a supermodel and a surrealist muse before becoming a photographer in her own right.  When World War Two broke out began by photographing the home front for Vogue before lobbying to be sent to the front line. She captured images of the Allies using napalm in France, and then of the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. Famously, she photographed herself in Hitler's bathtub, her muddied boots defiant in front of the tub.  She was tough, self-medicated with alcohol, "sex positive", and by all accounts a rather distant mother.  Her life is big enough for several films, or a miniseries. Sadly this film, produced by and starring Kate Winslet, can't seem to wrap its arms around its subject and wrestle it to the ground.

The first problem with LEE the film is its framing device. Winslet is aged up to be the seventy-year old Lee going through her old photos with a young interviewer (CHALLENGERS' Josh O'Connor).  The problem is that every time we get to a moment of dramatic tension and need to stay emotionally engaged we are ripped out into a different era.  The worst example of this is when we go from Dachau to Hitler's villa, now being used as a convivial officers' mess.  The contrast is sinister and surreal and Alexandre Desplat's score captures the weirdness of it. The problem is, the contrast is split by an interlude in the 1970s. I understand why Winslet the producer thought she had a duty to include this framing device - more of which in the spoiler section after the release info - but I think it was a distraction ad a mis-step.

The second problem with LEE is that the first act in St Malo is marred by the casting choice of Alexander Skarsgard as her lover Roger Penrose. Skarsgard simply can't do a convincing English accent and it's hugely distracting.  

The film is on firmer footing with the third and most impactful relationship that Miller had - her collaboration with the Life magazine photographer David Scherman. Andy Samberg is good in this role as far as it goes but the film isn't interested in exploring why this relationship worked when so many others didn't. And it criminally under explores his reaction to the camps. 

We are on firmer footing with Lee's female friendships.  Winslet is at her finest in scenes of tender intimacy, first with Noemie Merlant's surrealist artist Nusch - and most heartbreakingly with Marion Cotillard's Solange d'Ayen. This is not a convincing film but Cotillard's cameo is pure authentic tragic pain and deserves awards season recognition.  I also loved Andrea Riseborough (BRIGHTON ROCK) as the thoroughly decent and thoroughly straight-laced Vogue editor Audrey Withers.

The problem is that these moments of genuine heartbreak are scattered in a film that can't quite convince as a whole. I blame this mostly on the screenplay by Liz Hannah (THE POST), Marion Hume and John Collee (MASTER & COMMANDER).  I think the time spent in St Malo is good as a contrast to the wartime suffering, but I felt every moment spent with Roger or the interviewer was wasted. Most of all I just didn't feel that I ended the film understanding Lee more than at the start. The script felt reductive. Its Lee is a victim of abuse who protects the abused but cannot protect herself or her family from her alcoholism.  But is that the only explanation I am to have of why this beautiful privileged woman decided to go to Dachau? And was she an alcoholic before the war? Or just after Dachau?  And why don't we ever really see her suffer for that?  She is the most high-functioning alcoholic I have seen.

I also feel that the film is both dumbed down with exposition AND weirdly does not explain stuff I needed to know! There's lots of exposition - especially early on - but then no signposting that we are at Dachau, or really that we are in Hitler's actual house, or that the little girl in the camp was in a brothel. I only knew that because Kate Winslet referred to that scene in a Q&A. 

Is the film worth watching? Yes for the scenes with Riseborough and Cotillard and for Winslet's performance. But it remains a frustrating viewing experience.

LEE is rated R and has a running time of 116 minutes.  It played Toronto 2023. It opens in the UK on September 16th and in the USA on September 27th.

Spoilers follow:  Kate Winslet said in her Q&A that she felt a duty toward Lee's son to give him the conversation with his mother about her life that he never had in real life. This film was made in collaboration with the son and the Lee Miller estate. I feel that that sense of obligation was a burden for this film.  The lack of relationship between mother and son is only interesting if we really explore her post-war PTSD and as a reflection on what she saw. By wrapping the film up in it, and making it have a conversation with Lee's wartime experiences, it diminishes the power of the Holocaust scenes and adds little depth to our understanding of Lee.