JAY KELLY**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 3

JAY KELLY is a film with a simple and arguably trite message: those who pursue success at all costs end up not alone but lonely.  Inevitably, when it comes to movie stars, the cost is paid by wives and children.  It’s ground that we have seen trodden from 81/2 to ALL THAT JAZZ and countless films in between.  Trite, but also relatable.  Every parent who has had to take a business meeting or a business trip and missed their kid’s school concert can empathise. Everyone who has reached a certain age and looks back on decisions that seemed like they weren’t even choices at the time, but are bitterly regretted in retrospect, can sympathise. So this is a strange film that seems obvious but somehow hits home.  I laughed a lot, I rolled my eyes on occasion, but in the end the characters, and the central love story, really stuck with me.

George Clooney stars as the eponymous ageing film star whose mid-life crisis is triggered by a trio of guilt-inducing events. First off, his old mentor and movie director (Jim Broadbent) dies - a man that Kelly abandoned when he fell out of fashion.  Second, Kelly runs into an old fellow acting class student, played in youth by The House of Guinness’ Louis Partridge and as an old man by The Morning Show’s Billy Crudup.  That student had a lot of talent but ultimately was too nervous to ace the audition that Kelly ultimately won.  The resentment lingers.  Third, Kelly has to confront his woeful relationship with his two daughters when his youngest leaves for a European vacation.  The eldest (Riley Keough, superb in a cameo) feels her abandonment as a child keenly, and that relationship feels the hardest to fix.  But both young women seem refreshingly grounded.

So we think this is a movie about family, and I guess it is.  And let’s not pretend that Jay is going to fix 35 years of bad choices over a long weekend in Italy.  But the movie wants us to realise that he’s not the only one. Every member of his team, but principally his agent (Adam Sandler) and his publicist (Laura Dean), are putting their lives on hold to minister to his every need and enable his success.  One by one this movie strips him of their comforting support blanket. I am not sure if there is any major character development or revelation.  But a near-final scene of surprising tenderness between Sandler and Clooney shows the real danger of believing that you have chosen a family above your own.  The movie title tragedy is Jay’s but the real tragedy is his agent’s. 

Overall, JAY KELLY is a deceptively slow-moving gentle comedy that hits harder than you might realise on a first watch.  It does not contain the visceral anger of writer-director Noah Baumbach’s MARRIAGE STORY, but in working with debut feature writer Emily Mortimer, Baumbach has created something more melancholy and wistful, despite the brilliant cheesecake gags.

JAY KELLY is rated R and has a running time of 132 minutes. It played Venice, San Sebastian, Telluride and now London. It opens on November 14th in cinemas and on December 5th on Netflix.

BARBIE***

BARBIE is a fun light film that isn't really as profound or original as it thinks, but worth seeing for Ryan Gosling's star-turn as Ken. Greta Gerwig shows us how cine literate she is, but she tangles herself in knots trying to show us how Barbie is actually a feminist icon. Worse still, she wastes a truly heartfelt pre-ending with housewife turned Barbie inventor Ruth Handler with yet another tonally uneven shift into broad comedy.

First the good stuff. For much of its running time BARBIE is a lot of fun. It looks fun, the pop songs are great, the costumes are fabulous and it has the same kind of crass gonzo energy as ZOOLANDER.  Ryan Gosling is absolutely superb as Barbie's overlooked boyfriend Ken, really channelling that Owen Wilson-Ben Stiller vibe with his outrageous prickly vanity.  I also loved Michael Cera - long known to us a dry comedy genius - as Ken's even more overlooked sidekick. 

The problem is that these charismatic, hilarious, male characters overshadow Barbie in her own movie.  Ken's enlightenment upon leaving Barbieland for contemporary LA is that men (and horses!) rule! The path of Ken from friendzoned sidekick to champion of the patriarchy and thence to working on himself and being "Ken Enough" is genuinely fascinating and funny and at times genuinely poignant. It's something we haven't really seen addressed in contemporary film before: the reaction of men in a world that is now empowering women - or at least paying lip service to that. 

