Film

Fighting With My Family

24/02/19

I have to confess that my expectations for this are not particularly high. This may surprise you, but the world of WWE wrestling is not something that’s ever figured high on the list of things I enjoy – but a members’ screening of Fighting With My Family at The Cameo, coupled with a quiet Sunday afternoon, is enough to entice me along to give it the benefit of the doubt.

And against all the odds, I am thoroughly entertained.

Written and directed by Stephen Merchant (who seems to be making more credible inroads into the movie industry than his old compadre, Ricky Gervais), this is a ‘based on a true story’ account of the career of Saraya Knight (Florence Pugh), who, from her childhood, along with brother, Zak (Jack Lowden), is schooled in the ways of all-things-wrestling by her parents, Ricky (Nick Frost) and Julia (Lena Heady).  They run a small wrestling club in the exotic locale of er… Norwich, where they regularly put on small-time bouts and train the local teenagers in the ways of unarmed combat.

Saraya and Zak have always dreamed of hitting the heights of the WWE so, when they are invited to go along to a tryout in London, they are of course wildly excited. But things become more complicated when Saraya is invited to head out to Florida to see if she has what it takes to become a wrestling superstar – while Zak is given a polite ‘no thanks.’ Now he has to watch as his sister has chance of achieving everything he’s ever dreamed of, while he’s stuck in Norwich, helping to care for his partner’s new baby and training the local teenagers. Bitter? Yes, pretty much.

Merchant does a terrific job of this, managing to steer  clear of the obvious and giving us a much more nuanced story than we might have expected. Just when we think we know where this is heading, he throws in the odd surprise – like the seemingly snooty model girls training alongside Saraya, who turn out to be perfectly decent people. Pugh, in a role I’d never have anticipated after Lady Macbeth, is appealing as a square peg trying desperately to fit into a round hole, and Lowden does an excellent job of conveying Zak’s inner torment as his sister’s star continues to rise. Vince Vaughan is terrific as the hard-assed coach who pushes Saraya to the edge of endurance and there’s even a nicely judged cameo by Dwayne Johnson, where the man’s inherent likability is allowed to shine through.

Look, this is never going to be anybody’s choice for film of the year, but if you’re looking for a slice of undemanding fun, and a genuinely heartwarming conclusion, you could do a lot worse. It may not convert you into a rabid fan off WrestleMania, but you’ll have some genuine laughs, something that’s in woefully short supply these days.

4 stars

Philip Caveney

The Kid Who Would Be King

20/02/19

When I was just a nipper and there was such a thing as ‘Saturday Morning Pictures,’ I would often watch features from the Children’s Film Foundation. These were stories about gangs of plucky kids, coming together to solve a crime or save a theatre or take on invading aliens – you name it. I mention this mostly because there’s something about The Kid Who Would Be King that rather reminds me of those films – albeit this time with the advantage of a sixty-million-dollar budget.

Joe Cornish made an impressive directorial debut with Attack the Block seven years ago and, after some messing about in Hollywood, he’s gone back to an idea he first came up with as a teenager, and which has been bubbling around in his head ever since.

This is the story of Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis), a mild mannered twelve-year-old, who, together with his best mate, Bedders (Dean Chambo), is the subject of bullying at his secondary school, mostly at the hands of Lance (Tom Taylor) and Kaye (Rhianna Doris). (The bullying, by the way, is the unconvincing sort you only ever see in movies – holding somebody upside down to shake the coins from his pockets, etc.) One night, chased into a building site by his oppressors, Alex finds an old sword embedded in a stone and easily plucks it out. Pretty soon, he’s approached by Merlin (played by Angus Imrie and, occasionally Sir Patrick Stewart), who informs him that he is now ‘the once and future king,’ and that ‘divided Britain’ is at the mercy of evil witch, Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson) and her armies of the undead. Only a hero of epic proportions can save the world from disaster. By the way, those who think they are spotting a Brexit allegory here should be aware that Cornish claims it’s just a coincidence. You decide.

The film has a pleasing, amiable feel about it with plenty of in-jokes mixed in with the admittedly impressive action sequences. For the most part, it works a treat. If there’s an occasional tendency towards mawkishness, well, those bits are mercifully brief and soon enough, we’re flung headlong back into the action.

However, though the legions of flaming skeleton knights are initially pretty impressive, they are perhaps somewhat overused. A final confrontation between a bunch of school kids and the forces of darkness feels unnecessarily protracted and I think TBWWBK could easily had shed thirty minutes in the telling to ensure it keeps a firmer grip on an audience’s attention. I also can’t help feeling a little bit sorry for Rebecca Ferguson, chained to a wall for half the movie and spending the rest of it morphing into a hideous lizard-like monster. Well, that’s show business.

