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.

BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER****

Pleasantly surprised by BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER, despite what felt like a raft of mediocre reviews.  Edward Berger's follow-up to his superb CONCLAVE has style to spare and a beautifully haunting examination of addiction, redemption and spiritual awakening. I am only docking it a star because I felt like the costume choices for Tilda Swinton's character were so outlandish as to become comic, and undercut the emotion and gravity of the story.

The Penguin's Colin Farrell stars as Reilly, a gambling addict and conman posing as an aristocrat in Macao.  He is desperate for a big win at the Baccarat tables and his only source of credit is a casino waitress/black market credit broker called Dao Ming (Fala Chen).  Meanwhile a British debt collector called Blithe (Swinton) is on his trail. He goes on an insane bender, forges a deep emotional relationship with Dao Ming, and arguably Blithe too, and suddenly his lucks comes almost miraculously good. The existential question is what he will do with that good fortune.

The film is showcase for Farrell's ridiculous acting talent and willingness to mine the very depths of human depravity and vulnerability. It's also a showcase for cinematographer James Friend and his stunning visuals of rainstorm-drenched Macao. I felt utterly immersed in this world, and utterly invested in Reilly's story.  I was rooting for him even as he self-sabotaged.  I also loved the thematics, but can't really discuss them here without spoiling the plot. Suffice to say that those familiar with certain genre of Chinese film-making will not be disappointed.

BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER is rated R and has a running time of 101 minutes. It is available to watch on Netflix. It played Telluride, Toronto, San Sebastian and London.

THE ROSES****

I was pleasantly surprised by Jay Roach's remake of the iconic late 80s black comedy about a divorcing couple sabotaging each other's lives. The Crown's Olivia Colman plays a talented chef who puts her career on hold to raise the kids while Benedict Cumberbatch (THE THING WITH FEATHERS) goes on to become a successful architect.  The tables are turned when a massive storm both destroys his latest commission and his career but drives a famous food critic into her humble crab shack.  He becomes a stay-at-home dad and she becomes a radically successful restauranteur.  The divorce only moves into view in the final 45 minutes or so, and allows for a deliciously brilliant cameo from Allison Janney as a fierce divorce lawyer. It's then that we get the gonzo sabotage that made up most of the original film.  

I loved everything about this film. The brilliantly nasty verbal sparring from the two British leads, much of which comes at the expense of their shocked, prudish American friends.  No surprise that the script was written by Tony McNamara who so beautifully mined marital bickering in his under-rated and hilarious TV series The Great. But what gives this movie so much more depth and relatability compared to the original was its willingness to explore contemporary marriage dynamics around gender norms. I loved seeing the husband and wife struggle to cope with his feelings of emasculation as she becomes the breadwinner, and the wife struggle with becoming a side-show in her own children's lives.  We may not all build multi-million dollar houses in the Bay Area, but I think a lot of these financial and cultural pressures on marriage resonate. It was wonderful to see them explored honestly on film.

THE ROSES has a running time of 105 minutes and is rated R. It was released in August.

FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS*

Bored as fuck watching FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS. No humour, no grand emotional revelations, no chemistry between the leads, hackneyed action scenes and scoring, unclear why it's in a retro-Jetsons world, wondering if it would have more fun to just watch reruns of The Jetsons.

In this reimagining of the unloved ginger stepchild of the Marvel universe, the ubiquitous Pedro Pascal (enough already!) plays astronaut turned mutant Reed Richards and The Crown's Princess Margaret, Vanessa Kirby, plays his fellow astronaut turned mutant and pregnant wife Sue Storm.  GLADIATOR 2's Joseph Quinn plays Sue's brother Johnny and the quartet is rounded out by The Bear's Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the poor fucker who spends the film playing a rock-like thing called... The Thing.  

As the film opens, earth is under attack from a generic Big Bad with an emissary called the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner). The screenwriters try to have some IRON MAN style witty fun with Johnny asking her if the surfboard is part of her body. It lands flat. The plot revolves around the Big Bad wanting the astro-human baby because Power, and the astro-human baby's mum being understandably reluctant to give him up.  But I never really felt the stakes.  The family are so popular it's not like the humans are coming with pitchforks to steal the baby.  I never felt like the baby was at risk. I never felt like the mum was at risk. Rumble rumble, the end.

What a waste of on-screen talent. Especially Natasha Lyonne.  Director Matt Shakman (Wandavision): do better.  I think it's interesting that there are seven accredited screenwriters on this film, although to be fair that includes its comic-book creators. Maybe that speaks to its lack of forward momentum, clear linear narrative and muddiness. I also wonder whether with a concept so brilliantly deconstructed, parodied, but ultimately enhanced with THE INCREDIBLES, cinema-viewers have just moved beyond the source material.

FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS is available to screen on Disney+. It has a running time of 115 minutes and is rated PG-13.

NUREMBERG**

James Vanderbilt, screenwriter on iconic films such as David Fincher's ZODIAC, stages his directorial debut with NUREMBERG, a film about the trial of the infamous Nazi leader Hermann Goering.  

While trying hard to hue close to the historical record, Vanderbilt's script has two fatal flaws - it is patronising and it is far too pleased with itself.  The former manifests in endless passages of ham-fisted exposition, assuming that the viewer knows nothing and it is too stupid to figure it out.  This extends both to the historic events AND their contemporary resonance. 

The latter manifests in clever-clever cuts between lines of dialogue that flatly contradict each other for comic effect.  We get dumb action movie lines like "Welcome to Nuremberg" (insert mike drop), from dumb caricature characters like John Slattery's military prison guard. We get the same character anachronistically referring to two psychiatrists as "mental health professionals".  We get a desperately harrowing courtroom scene of real Holocaust footage shown and then a smash-cut to a cool jazz club and our protagonist flirting with a pretty journalist. Just no.

So this is a tonally jarring, condescending and obvious film containing a central bad performance from Rami Malek as US Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelly. Why might it still be worth your time? A star each for Russell Crowe and Leo Woodall as Goering and Sergeant Howie Triest respectively. Crowe is absolutely magnificent as Goering - capturing his slippery charm, bonhomie, narcissism and at core his complete fanaticism.  It's a shame such a performance - Crowe's best in years - is wasted on this film.  And kudos to Leo Woodall, who recently impressed as the lead actor in TUNER.  As Howie, Woodall is the very moral and emotional heart of this film, far moreso than Malek's gurning shrink. Otherwise Shannon and poor Richard E Grant are mediocre in roles ill-written and under-serving their real life counterparts.

NUREMBERG is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 148 minutes. It played Toronto and San Sebastian. It was released in the USA last Friday and in the UK next Friday.