Month: June 2023

Run Rabbit Run

29/06/23

Netflix

Run Rabbit Run is an unsettling psychodrama, set in an Australia that’s a lot darker and less sun-kissed than we usually see on screen. Woman of the moment, Sarah Snook, stars as single mother Sarah, whose orderly life disintegrates when her young daughter, Mia (Lily LaTorre), begins to exhibit some disturbing behaviours.

On the surface, Sarah seems to have it all: a good job, a nice house, a sweet kid and a civilised relationship with her ex (Damon Herriman). But underneath, she’s struggling. Her dad has just died, and her garage is full of his things, forcing her to confront a childhood trauma she’d rather forget. On Mia’s seventh birthday, a white rabbit appears from nowhere and the little girl adopts him as her pet. And then she starts to talk about things from Sarah’s past, things that she can’t possibly know…

It’s a simple enough story, but director Daina Read manages to generate real tension, despite what is obviously a low-budget, proving that you don’t need expensive gimmicks to make a scary, unnerving film. Sarah’s unravelling is slowly and meticulously examined, so that I’m holding my breath for much of the running time, genuinely fearful, wondering what is going to happen next.

I do suspect that much of the movie is on the cutting room floor. Early press releases (back when Elisabeth Moss was attached, before ‘scheduling conflicts’ meant she had to pull out) make much of the fact that Sarah is a fertility doctor, forced to confront her beliefs about life and death, but there’s not a lot of that in the version before me. True, we see Sarah wearing scrubs, and there’s one scene where she scans a pregnant woman, locating her foetus’s heartbeat, but beyond that and a solitary reference to her as ‘Doctor’, her job isn’t mentioned at all. In fact, when the rabbit bites her, she doesn’t seem to know how to treat the cut, so it’s hard to believe she’s even got a first aid certificate, let alone a medical degree. In addition – and I’m being deliberately vague here so as to avoid a spoiler – there’s quite a big event at the end that isn’t flagged up at all, so that I have to rewind to check if it really happened.

Despite these niggles, Run Rabbit Run is an enjoyably thrilling watch, and Sarah Snook and Lily LaTorre both carry it really well. Mia’s rabbit mask and the oblique Alice in Wonderland imagery are horribly spooky, and I find myself still thinking about this film when I wake up the next day.

3.8 stars

Susan Singfield

Söderberg Pavilion Café

29/06/23

Lister Square, Quartermile, Edinburgh

Söderberg is a bit of an Edinburgh institution: there are seven of the popular Swedish cafés dotted around the city, so it’s unusual to go for a walk without passing at least one. Nonetheless, we’ve never eaten there until today. The closest we’ve come was during the pandemic, in that weird post-lockdown period, when restrictions were slowly being loosened but we still weren’t allowed to sit indoors. During that time, my parents came up for a visit, and – being classed as vulnerable and thus wanting to avoid unnecessary risk – booked themselves into an Airbnb rather than staying at ours as they usually would. Their holiday flat was on the Quartermile so, every evening, we’d sit outside this Lister Square branch for a cup of tea or a glass of wine, shivering but glad to be together, glad to be out in the world again.

The gym we used to go to almost every day is directly opposite that same branch of Söderberg, but our pandemic pause turned into a three-year gap. Six weeks ago, we decided to rejoin, and so we find ourselves once again working up a daily sweat on the cross-trainers or exercise bikes, gazing out of the window at the people sitting in the sunshine, enjoying their coffee. We resolve to treat ourselves to a well-earned brunch one day.

And today seems like the right occasion. The sky is blue, the air is warm and, most importantly, I’m off work this afternoon, so we have time to dally. What’s more, we’ve worked up quite an appetite over the past hour! We request an outdoor table and, once seated, scan the short menu and choose quickly.

We both want a freshly squeezed fruit juice. Philip opts for a simple apple, while I have the fancier-sounding carrot, apple and ginger, which is pleasingly tangy. They’re both just as lovely and refreshing as you’d expect a decent glass of juice to be.