But quibbles aside, this is a film that is squarely aimed at a young audience, who will surely enjoy its deft blend of thrills, chills and chuckles. So it’s somewhat disappointing to note that at the afternoon performance we attend, there are perhaps only two kids in the rather sparse crowd. The film has already had a disappointing showing at the American box office where Arthurian mythology doesn’t mean an awful lot to the average viewer. It would be nice to see this do a whole lot better here.

If you have youngsters in need of entertainment, get them to a screening of this before it turns into an owl and flies away.

4 Stars

Philip Caveney

A Private War
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17/02/19

Marie Colvin was an extraordinary woman, and Rosamund Pike, it turns out, is exactly the right actor to convey her strength and singularity. Her performance as the celebrated war reporter is gutsy and bold, nuanced and considered – quite possibly a career best.

A Private War is a biopic, detailing the last ten years of Colvin’s life, following her from war zone to war zone, highlighting the personal toll – both physical and mental – of uncovering and revealing so many unpalatable truths. It’s a worthwhile endeavour, but it doesn’t quite pay off.

Maybe it’s because Colvin is famous as an observer and interpreter of stories; as the central character, she seems misplaced. It’s as if the important stuff – the stuff she’d want to focus on – is happening off-screen, and we’re reduced to watching her reactions instead. Of course it matters what happens to those who chronicle events, but their narrative is inevitably secondary to the events themselves. Here, that order is subverted, and I don’t think it wholly succeeds. I feel curiously distanced, from the wars as well as Colvin, never emotionally engaged.

Still, there’s much to praise here too. Pike isn’t the only one to deliver a great performance: Jamie Dornan does a sterling job as Colvin’s sidekick, photographer Paul Conroy, and Tom Hollander injects warmth and like-ability into his portrayal of otherwise hard-headed newspaper editor Sean Ryan. Stanley Tucci provides the much-needed – both in the movie and, I imagine, in Colvin’s real life – light relief, as her London lover, the only person with whom we see her truly relax.

We are shown the horrors of war – a mass grave in Iraq, besieged towns in Syria – and the awful relentlessness of it all, the despair of those affected. But it never gets personal; we never learn enough about the individuals. ‘Find the people,’ Colvin tells rookie journalist, Kate Richardson (Faye Marsay), ‘and tell their stories.’

It’s a shame the movie doesn’t take its protagonist’s advice.

3.8 stars

Susan Singfield

Alita: Battle Angel

17/02/18

This one has been a long time coming.

Back in the early 2000s, James Cameron had two pet projects he was planning to direct. The first was Alita: Battle Angel, based on Manga comic, Gunnm. The other was a little thing called Avatar. We all know what happened with the second option and (unless you’ve been living in a hole for a good while) we also know that, after much humming and hawing, Cameron has committed himself to filming four Avatar sequels. But clearly he wasn’t ready to give up on that other project. Enter Robert Rodriguez to take up the directorial reins as Cameron’s er… avatar… while he contents himself with co-writing and producing duties on Alita. What could go wrong?

Well, the word on the street is that the resulting film is a bit of a dog’s dinner and one that looks certain to lose an awful lot of money. But, if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that it’s unwise to underestimate Cameron, who has managed to confound expectations several times before. Most people predicted that Titanic would sink without a trace…

In the year 2563, the earth has been reduced to a devastated post-war shambles. Most people live in the ramshackle chaos of Iron City, while high above them, in a floating sky palace called Zalem, a mysterious ruling class look disdainfully down whilst quite literally dropping their trash on the less fortunate below them. A metaphor perhaps for the way in which the affluent West offloads it’s garbage on the poorer countries of the world? Quite probably.

Whilst searching through a rubbish dump, cyborg scientist Dr Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) discovers the head and spinal column of a young female cyborg. His scanners detect signs of life in it. So he whips it back to his laboratory, where he conveniently happens to have an artificial female body all primed and ready to go, the one he actually built for his wheelchair-bound daughter Alita, but which she never got to use.

The new version of Alita (played by a GGI augmented Rosa Salazar) wakes up with a powerful new body that works a treat but oddly, she has no memories of her previous existence. However, it isn’t long before she discovers that one thing she can do really well is fight, using an ancient martial art called Panzer Kunst… and fight she does. A lot.

