BABYGIRL**

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

LOVE LIES BLEEDING**

British writer-director Rose Glass (ST MAUD) returns to our screen with a Tarantino-esque GRINDHOUSE movie where romance and violence sit together in a film in which earnest emotions, comic-book stylings and laugh-out-loud absurdism sit uneasily together. For me, the film was less than the sum of its parts, but there's no doubt that the BFI Flare crowd loved it, laughing uproariously throughout. My question is whether they were laughing at, or with, a film that seemed to waste Kristen Stewart's earnest performance.

Stewart stars as Lou - a gay woman who works at a gym in a dusty desert border town seemingly run by her gun-running badass father (Ed Harris in comedy hair extensions). Lou only sticks around to protect her sister (Jena Malone) from her abusive husband. This doesn't sit well with Lou's new lover Jackie (Katy O'Brian), who dreams of winning a body building championship in Vegas and driving to the coast with Lou for a new life. 

What could've been a deeply felt emotionally intense relationship drama becomes a nasty little crime movie when Jackie goes Hulk-Smash on Lou's scumbag brother-in-law and we discover Lou's talent for cleaning up murders. I love a grungy scuzzy crime caper, but what made this a bit frustrating is that I was being asked to take the central relationship with Hulk seriously. It felt like every tonal shift was pinging me about and what was so bad it's good finally just became it's bad.

LOVE LIES BLEEDING has a running time of 104 minutes and is rated R. It played Berlin, Sundance and BFI Flare 2024 and is currently on release in the USA. It opens in the UK on April 19th.

MARY & GEORGE (TV)****

MARY & GEORGE is a sumptuously produced costume drama set in the court of King James I of England. Despite being known to most English schoolchildren as the sponsor of a new translation of the Bible, historical sources tell us that he was definitely homosocial and most likely bi- or homosexual.  In this retelling from D.C.Moore, based on a work of history by Benjamin Woolley, any ambiguity is eradicated. James was most definitely homosexual - able to sire children with his Danish Queen - but taking pleasure in a series of young beautiful men.

This gives our heroine Mary Beaumont her chance at societal advancement, wealth and power. Born a serving woman, by the time we meet her she has already successfully faked an aristocratic lineage and buried her first husband. She marries a country booby in order to maintain her children, and grooms her son George to seduce the King. That they both achieve great power and set up her descendants as those the Dukes of Buckingham is a testament to Mary's intelligence, ruthlessness and strategic brilliance. 

Iconic actress Julianne Moore (MAY DECEMBER) perfectly embodies this complex and ambiguous woman. She is no feminist - happily sacrificing a rich heiress to her mentally ill and violent younger son. But one cannot help but admire her resilience and resourcefulness in a world where she had no lineage and few legal rights. It is testament to Nicholas Galitzine (RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE) that he matches her beat for beat. When we first meet his George he is young, fragile and drifting. By the end he is out-strategising both his mother and the King. He remains compelling throughout. In smaller roles, I admired Tony Curran's ability to make James so much more complex and indeed admirable than just a "cockstruck" dilettante. I also very much liked Sean Gilder as Mary's new husband, and Nicola Walker gets all the best lines as the scabrous, independently wealthy Lady Harron.

The production design, costumes, music, and locations are all beautifully done. The show is a joy to watch, and as far as I can tell, the broad historical outlines are close to the real history. My only real criticism of the show is that it cannot maintain the brilliantly funny brutal comedy of its opening episodes and that once the Villiers get closer to power, a dark pall falls over the show.  I felt that somewhere around episode 5 the drama lost its intensity and zest and we drifted toward the inevitable grim ending.  I wanted more of the bawdy language and nakedly open powerplays - notably between Mary and Lady Harron.  The show suffered for the latter's loss.

MARY & GEORGE is available to watch in its entirety in the UK on Sky. It releases next month in the USA on Starz.

SILVER HAZE*****

Dutch writer-director Sasha Polak's SILVER HAZE a lightly fictionalised depiction of actor Vicky Knight's life story.  As a young child, Franky (Vicky's on-screen avatar) was badly burned in a fire in her uncle's pub, and still holds her father's new wife Jane responsible. This film picks Franky up as a young woman who is filled with anger and resentment.  She lives in a chaotic crowded family home in an economically-deprived part of East London. The threat of verbal or physical violence is always just under the surface and Franky gives as good as she gets.  