My brunch is Ägg – two eggs baked in a stone oven, served with sourdough and rocket. I add avocado, spinach and pesto, and I’m glad I do, as the boldly-flavoured walnut and basil pesto really elevates the dish. Philip has the Varm getost, an open sourdough sandwich featuring goat’s cheese, walnut, pine nuts and rocket. The goat’s cheese, he says, is delicious.

Sitting outside, lingering over a meal, feels every bit as indulgent as we imagined. In all honesty, however, we’re both a little disappointed by the meagreness of the portions. It’s not that we want anything too over-facing mid-morning, but a single, thin-cut slice of bread just feels a bit stingy. We’re not super-impressed by the mounds of undressed leaves on our plates either. An extra slice of bread and a decent salad dressing would have made this experience a lot more satisfying.

3 stars

Susan Singfield

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

28/06/23

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) was a near-perfect movie, a fast-paced action adventure that harked back to the classic serials of the 1940s. It made a huge profit off a comparatively low budget, so – inevitably – there were going to be sequels. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) may not have had the perfection of their whip-tight progenitor, but were decent enough efforts in their own right. And that’s probably where the whole enterprise should have ended. 2008’s The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was – to put it mildly – a major miscalculation, despite being helmed by the usually dependable Spielberg. For a very long time, there were vague rumours of a fifth outing which remained exactly that. Rumours.

After all, Harrison Ford was getting a bit long in the tooth, so… maybe not?

But now, directed by James Mangold, and written (mostly) by Jez Butterworth and his brother John Henry, everyone’s favourite archeologist is back in the game. When we reunite with him it’s via a flashback. It’s 1944, the Germans are rapidly losing the war and, thanks to the wonders of de-aging software, Indy looks like his former self. He’s working alongside his old pal Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) and the two of them are attempting to rescue an ancient antiquity, the Lance of Longinus, from a Nazi train packed with loot. Indy has just been taken prisoner, but needless to say, he’s soon free and wandering the length of the train, looking for the artefact. Also present is Dr Voller (the always excellent Mads Mikkelson), who has already decided the lance is a fake but has discovered instead, on the same train, the titular device (or at least half of it), built by Archimedes and capable of… well, that would be telling. A lengthy action set-piece ensues and it’s pretty good, serving as a promising opener.

But then we move to 1969. Mankind has just landed on the moon and Dr Jones is now earning a crust as a University lecturer, though his students seem much more interested in listening to rock music and smoking dope. Retirement beckons and it’s made very clear that Indy has lost his mojo. Then along comes his Goddaughter, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who is also very interested in the Dial of Destiny, but mostly because she plans to sell it to the highest bidder. To give her fair credit, Waller-Bridge gives the franchise a much-needed update, and she’s good on the smart-arse wisecracks, but I’m not sure I quite buy her as an adrenalin-powered action hero. Then again, if I can accept an eighty-year-old male in the role, maybe anything is possible.

The bad guys soon come a-calling and, what do you know, they’re being led by Dr Voller, who has his own unthinkable plans for Archimedes’ invention and won’t hesitate to carry them out. Indy and Helena team up and a game of cat and mouse ensues with some protracted chases. A lengthy sequence featuring Ford on horseback (or at least, his stunt double) is perhaps the film’s standout, but the problem here is that there are just too many of these pursuits. A really complicated one featuring our heroes in a tuk tuk definitely overstays its welcome.

There are frequent nods to those earlier films – some of which work, others which feel meh – and there’s a surprisingly touching scene when Indy tells Helena about what happened to his son and why he and Marion Crane (Karen Allen) are no longer an item. John Rhys-Davies shows up once again as Sallah, but is given very little to do here and, naturally, Helena has a keen young assistant in the shape of Teddy (Ethan Isadore), who seems able to turn his hand to most things, including at one point piloting a plane. As you do.

With a running time over two-and-a-half hours, it’s to Dial of Destiny’s credit that it never really runs out of steam and, if the final conceit is hard to swallow, well, this is a series that’s known for it’s supernatural reveals. (Just don’t overthink the space-time continuum stuff because, on reflection, much of it really doesn’t add up.) I leave feeling that I’ve been suitably entertained but, before I’ve even made the short walk home, I’ve thought of at least half a dozen questions that remain maddeningly unanswered.