By contrast, Barbie's enlightenment that the real world is not a matriarchy is pretty hackneyed.  America Ferrera makes a superb speech in the final act of the film about how tough it is to be a woman in contemporary society - be pretty but not too threatening, be thin but not too thin, have a career but also be a great mum. The speech resonates but felt like so many speeches I had heard before. There is (sadly) nothing new here for us, even it's new to Barbie. 

I also don't feel that the film ever squares the circle of how to reconcile the "fascistic" uber prettiess of Barbie with the concept that Barbie is actually a feminist empowerment telling little girls everywhere they can be doctors and scientists and President.  What Barbie actually tells them is that society recognises and rewards an impossible standard of beauty.  The character Sasha gets it right with her epic second act takedown but Greta Gerwig (in partnership with Mattel) never has the balls or the scope to really explore that.

Last but not least, let's talk about tone, and how Greta Gerwig tries to have it all - from dayglo Barbie pink with songs by Lizzo and Dua Lipa, to ethereal mournful existential angst in the words of Billie Eilish.  I feel that is particularly jarring in the final scenes of the film where a genuinely moving scene between Margot Robbie's Barbie and Rhea Pearlman's Ruth Handler is sandwiched between Barbieland fun and a gynie joke. Pick a lane, Greta! Pick a lane.

BARBIE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 114 minutes.

This is not a review of WHITE NOISE - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 2

Noah Baumbach's adaptation of the Don DeLillo academic / western proseperity satire is mystifyingly opaque and uninvolving. We are presented with a central couple that are spoiled, self-involved and unlikeable. The dad is an ego-driven college professor who teaches Hitler studies but can't speak German. He's married to a woman, Babette, who is numbing herself to the inevitability of death with pills. They have a gaggle of precocious kids who all seem to be obsessed with death and calamity while all the while being surrounded by the detritus of American consumerism and endless layers of meaningless conversation and noise. There's no-one to like. That's probably the point. But then it makes it harder to care about their reactions to the Airborne Toxic Event that happens when a lorry crashes near their home town.  They're evacuated. The dad is exposed to toxins. Or is he? Is the evacuation real or a simulation or a simulation that takes advantage of real events?

It's all very clever but I feel reality has moved beyond what this movie was satirising in the mid 80s.  Academia is now so far up its meta-textual Critical Theorised arse that the de-contextualised lecture duel between Driver's Hitler professor and Don Cheadle's Elvis obsessive seems pale meat compared to the BS that actually takes place now. (I should explain I am academe-adjacent IRL).  

And yes, the film is making a point about late-stage capitalism and misinformation and misdirection but I feel that in a post-Trump world this is all stuff we a) know and b) get bigger darker laughs from on the Colbert Late Show each night.

So I walked out after an hour.

WHITE NOISE has a running time of 137 minutes. It played the Venice and BFI London Film Festivals and will be released on Netflix on December 30th.

MARRIAGE STORY - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Day Six

Writer-director Noah Baumbach has created, in MARRIAGE STORY, the best Woody Allen film since the late 1980s. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about a director so closely replicating the technique of another even if it's a technique I so admire and it's done so well.  But if I push that slight queasiness to one side, I have to admit that MARRIAGE STORY is one of the most authentic, heartfelt and beautifully acted relationship dramas I've seen in some time, and I hope that Baumbach, Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver and Laura Dern are duly reward with award nominations.

The story is a deeply personal and relatable one.  It's based on Noah Baumbach's own divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh, and acted by Scarlett Johansson in the midst of her own divorce.  Two fundamentally decent good people find they cannot live together anymore.  The husband - a theatre director - feels that his wife, his star actress - has cooled sexually, resents her for his having been married and faithful in his prime, and so has an affair.  The wife resents the fact that her career has been subsumed into his, that he so steadfastly considers them a New York family when she wants to go back to LA, that she's never given the chance to direct.  In the most trenchant line of the film, her lawyer points out that when he wants something it's a debate, but when she wants something it's just a discussion.

