Tag Archives: Film review

Arts, Drama, Films

Film Review (Oscar nominee): Capernaum

REVIEW: 15 cert, 126 minutes

Zain

The plucky young boy Zain (Zain Al Rafeea) in Capernaum: an endless struggle to get by.

EVERY so often a film comes along which is difficult to comprehend and one in which is hard to figure out and wrap your head around. Not the ones you can’t believe were ever made (there’s no shortage of those) but the ones that simultaneously seem so real and so impossible that watching them is like witnessing a magic trick you’re unable ever to fathom. Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum – one of this year’s foreign-language Oscar nominees, and the Jury Prize winner at Cannes last year – is that kind of film. It is the story of a child surviving on the streets of Beirut, infused with the richness of great fiction and the heart-in-mouth power of front-line news footage.

The young survivor is Zain, played in an utterly disarming performance by Zain Al Rafeea, who, like his screenplay character, is about 12-years-old. He’s a newcomer to acting, but a Syrian refugee in real life. Zain flees his family’s dingy Beirut apartment in the wake of a decision by his parents that he sees, quite rightly, as an appalling betrayal, and is bounced around in the tumult of the Lebanese capital (the film’s title is a French term for chaos, and also a Biblical town cursed by Christ). Having lived with his poverty-stricken parents and numerous siblings, Zain was aghast when his father arranges for his sister, who he is especially close to, to be married off to a businessman. She is barely pubescent.

Bambi-eyed the boy may be, but he is no Disney innocent, and gets by on his considerable wits in a frenetic war-ravaged town. After fetching up at a decrepit theme park, he befriends an Ethiopian single mother called Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw). She is a cleaner who starts to rely on him to look after her own toddler while she is at work. He becomes, in effect, a surrogate big brother to her similarly undocumented toddler Yonas – who is played by a one-year-old in what must be, without a sliver of exaggeration, one of the greatest infant performances in cinema history. When Rahil goes missing, Zain becomes Yonas’s guardian too, and the two children must fend for themselves in the direst of circumstances.

The irony is clear: Zain is much better at parenting than his own parents. In fact, the film is framed by a courtroom sequence in which Zain sues his mother and father for bringing him into this wretched world. This brings shape to a story that sprawls by nature.

For some, Zain’s legal challenge adds a discordant note of fantasy to a film that otherwise pulsates with realism. Others are likely to love every minute of this movie, which seems largely improvised, but which is brilliantly crafted and directed.

Capernaum is Labaki’s third and most ambitious film to date. It is close in both texture and spirit to the Brazilian crime epic City of God: it teems with the same excitement and danger as Fernando Meirelles’s film. To call it Dickensian would probably be too great a compliment. Whether Capernaum has the staying power of the great social-realist films remains to be seen. But, in its unbroken gaze and visionary sweep, it does feel like a landmark.

The list of films in this year’s Foreign Language category at the Academy Awards, which also includes Roma, the Netflix film that won a Bafta and is tipped for an Oscar, is considerably classier than the list of nominees for Best Picture.

Nadine Labaki probably won’t walk away from the Oscars with a gold statuette and the movie industry’s greatest bauble, but in most other years, she surely would have done.

Verdict: Social realism with a blockbuster spirit. A classy drama.

★★★★★

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Arts, Films, Literature

Film Review: All Is True (12A)

REVIEW

AT the Global Theatre in London on June 29, 1613, a stage cannon was fired during a performance of William Shakespeare’s play All Is True, which today we know as Henry VIII.

. See also Short Essay: Shakespeare’s Plays

Such a small and theatrical flourish would come to have devastating consequences, because the cannon set fire to the Globe’s thatched roof and within an hour one of the most famous playhouses, where most of Shakespeare’s plays had been unveiled, had burned to the ground.

The career of the country’s greatest playwright ended on the same night. He never wrote another significant play and died a couple of years later.

Those last two years are the focus of Kenneth Branagh’s All Is True. Heartbroken and bereft, Shakespeare returns to his home town of Stratford, and to the uneasy embrace of his wife Anne Hathaway and their two daughters, whom he has rarely visited over the previous two decades.

All Is True is heavyweight production, particularly in terms of those doing the acting. Branagh, who has done as much as anyone alive to bring Shakespeare’s plays to the silver screen, plays the great man himself.

Under a gleaming dome of a forehead, he is, though, barely recognisable. A knobbly prosthetic nose and a jutting bearded chin which, when added to a surprising lack of assertiveness, give him the air of a man who can’t decide whether he has entered a lookalike contest as Jimmy Hill.

Less compromised by the make-up department, Judi Dench plays Anne, and Ian McKellen has a highly enjoyable cameo as Shakespeare’s erstwhile patron, the Earl of Southampton. It is strongly hinted that the Earl was also the object of Shakespeare’s ardour. Or “Bardour”, if you prefer.

The script is by Ben Elton, who has tempered the jauntiness of his Shakespearean sitcom Upstart Crow to give us a barrage of sexual scandal and a whirl of emotions – grief, resentment, envy, lust – more suited to a modern soap opera like EastEnders. Or, maybe something else entirely different.

