A PALE VIEW OF HILLS***

Writer-director-editor Kei Ishikawa has finally brought a version of Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel to screen, nearly 50 years after it was first published. It's a story about generational trauma and conscious and subconscious dissembling through memory. 

The primary expression of this is through the character of Etsuko (the word "character" used advisedly here.)  In the early 1950s she is a submissive pregnant housewife recovering from the trauma of having survived Nagasaki.  Her husband is a typical salaryman, but she seems to have a fondness for her father-in-law.   She is attracted to the strength and radical modernity of a woman called Sachiko - also a Nagasaki survivor, and single-mother to her young daughter Machiko. Sachiko dreams of escaping to America with her lover Frank - a dream that Etsuko may or may not believe in. Both women are trapped and seeking escape. Friendship with Sachiko encourages Etsuko to be braver. Both suffer from prejudice, trauma and fear.  Nagasaki survivors are seen as tarnished and damaged: and perhaps contagious.  

The secondary expression of the theme of confronting the past and one's own role in it, is played out in the story of Etsuko's father-in-law.  He seems like a lonely old man desperate to reconnect with his son Jiro. But in reality he is visiting Etsuko and Jiro to facilitate a confrontation with an ex-pupil, now teacher, who denounced the father as a nationalist who preached propaganda in the classroom. As the ex-pupil says - Japan has changed - it's a brave new world - and everyone must change with it.

Just how far they have indeed changed, and own that change, or whether that change is authentic or appropriated, is part of the slipperiness and puzzle-aspect of the film.  I really enjoyed seeing the characters in the Japanese setting, even though the pace of the first hour of the film was too slow for me.  The cinematography and production design are beautiful, with some lovely tableaux. I also love how the small-town feel contrasts with the forbidden dangerous wild grassland across the river, cordoned off because of nuclear contamination. This is a world where conventional bourgeois life lives knowingly and perhaps dangerously right alongside danger.

Where I thought the film suffered was in its early 80s framing device. A now widowed Etsuko, having settled in Britain, is selling the family home. Her daughter Niki is an aspiring journalist, and thinks that the personal story of her mother's experience of Nagasaki will make for a good story.  But this too is a ruse. She wants to know her family history and this is a means to coax it from her reluctant mother.

The film gave me a lot to think about and I really loved some of the performances.  Suzu Hirose and Fumi Nakaido as young Estuko and Sachiko are superb.  But I really didn't like the framing device and found both the dialogue and performances of Camilla Aiko as Niki and Yo Yoshida as the elder Etsuko stilted and uninvolving.

A PALE VIEW OF HILLS played Cannes Toronto and London 2025. It will be released in the UK on March 13th. It has a running time of 132 minutes.

"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" **

"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" does not work on its own terms because Emerald Fennell does not pick a lane, because she has no good original ideas, and because she has no cinematic taste. She thinks she’s daring and transgressive but actually she’s just crass and juvenile and undercuts any attempts her actors are making to inject credibility or elicit sympathy from the audience. Hong Chau is good as Nelly and Jacob Elordi tries hard as Heathcliff in a straight drama. Isabella is played - problematically - for broad knowing laughs in a second separate film. Martin Clunes is playing a Dickensian villain in a third. Margot Robbie is just too old and haggard to play Cathy at any age. Ultimately though this is Fennell’s failure. I laughed at the screen when Clunes died amidst two piles of empty gin bottles. I laughed harder when Atlanta was burning. We get it Emerald: you watched GONE WITH THE WIND and REBECCA. Now please do fuck off and direct music videos. 

"WUTHERING HEIGHTS" REALLY does not work as an adaptation of Emily Bronte’s actually transgressive novel. The juvenile absurd emotions turned up to eleven revenge psychodrama that Cathy and Heathcliff put each other through only makes sense when you know they are adolescents - when Cathy dies at 20. The idea that marrying Heathcliff would degrade Cathy only works when money won’t wash over his “otherness” because he is either the son of a black slave or a gypsy or a lascar. There is no evidence in the book that they ever had sex. It’s not a love story. It’s a story of psychosexual sadism carried over three generations. Eliminating Hindley means we have no Hindley-Heathcliff-Cathy triad to mirror the Edgar-Heathcliff-Cathy triad or the Hareton-Heathcliff-Cathy2 triad. 

Of course Emerald Fennell is narcissistic enough to think we give a shit about how SHE felt reading the novel at 14 and that the book is unfilmable. But Andrea Arnold made a superb film of the first half off this book. And I hate to break it to you Emerald, we watch this because of Bronte not you. 