They begin the divorce process hoping not to involve lawyers. They have precious little money to split - the only real contention is custody and specifically where their primary home will be - are they a New York or LA family. But as she files for divorce when shooting a pilot in LA, as her kid was born in LA, he's in school there while she shoots the pilot, it all seems to go in her favour. Moreover, she hires a no-nonsense cut-throat lawyer played by Laura Dern, while he hires a decent lawyer played by Alan Alda. This all winds through - we get an absolutely superb, unrelenting, vicious, heart-wrenching, set piece argument - and the case is settled. The irony being that if he'd agree to just spend a year in LA in the first place they might never have gotten divorced in the first place.

I really love this film. There's something so honest about their mutual resentments, about her need to break free, about his complete lack of awareness.... There's also something so tragically well-observed in how the expensive lawyers think it's all about victory, and are actually social friends outside of the courtroom, and don't really care about the clients at all. There's a wonderful moment of subtle acting near the end when her lawyer has managed to squeeze out another concession from him, but a concession she even wanted, and when the lawyer says "you won!" you can see her wince.  

This is Scarlett Johansson operating at a level we haven't seen before - establishing herself as a truly gifted and mature actress. And in combination with her surprisingly tragicomic, charismatic performance in JOJO RABBIT - this truly is her year.  And I guess I'm overall pleased that someone is giving us complicated adult dramas of the calibre of late 80s Woody Allen, even if it isn't Woody himself. 

MARRIAGE STORY has a running time of 136 minutes and is rated R. The film played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and London. It will get a limited theatrical release in November before being released on Netflix on December 6th.

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (NEW AND SELECTED) - Day 4 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

In a London Film Festival where the prevailing tone has been one of a wake, in the words of Meester Phil, "Thank god for some wit and arseholery." The arsehole in question is paterfamilias Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman with a raffish beard), a retired sculptor full of passive aggressive nastiness and jealousy. On the last of many marriages, Harold lives an indulgent life bitter that his supposedly less talented peers have achieved more commercial success, and demanding that his three children dance to his needs. The eldest is his son Danny (Adam Sandler) - an utterly charming but insecure man who has been constantly overlooked in favour of Harold's younger son Matthew (Ben Stiller), who is far more successfully financially and seems to have discovered a better way of dealing with his father. And then poor Jean (Elizabeth Marvel) is so overlooked that her grievances with her dad taking a back seat and comically inserted in parenthesis. 

The film is, then, a very darkly comic one.  There are properly laugh out loud moments to be sure - but the tone is bitter and tragic. And this is where the casting is absolutely spot on. I love it when Stiller and Sandler play straight roles because there's a certain manic comic energy underlying it. And when they ARE called upon for their slapstick chops, the payoff is all the better for the surrounding dark context. If I have any criticism to make, it's that the film felt over-long and occasionally lost momentum.  I felt that this was particularly the case in the scenes involving Harold's fourth wife Maureen (Emma Thompson).  Nothing wrong with her performance at all, it just felt a bit redundant. Otherwise this was a truly superb film as one would expect from a Noah Baumbach picture. 

THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES has a running time of 110 minutes and will be released on Netflix on October 13th. 

MISTRESS AMERICA

Greta Gerwig - the writer and star of MISTRESS AMERICA - has fashioned a career as a writer and actress playing variations on a certain theme.  In we start with Whit Stillman's fantastic DAMSELS IN DISTRESS, Gerwig played a character called Violet that should've been insufferable - an arrogant, supremely confidence college student intent on making everybody's life better with her brand of wisdom. And yet there was something so knowingly absurd about her confidence that she became endearing, and I adored the movie.  Then we got FRANCES HA,  directed by Noah Baumbach, where Gerwig played a similarly eccentric twenty-something girl, but this time so indulged and flaky that I found her irritating beyond endurance.  Now we get Gerwig as Brooke Cardinas, the heroine of MISTRESS AMERICA, also directed by Baumbach.  She combines the arrogance of Violet with the flakiness and self-delusion of Frances, but somehow the result is a perfectly nuanced and captivating character, and a movie of real substance as well as wit.