Of course, given the genre, this is probably inevitable but it’s in the film’s early stretches that it is at its most accomplished. Alita is a genuinely exciting CGI creation (I hope to see Salazar in some less tweaked roles in the future) and the basic premise, with its shades of Frankenstein and even Pinocchio, is initially alluring. But why do so many action movies have such one-note lead characters? Think how refreshing it would be if Alita was good at music… or poetry… or… well, something other than kicking people repeatedly in the face. Rodriguez, by the way, somehow succeeds in giving us an ultra-violent movie that manages to hang on to its 12A certificate, mostly by virtue of lopping off artificial limbs and robotic heads rather than flesh and blood. A bit disingenuous, I think.

From this point the film is a decidedly mixed bag. We meet Ido’s ex wife, Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), a fellow cyborg scientist who is desperately trying to earn her passage back to Zalem, mostly by buttering up the mysterious Vector (Mahershala Ali, proving that he’s not afraid to wallow in less hallowed projects than his recent Oscar-nominated films). There are some decent action sequences (the one where Alita is pursued by a murderous pack of weirdly constructed cyborg killers plays like a cross between Mad Max and The Wacky Races, but manages to generate some genuine thrills in the process). If there’s an overlying problem here it’s simply that the plot feels rather nebulous. I am never really sure why so many people are keen to kill Alita, nor quite what to make of the occasional flashbacks she encounters.

I do however like the fact that the mysterious overlord briefly glimpsed looking down on all the shennaningins from the safety of Zalem really looks like James Cameron himself – which would have been a brilliant idea. (Someone in the know assures me that it is actually Ed Norton, but I like my idea better.)

Alita isn’t the disaster that so many have predicted – but neither is it a triumph. It’s a curate’s egg of a film. Good in parts but, in others, indigestible.

3.6 stars

Philip Caveney

 

All Is True

09/01/19

All Is True is a gentle affair and, actually, a perfect Sunday afternoon film. You know what I mean: it’s one to settle down in front of when you’ve eaten too much dinner and you want to engage with something clever but not challenging, fun but not frenetic. It’s a quality piece; how could it not be with its fine pedigree? With Kenneth Branagh starring and directing; with Judi Dench supporting; with Ben Elton providing the script? (Okay, I know Elton has his naysayers, but there’s no denying he’s good at this historical comedy stuff. Blackadder is still up there, I think, and Upstart Crow is pretty decent too.)

It’s the tale of William Shakespeare’s latter years, back in Stratford with his family after living apart from them in London. But now his theatre – the Globe – has gone up in flames, destroyed by a misfired prop cannon; he’s lost his mojo and he needs somewhere quiet to lick his wounds. Returning home also gives him the belated chance to mourn his dead son, Hamnet, who died of the plague while his father was away, and to repair his fractured relationship with his daughters and his wife. But there is scandal in small towns as well as in cities, and Will’s no stranger to it. His own father was a thief, and now his daughter, Susanna (Lydia Wilson), is caught up in a lawsuit, accused of adultery.

Interestingly, this is the second fictional interpretation we’ve seen of this affair (the recorded facts are sparse, but we do know that her accuser was found guilty of slander and excommunicated for his lies) – the first, The Herbal Bed by Peter Whelan, was performed at The Lowry in 2016 – you can read our review of it here: https://bouquetsbrickbatsreviews.com/2016/04/02/the-herbal-bed/.

But Elton’s scope is wider than Whelan’s, focusing too on the strange details of Hamnet’s death, and his twin sister Judith (Kathryn Wilder)’s reaction to it, as well as on Shakespeare’s own insecurities as a grammar-school educated merchant’s son, occasionally mocked by the upper-class university graduates he counts as his peers.  There’s a meandering quality to the movie that suits its Stratford setting; the light is gorgeous and the period is beautifully evoked. It’s funny too, and informative. There’s no denying it’s a slight piece of work, a little bit of whimsy to while away the hours, but it’s entertaining and engaging, and, provided you’re not in the mood for something more demanding, perfectly enjoyable.

3.8 stars

Susan Singfield

Velvet Buzzsaw

08/02/19

On paper, it all looks very promising.

In 2014, writer/director Dan Gilroy gave us Nightcrawler, a brilliant movie with arguably career-best performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo. Velvet Buzzsaw, set in the LA art world, must surely be an opportunity to pull off a similar trick, making us care about essentially unlikable people… mustn’t it? Unfortunately, the characters who inhabit this movie are such an appalling collection of poseurs that it’s hard not to cheer when awful things happen to them. Which is only the first of its problems.

