Category: cinema

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with having no hair and a big oval face, thank you very much!” Rory Kinnear is on a mission to let everyone know how great it is to be bald. He is “evangelical” about it, he says. The actor, perhaps best known for playing M’s chief of staff Bill Tanner in the four most recent Bond films, is a proudly bald man. (He says some kind things about my hairless scalp, too.) “Everyone should see losing their hair less as the descent into ageing, and more as a passing into a phase of self-enlightenment,” Kinnear says.

He’s never been tempted to have implants, or wear a wig? Isn’t that what famous actors in their late 40s do? He rolls his eyes. “I congratulate everyone who is on the brink of baldness. When some might see that as the time to thread, or saw open, or whatever the latest surgery techniques are, I say no. I understand that people have all kinds of attitudes to their appearance and it can be very complicated, but I am really keen that everyone is OK with it.”

The only downside of hair loss for Kinnear is having to wear a hat in the summer to avoid burning. There is indeed a well-worn baseball cap to his left on the sofa of the central London hotel where we meet. I had wondered if it was an actorly disguise to throw on while walking through Soho, but after spending time with him, Kinnear, 46, doesn’t really seem like that kind of person. He is dressed sensibly – polo shirt, chinos, slightly battered trainers; shall we say extreme dadcore? – answers questions considerately and eloquently, asks a fair few of his own, and is prone to self-deprecation. When I mention the “big productions” he’s been involved with, he fakes surprise that I’m referring to the Bond films. “Oh, that! I thought you were referring to my work at the Plymouth Theatre Royal in The Tempest with Richard Briers,” he shoots back.

The son of actors Roy Kinnear and Carmel Cryan, he attended Balliol College, Oxford, and later Lamda. His early career was largely on stage, but he is now a TV and film staple, with credits including Mike Leigh’s Peterloo, Years and Years, Alex Garland’s eerie horror Men and as Winston Churchill in Guy Ritchie’s second world war romp The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Despite his real-life affability, he has carved out a niche for playing difficult or unlikable characters. In Southcliffe (“The most harrowing drama on TV”), he played a troubled reporter returning to his home town after a tragedy. In the first ever episode of Black Mirror, he played a spineless prime minister blackmailed into having sex with a pig, while in Sarah Solemani’s Ridley Road he starred as slippery fascist leader Colin Jordan.

Kinnear’s next appearance will be in the second season of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. He’s playing Tom Bombadil, a mysterious, magical, much-beloved character from JRR Tolkien’s classic, but one never before seen on screen. Viewed by Tolkien as a personification of nature, and the oldest being in Middle-earth, Bombadil doesn’t intervene in any of the goings-on in the books. Having been around since the dawn of time, he’s above the petty notions of good and evil.

That makes him a tricky character to adapt. Neither Ralph Bakshi, director of the 1978 animated retelling of the story, nor Peter Jackson, the film-maker behind the multi-Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy, thought him worthy of inclusion in their versions. Bakshi said Bombadil “didn’t move the story along”, a view shared by Jackson. Even JD Payne, co-showrunner of The Rings of Power, told Vanity Fair that the character was “anti-dramatic … the characters kind of just go there [to Bombadil’s home] and hang out for a while, and Tom drops some knowledge on them.”

What drew Kinnear to a character so inconsequential no director ever wanted to go near him before? His partner, it turns out. Kinnear had been approached by the producers of the series in late 2022 about joining the cast. But having never read the books or seen any adaptations, he was in the dark about the significance of the character. He got off the phone and went downstairs to tell his partner, fellow actor Pandora Colin, about some character called Tom Bombadil.

“She looked at me and said: ‘You’re kidding?’” he recalls. “It’s her favourite part of the books. I usually like her taste, so I thought I’d better read them and start preparing. It was mainly from her reaction that I was interested. Inconsequential, dramatically, as Tom may be, he’s obviously left an impression on fans.”