FRANCES HA

For the written review, well, keep reading! But for the podcast review, either listen directly below or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

Sweet tap-dancing Christ, but FRANCES HA annoyed me. It's exactly that kind of precious, self-aware smug hipster movie that riles me, in exactly the same way as HBO's Girls riles me.  We are meant to be charmed and empathetic toward these flakey, twentysomethings with their great books college degrees who studied semiotics and thinks that life owes them a living. And why oh why is "investment banker" always a lazy shorthand for the soul-less putz who puts up with this shit and pays the bills?  I don't find this behaviour - lazy, narcissistic, delusional - charming. And even if I did, I wouldn't want to watch it for the 86 minute runtime of this movie.  And I'm not buying the idea that just because you filmed it in black and white it's deep and meaningful.

But let's take a breath and look at what we have here.  FRANCES HA is a movie written and directed by Noah Baumbach, who made the stunningly good THE SQUID & THE WHALE and the more sporadically successful MARGOT AT THE WEDDING and GREENBERG.   The latter film starred Greta Gerwig, the charming actress who plays, well charming characters who win our hearts even as they're being doormats (GREENBERG), obnoxious (DAMSELS IN DISTRESS) or flakey (FRANCES HA).  In GREENBERG and DAMSELS, the movies worked largely because Gerwig is just one of those people that you're happy to spend time with.  And the fact that I didn't walk out of FRANCES HA is largely thanks to the fact that she is pretty charming even when she's being utterly irritating.

So what's it all about Alfie?  It's about the friendship between college best buddies, Frances (Gerwig) and Sophia (Mickey Sumner).  That friendship is tested when Sophia does what late twenties girls do - gets a series job, gets an aspirational apartment and gets a fiancée.   Meanwhile, Frances is stuck as an apprentice modern dancer with no real steady income and no real hope of won.  The fact that she's impressed with the fact that she even asks for more work sums up the low bar she has set herself - and even then she ends up a loser.  So that's it.  For the first hour of this flick we watch Frances fail, and infuriatingly never really deal with that, just telling herself and her friends lies about how she's doing okay.  And then there's a crisis and a resolution neither of which I think are particularly credible.

Here's the basic level at which this movie doesn't work.  You know how Sofia Coppola so brilliantly and effortlessly captures how young girls are in each other's company?  There are a number of scenes where Baumbach tries to establish the same intimacy and freedom between Frances and Sophia, but it always comes off as stage-y rather than authentic.  And if you don't believe in their friendship, then the whole dramatic love story played as platonic friendship just doesn't work either. Of course, one let out could be that Baumbach is trying to show us how Frances sees her own life - mythologised, romanticised, a series of beautifully staged montages.  But I suspect that the movie isn't as clever as all that.

I think the simplest conclusion is that if you are someone who likes HBO's Girls, and thinks Lena Dunham is the voice of your generation, then this movie is for you.  I would rather just watch MANHATTAN or ANNIE HALL and be done with it. 

FRANCES HA has a running time of 86 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK for strong language and sex references.

FRANCES HA played Telluride, Toronto, New York, Berlin and host of other festivals in 2012.  It was released earlier this year in the USA, the Netherlands, Russia and Canada.  It is currently on release in Belgium, France, Poland and Israel. It opens in Poland on July 19th, in the UK and Ireland on July 26th, in Germany on August 1st, in Sweden on August 16th, and in Iceland on September 6th. 

SUBMARINE - as unsatisfying as onanism

This review is brought to you by The Ginger Dwarf, a man cursed not only with being short and ginger, but also with going to school in Wales.... 

I have never read “A Catcher in the Rye”. Perhaps this is why I felt deeply unsatisfied by “Submarine”, which, like onanism and caffeine, felt momentarily fantastic, but was ultimately disappointing. Its quirky humour, often delivered with deadpan voiceover, was at times inspired and very funny, but wasn’t sufficient to carry a movie which was too long and whose plot fell into facile traps towards the end. 

Richard Ayoade’s debut film (he wrote the screenplay and directed it, and most impressively, managed to live in Barry throughout the filming process, as anyone who has ever lived in South Wales will immediately understand), follows the travails of precocious pseudo-intellectual teen Oliver Tate. 