Gyllenhaal plays Morf Vandewalt, an influential art critic. One word from this man and an aspiring artist can kiss goodbye to his career (Hmm. I wonder what it’s like to have that kind of influence?). Morf has a bit of a thing for Josephina (Zawe Ashton), who works as an assistant to hard-nosed art dealer, Rhodora Haze (Rene Russo). Josephina has lately been struggling in her career but an unexpected opportunity arises when reclusive artist Vetril Dease drops dead at an art launch and she chances upon a massive haul of his paintings hidden in his apartment. Despite the fact that Dease left strict instructions that his work should be destroyed in the event of  his death, Josephina steals his pictures and, with the help of Vandewalt and Haze, sets about selling them to the highest bidders. But Dease was a troubled soul and his paintings have taken on certain aspects of his personality – probably because he used bits of his own body tissue when mixing his paints.

To be fair to Gilroy, he sets out his stall expertly, skewering the world of contemporary art and pointing out that, in this day and age, it is inextricably bound up with commerce. In this film, people cannot mention an artist without pointing out how much his or her work is currently selling for. But having created this world, Gilroy seems to have nowhere interesting to take his characters, except along an extremely well worn path of bumping them off in increasingly unpleasant circumstances. Which would be all right, if it weren’t for the fact that this is supposedly a horror movie and it fails comprehensively to generate any sense of terror. More damning is its predictability. The demise of rival art dealer Gretchen (Toni Collette) is so clumsily signalled, you know what’s going to happen to her well before she does.

And then there’s the little matter of the film’s own internal logic. Many of the deaths here  really don’t make sense in terms of the premise that has already been established. That catchy title by the way, refers to Rhodora Haze’s previous incarnation as a member of a punk band of the same name. It also leads to one of the film’s most tenuous plot twists.

This Netflix Original has certainly divided opinion. I’ve heard a lot of people decrying it and just a few speaking up in its defence, but I have to say I’m with the naysayers. This is, frankly,  a massive disappointment.

Interested parties can find our review of Nightcrawler here: https://bouquetsbrickbatsreviews.com/2014/11/03/nightcrawler/

2.6 stars

Philip Caveney

Capernaum

03/02/19

Capernaum opens with a scene that could have been lifted straight from a mawkish Hollywood weepie. Twelve year old Zain (Zain Al Rafeea) is attempting to sue his parents. Their crime? They have given him life and it has turned out to be one of unrelenting misery. If this device seems sensational, stay in your seat – because from here the film cuts away to show us Zain’s existence on the streets of Beirut, and it isn’t long before we’re pretty much in agreement that he’s been dealt a bad hand of cards.

Zain lives cheek by jowl in a tiny run down apartment with his eight siblings. The children are all forced to participate in the money-making schemes of their desperate parents, which largely revolve around forging prescriptions for Tramadol and distributing the drug to various relatives housed in the local prison. These scenes are explored with almost documentarian attention to detail, plunging me headlong into harrowing poverty and desperation and making me supremely grateful for my own comfortable existence. The actors are all non-professionals, which adds to the sense of verité.

When Zain isn’t dealing drugs, or selling fruit drinks on the street, he’s fetching and carrying and trying to look out for his eldest sister, Sahar (Haita ‘Cedra’ Izza), who has just started menstruating and, at the tender age of eleven, is therefore considered a promising matrimonial prospect for Assaad (Nour El Husseini), the man who owns the property in which the family live. So no pressure there.

When, in one of the film’s most devastating sequences, the family is forced to hand Sahar over to Assaad, Zain reaches breaking point and runs away from home. Finding himself in a ramshackle fairground, he is taken in by Ethiopian immigrant, Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw), who gives Zain food and shelter in exchange for him babysitting her infant son, Yonas (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole). But Rahil is working in Beirut on forged papers and, when she is arrested, Zain is, quite literally, left holding the baby. His life now consists of finding food and water in order to keep Yonas alive.

This is a harrowing and deeply affecting story, centred around a truly extraordinary performance from Zain Al Rafeea. He trudges resolutely through an onslaught of slings and arrows, looking for all the world like a glum-faced angel – indeed, the moment where he finally locates his smile is almost transcendental. His scenes with the (adorable) baby are also beautifully judged, even though they amp the anxiety factor up to the maximum. Complex issues are brilliantly explored with plenty of nuance and subtlety and, for the most part, the film is not judgemental. Zain’s parents are not the evil caricatures they could so easily have been, but people driven to extraordinary measures in order to survive.