The Rings of Power takes place during the Second Age, centuries before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and plays fast and loose with the lore so sacred to Tolkien heads. Bombadil’s appearance in the show is not based on anything Tolkien himself wrote, meaning the showrunners can pretty much do whatever they like with him. What we do know is that Bombadil will encounter the Stranger – a character very likely to be outed as Gandalf the Grey – and help him fulfil his true purpose. It isn’t possible to give more than that away: only four of the eight episodes were available to preview, in keeping with a show whose writers’ room reportedly had a fingerprint scanner and security guard sitting outside.

How does Kinnear deal with the secrecy on such big productions? “On The Rings of Power, and on Bond, there’s nothing in my emails that would be searchable if you were snooping. Scripts for Bond arrive in taxis, nothing is sent digitally. But once you’re in person people are a lot more open. And it’s all understandable when you consider people try to fly drones over sets, or take long-lens photographs.”

Reaction to the first series of Rings of Power bordered on hysterical, whether it was Tolkien scholars crying sacrilege, anti-Amazon folk objecting to the company’s association and giant sums of money involved (the budget was rumoured to be about $450m) or those delicate souls who needed smelling salts at the sight of an elf or dwarf being portrayed by a Black person. The series was heavily “review-bombed” (the practice of mass publishing negative reviews to tank a film or TV show’s rating on sites such as Rotten Tomatoes), so much so that Amazon suspended reviews on its own platform. It’s quite an environment to be walking into, but none of this particularly bothers Kinnear. As with most things, his approach appears to be entirely sensible.

“It reminds me of my first day on Quantum of Solace,” he says. “I was about to do a take with Judi – Dame Judi Dench, I mean – and we were walking across a hallway. A thought went into my mind: ‘Everyone is going to see this.’ I immediately messed it up and couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. What an amazing time to have that thought. And why hadn’t I had it before? They were already quite popular films. It’s not as if we were going to chuck it out and hope it found an audience. It’s similar with The Rings of Power. People are going to watch it. You have to recognise that and do your job well.”

Indeed, for all the negative online chatter, Rings of Power is Prime Video’s most watched show ever, with more than 100 million viewers worldwide. Kinnear is sanguine about the discourse around it; however many people are commenting, there are more just simply watching.

“I can be well aware of what other people have said in the bubblespheres about a show, and then watch it, and none of that have any impact on my enjoyment of the show,” he says. “As long as the noise doesn’t put people off watching something altogether, which can happen, that attendant noise just creates more buzz, which brings more people to it anyway.

“And for every force there is an opposite. You could say that the opinion on TV shows and particularly theatre being held by three or four, normally white, men, throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s was no good either. You could say social media chatter is the democratisation of opinion.”

One project of Kinnear’s that proves his point is Bank of Dave, Netflix’s film about real-life Burnley businessman Dave Fishwick, who tried to set up his own equitable bank to help his community. Reviews were middling , but it became a word-of-mouth smash. Kinnear has filmed the sequel and it will be released in January. Another project in the bag with a similar campaigning spirit is Toxic Town, a four-part series written by Jack Thorne and due later this year, which tells the story of the Corby toxic waste case, one of the UK’s biggest environmental scandals. Both projects are part of a trend of dramas shining a light on real-world injustices and connecting with audiences in a way that, as with the hugely successful Mr Bates vs the Post Office, can help bring about actual change.

Starring in Bank of Dave and Toxic Town in such quick succession is mere coincidence, says Kinnear, not part of some grand plan to become a champion of the people. “People have to write them in the first place, and Jack Thorne has form in this area. A lot of his writing career has been about injustices faced by disabled people and maybe that’s why they were led to me,” he adds, referring to his sister Karina, who was disabled from birth and died of coronavirus in 2020. “But I don’t think so, I’m not seeking this work out. They are both just projects that have a resonance that chimes with me. I wanted to be involved.”

