GOODBYE JUNE**

Kate Winslet has been evolving behind the camera, producing the biopic LEE and now making her directorial debut with this new mawkish family Christmas movie GOODBYE JUNE.  Helen Mirren plays the titular protagonist, dying of cancer in her most unglamorous role to date.  Her four children, husband and assorted grandkids gather around and try and sort through their various emotional issues before giving her a twee Christmas nativity play send-off. Winslet plays the financially successful, stoic elder sister.  The wonderful Andrea Riseborough plays her resentful younger sister.  Toni Colette plays a hippie dippie third sister who returns from Germany and apparently is desperate to be pregnant. And a dishevelled Johnny Flynn plays the sensitive son Connor.  Timothy Spall plays the rather loveable but apparently emotionally disengaged dad who deals with his forthcoming grief by, I kid you not, singing karaoke.  It's testament to Winslet's pull that she could assemble such a sterling cast, and as a result, this film could never be a total failure. But it's a shame that her son Joe Anders' script resorts to cheap devices to try and wring tears from our eyes. I cringed when Spall's dad began his karaoke act and the final nativity scene made me gag.  Your mileage may vary.

GOODBYE JUNE is rated R and has a running time of 114 minutes. It was released on Netflix earlier this month.

PETER HUJAR'S DAY**

PETER HUJAR'S DAY is an odd fish of a film that offers a fascinating glimpse into what life must have been like at the heart of the bohemian, queer arts scene in late 70s New York, before woefully outstaying its welcome. 

It stars Ben Whishaw as the titular real-life queer activist and portrait photographer Peter Hujar.  We spend the entire hour and a quarter in his stunning New York apartment (imagine enjoying THAT on a magazine salary now!) as he relates what happened to him the day before to his friend and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall).  To be fair, this minute detail contains a lot of delicious gossip about iconic writers - not least Fran Lebowitz, Susan Sontag and Allen Ginsberg.  But the minute detail and almost deadpan tone bely the emotion of what Peter is actually experiencing.  Ginsberg, for example, is wildly, offensively, inappropriate. But we don't really see or feel what Hujar's response is to this.  Maybe that's because the film is based on a transcript of the real-life version of this interview that was recently uncovered in the Morgan Library.  It's not so much a scripted drama as a recreation of an admittedly and deliberately mundane retelling of the day in the life of a jobbing photographer. The problem is we never see or feel the importance of his art. 

That said, there is a tug back into emotional response at the end of the film. It's scored with the Mozart Requiem and cuts to white. Those of us who know anything about Hujar realise that this is the heyday of that beautiful moment of queer expression and activism in New York. The AIDS crisis was around the corner of the 1980s and would claim Hujar as a victim, iconically photographed on his deathbed.  None of that is in THIS film, to be clear. But for those of use who know, it adds some poignancy to Whishaw's final scenes.

PETER HUJAR'S DAY played Sundance, Berlin and London 2025. It has a running time of 76 minutes. It was released in the USA in November and will be released in the UK on Jan 2nd.

MARTY SUPREME*****

MARTY SUPREME is a gonzo caper about a narcissistic arsehole who will exploit everyone and everything to fulfil his dream. The challenge for writer-director Josh Sadie is to make us root for him, and maybe even like him, nonetheless.

Timothee Chalamet stars as the titular protagonist Marty Mauser - an acne-scarred hen-pecked shoe-salesman who dreams of travelling to England to become a champion table-tennis player.  Destroyed in that final by his Japanese opponent, the balance of the film sees Marty try to con and finagle his way into enough cash to go to Japan for the rematch, including but not limited to getting a schlubby put-upon live-at-home man called Dion to produce branded table-tennis balls called the "Marty Supreme", and conning a mafiosi (improbably played by Abel Ferrara) whose dog he was sitting, while also being on the lam from some white hick racists and a psychopathic rural farmer. And that's before we even get to Marty's two love interests: the  woman who loves him - his pregnant childhood friend turned lover played by Odessa A'Zion - and the woman who sees right through him - a faded starlet and trapped trophy wife played by Gywneth Paltrow. 