So it’s a shame, then, that the film’s final message – that poor people should have fewer kids – is over-simplistic and only partially explained by the fact that it’s essentially a child’s-eye view of the situation. We all know, don’t we, that the problem is far more complicated than that?

But Nadine Labaki’s film is an undeniably powerful one and it’s no surprise that it’s been nominated for this year’s foreign Language Oscar. It’s also the latest in a whole series of movies that have me weeping inconsolably in my seat. Capernaum may not be perfect but I defy anyone to sit through this and not feel moved by it.

4.8 stars

Philip Caveney

 

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

02/02/19

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a fascinating tale, as much about the spurious nature of ‘worth’ as it is a personal memoir of triumph and degradation. We enter the obscure world of literary memorabilia, where trite postcards or carelessly dashed-off letters command big bucks, just so long as they’re written by a person of note. A thank you card from Noël Coward? That’ll be six hundred dollars, please. And if Coward didn’t actually write it? Well, what’s the difference, really?

Lee Israel, played here with real aplomb by Melissa McCarthy, is a biographer, justifiably proud of her published work, but dismayed to see her stock falling. Having hit the dizzy heights of the New York Times Best Sellers list with her 1980 book about Dorothy Killigan, she’s devastated when her next project, about Estée Lauder, is a flop. Her bitchy agent, Marjorie (Jane Curtin), stops taking her calls, and laughs openly at Lee’s ideas for future work. Unable to afford the vet’s fees for her beloved cat – or, indeed, to pay her rent – Lee starts to look for other ways to turn a buck.

Israel is a complex character: prickly, tough-talking and isolated, proud of her abilities but unsure of how to make them pay. She’s not especially likeable: she drinks too much; she’s sarcastic; her apartment is filthy and covered in cat shit. And, when the going gets tough, she turns to crime. It’s to McCarthy’s great credit that she imbues the troubled author with enough pathos and vulnerability that we find ourselves rooting for her, willing her to find a way out of her situation. This is helped in some measure by Israel’s putative (and fictional) relationship with a sweet-natured bookseller, Anna (Dolly Wells), which allows us to see how self-destructive Israel is, and how lonely she makes herself.

Still, every crook needs a partner in crime, and Israel’s is Jack Hock, a drinking buddy with whom she develops a friendship of sorts. It’s great to see Richard E. Grant back in a role he can relish (because, let’s face it, he’s not been given much to get his teeth into since Withnail), and he certainly makes the most of the opportunity to show off his acting chops. This is true of McCarthy too, whose performance here has far more depth and subtlety than most of the rumbustious comedic turns she’s previously been noted for.

Israel’s aptitude for forgery is rooted in her real writing skills, and she takes a perverse pride in possessing a wit caustic enough to pass for Dorothy Parker’s, arch enough to pass for Coward’s. There’s a sense here of a woman taking revenge on a literary world that has spurned her, exposing the stupidity of the very people who say she’s not good enough. Director Marielle Heller does a good job of quietly teasing out these themes, and the film is tightly constructed, with every scene earning its place.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a first-rate movie and one which is, ironically, likely to make the value of an authentic Lee Israel forgery soar. Now, where can I get hold of a typewriter?

4.3 stars

Susan Singfield

 

Green Book

31/01/19

It’s 1962, and at the Copacabana Nightclub in New York, Italian American Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) is working as a doorman/bouncer. Known as an ace exponent of BS – and also for being very handy with his fists – Tony finds himself in a bit of a fix when the club is unexpectedly closed for renovations. How is he going to support his loving wife, Dolores (Linda Cardellini), and his two sons (one of whom is destined to grow up to be a Hollywood scriptwriter?)

Salvation comes in the form of an unexpected job offer. Celebrated musician, Dr Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), is planning to embark on a three month tour of America and, since he intends to appear in several venues south of the Mason Dixon line, he needs somebody to drive him – somebody who can handle himself in a tight spot. Tony seems like the logical choice.

But there’s a fly in the ointment. Tony, you see, is a racist. Not a confederate flag-waving agitator or anything like that, but a man who chooses to drop a couple of drinking glasses into the trash after they’ve been used by black workmen who do some work in his apartment.

However, he’s also a pragmatist. He needs a job and this one will pay well, provided he gets his client to every single booking, so off the two men go in a hired Cadillac, using the titular Green Book to locates those rare hotels that are actually prepared to admit black guests.