Although, with some affecting personal journalism for the Guardian in recent years – notably one piece about his anger at having to bury his sister on the same day one of the Downing Street lockdown parties took place – he perhaps has more power than he might think. Or at least has a gift for calmly articulating the public mood. I ask if he might become more involved in campaigning for social care reform, which he has also written powerfully about, perhaps becoming a James Timpson figure in that arena. He winces gently and stresses that no, he’s “fundamentally an actor”, and that he’s wary of it seeming as if he’s talking on behalf of people who would prefer to have a microphone or dictaphone put in front of them.

Still, he will assist where he can. “Just walking down the street, you will see lots of people with visible disabilities, let alone the people with invisible ones. So unless the rest of us are there to give support, to give voice to and advocate for those people, it’s easy for politicians to ignore. It takes an awful lot of time and effort to look after someone, or to be looked after or to advocate for yourself, let alone try to bring about change in the system. If you just leave it to the people who it directly impacts, then there just isn’t the time in the day for them to lead a campaign as well as everything else they have to do.”

Even if he isn’t ready to throw himself into social justice campaigning, Kinnear still has more than enough in his calendar. As well as Toxic Town and the Bank of Dave sequel, he will appear as Mozart’s patron Joseph II in a small-screen version of Amadeus, and of course there’s the potential for more Rings of Power. While he hadn’t read any fantasy fiction before swotting up on The Lord of the Rings – he’s more of a James Joyce man – he admits he can now see the appeal, noting that the best fantasy holds up a mirror to our world. Could this newfound love of Tolkien spark a midlife diversion? Is Kinnear about to enter his nerd era?

“It hasn’t started yet,” he says. “But who knows? I got into opera in my 30s, listening, then watching and then even directing some. Then I got more into cricket in my 40s. Maybe my 50s, fast approaching, will be my fantasy decade? Perhaps as I approach my own shuffling off, I will need something to help me escape.”

Season two of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is available on Amazon Prime from 29 August.

The last time Elliot Page appeared in a film, it was literally a car crash. Page, who was nominated for an Oscar at the age of 20 for the teen-pregnancy comedy Juno, was starring in a remake of the Julia Roberts thriller Flatliners, playing one of a group of medical students who engineer near-death experiences to get a peek at the afterlife. His co-stars included James Norton, Diego Luna and Kiersey Clemons, but during a hazardous driving scene it was only Page and Clemons who were not given seatbelts. Stunt coordinators told them: “You’ll be fine.”

Instead, they were traumatised. In his 2023 memoir Pageboy, the Canadian actor describes the shoot as “a shitshow”. It wasn’t merely the cavalier regard for his safety. He also had pressure put on him to look stereotypically feminine, and one senior crew member asked whether he was angry that his character was straight.

That was seven years ago. Page, who came out as transgender in 2020, has been seen on television in the interim, including a recurring role on superhero series The Umbrella Academy, where his character transitioned, too. Page’s return to cinema has been a long time coming but he could scarcely have chosen a better re-entry point than Close to You. It’s a thrillingly intimate drama in which he plays Sam, a trans man drawn back to his Canadian home town for his father’s birthday. His well-intentioned family try their best to be welcoming and upbeat, but the conditions in their acceptance of him soon start to show.

Page must have been biding his time for a movie this meaningful. Presumably he felt his return to cinema needed to double as a statement. Right? “Gosh, maybe I should think about things more that way,” the 37-year-old says bashfully. “But it was really organic. Before finally coming out as trans, I wasn’t feeling so inspired. I didn’t feel right for certain reasons, as you can imagine. But then to be connected with Dominic …”

That is a reference to Dominic Savage, the 61-year-old director of Close to You. A videocall with the pair of them is a tale of two cities, and two sitting rooms. Page, in a charcoal T-shirt, is in his New York home, a minimalist vision of cream walls and white curtains. Savage, wearing a knotted neckerchief and chunky Ronnie Barker-style glasses, is in London in what resembles an upmarket bric-a-brac shop. A pair of Baftas preside from the mantelpiece over a cluttered landscape of lamps, chairs and cushions.

