CHRISTY**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 10

Writer-director David Michod (THE KING) returns to our screens with a crisply told and powerful biopic of the first female boxing star in America, Christy Martin.  The directorial style is unflashy but we feel every punch and blow of the boxing matches. But the point here isn’t so much the drama inside the ring as the peril outside of it.  Because in her early twenties, Christy confirms to the expectations of bigoted early 90s West Virginia and marries a man who coercively controls her. He is a man 25 years her senior, her boxing trainer, and a total sleazebag. He lures her into the relationship with false promises of meeting Don King, and the offer of cover. They both know she is gay, and that the world won’t accept her for being gay.  This makes Christy uniquely vulnerable to Jim Martin’s predation. 

Over the course of the film we see Christy train and win, usually with a knock-out punch. When she finally does get that meeting with King she starts earning big and can afford a flashy lifestyle.  The film captures the awful haircuts and shoulder pads brilliantly.  But the pressure from her husband is unrelenting, and while I won’t say more at the risk of spoiling the story if you do not know it, the final half hour of this film is harrowing.

This is a film centred on two superb performances. The first is by Ben Foster, who I have always admired, and last saw in the London Film Festival playing the psychopath Lance Armstrong in THE PROGRAM. If anything, he is even more chilling here. But the performance than really anchors the film is that of Sydney Sweeney. I was first truly impressed by her acting in REALITY, and she announces herself as an actor of real intelligence and sensitivity in this film.  She bulks up with 35 pounds of muscle and is utterly convincing in the ring. More importantly, she manages to capture both Christy’s vulnerability and bravado.  I truly hope the prejudice against Sweeney does not preclude her from awards contention as this is a monumental performance. In the supporting roles, I really liked Merritt Weaver (The Bombing of Pan Am 103) as Christy’s bigoted, insidious mother, and Katy O’Brian as Christy’s boxing rival turned love interest Lisa Holewyne.

CHRISTY has a running time of 135 minutes. It played Toronto and London and will be released in the USA on November 7th.

EAGLE EYE - slick vacuous paranoid thriller

EAGLE EYE is a very slick, not undiverting action movie with a plot to so ludicrous* you could stick a cherry on top and call it Sarah Palin. Two normal people, played by Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan, are plucked out of obscurity by a sinister female voice on the end of a cellphone who seems to be able to control any IT system in America. Naturally, the fuzz, in the form of Billy Bob Thornton and Rosario Dawson, are also chasing after our heros, in a movie that splices by NORTH BY NORTHWEST with 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and ends up some way south of both of them. There are some flashy stunts and car chases and a suitably paranoid thriller element in which the very systems designed to keep us safe turn against it. As a basic guide, if you enjoyed WANTED or HITMAN you'll probably enjoy EAGLE EYE, but don't expect something of the same quality as DISTURBIA.

EAGLE EYE is on release in the US, Argentina, Australia, Chile, Hong Kong, Peru, Thailand, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, the Philippines, Venezuela, Belgium, Singapore, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Russia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Turkey, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, South Korea, Austria, Estonia, Spain, Egypt, Indonesia, Kuwait, India, the UK and Japan. It opens next weekend in Iceland and Norway. It opens on December 24th in France and on January 2nd in Japan.

*Seriously. *SPOILER* Would an artificial intelligence so powerful it could control every network need to coerce two dumbass civilians anyways?

VACANCY - pretty vacant

There's no point in asking why Hollywood insists on churning out these derivative, mediocre horror flicks. The answer's simple. They're relatively cheap - requiring only deserted motels/warehouses/army facilities and C-list stars. You don't even need to bother with an original plot.

In the case of VACANCY, the standard issue victims are played by Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson. They discover that their creepy motel room is actually a snuff movie set. The first fifty minutes of the movie are actually pretty well put together and successfully ramp up the tension. DP Andrzej Sekula creates a suitably grungy look in contrast to the eerily clean feel of AMERICAN PSYCHO. It's also quite nice to have protagonists that you can sympathise with because they're half-intelligent adults as opposed to whiny-ass teenagers. And despite their C-list status, Wilson and Beckinsale actually perform pretty well. Early on they have a conversation in which they discuss their impending divorce. It feels real and heartfelt. I almost suspected them of having some range. The last twenty minutes of the movie are as weak as a very weak thing, though.

I don't know why I persist in watching this stuff. I mean, it's not like it's actively bad, but it certainly doesn't push out the boat in the way that the best J-horror does. I feel that we're at the edge of a trend that leads toward the best-selling movie in 2055 being called "ASS".

VACANCY is already on release in the US, Russia, Egypt and the UK. It opens in Singapore, Denmark, Germany, Malaysia, Finland, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, the Netherlands and Slovakia in July. It opens in Belgium, France, Brazil and Australia in August. It opens in Argentina in September and in Spain in November 2007.