On their travels, the two men’s relationship gradually develops into mutual respect and, as Tony witnesses the humiliating travails that Don has to undergo in those Southern states, the more he begins to understand how wrong he’s been for all these years. Here is a country where the man who has been booked as the star turn at a swanky establishment is unable to dine in the restaurant or even use the same toilet as the other (white) guests.

Of course, this could so easily become trite and over sentimental – but the script, written by Nick Vallelonga, successfully walks a perilous tightrope over the potential pitfalls. It is often downright hilarious and, when it needs to be, suitably heartfelt. Peter Farrelly (yes, that Peter Farrelly, the one who wrote Dumb and Dumber!) handles the direction with perfectly judged restraint. Mortensen, who has beefed up almost beyond recognition, is terrific as Tony, a man whom I initially dislike intensely, but who gradually works his way into my affections with his brutish attempts at humour.

It’s Ali, however, who is the real standout here, managing to imbue his effete character with an affecting vulnerability. Don, it turns out, is a stranger both to the white world in which he plies his trade and the black one, of which he ironically has little experience. Sitting in his swanky apartment above Carnegie Hall, he looks like the loneliest man in the world. One of the funniest scenes in the film is the one in which Tony introduces him to the music of Chubby Checker and Aretha Franklin – and then to the dubious delights of Kentucky fried chicken. I should also add that Linda Cardellini makes the very most of her limited screen time as Dolores, imbuing her character with real warmth.

Of course, this being based on a true story, there have been some rumblings of discontent, mostly from Don Shirley’s surviving relatives,  who claim that the friendship between the two men has been wildly exaggerated for dramatic purposes. This may be true but, whatever the realties of the situation, Green Book is nonetheless a terrific film that never loses momentum, despite a running time of two hours and ten minutes.

It fully deserves its five Oscar nominations. Go and see this, if only to remind yourself of how recently the horrors of segregation held sway in the American South – and, of course, to watch those two knockout performances.

4.8 stars

Philip Caveney

 

If Beale Street Could Talk

28/01/18

After the meteoric success of 2016’s Moonlight (only his second attempt at direction), Barry Jenkins could probably have chosen any subject he fancied for his third feature. As it turned out, he’d already begun developing If Beale Street Could Talk at the same time as his Osar winner, adapting it himself from a groundbreaking novel by James Baldwin, so of course it was a logical step to move straight on to that. Set in the early 1970s, it’s a stylish slow burner that centres on the doomed relationship of two young people.

Tish Rivers (Kiki Layne) has known Alonzo ‘Fonny’ Hunt (Stephan James) since the two of them were kids. She’s the youngest daughter of a loving and supportive family and is still based at home, while he’s become more of a loner, living in a rundown basement where he’s trying to establish himself as a sculptor. (His work, it must be said, is spectacularly underwhelming). When romance finally blooms between Tish and Fonny, it seems almost inevitable that they will end up as man and wife – but when he is wrongfully accused of rape and sent to prison, she discovers that she is pregnant with Fonny’s child; and all their hopes for the future come tumbling down around them.

Jenkins takes his own sweet time over the narrative, skipping back and forth in chronology to hone in on key points in the couple’s relationship. We also spend time with Tish and Fonny’s respective parents and in particular, we focus on Tish’s mother, Sharon (Regina King) and her increasingly desperate attempts to prove Fonny’s innocence by travelling to Puerto Rico to confront the poor woman who has mistakenly identified Fonnyas her assailent. King’s performance has garnered the film a ‘best supporting actress’ Oscar nomination, along with Nicholas Britell’s score and Jenkins’ for best adapted screenplay. But this is essentially Tish and Fonny’s story and the two leads play their roles with absolute conviction.

There’s a rich, languorous intensity about If Beale Street Could Talk that really takes us inside the central characters, revealing everything we need to know about them and the way they relate to each other. If the glacial pace occasionally palls – the scenes where Fonny reconnects with his old friend Daniel (Bryan Tyree Henry) could have benefited from a little pruning – this is nonetheless a considerable achievement and something that in these times of short attention spans, we are rarely witness to. This puts me in mind of the films of the late, great Douglas Sirk, who worked in a similar way.

I love the film’s brutal honesty, refusing point blank to offer us anything resembling a convenient conclusion, pointing out that real life rarely comes with such luxuries attached – and for a young black man in America, justice is a commodity that’s very hard to find.

This may not be the absolute knockout that Moonlight was, but it’s nonetheless an engrossing and beautifully directed film that deserves the widest attention.

4.7 stars

Philip Caveney