“I was aware of Elliot when we were introduced,” he says of the actor, who appeared in blockbusters including Inception and the X-Men franchise. “But part of the process for me in making films is to be able to see inside someone.” The first work of Savage’s that Page saw was I Am Kirsty, part of his I Am … series of character studies of women for Channel 4. This one starred Samantha Morton, whom Page already worshipped for her performance in Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar. Is his character in Close to You named Sam in tribute to her? “I didn’t think of that until now,” says Page. “I kind of love it. That’s awesome. Dominic?”

“Here’s a little secret,” says Savage with the sheepishness of someone poised to rain on his friend’s parade. “Behind my computer here, there’s a whole load of CDs and that’s how I name my characters. Sam must be Sam Cooke. I do think quite musically. I don’t want to sound pretentious but there’s a kind of musicality to my films, as there is to life.”

Music has been with Savage from an early age. His late father was an organist at a bandstand in Margate, the Kent coastal town where he was raised. The director’s first film experience was in front of the camera, not behind it. At 11 years old, he was cast in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon as the young Lord Bullingdon, who grows up to challenge his stepfather to a duel. Discovering that Savage was an accomplished pianist, Kubrick packed him off on the US chatshow circuit to promote the film by playing selections from the soundtrack. On the day we speak, Savage is preparing to fly to Dublin for a screening of that 1975 masterpiece. “You should dress up like your character!” says Page.

But Savage’s musical point is well made. His method of working – building the initial story with his lead actor, shaping the cast’s improvisations without writing any dialogue, and shooting everything with a handheld camera in natural light – has resulted in a body of work that moves to natural, soulful rhythms. From the improvisatory process miracles of naturalism emerge, such as the moment when Sam’s sweet but twitchy mother, played by Wendy Crewson, accidentally misgenders him. Was that a genuine slip of the tongue?

“It was!” laughs Page. “I feel weird because I get misgendered all the time, and I don’t care unless someone’s trying to, you know …” He wrinkles his nose to indicate dubious motives. “I want to be clear: I wouldn’t correct Wendy as me. I’d be like: ‘It’s fine. We’re going to move on from the moment. It takes a second.’ But, you know, I’m not me. I’m Sam here. And that moment was so perfect because that’s what happens.” Page’s own mother does her best, he says. “She’s pretty good. I’m like, ‘Of course, it’s going to take you a second, mom. It’s fine. You don’t need to beat yourself up about it!’”

Close to You is manifestly not the story of Page’s own life. Whereas Sam’s father is kind, even if he doesn’t always spring to his son’s defence as readily as he might, the family portrait in Pageboy is less rosy. Page writes of the cruelty of his stepmother during his childhood, and the hurtfulness of his father, who later “liked” a social media post from Jordan Peterson, despite the rightwinger having once been expelled from Twitter in its pre-Elon Musk days for deadnaming and misgendering Page. “To be frank, it is hard to imagine a relationship with them again,” the actor wrote of those family members.

But there are points of overlap between Sam’s life and his own. Page and Hillary Baack, who co-stars as Sam’s almost-sweetheart from his school days, really are longtime friends: they met on the 2013 thriller The East, and never lost touch. Baack tells me by email that she and Page have “remained curious and genuinely care about each other. Compared to when I first met Elliot, he is much calmer, more grounded. I can feel a weight having lifted, and a real joy for life emerge with more freedom and colour than I’ve seen before.”

Another crossover is the red woolly hat that Sam wears for most of the film. In Pageboy, he writes of being told as a young actor in Hollywood to “take off your hat”, another push toward gender conformity. Now he wears it proudly throughout Close to You. Deliberate or coincidental? “I think a bit of both. A hat is, and has been throughout my life, some kind of gender marker for me. And now it’s like: ‘Oh yeah, I can do this. And it’s not an issue. It’s not going to turn into a long conversation.’” Arguably the most radical moment in the film occurs when Sam has taken all he can of the domestic tensions. “Family is not the most important thing,” he announces. For queer and trans people, the pressure to placate or conform to a family who may not have your best interests at heart means putting up with aggressions of the micro and macro variety. Close to You suggests it is perfectly reasonable simply to opt out.