Oliver, best described as Wales’ answer to Adrian Mole, wears a duffle-coat and carries a briefcase around school. He obsesses about the nonchalant, twisted and red-coated Jordana Bevan, whose eczema and apparent bow-legs appear to be offset in his eyes by high-cheekbones and a flirtatious smile. That he is bound at some point to lose his virginity to her is a sine qua non, since this is a coming-of-age movie. And when the moment comes, pun intended, it is well executed and almost Andy Stitzer-like. Our solipsistic hero, encouraged by this victory and undamaged by life experience decides to try to save his parents’ marriage. Unfortunately for the viewers we simply don’t care enough about this awkward couple to care; they are just not likeable enough. They’re the sort of people who encourage their children to call them by their first names. We hardly envy their bourgeois hell. The juxtaposition of the parents’ decaying marriage and Tate’s burgeoning relationship with Jordana feels laboured. 

The only saving grace of this development is that it allows Paddy Considine’s character to run wild for a while. Much more of the dynamic between the mulleted Graham Purvis and Oliver could have been made, not least since, in their own ways, they believe equally in their own grandiose self-images. Prosaic characterisation is the film’s biggest let-down. Although he is bullied, it is refreshing that Oliver is not a total wimp, eschewing wholesale playground capitulation, but still he’s still whimsy and annoyingly affected. Jordana could have been more than the tough lass with a (barely) hidden soft side. Indeed, if this was a grown-up movie she’d have been a hooker-with-a-heart. Personally, I’d have preferred her to remain a hard-nosed and Juno-esque, or even better, like Sheeni Saunders’ “Portia Doubleday” in that other, excellent but neglected Michael Cera vehicle “Youth in Revolt”. Also noticeably implausible is the mother’s character. Albeit brilliantly played by Sally Hawkins, she comes across as far too sensible to fall for Purvis’ phoney wizard cum wedding DJ. Ayoade’s film has been frequently compared to Rushmore, indeed Wes Andersen regular Ben Stiller appears fleetingly as a TV soap star in Submarine. And yet the characters are self-involved and unpleasant, without the redeeming qualities which make Andersen’s films so textured. Despite the buzz, Submarine is underwhelming. Ayoade’s irreverent humour (he lists his influences for this film as Taxi Driver & Badlands – is he, even here, taking the piss?) is hit-and-miss and fails to convince in a movie which should have ended differently, and earlier. 

SUBMARINE played Toronto and London 2010 and Sundance 2011. It opens in the UK this weekend; in Norway on April 15th; in the US on June 3rd; in Poland in August and in Sweden on September 23rd.

Overlooked DVD of the month - GREENBERG

Writer-director Noah Baumbach makes excruciatingly well-observed films about financially privileged, neurotic, unsympathetic middle-aged Americans. When his films work, they are masterpieces of razor-sharp dialogue and uncomfortable silences and fleeting moments of sympathy for the fundamentally unsympathetic. His latest film, GREENBERG, features a classic Baumbach character, brilliantly played by Ben Stiller. Roger Greenberg is the definition of the bi-coastal American mid-life crisis. He's a forty-something, neurotic failed pop star turned carpenter who spends his life feeling sorry for himself, using recreational drugs, hitting on younger women and basically being self-indulgent and whiny. He is a walking embarrassment - the Uncle who won't grow up - the brother who won't get himself together - the friend who won't admit to his failures. 

Greenberg comes to LA to house-sit his brother's house and, taking the family's cue, casually abuses the services of their au pair/social secretary/general all round skivvy Florence (Greta Gerwig). The interaction between the passive-aggressive Greenberg and the vulnerable, low-self-esteem Florence is fascinating. She is sympathetic but hopeless. Greenberg is simultaneously repelled by her openness, and inflated by the fact that he has finally found someone in such dire circumstances that even a loser like him can help her. (I've been rewatching the classic 1981 BRIDESHEAD REVISITED recently, and as far apart as these things are, I thought I recognised something of the relationship of Sebastian Flyte and Kurt in Greenberg's attraction to finally being of use.)