The narrative is propelled by Franky's relationship with Florence (Esme Creed-Miles), a privileged but troubled girl who now lives with her grandmother Alice in Southend. It begins as a liberation, allowing Franky to discover she is gay, and allowing her to create a found family with the wonderfully supportive Alice, and Florence's younger brother Jack.

I really admire this film for its delicate balance between laugh-out-loud family banter - genuine menace in a scene of a London bus - and joyous emotional release.  Sacha Polak handles the shifts in tone and mood so beautifully that you emerge from a film that deals with epically profound topics feeling uplifted. I also admire how brave the film is. Not just Vicky Knight having the body confidence to be naked on screen, and to show her unique beauty, but her real-life siblings playing her on-screen family and revisiting a traumatic experience. In a sub-plot, Franky's sister explores converting to Islam, and her need for that is treated with respect but also good humour. That feels brave in the current climate.  Finally, I am grateful to any film that lets me spend time with the charismatic Angela Bruce.  As Alice, she is no pushover, but radiates warmth. A tricky balance to pull off.

Behind the lens, Polak's largely Dutch crew create some memorable visuals of Southend, and a beautiful soundtrack, on what must have been a low budget. It just cheers my soul that unique, brave, entertaining and moving films like this can still be made and released. I really hope it finds the audience it deserves.

SILVER HAZE has a running time of 102 minutes. It played Berlin and London 2023, and will play BFI Flare 2024. It will be released in the UK on March 29th.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SHERE HITE****

Nicole Newnham's new documentary is an urgent, well-constructed and desperately relevant film about a feminist sociologist and publishing sensation cut down by the patriarchy. 

Shere Hite was a beautiful, intelligent, curious and sex-positive woman. She supported herself through college at Columbia and then in her sociological research by modelling, some of which was nude.  She saw nothing wrong with this. She became famous for publishing The Hite Report in 1976 - summarising the results of a survey of 3000 American women. The most shocking of its revelations was that the best way to satisfy a woman sexually was through clitoral stimulation, and that conventional vaginal intercourse was a poor way to achieve this.  As a result, most women's best sexual experiences were through masturbation.

The severity and savagery of the masculine backlash was comprehensive.  The publishers tried to sabotage the book by restricting sales and the first print run.  They refused to run any publicity. But they couldn't stop the juggernaut of interest. Apparently it's the thirtieth best selling book of all time, even though few today have heard of it.  But the accompanying PR interviews, many of which are excerpted here, show the toll it took on Hite. She was pilloried on TV shows and accused of making men irrelevant. Men tried to discredit her based on her nude modelling and the sample biases in her research (you try getting a representative sample of women to answer a sex survey!).  Publishers would not give her a contract for her ongoing research and she ended up giving up her US citizenship and forging a new life in Europe.

Perhaps this cancellation and suppression is ongoing. People today all know about the Kinsey report on men, but how many now about the Hite report on women? Why - after immense critical acclaim at the Sundance film festival, did this film not get wider distribution, despite a star as big as Dakota Johnson voicing the words of Shere Hite? Why does the world not care when Shere Hite was speaking to exactly the repression of female sexuality that we now see rearing its head in the United States?  All of these factors speak to the continuing importance of Hite's work. This film is a worthy argument along those lines.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SHERE HITE is rated R and has a running time of 118 minutes. It played Sundance 2023 and was released in the USA last November. It was released in the UK this week.

LIE WITH ME aka ARRETE AVEC TES MENSONGES***

Two seventeen year old boys fall in love in small-town France.  One leaves for America to pursue his dream of becoming a writer and living a life true to himself.  The other stays back, weighed down by obligations toward his family farm, and maybe because of a lack of courage to come out.  Thirty-five years later the writer returns to find his lover has died, but also that a handsome young man, his son, is insinuating himself into the writer's life under false pretences.