“I don’t write those lines, so things are said that are really meant,” says Savage of his improvisatory process. “The actors aren’t acting any more. Elliot reacted in that organic way and it was rather perfect and beautiful. I liked the surprise of it. I remember us at the time saying to each other: ‘That was important.’” Page beams proudly. “You could feel something happen,” he says. “And yeah, we’re not actually used to a queer trans person having a boundary in that moment: ‘Hey, I actually don’t want to sit here and this isn’t good for me.’”

That resonates with Savage, who is a father of three adult daughters. “I get it. We find our families in all kinds of places, don’t we? They’re not necessarily the people that we’ve grown up with and that we were born to. Some people, I imagine, would think that was heresy, but I find it quite a liberating idea.”

The scarcity of trans narratives puts undue pressure on the ones that get made to tell everybody’s stories. But trans film-makers including Isabel Sandoval (Lingua Franca) and Jessica Dunn Rovinelli (So Pretty) have spoken of their frustration at the emphasis on the educational in trans cinema and an obligation for those films to be easily understood by cisgender audiences. Close to You is not guilty of that, but Page isn’t oblivious to the complaint.

“It can, of course, be tiresome,” he says. “But I also try my best when I’m doing press to be like: ‘I understand that you don’t know a trans person, so let’s talk about it …’ The vast majority of people don’t personally know a trans person, or don’t think they do. That helps to spread the lies about our lives, about our healthcare, about who we are – and to then have those lies utilised for nefarious means.”

Close to You can only help, though any good intentions would count for little if it wasn’t also a complex work: wise about how we balance our duties to ourselves and others, devout but unsentimental in its portrait of romance, and with a brave, bold lead performance that deserves to shock a temporarily flatlined film career back to life.

The bad blood between Vitali Klitschko, former heavyweight champ and now mayor of Kyiv, and Ukraine’s hero president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is not exactly a secret but there’s fascinating detail in this film by Kevin Macdonald that shows how both men – who we’d fondly like to think are united at the hip in the struggle to repel the Russian invasion – appear to undermine each other. I say “appear” of course, because this can’t be anything other than a partial view; with Macdonald’s camera and access firmly focused on Klitschko, and no response provided from Zelenskiy’s camp.

Still, the footage Macdonald gets is remarkable, particularly of Klitschko in meetings with senior American politicians (including secretary of state Anthony Blinken) during which he attacks, in a not especially veiled manner, the Zelenskiy government as becoming an autocracy. In other sequences Klitschko claims Zelenskiy is victimising powerful city mayors and running a murky, Soviet-style political operation, that Ukrainian democracy is in danger and that, without “reform” aid money will disappear. In effect, he accuses Zelenskiy of wanting to turn Ukraine into “Russia 2.0”. True or not, it’s sobering evidence of a split at the heart of the Ukrainian establishment, though perhaps not immediately obvious how it will affect the prosecution of the war, or indeed what comes after hostilities have concluded.

All this material adds layers of complexity to what – initially at least – looks like a home run of a documentary profile. Klitschko, along with his brother Wladimir, dominated the heavyweight division in the 00s, and brought the same combative spirit to a post-ring political career, which resulted in his election win in 2014. (The film suggests the root of Klitschko’s feud with Zelenskiy dates from the latter lampooning him on his TV shows before launching his own tilt for office.) Like any politician, Klitschko is a hard nut to crack, presenting a resolute, hardworking face to the world: we see him doing media interviews, political meet-and-greets, attempting to console grief-stricken citizens, handing out posthumous medals for dead servicemen. He also comes in for his share of criticism; accused of wasting money on vanity building projects instead of shoring up Kyiv’s defences, and – crucially, perhaps, for its relevance to his conflict with Zelenskiy – failing to keep a bomb shelter open when it was needed. (We see Klitschko visibly greying as he is berated by one of the distraught survivors of the attack.)