I liked GREENBERG. Or maybe it's a film that you don't so much like, or enjoy, but see as a reflection of people you know, and admire for its honesty in depicting a certain slice of life. Greenberg is a profoundly unsympathetic character, but I did care about his journey and find some satisfaction, if not redemption, in the final scenes of the movie. GREENBERG isn't as bitterly funny as THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, nor does it have as interesting a cast of characters. GREENBERG feels more like a character study - a closely drawn, almost claustrophobic, portrait of a man in a crisis. It felt real, and painful and sometimes infuriating. But I was happy to have spent time with its characters and bought into the relationships and narrative arc.

Baumbach is, like Nicole Holofcener, the great chronicler of our decadent, pampered lives. Of rich people who feel guilty for being rich, but want all that being rich gives them. Of emotionally unstable people self-sabotaging. Of people in their thirties and forties who refuse to grow up and take responsibility. Of emotional narcissism and the difficulty of connection. I am grateful that there is room for his kind of cinema, even if it is, by definition, a painful watch.

GREENBERG played Berlin 2010 and opened earlier this year. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Wes Anderson's THE FANTASTIC MR FOX to open London 2009

After the genius of BOTTLE ROCKET and THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS and the self-indulgent fiascos of THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU and THE DARJEELING LIMITED, all eyes are on Wes Anderson's next project, an animated adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic, THE FANTASTIC MR FOX. Set for release in the UK on October 23rd and in the US on November 13th, the movie will open the London Film Festival this year. Let's hope it can break the hoo-doo of recent open films which have all been picked on commercial rather than critical grounds - mediocre, solid but that's all. I give you films such as THE CONSTANT GARDENER, FROST/NIXON and oh, that awful biopic, SYLVIA. So far, things look good. We have a voice cast stuffed with Anderson regulars - Owen Wilson, Angelica Huston - but we also have top notch British characters - Michael Gambon, Helen McCrory - not to mention genuine Hollywood A-list in Meryl Streep (stepping in for Cate Blanchett as Mrs Fox). I also love that Anderson has gone back to old school stop motion animation. Sounds, if not fantastic, given his recent record, at least intriguing....

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING - a step back from SQUID

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING is a film about a selfish, hateful novelist who arrives at her sister's house and proceeds to hurt everyone in her path, not least her own son. She is a rather savage figure, and despite the fact that writer/director Noah Baumbach creates a realistic, fully-fleshed portrait, I found it hard to have any empathy for her or to be interested in what she did. Some way through the film, another callous author (Ciaran Hinds) brutally exposes Margot (Nicole Kidman) at a public reading. I thought this might have been cathartic. Up until that point, I would have happily slapped Margot myself, so presumably I would have enjoyed seeing her skewered? But I felt neither happiness at, nor sympathy for, her downfall. Just mild irritation that I had to witness yet another selfish, hateful novelist inflicting pain on others.

So what is there to hold our interest in this film? Jennifer Jason-Leigh gives a wonderful performance as Margot's kind-hearted but weak-willed younger sister, Pauline. Despite all the punishment Margot deals her, Pauline still loves her and listens to her. Jack Black is also marvellous in a small role, playing it relatively straight. He seems all the more funny the more he is hemmed in by a stern script and director, and he plays one of the few love-able characters in the movie.

Other than that, MARGOT AT THE WEDDING is a pretty dismal affair. And that extends to the production design and the camera-work. DP Harry Savides has treated the negative to give the scenes a dull, mono-chrome look, and interior scenes in particular look murky and uninteresting.

The movie seems like a step backward from THE SQUID AND THE WHALE. That movie was far from perfect, but it did capture my interest and the cutting observations of human frailty were tempered by something like human warmth. By contrast, MARGOT feels misanthropic. And the little flaws that marred SQUID are magnified in MARGOT. The final scene is a case in point. Baumbach doesn't seem to be able to restrain himself from big dramatic flourishes at the end of his films. They feel stagey and heavy-handed.

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING played Telluride and Toronto 2007. It opened in the US last year and is currently on release in Australia. It opens in the UK on February 29th and in Belgium and the Netherlands in March. It opens in Denmark on April 11th and in Norway on May 9th. It opens in Spain on June 6th. MARGOT AT THE WEDDING is also available on Region 1 DVD.

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE - if Wes Anderson and Woody Allen made a movie...