So, this is far from the disaster I anticipated but, when held up against that brilliant opening shot of Raiders, it’s frankly not in the same league. I can’t help feeling that, now it’s out in the world, this particular treasure chest should be triple-locked and left in a quiet place to gather dust.

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Asteroid City

25/06/23

Cineworld, Edinburgh

If you were ever looking for the film director equivalent of Marmite, Wes Anderson might just be your best bet. His detractors delight in pointing out that he always makes the same film, but that’s a ridiculous over-simplification. While I’d be the first to admit that his films do have an unmistakable look – that you can see one frame, taken at random from any one of his many features, and know instantly that it’s his work – we rarely make that complaint about artists who work with paint and canvas.

Asteroid City has all of the man’s familiar hallmarks: those sumptuous, vividly-coloured landscapes dotted with unlikely looking ramshackle buildings; a massive roster of A listers, all of them prepared to swallow their pride in return for delivering just a line or two of quirky dialogue; and that weird detachment from reality, those bizarre situations seemingly created to point up the artificiality of the whole undertaking. For me, these are the elements that confirm Anderson as a unique and brilliant filmmaker. But then, I’ve been a fan ever since Rushmore in 1998.

The film opens in stark black and white with an earnest narrator (played by Bryan Cranston) talking about the creation of a new play by hotshot writer, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), and the play’s tortuous path to production – and then we cut to the full-colour, wide-screen film adaptation of the same story. War photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) arrives at the titular desert town with his son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan), who is one of five gifted children invited to attend a ceremony where one of them will be presented with a prize for their latest invention.

Woodrow and his three little sisters have some devastating news to deal with first, but their father seems far more interested in the presence of screen actor, Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), who has her own gifted daughter, Dinah (Grace Edwards), in tow. It’s not long before Dinah and Woodrow begin to develop an interest in each other…

But this is about as far as any rational plot outline can take us. From this point, madness ensues in the form of a group of singing cowboys, the aforementioned weird childhood inventions and a WTF alien visitation. And, as the tale enfolds, we are treated to regular visits back to the monochrome world of the original theatrical version, where we see the actors in the film actually being the actors and learning to handle their roles, whilst commenting on the artificiality of the whole experience. Meta? Well yes, but clearly that’s the point.

If this sounds hard to get your head around, don’t despair, because the sparky script by Anderson and Roman Coppola keeps the pot bubbling happily away as the story unfolds. I find myself laughing at the wonderful absurdity of some of the situations – and is the director making a comment on cinema’s general inability to handle theatrical material with any sense of conviction?

It’s heartening to see that a sizeable audience has come out for this on a rainy Sunday afternoon and also to read that Asteroid City has enjoyed a bigger opening weekend than the latest Transformers movie. Perhaps a lot more people out there are acquiring a taste for Marmite.

4.6 stars

Philip Caveney

Titanic the Musical

21/06/23

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

The tragic story of The Titanic has exerted a powerful hold on the public imagination ever since its doomed maiden voyage in 1912. It seems horribly ironic that, as we take our seats in The Festival Theatre, the vessel (or at least an ill-fated attempt to visit what remains of it) is once again dominating the news channels. Still, whatever you think about the subject, this stately musical by Maury Weston and Peter Stone offers an assured account of the events that led to one of the biggest disasters in maritime history.

In the first half, we’re introduced to the players as the ship prepares for departure. There’s Captain Edward Smith (Graham Bickley), looking forward to what he believes (rightly as it turns out) will be his final voyage. There’s the ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews (Ian McClarnon), proud of his own ingenuity and convinced that the ship he has built is ‘unsinkable.’ And there’s J. Bruce Ismay (Martin Allanson), the managing director of the White Star Line, presented here as the villain of the piece, a man whose rampant hubris is held largely responsible for the disaster. The truth is rather more complicated than that, but every story needs a villain, I suppose.