And don’t even get me going on a deeply privileged white woman blathering on in press tours about how this is a female made movie as if this allows her to erase the fact that the lead actor should be a person of colour and that the entire story is about him being diminished for being brown. And then - just to add insult to injury - Margot Robbie parading jewelry stolen from Mughal India and ascribing its ownership to Liz Taylor - erasing its actual origin. Either they are racist or stupid or both. 

WUTHERING HEIGHTS" is rated R and has a running time of 136 minutes.  It gets a star for Hong Chau and a star for Martin Clunes. 

More thoughts: Heathcliff’s continual demand of consent from Isabella was deeply troubling. A joke, played for recognition. But also part of the overall softening of Heathcliff and Cathy - to make them “likeable” and credible as a love story gone wrong. Young Cathy isn’t pinching and punching staff. Heathcliff doesn’t kill Isabella’s dogs. Eliminating the back half of the book makes Heathcliff a lot less violent and indeed borderline necro. I also feel that making Cathy’s baby die early in the womb so that Cathy then dies of septicaemia is a way for Emerald to keep Cathy/Robbie looking “pretty” and unpregnant to the end. It allows Cathy and Heathcliff to keep pretending that they are starcrossed lovers in arrested development.  Emerald can’t handle them being culpable adults as much as they can’t.

DHURANDAR aka MASTERMIND*****

DHURANDAR is an epic super-long spy-mafia-thriller set in the political powder-keg that is contemporary Indian-Pakistani politics.  And let's be clear up front:  writer-director Aditya Dhar (URI: THE SURGICAL STRIKE) is definitely in the Indian nationalist camp, telling his story from the perspective of a country trying to defend itself from horrific real-life terrorist attacks like Mumbai 2008.  There is no attempt here to understand the Pakistani side of the conflict although there is nuance to the lead Pakistani character, Rehman Dakait.  How else to explain a proud Balochi helping the state that oppresses his people?  As a result, for those of us critical of Narendra Modi's Hindu Nationalist politics, it's easy to write this film of as propaganda.  Your mileage my vary.  I found its handling of recent terrorist attacks fair.  My only problem with it - and it's a big one - was a statement in its final minutes that not only is the Pakistani state behind attacks such as Mumbai (fact), but that it's behind "ninety percent of all terrorism" (not fact). That's a dangerous piece of hyperbole but I trust the audience to parse the fact from the propaganda, all the while enjoying what is a really superb film.

The movie opens with Indian officials negotiating the release of airplane hostages, and then zips through the terrorist attack on India's parliament building.  This prompts the Indian security services to send in a sleeper agent to infiltrate the gangs that work in cahoots with Islamic terrorist and the Pakistani state.  This infiltrator is "Hamza", played in a series of glorious hair-pieces by the ever-charismatic and muscle-bound Bollywood superstar Ranveer Singh.  

Hamza poses as a Balochi waiter in Karachi's Lyari district and slowly infiltrates the gang of the aforementioned Rehman. Rehman is himself pursued by Pakistani cop SP Aslam. Later Hamza will romance a rival politician's daughter, presumably so we can have some filmi romance scenes and songs.  More pointedly, Hamza will witness Major Iqbal planning the Mumbai attack, but fail to prevent it.  All of this is based on real-life criminals and real-life politicians and real-life terrorists. In the most searing moment of the film, the director Aditya Dhar chooses to show real life audio from the night of the Mumbai attacks, with the handler egging the terrorists on to greater acts of violence.  It's a brave and powerful moment. 

Come for Ranveer, stay for the golden oldies!  The joy of this film is not in Ranveer's physically committed performance, but in seeing so many older actors given superb roles and sinking their teeth into them.  There's been a lot of internet chatter about just how good Akshaye Khanna is as Rehman, and boy he acts everyone else off the screen.  From affable wedding guest with a memed weddding entrance, to a truly scary purveyor of vengeful violence, to a skilled populist politician. Khanna has the prime role in this film and it's one for the ages. It's an Oscar-winning performance that dominates the film and transforms it into something really special.  But kudos also to Sanjay Dutt as SP Aslam and an almost unrecognisable Arjun Rampal as Major Iqbal.  And Madhavan is always great - not least playing Ajay Sanyal here.

This film is so good that after nearly four hours of viewing I could easily have watched it again, and cannot wait for its sequel.  This is Bollywood at its most provocative and handsomely produced. 