The more accurate translation of this film's title isn't Lie With Me but Stop With Your Lies, or Stop Making Up Stories. And everyone in this film is lying. Stephane, the author, is lying about what Thomas meant to him, and why he writes, and fearful of publishing something that truly deals with what happened.  Thomas lied his whole life about his sexuality, but also left enough clues for his son Lucas to figure it out. And Lucas lies about his obsession with finding out until he is exposed. 

The resulting film is gentle, elegant, beautiful and moving but also rather slow, plodding and obvious.  It never really captured my heart. It felt rather safe and anaemic and gentle.  The novel upon which it is based is apparently a best-seller so I may try that instead.

LIE WITH ME played BFI Flare 2023 and is currently on release in the UK. It has a running time of 93 minutes.

JOY RIDE***

Adele Lim - screenwriter on CRAZY RICH ASIANS and  RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON - returns to our screens with a raunchy comedy that reads like an Asian remake of BRIDESMAIDS. Four Asian-Americans go on a holiday to China, have a bunch of sex, take a bunch of drugs, and wrestle with their identities. The comedy is crude, the plotting very much tab A into slot B, complete with third act falling out and fourth act resolution. There is nothing surprising here but it was quite funny, if in a deeply, deeply crude way.

The central protagonist is Emily in Paris' Ashley Park playing model minority adopted daughter Audrey. She is sent on a business trip to China to land a new client largely because of her ethnicity. The joke is that she is culturally white, has never dated an Asian, and evinces no interest in finding her Chinese birth mother.  That's where her culturally-assertive, aspiring-artist best-friend Lolo (Sherry Cola) comes in. The third wheel on the holiday is Sabrina Wu's Deadeye - a genderqueer "weird" friend who comes closer than any other character to showing emotional vulnerability as a loner who finds community in K-Pop. And when they get to China they hook up with Ashley's college roommate Kat, played by EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE's Stephanie Hsu. She's now a Chinese soap-star, hiding her sex-positive past from her hunky Christian boyfriend.

There's lots of good stuff in this film about the pressures of being a model minority, and the experience of being both not quite American and yet also not quite Chinese - at home in neither and longing for acceptance in both.  We also get a really nuanced take on racism.  Sure, Audrey's boss sent her to China because of her race, which is racist, but then again, what's up with Audrey not dating Asians, and the girls feeling safer in a train carriage with an American woman?

I just felt the social commentary was undercut by the deeply predictable plotting and crude humour. Your mileage on that may vary.

JOYRIDE has a running time of 95 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK. JOY RIDE played SXSW 2023 and was released in the USA last month. It was released in the UK this week. 

WINTER BOY aka LE LYCEEN****

 

Theatre and cinema writer-director Christophe Honore (MA MERE) returns to our screens with a deeply personal, heartfelt and affecting retelling of the loss of his father and the impact this had on him as a young gay man.

The film opens in contemporary rural France with high-school student Lucas speaking not quite to camera as an unreliable narrator of his own story. We later find this is part of a therapy session. He describes his final trip to boarding school with his father, played courageously by Honore himself, who we come to realise probably committed suicide by driving his car into oncoming traffic.  Very quickly, the father is dead, and we see the rest of the film unfold in grief and trauma.

At the start of the film, Lucas is an out gay schoolboy with an active sex life. But when his father dies he decides to close off all feelings and live for physicality and the moment. He goes to Paris with his elder brother Quentin and develops a crush on Quentin's room-mate Lilio. He also flirts with religion, indulges in a random hook-up for the first time (nicely inter-cut!) and flirts with sex work in a kind of twisted act of protection for Lilio.

Clearly he is acting out, and struggling to come to terms with grief and his own sexual power as a near-adult. It's a lot and when the waves finally break the ramifications are severe and sensitively handled. 

There's so much to love in this film. First and foremost, newcomer Paul Kircher's magnetic central performance as Lucas but also Erwan Kapoa Fale's heartbreakingly sensitive turn as Lilio. I love that Honore depicts gay sex beautifully and openly, and also that he depicts the love-hate of siblings so authentically. Vincent Lacoste is fantastic as big brother Quentin. I really felt like I knew this trio and felt invested in their lives. 