Around this triumvirate flock the passengers: the privileged toffs in first class, the hopeful emigrants looking forward to a brand new start in second, and the poor and the dispossessed down in third. There’s also the many members of staff who wait on more than two thousand passengers. The twenty-five members of the cast certainly have their work cut out to represent so many doomed travellers and, it has to be said, with umpteen speedy costume changes, they do a pretty good job of it.

Yeston’s sombre score avoids the cheesy power ballads so often associated with this kind of production, opting instead for a kind of operetta approach. In the jollier moments (and yes, there are a few in the first half), there’s even a hint of Gilbert and Sullivan in the delivery, as members of the cast waltz merrily across the deck.

But of course, the second half can’t be anything but mournful as the ship, having kept its rendezvous with that iceberg, begins (spoiler alert!) to sink beneath the waves.

It’s here, to be honest, that the production struggles to recreate the ensuing chaos. David Woodhead’s set design is impressive but stolid, and I find myself longing for some state-of-the-art special effects to contribute more Sturm und Drang to the closing moments. What’s more, it’s impossible to be surprised when the story I’m watching is so ingrained into my memory that I find myself picking up on its occasional deviations from the truth.

Still, there are some strong moments here. I particularly enjoy the duet between Frederick Barrett (Adam Filipe), sending a marriage proposal to his sweetheart back in England, and Harold Bride (Alistair Hill), the Marconi radio operator who enables him to do so. And anybody who can keep a dry eye through the final duet of elderly couple, Isador Straus (David Delve) and his wife, Ida (Valda Aviks), as they decide to face their fate together, is certainly made of sterner stuff than me.

The production closes with a tribute to the 1,500 people who lost their lives on that fateful night – and, after the enthusiastic applause has died away, Bickley steps forward to deliver the cast’s heartfelt hope that the passengers aboard the missing Titan submersible might be found safe and well.

That of course – like the Titanic itself – will soon become a matter of historical record.

4 stars

Philip Caveney

Timberyard

18/06/23

Lady Lawson Street, Edinburgh

We’ve lived in Edinburgh for seven years now and we’ve always been aware of this restaurant, just around the corner from where we live, but – for one reason or another – we’ve never eaten here. But our tradition of indulging in fine dining to celebrate Susan’s birthday, plus the fact that Timberyard has recently been awarded a Michelin star, suggest that now is a good time to give it a whirl.

So here we finally are, settling down at a table in the spacious, warehouse-like interior, while outside the long run of hot weather is about to to be interrupted by heavy rain. But in this glorious candle-lit interior, the rain comes and goes without us even noticing.

Firstly, a word about water. Most restaurants try to sell you bottles of the stuff (a practice I’ve long disapproved of for environmental reasons) but at Timberyard, our choice of still or fizzy water comes as standard and our glasses are regularly topped up by the attentive staff – an idea I’m in favour of seeing elsewhere.

Since we’re currently on the wagon, we both decide to try one of their homemade soft drinks. I sample the bramble & lemon seltzer, which is zingy and refreshing, while Susan opts for jam on toast, a drink that somehow – don’t ask me how – really does invoke those flavours. I mean, I understand how they might accomplish the ‘jam’ bit, but how do you make a soft drink taste of toast?

We’ve chosen the eight-course tasting menu, which sounds prodigious, but is carefully presented in perfectly-sized offerings to ensure that the diner is never overwhelmed. That said, we decide to skip the option of adding a cheese course. Even we have limits!

We begin with ‘snacks’ – bread and cultured butter with pickles and ferments, raw beef on toast with yellow beans and cod’s roe and a little bowl of beach rose and tomato broth. These offerings set the tone for the evening, a series of intense flavours, each one different to the last and, frankly, quite unlike anything I’ve eaten elsewhere. The much-lamented Edinburgh Food Studio is probably the venue that comes closest in recent memory.

