DISCLOSURE DAY**

Bless his heart! Steven Spielberg still thinks that network news is relevant. Steven Spielberg still thinks that if people watch something on network news that they'll believe it. Steven Spielbering still thinks that Roswell is cool. Steven Spielberg is still obsessed with midwest middle-class childhood Americana. Steven Spielberg still believes that, in the words of Woody Allen's MANHATTAN, "you have to have a little faith in people". FFS. Have you not seen the past decade? In the words of Peep Show's Super Hans, "People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can't trust people, Jeremy." Which is not to say that Spielberg hasn't made a simultaneously schmaltzy AND cyncal film. How else to explain the very deliberate care to tell ticket-buyers in Red States that the existence of aliens is compatible with the Book of Genesis?

Okay so what's the plot? Super intelligent aliens have been making contact with man since Roswell, and man - or at least American men - have been hushing it up and exploiting them ever since. A bunch of rebels (Colman Domingo, Josh O'Connor) steal the video proof and rather than just uploading it to TikTok they partner up with Emily Blunt's TV weather girl to put it out on local TV. That's it.

Now there are a bunch of MacGuffins and side hustles involving Blunt's character being able to suddenly speak a bunch of languages, and O'Connor's character being a maths savant, and Eve Hewson's character having a crisis of faith, but it's all just bollocks really. Colin Firth occasionally turns up in a turtleneck as a cross between Dr Evil and Basil Exposition and almost every line reading of a deeply hackneyed script (David Koepp and Spielberg) prompts unintended mirth.

And my enjoyment is not helped by the fact that Emily Blunt now falls into that category of actor (Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Nicole Kidman) whose plastic surgery and over-filled face is a distraction. I spent the entire movie wanting to give her an antihistamine. 

Oh yes, this being Spielberg there's also a weird-ass interlude featuring a Hansel and Gretel house and some poor kid has gone through CGI. I was wondering if Emily Blunt's face is now so waxy and unreal that they were forced to CGI a real kid to make her look like Blunt's younger facsimile.  The CGI is really bad by the way. The CGI animals are rubbish. I have seen a more convincing and emotionally affecting fox on Lego Masters Australia.

It's sad to see an old man stuck in 1987 and churning out sci-fi as if the past thirty years of film-making (or politics for that matter) didn't happen. Has he not watched any Gareth Edwards or Denis Villeneuve? Are we meant to be impressed by car chases that look like the Dukes of Hazzard when we just saw Paul Thomas Anderson break cinematic ground not once but twice in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER? 

Retire, mate. Retire.

DISCLOSURE DAY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 145 minutes. It is on global release.

REBUILDING***

Writer-director Max Walker-Silverman's REBUILDING is set in the American West, amidst a community whose houses and land have been destroyed by wildfire.  They now find themselves living in FEMA trailers, attempting to rebuild their lives. There's a well-meaning but ultimately useless bureaucrat who needs them to fill out the right paperwork and submit it online - absurd when they don't have computers or wifi.  And a loan officer who delicately informs our protagonist that it will be years before his farm will be productive again.

The film is centred around Dusty - a farmer who has inherited a farm that has been worked by generations of his family. It feels as though Dusty has a romantic sentimental approach to making a living, something his ex-wife calls him out for.  As the film opens, he has to take care of his daughter Callie Rose after a long hiatus, and a lot of the gentle joy of the film is seeing them try to re-establish a relationship, and for both to come to appreciate the ramshackle group of people they are living with.  It's a film about refound actual family, and newly adopted found family.  

The film is not without its longeuers in its central chapters, but I found myself really rooting for the characters and moved by the film's resolution.  I appreciated Josh O'Connor's central performance, eschewing the theatrics of an exxagerated accent, and allowing his subtle facial reactions to do the talking.  I also liked Meghann Fahy as his ex-wife. It was also to a pleasure to see True Detective's Kali Reiss back on screen.

REBUILDING is rated PG and has a running time of 96 minutes. It played Sundance 2025 and opened in t the USA in November.  It will open in the UK in April 2026.

