SIRAT**

Frack me, SIRAT is a steaming pile of pretentious wank. I rarely agree with Peter Bradshaw's reviews in the Guardian but he was absolutely spot on in calling this the most over-rated film of 2025.  He wrote that the final part of this film descends into Monty-Python-esque absurdity and once you see that it's hard to unsee it. I felt that writer-director Oliver Laxe might have been trying to make some deep and meaningful point about the savagery of life but got lost up his own backside.  It's actually a real shame because Laxe clearly knows how to create a stunning visual and how to score it. Maybe he should just do music videos?

The movie opens in Morocco where middle-aged schlubby dad Luis (Sergi López) and his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) are derping around raves trying to find their missing daughter/sister.  They join up with a group of feckless hippies on a humbug and start journeying across a desert in a convoy of vans trying to find another rave that the daughter might be at. It all seems rather vague.  There are some soldiers - it's unsafe - there are landmines.  Anyways, bad stuff starts happening and keeps on happening - to the characters and to the viewers.  The movie lurches off-piste and then gives up all hopes of any kind of emotional impact or gravitas. 

SIRAT is rated R and has a running time of 115 minutes. It played Cannes 2025 where it won the Jury Prize. It also played the BFI London Film Festival. It went on release in the USA last November and will be released in the UK on February 27th.

AFIRE*

Man, I just did not get AFIRE. Is it an environmental satire about how we are all obsessed with our own mundanity while the world - literally - burns down on the edge of our peripheral vision?  Is it a satire on the narcissism of so-called creatives who underestimate the intellectual capacity of those around them?  Is it meant to be a deep and meaningful character and relationship study? Or is it meant to be a dark comedy? After an hour and forty minutes I neither know nor care. I found this film to be slow, dull, containing no characters that I found empathetic nor any plot "twists" that were compelling.  My mind drifted. I wanted to eat a blue smurf-flavoured ice cream.

The film centres on Leon (Thomas Schubert), a schlubby self-important author struggling with his second book. His friend Felix (Langston Uibel) invites him to his mum's seaside vacation house but the car breaks down en route and when they get there they find another couple also in residence. For the first thirty minutes of the film we see them from a distance but hear them loudly fucking in the next door bedroom, much to the voyeuristic Leon's frustration.  After that, Nadja (Paula Beer) comes more clearly into focus, firstly as an ice-cream seller and then as someone who is more than an intellectual and emotional match for Leon. But the character is really short-changed in this pisspoor film - a mere plot device to show up Leon's vacuity.

AFIRE has a running time of 102 minutes and is rated 12A. It played Berlin where it won the Silver Bear. It was released in the USA last month and in the UK last Friday.

NO HARD FEELINGS*

 

NO HARD FEELINGS is a desperately ill-judged "comedy" in which Jennifer Lawrence attempts to be Amy Schumer and fails. It pains me that such a talented dramatic actress should waste her time trying to be something she is not - because she is not kooky or adept at physical or verbal comedy.  She stars in this film as a thirty-something commitment-phobe who is about to lose her family home.  Desperate, she answers a Craigslist ad to basically deflower a shy, much-bullied kid before he goes to College. Cue lots of awkward and unwatchable scenes where J-Law throws herself at the petrified teen who rightly deploys pepper spray.  He actually is a sweet kid, and as played by the talented Andrew Barth Feldman, is the only thing hooking us into the heart of the movie. Ultimately, naturally, both of them grow through the experience.  She realises she needs to grow up and leave home.  He realises he needs to do the same. They end up as friends.  But what happens within the running time of the movie is just bizarre. I am not saying that a weird age-gap film can't work.  Just look at HAROLD & MAUDE. But J Law doing a nude comedy fight scene just wreaks of desperation.  Avoid at all costs.

NO HARD FEELINGS is rated R and has a running time of 103 minutes. It is available to rent and own.