All Is True largely unfolds as an everyday tale of country folk, for which Dench unpacks her best rural vowels. Some might rather suggest it’s a ruff version of The Archers.

 

THE scandals concern both Shakespeare’s daughters. Susanna (Lydia Wilson) is unhappily married to a holier-than-thou Puritan doctor, to whom she is appearing unfaithful.

Judith (Kathryn Wilder) marries the more rakish Tom Quiney (Jack Colgrave Hirst), who has already impregnated another local woman, Margaret Wheeler (Eleanor de Rohan).

The grief is mostly Shakespeare’s, whose return to Stratford, without the distraction of writing and staging all those plays, re-ignites the pain of losing his only son, 11-year-old Hamnet, many years earlier.

“I’ve lived so long in imaginary worlds, I’ve lost sight of what is real,” he laments. At first, he gets precious little sympathy either from the stolidly undemonstrative Anne, or from miserable Judith, who was Hamnet’s twin, and feels certain that her father would prefer her to have perished instead.

Occasionally, Shakespeare loses his temper with these unappreciative womenfolk. “Through my genius I’ve brought fame and fortune to this house,” he bellows, and 400 years or so later there’s no real arguing with that, though Anne doesn’t look too convinced. But, gradually, the family learn to live with and even love each other again, despite Elton pulling out a rather startling late twist.

Branagh’s decision to cast Dench has raised eyebrows.

Anne was eight years older, whereas the actual gap between them is 26. Nevertheless, it’s a pleasure to see our greatest Shakespearean actress playing the Bard’s wife, and, All Is True contains many pleasures, not least the cinematography by Zac Nicholson.

Nicholson pounces like another 17th-century genius, Rembrandt, on the lighting opportunities afforded by all those candles, and all those sunbeams streaming through mullioned windows.

Outside, the panorama shots are ravishing. Warwickshire is a beautiful part of the country.

Verdict: An Intriguing tale.

★★★★

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Arts, Films

Film Review: Creed II (12A)

REVIEW

Creed II is unashamedly formulaic. Fortunately for the viewer, the formula is a good one.

Veteran boxing trainers talk about the old left-right combo. Here it is in narrative form: brutality in the ring, poignancy out of it, thumped by one, hammered by the other. That is, until finally, the audience are on the ropes, likely to feel somewhat drained, wholly entertained, and perhaps also just a little bit suckered, having fallen again for the venerable Rocky one-two.

More than four decades and seven sequels have passed since the 1976 original, so it’s no surprise that the formula is as polished as it is. Some things remain unchanged; Sylvester Stallone’s voice still seems to emanate from the bottom of a mineshaft. The Great Mumbler, also credited as producer and co-writer, is on top form here, just as he was two years ago in Creed.

As before, though, the acting laurels go mostly to Michael B. Jordan. He delivers a terrific performance as the newly crowned, world heavyweight champ Adonis Creed.

In the previous film, he discovered who his late father was. None other than Apollo Creed, who back in the day fought and befriended Rocky Balboa (Stallone). That’s why Adonis – sensibly known to friends and family as Donnie – wanted Rocky in his corner as he embarked on a pro boxing career that lacked the usual springboards of deprivation and delinquency. Adonis had money and was properly educated. What did he want with sweaty pugilism?

It was unresolved daddy issues that made a fighter of him. In Creed II, the psychology of parent-child relationship looms almost as large as Dolph Lundgren, back in the series for the first time since Rocky IV (1985) as big Ivan Drago, the man who battered Apollo Creed to death in the ring.

 

DRAGO has an equally sizable son, Viktor (Florian Munteanu), whose dearest wish is to flatten Adonis. That would avenge the humiliation that the old man later suffered at the fists of Rocky, leading not only to exile from Mother Russia but also the departure of mother Ludmila, Viktor’s own parent (Brigitte Nielson, the former Mrs Sly Stallone, also last seen in Rocky IV).

Ivan and Viktor duly turn up in Rocky’s home town of Philadelphia to throw down the gauntlet. “Because of you I lost everything,” growls Ivan to Rocky. “Country. Respect. Wife.” Not to mention possessive pronouns and definite articles.

So, there are mummy issues, too, in this film. What is more, Rocky is trying to address a painful father-son estrangement of his own.

And if all that weren’t enough, Adonis’s hearing-impaired girlfriend Bianca (Tessa Thompson) also makes him a daddy in the course of Creed II, so he must balance his new parental responsibilities with his obligations to his dead father as he decides whether or not (as if you really can’t guess) to take on Viktor Drago’s challenge.

Any good boxing movie was never just about the boxing. Despite the yawning gap, at times, between the story and any kind of plausibility, Creed II really is a good boxing movie. In the real world, fighters don’t just emerge from nowhere to challenge for world titles, just as punches don’t resound with thwumpfs like baby elephants landing on a mattress.

There’s a cracking soundtrack, some of it provided by the lovely Bianca (a successful singer, despite her deafness), and the film is directed with a tremendously sure touch by Steven Caple Jnr.

At just 30, he is even younger than Jordan, his leading man, but evidently Stallone wanted someone of that generation at the tiller. The film production released in late 2018 was a gamble, but it pays off.

Verdict: Deserves success.

★★★★

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