As that attempt at a synopsis might suggest, MARTY SUPREME is an absurd film, over-stuffed with memorable characters and crazy plot-twists.  It picks you up and takes you on a breathtakingly audacious ride. The running time is long but it never flags, thanks partly to pairing the 1950s setting with a superb 1980s synth-pop heavy soundtrack, just because.  But behind all of its craziness, there's depth.

We are in the mid-1950s, and the world is still recovering from the horrors and bigotry of World War Two. Everyone is shocked that Marty's Japanese opponent is allowed to travel given the recent travel-ban; Marty's good friend and competitor is a Holocaust survivor; and Marty will even exploit his prison camp experience to distract a love-rival.  There's also something to the idea of a film that posits a world of extreme self-actualisation. Marty is the ultimate fake it till you make it manipulative showman, who wants a woman just because she's a symbol of success.  In a weird way his charm is that while he IS manipulative he is also strangely honest.  He just can't help himself from mocking Gywneth Paltrow's heartbroken starlet for sleeping with him. He barely acknowledges anybody's wants and needs above his own, although does seem to have some kind of heavily submerged set of core values. He punches his pregnant lover's husband, saying "shame on you" and seems to mean it. I think he really does seem to see some talent in Dion and root for him.

The only weakness of the film is that Josh Safdie and co-writer Ronald Bronstein decide to give Marty a transformative and perhaps even redemptive moment at the end of the movie.  I think I might have preferred if they had kept him as he was, but I cannot deny that I had an amazing time watching the film nonetheless.  This is full speed ahead, full commitment film-making.  Josh Safdie and Marty Mauser are as one. 

MARTY SUPREME is rated R and has a running time of 150 minutes. It will be released on Christmas Day in the USA and Boxing Day in the UK.

SENTIMENTAL VALUE*****

SENTIMENTAL VALUE is a devastatingly brilliant film featuring Renate Reinsve in an award-worthy lead role that could well unseat HAMNET's Jessie Buckley. It plays on the same themes as Noah Baumbach's JAY KELLY but with a willingness to truly explore generational family pain that JAY KELLY just isn't interested in.

In SENTIMENTAL VALUE, Stellan Skarsgard stars as a once-lauded but now faded auteur called Gustav who abandoned his wife and two young daughters to focus on his art  As the movie opens, the girls have matured into young women. The elder, Nora (Reinsve) has become a talented theatre actress but does not want a committed relationship.  The younger daughter, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas) seems happily married and has a young son, but struggles for money. Father and daughters are reunited after the death of the mother, but he is not their to provide emotional or financial support or to express regret.  Rather he wants to use the family house as a set for his comeback film, and for Nora and Agnes' young son to star in it. The familial exploitation doesn't end there, because the screenplay is actually about his own mother, who was apparently part of the Norwegian resistance to the Nazis, was tortured, and ultimately committed suicide in that same family home.  Nora refuses to take part, and so is awkwardly replaced by a young American actress played by Elle Fanning.  The balace of the movie sees each character grapple with their shared family history but also the metatextual layers of bringing that story to screen.

Writer-director Joachim Trier's film is beautifully shot, written and acted and reminded me of some of those superb Woody Allen dramas on the late 80s and early 90s, themselves influenced by Bergman.  It's a film that shows the narcissism of ambitious creatives, but also that hurt people hurt people.  It may also make a point about the redemptive power of art or art as therapy. But as the film closes with the filming of the film-within-the-film's climactic scene, we never truly see the consequences of it. All I can say is that I found it to be a truly ambitious depiction of different timelines, and a rare film to really centre complex female characters, and not to shy away from their spikiness. Reinsve is stunning. This is a film that rocks you to your core and stays with you for days afterwards.

SENTIMENTAL VALUE is rated R and has a running time of 133 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and London. It went on limited release in the USA in November and will be released in the UK on December 26th.