TWINLESS****

TWINLESS is a slippery, dark, brilliantly constructed dramedy about co-dependence and the lies we choose to believe. It stars Dylan O'Brien (MAZE RUNNER) in a superb performance as a twin grieving the death of his brother in a car accident.  He finds comfort in the friendship of Dennis (writer-director-actor James Sweeney) who he meets at a support group for newly winless grieving siblings.  Dennis also sets Roman up with his co-worker Marcia (Aisling Franciosi).  The problem is that Dennis is a deeply lonely, sad, and unstable young man, who becomes unnaturally obsessed with Roman, and is seeking far more than mere friendship.

The resulting film is genuinely funny but also really dark, and its construction really keeps you guessing as to where Sweeney is going to take us.  It would pair well with Alex Russell's LURKER as it covers some of the same subject matter. I won't say more for fear of spoiling it. Suffice to say that this is a film of astonishing assuredness and dexterity for a new director. I also feel that the central double-performance of O'Brien deserves a lot of praise.

TWINLESS is rated R and has a running time of 100 minutes. It played Sundance 2025 where TWINLESS won the Audience Award - Dramatic. It  also played London 2025.  It was released in the USA last September. It will be released in the UK on February 6th.

SPLITSVILLE****

Writer-director-actor Michael Angelo Corvino has created an absolute banger of a romantic-comedy with SPLITSVILLE.  It's an absurd set-up and yet within that gets to some real deep truths about thirty-something marriages and contains one of the funniest punch-ups on screen. You can really tell that Corvinho and his co-writer and co-lead actor Kyle Marvin are best friends in real life.

The movie is about the relationships between and within two couples. The first couple comprises Carey (Marvin) and Ashley (Adria Arjona).  Carey thinks they are happily married but Ashley actually wants a divorce because she doesn't feel physically fulfilled.  She drops this bomb on Carey when they're on their way to see good friends Paul (Corvino) and Julia (Dakota Johnson). We think Paul and Julia are happily married, and they even have a young son, but we discover that they are in an open marriage.  Thus inspired, Carey and Ashley decide to start seeing other people, leading to a tour de force scene in which we see the camera move between the various partners that Ashley is hooking up with.  Apparently this was shot in one take which is truly impressive.

What we learn from this scenario pushed to an extreme is that there are real feelings involved when you cheat or even just hook up after a break-up.  These people are all flawed but they're fundamentally good and all care for each other. There's a lot here about insecurity and ageing and feeling that you have to be more for your partner. More hopefully, there's also something rather lovely in the community that comes together of the people Ashley is seeing.

It struck me watching SPLITSVILLE that despite the craziness, it all feels way more credible and relatable than THE MATERIALISTS, in which Dakota Johnson also stars. It's also far far funnier.  Adria Arjona proves that her hilarious performance in HIT MAN was no accident. Johnson is allowed to be real. And the two male leads are just absolutely superb. This truly is one of the funniest films I've seen in a while.

SPLITSVILLE is rated R and has a running time of 104 minutes. It played Cannes 2025 and opened in the USA last summer. It will open in the UK on February 20th.

A LITTLE PRAYER****

A LITTLE PRAYER is a rare film of quiet humanity, compassion and nuance. It's a family drama in which believable real people face real challenges with no easy answers.  It's unafraid to confront dark material and yet left me feeling deeply hopeful. 

Writer-director Angus Maclachlan (JUNEBUG) situates us in contemporary North Carolina.  David Strathairn (GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK) and Celia Weston play Bill and Venida - two quietly decent straightforward Boomers and small business owners. They don't seek out confrontation but neither are they blind to what's going on around them.  The smallest pieces of dialogue hint at an emotional hinterland and past marital struggles.  

Bill and Venida not only share a business with their feckless son David (Will Pullen) but also live with David and his wife Tammy (Jane Levy).  The film is really centred around David's fondness for his daughter-in-law and disapproval of his son's affair with their co-worker Narcedalia (Dascha Polanca).  We also get the family rhythms disrupted by the arrival of Bill and Venida's self-absorbed and chaotic daughter Patti (PITCH PERFECT's Anna Camp) and her young daughter Hadley.  But even as Patti might be a caricature of a distracted and careless mother, we realise that she may also be dealing with a dark home situation scare by opioid abuse.