Timberyard’s efficient staff come and go bearing various dishes, each one a tiny revelation. There’s purple sword celtuce with nasturtium, conifer and smoked scallop roe; al denté green asparagus featuring coddled egg, pancetta, comte and hazelnut; veal sweetbreads, rich and succulent with pheasant back mushroom, broad beans and Scot’s lovage; a meltingly tender slice of turbot with pea flowers, sea aster, pil-pil and lobster butter; and chunks of deliciously rare Kerry beef with farm greens and anchovy. To say it’s all delicious would be something of an understatement.

And then of course, there are a couple of puddings. There’s elderflower – a frozen granita served with creme fraiche ice-cream, wonderfully refreshing after the richness of the beef – and there’s woodruff, an edible wildflower with hints of vanilla, cardamom and cinnamon, with a fluffy honey-rich exterior and a salty, bitter chocolate filling that lingers on the palette, ending the experience on a high note.

I can’t really explain why it’s taken us so long to try the Timberyard experience, but I’m glad we finally have. This is challenging food (in the very best sense of the word): an exquisite, constantly surprising selection of dishes that focus on local and seasonal ingredients. I can see exactly how the place caught the eye of the Michelin judges.

One thing’s for sure. We won’t be leaving it so long before we return.

5 stars

Philip Caveney

Greatest Days

18/06/23

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Back in the 1990s, when Take That took the world by storm, I was very anti-boyband. They’re still not really my thing (I’m no aficionado, but I tend to prefer bands that form organically and, you know, play their own instruments). Still, now that I’m a bit older and less tribal, I have to admit that TT did have some banging tunes (Rule the World and Shine are the best, to my mind), although I don’t think I’ll ever feel anything other than incredulous that The Samaritans actually had to set up a helpline for distressed fans when the group announced that they were splitting up. Like… what?

Greatest Days, a colour-by-numbers jukebox musical, leans into the deep emotional connections young followers attach to their oblivious heroes, mining Take That’s back catalogue to mixed effect. Teenager Rachel (Lara McDonnell) is obsessed. Things aren’t great at home – her mum and dad spend all their time arguing – so she retreats into a fantasy life, where ‘the boys’ help her out. An early dance routine, where the Take-That-Alikes pop out of kitchen cupboards to pass her utensils, lift her up to the overhead cupboards and stir her spaghetti hoops fills me with hope: it’s bold and theatrical and a lot of fun. (Sadly, it’s a technique that soon outstays its welcome: too many similar scenes follow, and it all starts to feel a bit overdone.) Her pals, Heather, Zoe, Claire and Debbie (Eliza Dobson, Nandi Sawyers-Hudson, Carragon Guest and Jessie Mae Alonzo), are all equally fanatical, and their friendship reaches its apotheosis the night that Debbie gets them all tickets to a gig in Manchester.

Fast forward twenty-five years. Rachel has grown up to be Aisling Bea (Heather, Zoe and Claire have morphed into Alice Lowe, Amaka Okafor and Jayde Adams respectively, while the adult Debbie is notably absent). Grown-up Rachel is a nurse, and still obsessed with the boys, forcing the kids on her ward to listen to what they perceive as her terrible music taste. She loves her job and her sweet-natured boyfriend, Jeff (Marc Wootten), but something is missing. When she wins a radio phone-in competition, she’s suddenly faced with the opportunity to put that right, to reconnect with the old gang and see their favourite band one last time, as they perform a reunion gig in Athens…

With such a lively, amiable cast and some gloriously OTT big numbers (neither boarding an easyJet flight nor travelling on a night bus have ever looked even a tenth as glamorous as they do here), there’s a lot to like about Greatest Days. However, it’s very uneven, as if writer Tim Firth and director Coky Giedroyc have thrown a match into a box of unlabelled fireworks, some of which prove spectacular and light up the sky (sorry, couldn’t resist), while others fizzle out like proverbial damp squibs. The revelation that the statues in the fountain are the boys, for example, should be a cheeky little wink of a moment, but instead is drawn out into a boring ten-minute montage of selfie-taking. The central premise seems a little overwrought too.