But there are things I didn't like in the movie too. I didn't like that the opening therapy scene carried on into voiceover over the immediate reaction to the death. I found it mannered and distracting rather than elucidating. I think Honore means it to be mannered: he's making a point about a disjointed, fragmentary and contradictory narrator. Fine. I just could've done without it.  I also didn't like what felt like a forced focus on the mother (Juliette Binoche) late in the film. It felt as though Honore had to give her one big scene to get her to do the film.

That said, this remains one of the most beautifully told and affecting movies I've seen in a while, and well worth seeking out. I can't wait to see what Paul Kircher does next. 

LE LYCEEN has a running time of 122 minutes. It played Toronto, San Sebastian and London 2022 and BFI Flare 2023.

BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM

In a world where large swathes of educated people wilfully believe that vaccinations cause autism; and that the Clintons and Bidens are part of an elite paedo ring; and that Covid is a hoax; I am was was really wary of watching a new BORAT film.  Isn't real life already filled with toxic racism, homophobia and misogyny?  How do you satirise bigotry when the entire political discourse of America in 2020 feels like it's gone through the Looking Glass?  But I am so happy that I watched this film, because it's really fucking funny, and really fucking horrifying, and both are important things to experience and acknowledge right now. Because whether or not the White Supremacist in the White House is evicted next January, the attitudes he exposed, the grievances and bigotry he unleashed, the lies he peddled will remain in the public discourse.  We need Borat to help us channel our anger into laughter, but we need to feel angry nonetheless.

Of course, if the world has changed for us, it's also changed for Sacha Baron Cohen. Borat is so recognisable he has a knock off fancy dress costume as seen in this sequel.  So Cohen couldn't actually use the Borat character to lure his bigoted marks into a false sense of security and expose their hatred.  Rather, he has to spend most of the film as Borat dressing up as someone else. And the real heavy lifting is done by the previously unknown but apparently comic genius Maria Bakalova, playing Borat's daughter Tutar. It is Bakalova that exposes the misogyny and sexual perversion at the heart of public life, not least in the coup de theatre that is the final scene where she plays a OAN-style news reporter in mini-dress and blonde wig, buttering up a lascivious Rudy Giuliani, who is all too ready to have a drink with her in a bedroom, let her take off his mike, lie back on the bed and apparently start to masturbate. What an absolute sleazebag. 

Which isn't to say that Baron Cohen/Borat doesn't have some phenomenal scenes himself.  In this sequel, we see Boart released from a long prison stint for embarrassing Kazakhstan's dictator, and sent to America to offer Trump a gift to make sure that he's seen as a friend of Trump in the same way that Bolsanaro and Putin are.  But Borat's daughter Tutar has contrived to be shipped to America instead, so that Borat has to offer HER as a gift. Cue some really queasy discourse about the pornification of young girls, and the appropriate role of women in modern life.  The most awful scenes are probably a tie between an anti-abortion pastor ignoring a case of incest and rape to focus on preventing abortion, and Borat in disguise singing a song to the delight of his bigoted audience as they chant along that their enemies should be given the Wuhan Flu while raising Nazi salutes.

Basically this is a film that makes you sick, but also makes you laugh in the way that maybe only Sacha Baron Cohen can. It's absolutely the film for this moment.

BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM has a running time of 95 minutes and is rated R. It is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

PREMATURE - BFI London Film Festival 2019

Ayanna (Zora Howard) is a naive bookish teenager bound for liberal arts college in the Fall.  But before that, her summer is upended by a chance encounter with Isaiah (Joshua Boone) that turns into a full-blown summer love-affair that - interestingly - she instigates.  He's older than her, and she loves his passion for music and ideas. She feels confident enough to open sexually and intellectually, sharing that she writes poetry.  It's intense and overwhelming, and ripe for a reality check when Isaiah's white ex-girlfriend shows up, or every time he gets into an argument with her friends over politics. The way in which both parties deal with the rift speaks to Ayanna's relative and understandable immaturity.  There's a third act twist that's beautifully and responsibly handled, and navigated, as the entire film, with real authenticity and nuance. And as we leave the couple at the end of the summer, there's a lovely ambiguity as to what will happen next.