THE HISTORY OF SOUND* - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 11

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE failed as a film because director Mona Fastvold had no interest in the interiority of her characters. By contrast, THE HISTORY OF SOUND fails as a film because the characters are so deeply closeted that their interiority is deliberately withheld to a mere bat-squeak of emotion amidst a tediously attenuated 2hr plus running time.

Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor star as Lionel and David, two students at the Boston Conservatoire whose affair is interrupted by World War One.  Bespectacled Lionel returns home to his Kentucky farm to await David’s return from France, upon which they derp around New England recording folk music on wax cylinders. Soon after, the urbane David throws off Lionel and retreats to academia. A brokenhearted Lionel becomes a chorister in Rome and then Oxford, breaking the heart of a boyfriend and girlfriend in turn, before seeking out David once more. All of that is simple enough, but takes the better part of 100 minutes. 

Mescal and O’Connor are, of course, superb actors, and do the best they can with material that asks them to constrain their emotions.  Director Oliver Hermanus and screenwriter Ben Shattuck take the same attitude with the context in which the characters exist.  We think the film might interrogate racism in post-reconstruction America with what might have been a more menacing and significant scene recording some black singers, but no, the film retreats.  We think the film might interrogate class prejudice toward Lionel with his intellectual girlfriend’s minted English family, but once again the film retreats. 

The result is a film about two closeted men that itself feels closeted and afraid. I think it was aiming at profound emotion and catharsis in its epilogue, but instead I was just bored and alienated.  The folk music is rather lovely, as recompense. But if you find that sort of thing enchanting you would be better off watching Bernard MacMahon’s AMERICAN EPIC.

THE HISTORY OF SOUND is rated R and has a running time of 127 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride and London. It opened in the USA on September 12th.

THE MASTERMIND*** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 7

Kelly Reichardt’s THE MASTERMIND is an odd film. As one would expect, it is formally beautifully constructed and has her typically restrained, measured tone with the subtlest hints of humour. But its central character is so selfish, smug and feckless, it’s hard to know what to do with the film’s requirement for us to engage with his story. 

The movie takes place in the early 70s in smalltown America, with society divided between the successful, conventional middle class family to which our protagonist belongs, and the young hippies protesting Vietnam. Josh O’Connor plays an art school drop out turned failing cabinet maker essentially bankrolled by his wealthy mother (Hope Davis). He is married with two young sons and as the film opens we are in media res: he is casing a local art museum for a heist. We quickly realise that he is a man of little moral worth: he uses his sons as cover and smuggles out a stolen figurine in his wife’s purse while letting them go through security on his their own. Later in the film he will claim he did it for them: the LFF audience guffawed at that. 

Josh O’Connor (CHALLENGERS) is brilliant as the “mastermind”, JB Mooney, in a thankless role. This is basically his film - he is in every scene - and if he were any less personally charismatic the film would be unbearable. Alana Haim’s role as his wife is even more thankless as her character is emotionally withdrawn. It’s a real relief when we get a great cameo from John Magaro (PAST LIVES) who at least brings some warmth and humanity to the film. 

Reichardt’s lensing and colour palette are beautiful. There’s a particularly elegant bravura shot that goes 360 degrees in a motel room. I was genuinely curious how the third act would play out. But the real star behind the lens is composer Rob Mazurek who gives us a kinetic jazz score that propels act one - the heist - and act two - the concealment. It is notable that as that score, and the action, falls away in act three, the movie really loses its energy. 

THE MASTERMIND is rated R and has a running time of 117 minutes. It played Cannes, Telluride and London. It will be released in the USA on October 17th and in the UK on October 24th.

WAKE UP DEAD MAN: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Opening Night Gala

Rian Johnson has done it again with another fantastically fun and wickedly tricksy murder mystery - the third in his Knives Out franchise. WAKE UP DEAD MAN follows his satire on narcissistic billionaire tech bros (GLASS ONION) with an on-the-nose dissection of contemporary MAGA Christianity’s nasty judgmental power-hungry malevolent brand of religion. 

An absolutely superb Josh O’Connor (also starring in MASTERMIND in this year’s LFF stars as a young kind and earnest priest called Father Judd. He’s sent to a cultish rural church in upstate New York, presided over by Josh Brolin’s wicked fire-and-brimstone preacher Monsignor Wick. Wick is aided and abetted by a Mrs Danvers-like spooky woman-of-all-work Martha (Glenn Close) and her faithful lapdog Samson (Thomas Haden-Church). The parishioners are all seemingly within Wick’s grasp when he’s stabbed in the back in an apparent locked room mystery. We are thirty minutes into the film - so enter Daniel Craig’s deliciously camp Southern detective Benoit Blanc to save our young compassionate priest and reveal who the real murderer is! 

The first thing to say is that this film works brilliantly as a murder mystery, and I say this as someone who just reread and podcasted about every single one of Agatha Christie’s crime novels. The mystery is satisfyingly tricky and intricate and solvable - though I doubt many will. It works in the best tradition of debunking apparently supernatural crimes and a good knowledge of Wilkie Collins and Sherlock Holmes will certainly help you. 

The second thing to say is that the film works equally well as a satire on MAGA and unfeeling religion and ruthless politicians. What’s even better is that it balances cynicism with earnest respect for genuine faith, by balancing the viewpoints of self-confessed heretic Benoit Blanc and the young priest Father Judd. There’s a deeply moving scene between Judd and a receptionist called Louise that shows what faith and ministry can do when administered with compassion. 

Finally, the film is just a damn good time. It’s funny. It has jump scares. It drops in hilarious one-liners about contemporary culture - whether substack or Netflix. And we even get a self-referential Star Wars joke. There is quite literally nothing not to like in this wonderful film. Bring on Knives Out 4!

WAKE UP DEAD MAN has a running time of 140 minutes. It played Toronto and opened London and will be on Netflix on December 12th.

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.

MOTHERING SUNDAY* - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 9

Eva Husson's MOTHERING SUNDAY is, I am sad to report, a total failure of a film. It has nothing in it to capture the interest of the viewer, and may even verge on the exploitative. This is all the more frustrating because it's an adaptation of Graham Swift's critically acclaimed novel of the same name, which told the story of a famous author and how an affair she had when working in service in the 1920s set her on the path to greatness. The problem is that this film shows us nothing of that greatness - we see no literary merit or acute perception by means of voiceover or later extracts of novels. Rather, the film merely declares the woman a success.  As a result, we are unconvinced, and don't understand why we should be interested in this author's origin story.

As the film opens we are in the last days of World War One.  The tone is one of suppressed grief and rage.  Three upper class families meet over a weekend in Henley. It becomes clear that one of them has lost both of their children in the war: the father (Colin Firth) represses this knowledge with banal cheeriness while the mother (Olivia Colman) looks sullen and detached but occasionally flares up into tears and deeply selfish condescension. Another family has lost two sons already, and the third, played by Josh O'Connor has inherited all their hopes and burdens. He must now study law and marry his deceased brother's fiancee.  He rebels by shagging the neighbour's maid (Odessa Young) and vast amounts of the film consist of them lying naked on a bed, or - once he departs for an engagement lunch - her wandering aimlessly naked around his house. This is basically 70% of the film. Will anything happen? No. Not even when a major event happens. There's no confrontation. No exposure. No dramatic tension. Nothing but boredom.

We then flash forward at intervals to the maid's second love - a black philosopher. Oh, we think, this could be really fascinating. How does a black man navigate Oxford in the 1920s? What prejudice do they face as a mixed-race couple? But no. Zero drama or character exploration here. Pretty girl gets typewriter and supportive boyfriend. Writes novel we don't see. Is apparently brilliant. We don't see it. Grows up to be Glenda Jackson. Is insufferably arrogant. Who gives a shit?

The film was so dull I started wondering what the point of the nudity was. Is it that it's meant to be sex positive? If so, cool. Apparently this is what writer Alice Birch does, or did, in her adaptation of Sally Rooney's Normal People. But I couldn't help wondering what people would say if a male director made a film that basically just followed a pretty young naked girl around with no apparent dramatic purpose.

MOTHERING SUNDAY is rated R and has a running time of 111 minutes. It played Cannes, Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival 2021.  It will be released in the USA and UK on November 19th.