YOUR PLACE OR MINE (zero stars)

Aline Brosh McKenna, the screenwriter of THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA and 27 DRESSES, returns to our screens with her debut directorial rom-com, YOUR PLACE OR MINE. I say rom-com, but this parlous excuse for a film is neither romantic nor comedic. There is no chemistry between the leads, Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher, and no laugh out loud moments. Even Tig Notaro can't save it. What's worse, the way in which this film deals with the real problems of school bullying and recovery from addiction, are borderline insulting.  No-one actually does any work on themselves in this film. All of life's problems can be fixed by throwing money at mean kids, and having good connections to influential businesspeople.  Maybe this is indeed Aline Brosh McKenna's experience of life. It doesn't fly with normal people.

Witherspoon plays a single mum in Los Angeles who complains about her kid's' medical costs but can apparently afford a beautiful quirky pretty house unlike anything I've ever seen in LA. She works as an accountant but is a book lover. Her best friend is Ashton Kutcher's recovering addict who lives a sleek, rich batchelor life in New York.  They house swap for a week when she needs to take some accountancy exams in New York and her babysitter bails.  He tries to fix her life by making her kid popular at school by pandering to the superficial demands of the bullies. She tries to fix his life by handing in a manuscript to a cute influential publisher she just happens to meet in a bar. It all ends happily ever after. 

The whole thing just hangs on the screen like a damp squib.  One cannot imagine Kutcher and Witherspoon actually having a relationship. They don't seem to be enjoying their time together at all. It's utterly predictable throughout.  The only reason to watch this is to hate watch it, and that's no good for anyone.

YOUR PLACE OR MINE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 109 minutes. It's streaming on Netflix.

MOTHERING SUNDAY* - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 9

Eva Husson's MOTHERING SUNDAY is, I am sad to report, a total failure of a film. It has nothing in it to capture the interest of the viewer, and may even verge on the exploitative. This is all the more frustrating because it's an adaptation of Graham Swift's critically acclaimed novel of the same name, which told the story of a famous author and how an affair she had when working in service in the 1920s set her on the path to greatness. The problem is that this film shows us nothing of that greatness - we see no literary merit or acute perception by means of voiceover or later extracts of novels. Rather, the film merely declares the woman a success.  As a result, we are unconvinced, and don't understand why we should be interested in this author's origin story.

As the film opens we are in the last days of World War One.  The tone is one of suppressed grief and rage.  Three upper class families meet over a weekend in Henley. It becomes clear that one of them has lost both of their children in the war: the father (Colin Firth) represses this knowledge with banal cheeriness while the mother (Olivia Colman) looks sullen and detached but occasionally flares up into tears and deeply selfish condescension. Another family has lost two sons already, and the third, played by Josh O'Connor has inherited all their hopes and burdens. He must now study law and marry his deceased brother's fiancee.  He rebels by shagging the neighbour's maid (Odessa Young) and vast amounts of the film consist of them lying naked on a bed, or - once he departs for an engagement lunch - her wandering aimlessly naked around his house. This is basically 70% of the film. Will anything happen? No. Not even when a major event happens. There's no confrontation. No exposure. No dramatic tension. Nothing but boredom.

We then flash forward at intervals to the maid's second love - a black philosopher. Oh, we think, this could be really fascinating. How does a black man navigate Oxford in the 1920s? What prejudice do they face as a mixed-race couple? But no. Zero drama or character exploration here. Pretty girl gets typewriter and supportive boyfriend. Writes novel we don't see. Is apparently brilliant. We don't see it. Grows up to be Glenda Jackson. Is insufferably arrogant. Who gives a shit?

The film was so dull I started wondering what the point of the nudity was. Is it that it's meant to be sex positive? If so, cool. Apparently this is what writer Alice Birch does, or did, in her adaptation of Sally Rooney's Normal People. But I couldn't help wondering what people would say if a male director made a film that basically just followed a pretty young naked girl around with no apparent dramatic purpose.

MOTHERING SUNDAY is rated R and has a running time of 111 minutes. It played Cannes, Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival 2021.  It will be released in the USA and UK on November 19th.