DHURANDAR has a running time of 214 minutes and is rated 18 for strong violence. It was released last December and is now on Netflix.

SPINAL TAP II: THE END CONTINUES*****

It's decades since I watched the original rock-mockumentary SPINAL TAP, so I can't remember the specifics of any of the jokes bar 'turning it up to eleven", Stonehenge and ill-fated drummers. And since then we've had the tragic murder of Rob Reiner and his wife. I just didn't know how I was going to react to this sequel.  I am happy to report that it's just delightful:  silly, sweet, sometimes melancholy, with some insane cameos and so many moments where I was guffawing out loud. 

The movie opens with our ageing three rockers retired and variously running a cheese shop, a glue shop, and writing muzak for crime podcasts.  The daughter of their old bandmate wants to bring them back for a shameless cash-in reunion concert in New Orleans, masterminded by a thinly veiled evil Simon Cowell-Simon Fowler-style impresario played with relish by Chris Addison (The Thick Of It).  Along the way we get old beefs rehashed, and the introduction of a new drummer played by Valerie Franco.  We get to see Tap interact with evident real-life fan Elton John in an extended and tremendous cameo.  It's just a bloody good time - just so well-meaning, so funny and so full of people pretending but actually writing good rock songs and enjoying playing them. In fact, the final 25 minutes is basically just a filmed real Tap concert.  Loved every second of it.

God bless Rob Reiner and all who sailed in him. 

SPINAL TAP II: THE END CONTINUES has a running time of 83 minutes and is rated R. It was released last October.

H IS FOR HAWK****

H IS FOR HAWK is a deceptively simple, desperately moving, but never manipulative, film about a middle-aged woman coming to terms with the death of her father. Its success rests on a typically brilliant central performance by The Crown's Claire Foy as the protagonist, Helen. We spend so much time with her, trying to parse her feelings as she hides away from her grief, her family, her colleagues and her friends. Her distraction mechanism is caring for a goshawk called Mabel - a beautiful and fiersome creature of epic strength, who ties our protagonist back to her father's love of nature. At the peak of her depression, Helen literally hides away in a large cardboard box, and we are alone with her and Emma Levienaise-Farrouch's string-heavy ethereal score. This is a film that has the courage to allow grief its appropriate space, and to depict it in all its oppressive power. It takes quite the actor to take on this kind of role, and quite the director to understand what this kind of story needs.

The film is directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and is based on a tremendously successful book by Helen MacDonald.  Lowthorpe, who previously adapted THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL, adapted the book alongside screenwriter Emma Donoghue, who worked on the Oscar-winning ROOM. I wonder if there's something in the fact that a lot of the behind-the-lens talent is female, because this film is a rare depiction of how vital and at times life-saving true female friendship can be.  We should all wish for the kind of friendship that Helen has with Christine (Andor's Denise Gough).  In that respect, this film reminded be of Eva Victor's SORRY BABY, insofar as it showed how sometimes friendship is all about persistance.

H IS FOR HAWK has a running time of 119 minutes and is rated PG-13. It played Telluride and London 2025 and is released in the USA and UK today.

DRAGONFLY****

Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams (LONDON TO BRIGHTON) has created a really haunting and stunningly well-acted film in DRAGONFLY. It's basically a two-hander between Brenda Blethyn as Elsie and her next-door neighbour Colleen, played by Andrea Riseborough.  As the film opens, Elsie has had a fall so her well-meaning but distant son arranges for her to have a carer come to the house. The carers are heavy-handed and cut corners and don't actually listen to what Elsie wants and needs. This is where Colleen steps in.  She is a traumatised and introverted woman hiding away from life with her gigantic dog - menacing to all others but clearly providing some kind of emotional safety support to its owner.  

The brilliance of Williams' script and Riseborough's performance is that we can never quite figure Colleen out. Is she using Elsie financially, or even emotionally? They seem to form some kind of genuine odd-couple friendship, bound together by mutual loneliness in a world that wants to park the damaged and the elderly out of sight and out of mind. This is the attitude summed up in Elsie's son, played in a brilliant cameo by Jason Watkins. He seems to be suspicious of, and resent, Colleen's help but unable to step up and provide that care himself. Something that Colleen is not afraid to point out, with devastating conseqences.

I really loved this film. It's spare and taut and keeps us in an increasing state of suspense and anxiety. The ending is brave and will sit with me for quite some time.  Kudos to all involved. 

DRAGONFLY has a running time of 98 minutes and is rated 15. It played Tribeca 2025 and opened in the UK last November.