The movie is really about parenthood.  Bill has an amazing conversation with Narcedalia where he disabuses her of her expectation that parents can control their kids and that a parent-child relationship provides a more secure kind of love than that between romantic partners. He seems bewildered and exasperated by his own children and incredibly tender toward Tammy.  And Tammy, while conflicted about her own infertility and ability to bring a child into such a difficult relationship, seems like more of a mother to Patti's young daughter than Patti is. 

I love how patient and nonjudgmental this film is.  The character of David might easily have been a villain, but even he is granted a scene of humanity.  Narcedalia could have been seen as a villain too but her story is heartbreakingly credible and admirable.  But really this film belongs to Jane Levy and David Strathairn, and a central pivotal scene really shows Levy's talent. I am not surprised that she has been nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. It's one of the most affecting performances I have seen this awards cycle. 

A LITTLE PRAYER is rated R and has a running time of 91 minutes. It played Sundance 2023 and then went into distribution hell. It was finally released in the USA last fall and is available to stream. It does not have a UK distributor. (I watched it on a FISA streamer).

GOODBYE JUNE**

Kate Winslet has been evolving behind the camera, producing the biopic LEE and now making her directorial debut with this new mawkish family Christmas movie GOODBYE JUNE.  Helen Mirren plays the titular protagonist, dying of cancer in her most unglamorous role to date.  Her four children, husband and assorted grandkids gather around and try and sort through their various emotional issues before giving her a twee Christmas nativity play send-off. Winslet plays the financially successful, stoic elder sister.  The wonderful Andrea Riseborough plays her resentful younger sister.  Toni Colette plays a hippie dippie third sister who returns from Germany and apparently is desperate to be pregnant. And a dishevelled Johnny Flynn plays the sensitive son Connor.  Timothy Spall plays the rather loveable but apparently emotionally disengaged dad who deals with his forthcoming grief by, I kid you not, singing karaoke.  It's testament to Winslet's pull that she could assemble such a sterling cast, and as a result, this film could never be a total failure. But it's a shame that her son Joe Anders' script resorts to cheap devices to try and wring tears from our eyes. I cringed when Spall's dad began his karaoke act and the final nativity scene made me gag.  Your mileage may vary.

GOODBYE JUNE is rated R and has a running time of 114 minutes. It was released on Netflix earlier this month.

PETER HUJAR'S DAY**

PETER HUJAR'S DAY is an odd fish of a film that offers a fascinating glimpse into what life must have been like at the heart of the bohemian, queer arts scene in late 70s New York, before woefully outstaying its welcome. 

It stars Ben Whishaw as the titular real-life queer activist and portrait photographer Peter Hujar.  We spend the entire hour and a quarter in his stunning New York apartment (imagine enjoying THAT on a magazine salary now!) as he relates what happened to him the day before to his friend and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall).  To be fair, this minute detail contains a lot of delicious gossip about iconic writers - not least Fran Lebowitz, Susan Sontag and Allen Ginsberg.  But the minute detail and almost deadpan tone bely the emotion of what Peter is actually experiencing.  Ginsberg, for example, is wildly, offensively, inappropriate. But we don't really see or feel what Hujar's response is to this.  Maybe that's because the film is based on a transcript of the real-life version of this interview that was recently uncovered in the Morgan Library.  It's not so much a scripted drama as a recreation of an admittedly and deliberately mundane retelling of the day in the life of a jobbing photographer. The problem is we never see or feel the importance of his art. 

That said, there is a tug back into emotional response at the end of the film. It's scored with the Mozart Requiem and cuts to white. Those of us who know anything about Hujar realise that this is the heyday of that beautiful moment of queer expression and activism in New York. The AIDS crisis was around the corner of the 1980s and would claim Hujar as a victim, iconically photographed on his deathbed.  None of that is in THIS film, to be clear. But for those of use who know, it adds some poignancy to Whishaw's final scenes.

PETER HUJAR'S DAY played Sundance, Berlin and London 2025. It has a running time of 76 minutes. It was released in the USA in November and will be released in the UK on Jan 2nd.

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.