I really was interested in the relationship, thanks mostly to Zora Howard's beautiful acting and writing. It also helps knowing she was pivotal in crafting the film alongside debut director Rashaad Ernesto Green, so that the explicit sex scenes don't come off as exploitative. But the really beautiful thing in this film is the backdrop to the relationship - our window into contemporary Harlem, in sunkissed 16mm - the way in which young people debate politics, or simply just hang out in launderettes, and the beautiful support system that young black women and their mothers have to provide for each other. 

PREMATURE has a running time of 86 minutes. It played Sundance and London 2019 and does not yet have a commercial release date.

BEACH RATS

BEACH RATS is a beautifully observed brave film about a teenage boy struggling to come to terms with his homosexuality.  It's written and directed by award-winning sophomore director Eliza Hittman and benefits from delicately beautiful, 16mm, nostalgia-tinted photography from celebrated French cinematographer Helene Louvert (PINA!) The film stars British actor Harris Dickinson as a 19 year old high school graduate called Frankie, without job, car or aim in life.  His father is dying, his mum (Kate Hodge) is an exhausted caregiver, merely observing his comings and goings, and the only real emotional reaction we get from all that is Frankie looking bemused and distant and filching his dad's meds.  What he does have is a bunch of jock friends with whom he hangs out at the beach in Brooklyn, getting high, and up to no good. Against this typically "bro" hetero backdrop, boasting about conquests, Frankie attempts a tentative relationship with Simone (Madeline Weinstein), but she soon realises that he's not into her, and maybe gets the reason why. It's testament to the nuanced and subtle performances from both actors that we never truly know how far she gets it.  Simultaneously, Frankie is exploring the world of gay chatrooms, and moves from online flirting to midnight hook ups at the beach. I love the way that the director handles these without awkwardness or squeamishness, and never objectifies Frankie.  It's rare to see such an honest depiction of casual sex in any film, let alone showing homosexuality. Kudos to all involved but especially Harris Dickinson who gives a truly astounding break-out performance.

BEACH RATS played Sundance 2017 where won Best Director. It also played the BFI London Film Festival. It was released earlier this year in the USA. It was released in the UK and Ireland last Friday in cinemas and on streaming services. It will be released in Germany on January 25th 2018. The film has a running time of 96 minutes and is rated 15 for strong sex, nudity, drug misuse and language. 

THE INCREDIBLE JESSICA JAMES

THE INCREDIBLE JESSICA JAMES is a wonderfully funny, socially aware comedy starring The Daily Show's Jessica Williams as a smart, funny playwright struggling to find professional success and love in contemporary New York. Written and directed by Jim Strouse (GRACE IS GONE), the movie has wit, courage and infectious optimism.  

Williams plays Jones as a confident, opinionated but never obnoxious young woman of talent and flair.  As the movie opens she's teaching kids theatre and helping them work out the issues in their lives while papering her wall with rejection letters for a play that she's writing.  She's also trying to get over her ex boyfriend (LaKeith Stanfield) while starting to date Chris O'Dowd's loveable but slightly banal app developer.  By the end of the film she's found fulfilment on both fronts, even though the ending places female friendship ahead of relationship success.

The bare bones of the plot sound quite simplistic - and indeed the stuff of many romantic comedies. And poor Chris Dowd effectively plays the loveable schlub that he always plays. But as with LANDLINE, the focus here is on the female friendships and in exploring familiar movie plotlines with greater authenticity, audacity and sexual honesty.  In all that, it's Jessica Williams who carries the day.  The result is a film that is hugely funny and heart-warming but that isn't a memorable classic. 

THE INCREDIBLE JESSICA JAMES has a running time of 85 minutes and is not yet rated.  It played Sundance and the San Francisco film festivals and does not yet have a release date. 

THE HANDMAIDEN - BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Day Four

As a huge fan of Chan-Wook Park's work and a huge fan of Sarah Water's novel Fingersmith, I had high hopes for Park's South Korean adaptation of this ingenious erotic thriller, and I was not disappointed.  Park's transposition of the story from Victorian London to 1930s occupied Korea works brilliantly well, while remaining faithful to the construction and emotional arc of the original text. This is a personal and creative but respectful adaptation at its finest.  Park's embellishments only serve to further enhance the thematic concerns of the original, and help create a sensory experience of rare  delight.