A pleasant – if ironically forgettable – trip down memory lane, Greatest Days probably isn’t going to relight anyone’s fire (I know, I’m doing it again) but, if you’re a fan of ‘the boys’, then you’ll probably enjoy it, so you’d better hot-foot it to the cinema before you run out of time.

3 stars

Susan Singfield

Leopoldstadt

16/06/23

National Theatre At Home

With live theatre events relatively thin on the ground at the moment, it seems a propitious time to indulge in NT Live’s ‘At Home’ selection – and the obvious first choice is Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, a play in five acts, which chronicles the lives of the Merz family in Vienna. With a cast of forty actors, this is a mammoth undertaking and, while Patrick Marber’s direction occasionally struggles to contain so many disparate characters, it’s nevertheless an education for me, providing an overview of world events that eventually led the Jewish people to the edge of annihilation.

The play opens in 1899, where Merz family patriarch, Hermann (David Krumholtz), his wife Greta (Faye Castelow), and their extended family are celebrating Christmas. Hermann (like many other Jewish businessmen) has converted to Catholicism in order to prosper in his everyday dealings, but he’s only too aware of the antisemitic sentiment of the true gentiles around him and at the party (where one of the children unthinkingly puts a Star of David at the top of the tree) there is already wistful talk of the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

As the story progresses – we jump first to one year later, then to the jazz era of the 1920s – we are aware that nothing has improved for the Merz clan and that their freedom to thrive is being rapidly diminished. The next section, set in November 1938 on the evening of Kristallnacht, is perhaps the most harrowing sequence, as the family home is visited by a sneering Nazi overseer, who quite literally gives them their marching orders, his callousness exemplified by the seemingly small act of brazenly stealing Hermann’s beloved fountain pen.

A moving coda, set in 1955, features three of the few survivors of that night, comparing notes and remembering the many – the very many – who died in the Nazi death camps. The play begins with a huge extended family on stage, but as the story progresses, their numbers steadily diminish until there are hardly any of them left and the performance space is almost empty. It’s a powerful moment when, in the final minutes, the rest of the cast drift back to stand behind the three survivors, silent witnesses to their own terrible fates.

While it’s nobody’s idea of an uplifting evening at the theatre, Leopoldstadt – which may well be Stoppard’s swan song – is an important and ambitious piece of theatre that highlights how an entire race of people, perhaps because of their very determination to succeed in the face of overwhelming odds, has been systematically tyrannised and subjugated throughout history.

While the complex nature of the Merz family tree (and the actors doubling as different characters) occasionally gives rise to some confusion as those we first see as children return as adults, it’s worth persevering for the powerful melancholy of that extraordinary epilogue, which for quite some time leaves the live audience in stunned silence before the applause finally begins.

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Chevalier

14/06/23

Cineworld, Edinburgh

Chevalier is the latest Hollywood film to cast light on an important Black historical figure, previously relegated to a footnote. It’s too little, too late of course, but at least it is a start…

Kelvin Harrison Jr plays the titular Chevalier, Joseph Bologne, a young Black prodigy. The illegitimate son of Georges de Bologne (Jim High), a wealthy plantation owner, and Nanon (Ronke Adekoluejo), an enslaved Senegalese woman, Joseph’s musical proficiency spurs his father to uproot him from Guadeloupe, dumping him in a posh Parisian conservatory, where his violin skills – and knowledge of courtly etiquette – can be honed. Fortunately for Joseph, he is as good with a foil as he is with a bow, and his ability to lunge and parry proves useful, both literally and metaphorically, as he tries to make his way in French society.