I really like THE SQUID AND THE WHALE. Despite the somewhat hammy ending, to my mind, writer/director Noah Baumbach has delivered a charming, often hillarious, often painful movie. Despite the similarity in feel to a Wes Anderson or even certain types of Woody Allen movie, the subject matter of the film feels really fresh and interesting. There have been films about flawed people with fractious relationships before, but rarely one that explores with such honesty, authenticty and good humour the impact of divorce on young kids, and how learning that our parents can be wrong is the first step in growing up. Every member of the cast turns in a great performance, from Jeff Daniels as the narcissistic, judgmental academic father to Owen Kline as the absurdly cool, cute but messed up kid brother. Anna Paquin is always fantastic, but I also liked Hailey Feiffer as the elder son's girlfriend. When he says something cruel to her, you can feel her teenage heart breaking. All in all, this film wears its indie heart on its sleeve, but, with the exception of the final few minutes, is never pretentious or manipulative. And as an added bonus, the movie is set in the mid-80s so there is plenty of opportunity to get nostalgic about Jimmy Connors, skinny black jeans and Short Circuit. I still have a smile on my face thinking about it and I can't ask for more than that.

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE premiered at Sundance 2005 where Noah Baumbach won the Best Director and Best Screenplay awards. It opens in the UK on April 7th 2006, in Germany on May 11th and in France on May 31st.

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU may be the most disappointing movie of 2005

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU may well be, for me, the most disappointing movie of 2005. This is because it is made by a director, Wes Anderson, whose previous films I have loved without reservation. Given that THE LIFE AQUATIC stars many of the same actors, covers many of the same themes, and lives in the same eccentric, richly-designed world, what went wrong? To cut a long story short, I think "sameness" is the problem. First, there is a problem when we see the same actors portray variations on the same character time and time again. In the case of THE LIFE AQUATIC the key culprit is Bill Murray. In the second half of his career he seems to be perfecting the role of world-weary, painfully self-aware, benumbed wanderer. Granted he is once again fantastic in this movie, but oh my goodness, the whole routine does seem a little tired. It was breathtaking in RUSHMORE, subtley different but still compelling in ROYAL TENENBAUMS, but by the time we have seen LOST IN TRANSLATION and the forthcoming BROKEN FLOWERS... well you get the picture. Ditto seeing Owen Wilson once again as the innocent-idiot; Angelica Huston as the wise-put-upon wife; and let us not forget the obligatory Indian guy. It just seems like Wes Anderson has his zone of comfort as far as characters are concerned.

Similarly, the thematic material is well-worn - disappointed sons and reluctant fathers; super-fan outsiders who desperately want to be part of the Cool group; relationships between the sexes that are fraught with misunderstandings - love triangles and love squares; the difficulty of dreamers to deal with the real world of hard cash; and the difficulty of dreamers to continue to believe in themselves when all around them doubt The Plan. We've been here before. Indeed, we've been here ever since BOTTLE ROCKET.

Moreover, all those incidental but important features of a movie that make up the tone of the picture - production design, sound-track - have taken over the asylum. It used to be that you were compelled to watch a Wes Anderson movie two or three times just to take in the richness of the set design and remember just what that cool track was. But now, the cute little details of set design are all there is. I so wanted to be interested in Steve Zissou 's (for which read Jacques Cousteau's) journey to hunt down the mythic jaguar shark and avenge the death of his partner Esteban. I so wanted to be fascinated by the relationship between Steve and his long-lost son, Ned. But somehow, every time the movie threatened to give us a bit of character development we got another scene with a cute red bobble hat, or crew-member Pele dos Santos (Seu Jorge) singing a David Bowie song. For, in the final analysis, this movie is a triumph of style, tone and mood over the substance that is the narrative arc and character development.

What I guess it all comes down to is that the movie just isn't as funny as TENENBAUMS. Perhaps this is because Anderson's usual writing partner, Owen Wilson, has been replaced by Noah Baumbach? Or perhaps it just signals that what was once magical and fascinating and amusing has now become stale. I tend toward the latter.

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU opened in the US last fall, and opens in the UK today. It opens in France on March 9th 2005, and in Austrian and Germany on March 17th.