The novel and film begin with a con.  The suave Fujiwara poses as a Count to woo the naive heiress Hideko, sending in his ally Sook-hee to pose as her maid and help win Hideko over. The plan is for Fujiwara to woo Hideko, elope with her, take her fortune and then lock her up in an asylum.  But the plans become complicated when the maid, Sook-hee, develops feelings for her mistress - feelings that are apparently reciprocated.  But just how innocent are all the parties involved?  What exactly has Hideko's tyrannical uncle been training her to read in his heavily guarded library.  And just how will Fujiwara and Sook-hee go to gain a fortune?  To say more of the plot would be to ruin one of the most finely and elegantly constructed novels I've read.  Suffice to say that fans of its intrigue won't be disappointed, and that even if you know the big reveals, you'll still be on the edge of your seat.  

STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON

STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON is a well-acted, well-directed but highly selective biopic that takes many of us down a path of music nostalgia and puts west coast gangsta rap back in its context of the Rodney King riots and law enforcement outrage.  Produced by Ice Cube and Dr Dre, the movie ungenerously foregrounds their contributions to the iconic rap group NWA at the expense of Arabian Prince and MC Ren.  Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell) is portrayed as a kind of musical genius but one soon brought under the sway of evil white businessman Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti) who has understandably sued the film's producers for his unflattering portrayal as a scheming dishonest money man eager to cut Ice Cube out of the action. As for Cube, he's played by the rappers own son O'Shea Jackson Jr who as well as looking the part brings so much energy and conviction to the part he steals the movie.  In a sense, this becomes his movie, as he realises he's being stiffed out of royalties, leaves the group, records his own diss record and achieves success.  Meanwhile, Dr Dre (Corey Hawkins) almost blends into the background in a role so manicured as to become bland. He becomes the dutiful son and the voice of conscience trying to get Eazy-E to see what Heller's doing.  It's okay for Apple to say Dre's sorry for his abuse of women during this period but it's also profoundly dishonest not to show it. Still, the basic underlying misogyny can't be totally airbrushed out of the film. Women exist as groupies, light-skinned and pretty if in the foreground.   When the band's about to reconcile, Eazy-E tragically dies of HIV, and the movie goes all syrupy. But there are no deathbed tears for the women he infected. 

TRAINWRECK

TRAINWRECK is just like every other Judd Apatow comedy. There's a character who's essentially a loveable gorgeous person but because of various issues has an infantile attachment to booze, weed and the sofa, so much so that said character almost loses the love of their life. But after a final act come to Jesus moment, wises up, realises that it's just fine to admit you want a conventional married life with kids and a mortgage and goes ahead and gets those things.  Because make no mistake, despite the frank sexual content, Judd Apatow comedies are very socially conservative, as well as being very formulaic and occasionally very funny.  The only difference in the case of TRAINWRECK is that the immature character is a woman - as written and played by Amy Schumer. She's the one who's getting drunk and having one night stands, and feels weird when her boyfriend says he loves her for the first time. And the guys in the movie - including a brilliantly cast LeBron James - are the ones who aren't afraid to talk about their feelings and are generous in bed and want to get married.  That the movie is formulaic doesn't matter because it's still brilliantly written and acted. It's laugh-out-loud funny, it's not afraid to take its lead character to some dark places, and there's real chemistry between the romantic leads.  

THE CLUB - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Three

I have to say that THE CLUB is about the bleakest most depressing film I've seen in quite some time, an impression deliberately instilled by the superb Chilean director Pablo Larraín (NO!) who shot the whole thing in a grainy washed out bleak grey-blue, and forces us to watch it as if through a smeared lens.  We're stuck in a small Chilean town where the sun never shines and nothing seemingly ever happens until a priest turns up with a new inhabitant for a secret hideaway house for defrocked priests.  Soon a disturbed young man shows up and casts the most lurid of accusations against the new arrival, and when the four inhabitants, evidently well-prepared for such accusations, hand him a gun he shoots himself in the head. This in turn brings another investigating priest to the house, and sets in train the events of the film.