The mid-1700s were turbulent times in France, but – for much of this film’s duration – Joseph is closeted from the outside world. Instead, he is protected by his talents, roped in to tutor Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton), and fêted by the opera-loving toffs. It’s not all plain sailing, of course: there are repeated slights as well as some open hostility, but – for a while – things seem to be going his way. But when he throws his hat in the ring as a contender to lead the prestigious Paris Opéra, it soon becomes apparent that he has overstepped the mark, and that the establishment will not countenance what they perceive as his presumption. Time to take him down a peg or two, they decide, and a trio of divas, led by La Guimard (Minnie Driver), announce that they will never deign to take orders from a “mulatto”. Joseph appeals to his ally, Marie Antoinette, but she refuses to act. Perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised to learn that a monarch believes in birthright…

But perhaps the Queen shouldn’t be surprised to learn that a victim will want revenge, and that her rejection is the final straw. Nanon, newly freed and reunited with her son in France, has already made some headway educating him about the ways of the world. Now the scales have truly fallen from his eyes, and there is only one thing for it: the Chevalier must join the revolution.

Directed by Stephen Williams, this is a handsomely mounted film, Stefani Robinson’s script sticking largely to the facts, although there is a little artistic license taken with the central romance, with much made of the scant historical information available. Here, Joseph embarks on a doomed affair with Marie-Josephine (Samara Weaving), wife of the vengeful Marquise de Montalembert (Marton Csokas). I think this is a good idea as, although the characters are all well-drawn, and Harrison Jr is particularly compelling, there’s not an awful lot of plot here. This really is Chevalier‘s main problem: the middle third sags. Another strand would help enormously: I’d love to have learned more about Nanon, for example, and her journey from slave to free woman.

Nonetheless, this is a rewarding and informative film, which will hopefully help to restore Bologne’s name to the musical canon.

3.7 stars

Susan Singfield

The Flash

14/06/23

Cineworld, Edinburgh

If Marvel Studios are having a thin time of things lately, spare a thought for DC, who have long struggled to establish a coherent onscreen presence for their cohort of superheroes and seem to feel obliged to put Batman into just about every film they produce. Flash is no exception to this rule. As for its titular hero, the producers must have been tearing their hair out when Ezra Miller’s off-screen controversy threatened to blow the whole project out of the water before it even got off the starting blocks. But here it finally is and, largely by virtue of not taking itself too seriously, it’s more entertaining than most of the recent comic book-inspired movies I’ve recently witnessed.

Barry Allen/The Flash (Miller) is managing to strut his stuff around the city, but is mostly playing second fiddle to everybody’s favourite hero, Batman (Ben Affleck). An opening sequence where The Flash saves a series of babies falling from a collapsing building sets the stall out well. But like most superheroes, Barry is haunted by something dark in his past – in his case, the murder of his mother, Nora (Maribel Verdú), a crime for which Barry’s father is currently serving time in prison, though Barry is convinced of his innocence. When Barry discovers that, by running at a particular speed, he can time travel, he hits on the idea of going into the past and changing one small detail, in order to save his mother’s life.

Before you can mutter ‘space time continuum’ the deed is done and suddenly everything is weirdly different. Barry meets his younger, goofier self, reconnects with an entirely different Batman (played once again by Michael Keaton) and learns that Eric Stoltz is now the lead actor in Back To the Future, a clever running gag that’s used to great effect. More worryingly, Barry has now lost his powers and needs to rekindle them if he is ever going to get back to his own time.

And he really needs to because, thanks to Barry’s time-tinkering, General Zod (Michael Shannon) is back, intent on destroying the entire planet…

Look, set down like that, it does sound like utter piffle, but Flash manages to play it all with real panache, thanks to Andy Muschietti’s assured direction and a witty script by Christina Hodson and Joby Harold. It’s only in the final third, that – predictably – the film begins to sag under the weight of its own hubris. The usual apocalyptic punch-up ensues and I can’t help reflecting that, where Across the Spider-Verse managed to juggle literally hundreds of manifestations of its lead character without ever becoming muddled, Flash‘s attempt to do something similar with the character of Superman just becomes incomprehensible. Supergirl (Sasha Calle) is also a player in this film but, apart from supplying a kind of get-out clause when everything is beyond salvation, she remains disappointingly 2D.

Still, there’s a satisfying conclusion to it all and a likeable final joke to send me on my way with a smile on my face. And if you ever wondered what Nicholas Cage’s Superman would have looked like, had it ever got off the ground, here’s your chance to find out.

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney