WILL & HARPER*****

Director Josh Greenbaum (STRAYS) has crafted a deeply humane, insightful and beautiful documentary about courage and ally-ship in WILL & HARPER. It stars Hollywood comedian Will Ferrell going on a road trip with his friend of many decades, newly out as a Trans Woman, Harper Steele.  The beauty of this film is that it allows us to ask all those uncomfortable awkward questions we don't know how to ask: how bad did it get for you before you were out? Will our friendship change? How do you feel about surgery? How do you feel about your body? There is so much evident love between the two friends that these questions can be broached with sensitivity and love.

We also see the two Americas, but have our prejudices challenged too.  We start at  dinner in liberal New York with many of Harper's old SNL colleagues showing love and support. As we cross over into red states we are surprised to find a warm greeting at a car rally. Less surprised to see the mood at a steak eating contest turn genuinely menacing. It's interesting to see how Ferrell tries to throw attention away from Harper and onto himself, but how that buffoonery can backfire. 

The result is a film that is by turns funny and touching and depressing and scary, which is maybe how trans people experience life. It left me with deep admiration for Harper in sharing her experience in this way, and for Will Ferrell to commit to a project that will undoubtedly help educate and hopefully bring some support to the trans community. Highly recommended.

WILL & HARPER is rated R and has a running time of 114 minutes. It played Sundance and Telluride 2024 and is on Netflix.

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.