MAGIC MIKE XXL

MAGIC MIKE XXL is a shameless cash-in: a movie ordained inevitable by the popularity of the original rather than by any narrative necessity.  Three years after Magic Mike quits stripping to set up house with The Kid's sister, his old stripper friends give him a prank call and invite him to a stripper convention for a kind of all-or-nothing retirement stripathon.  It's all a little shaky and fuzzy as motives go. To be sure, Mike's post-stripping life hasn't been a success: his business is struggling and his girl has left him.  But to go by the depiction of stripping shown in this film, why on earth would he ever have left? MAGIC MIKE XXL depicts a utopian world where strippers are ARTISTS and where by catering to women's whims they empower these "queens" and bring them a kind of sexual healing.  Accordingly, when Mike meets Zoe - an ex-stripper, maybe addict, down on her luck - he knows deep in his heart and groin that all she really needs is a cutting edge lap dance to bring her mojo back.  Better living through thongs. And so the movie unfolds as a kind of hippie dippie drug- and sex-fuelled road-trip to the convention where the kindness of strangers gets our motley crew of strippers through the night. I must admit that Gregory Jacobs and Channing Tatum's script and the men's acting does deliver an authentic feeling of male camaraderie.  But Jada Pinkett Smith is no match for the absent Matthew McConaughey as the MC, and there's no real depth to anything in the film - nothing to keep us going. And as for the routines and Troy from Community's rapping topless, awkward rather than sexy, I would say. Worst of all is the A-team style training montage where the boys put their new routines, costumes and sets together for the competition finale.  Let's hope this is the end of this particular franchise.

MAGIC MIKE XXL has a running time of 115 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is global release.

BFI FLARE OPENING NIGHT GALA - I AM MICHAEL

I AM MICHAEL is a provocative screening choice for a festival that celebrates the LGBT community. This is because it doesn't tell a coming out story, but a going in story, based on the true-life case of Michael Glatze.  Michael (James Franco) was a seemingly happy gay rights activist and journalist living in San Francisco with his partner Bennett (Zachary Quinto).  But something about the death of his mother, his increasing panic attacks, and belief that opening himself up to religion had helped calm him, led him to renounce his homosexuality in order to be reunited with his mother in the afterlife.  He trained as a preacher, married a woman he met at bible camp (Emma Roberts) and continues in his new identity to this day.

INDIA'S DAUGHTER (TV doc)

You can listen to a podcast review of this documentary below or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

In December 2012 a young female medical student was brutally gang raped and left for dead. She has been walking home from the cinema at 8pm in Delhi, India, and took a ride on what she thought was a bus service.  The case provoked mass protests from women who felt it symbolised their lack of security and equality in modern India.  It went to the heart of how women are perceived.  Do men have the right to punish them for so-called transgressions of traditional values?  Is it fair that a rape victim is made to feel shame and culpability for the act rather than the man?

ASK ME ANYTHING

ASK ME ANYTHING is a coming of age drama starring Britt Robertson (TOMORROWLAND) as Katie, an 18 year old girl who takes a year out after school, works as a nanny and starts a ruthlessly honest anonymous blog about her life.  At first she seems like your average mixed-up teen, smoking and drinking too much and making bad decisions about her sex life. But as we progress we realise that Katie has real emotional issues to do with her childhood and her family. These play out in her relationships with five men:  her alcoholic father (Robert Patrick); an old bookshop owner she worked for until her stepdad found out he was a sex offender (Martin Sheen); the married man she nannies for (Christian Slater), her older guys she's sleeping with (Justin Long), the college boyfriend she's also sleeping with, oh and yes, a sixth - the clinically depressed  friend she serially lets down.  To say that her relationships with men are highly sexualised is an understatement but what's interesting about writer-director Allison Burnett's film is that while other people try to put labels onto her - she's a whore, or in need of therapy - the film portrays a more nuanced picture.  I really liked Britt Robertson and found that even though her character often does unlikeable things, we are always sympathetic toward her - and that's a hard trick to pull off. Burnett also manages to make a film about a girl who is highly sexualised and vulnerable without making the film feel exploitative or voyeuristic. And unlike many films, the final twist doesn't feel cheap and unearned, but necessary and intelligent and genuinely thought-provoking. I can't wait to read the book, Undiscovered Gyrl, upon which this was based. 

ASK ME ANYTHING has a running time of 100 minutes and is a straight to video release.