As Macdonald’s film goes on, Klitschko emerges as a more conflicted and perhaps compromised character, particularly after his ex-wife and children weigh in, explaining his seemingly conscious change into political persona. (He’s certainly remarkably different from the lumbering, almost gauche figure who whupped all those fighters back in the day.) Klitschko and his brother also ponder the legacy of their father, a Soviet military officer whose loyalty to the Soviet regime was rewarded with leukaemia, probably caused by the his dedication to helping deal with the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Like the Ukrainian war itself, this is a story that is far from over, even if Klitschko’s power struggle with Zelenskiy is likely to remain a footnote in the wider struggle. Doggedly pacing through conference centres, military bunkers and hotel corridors, Klitschko aims to represent an implacable force and in Macdonald’s intelligent and capable hands he certainly does – in what will no doubt become an invaluable document for future historians of the conflict.

This rerelease of John Sayles’s western crime drama from 1996 is a reminder that he offered a vital but now maybe overlooked strand of indie movie-making and myth-making in 90s Hollywood, distinct from the brilliant ironies and shocks of Tarantino or the literary noir of the Coen brothers. Lone Star is a richly and densely achieved movie that gets a lot of storytelling done in two and a quarter hours; it is thoughtful and complex and grownup, a movie about the old west and the new west and about the culture wars of Texas and Mexico, about the melancholy spectacle of old white guys in Stetsons having coffee together, about who owns the narrative and who prints the legend. And it’s a film about the Freudian fear of the father and the embrace of taboo, with an extraordinary and very subversive ending.

The setting is the (fictional) little town of Frontera, Texas, attractive to a certain kind of visitor for being close to the border and a world of cheap bought sex in Mexico. In the grim words of Sheriff Sam Deeds, played by Sayles’s repertory regular Chris Cooper, the town should have a tourist slogan: “gateway to inexpensive pussy”. Sam should be in a good mood because the local courthouse is being named after his late father, Buddy, once himself the town’s sheriff, but Sam is subdued because a couple of treasure-hunt enthusiasts with a metal detector have dug up a skeleton with a “lone star” badge in some rough scrubland nearby. It is apparently what remains of a notoriously racist and corrupt law enforcement officer from even longer ago called Charlie Wade, played in flashback by Kris Kristofferson.

The rumour (which can hardly be spoken aloud) is that Wade was actually shot and secretly buried there by Buddy himself, played in flashback scenes by Matthew McConaughey. There was another beta-male sycophant officer hanging around: Hollis, phlegmatically played in the present day by Clifton James. But when Sam goes around asking questions about this skeleton and its rusted badge, the entire community stirs, as if roused from an uneasy sleep.

Sam himself is divorced – Frances McDormand has a great cameo as his unhappy, hyperactive, football-crazy ex-wife – and he has moved back here to his home town because he has never forgotten his Mexican high school sweetheart Pilar, now a history teacher played by Elizabeth Peña; her job is complicated now that she must debate with angry parents the way in which she teaches Tex-Mex issues. Meanwhile, Pilar’s demanding mother Mercedes (Míriam Colón) runs a restaurant, which, like many other such establishments, provides employment for illegal migrants and which institutionalises the ongoing crisis of loyalty. African Americans, the third ethnic presence after Anglos and Mexicans, are represented in a bar run by Otis Payne (Ron Canada), whose estranged son Delmore (Joe Morton) is an ambitiously careerist army officer.

These people form a constellation of stories and focal points of suppressed emotion and pain from which Cooper’s Sam emerges as the central figure, going through a kind of midlife crisis as he remembers how cruelly his father broke up his relationship with Pilar when they were kids. Sayles also brings off a particular kind of memory-flashback approach for Sam and Pilar, moving the camera in unbroken physical space from the thoughtful middle-aged Sam to the actor playing the kid that he was: a theatrical technique emphasising that all these events happened in the same place, and not that long ago.

The emerging truth is that the horror that once greeted intermarrying, a bigotry that governed life in decades past, is receding. Perhaps the tribal distinctions with which everyone has grown up – and which in people’s minds constitute the notion of “history” itself – will blur and vanish. A really absorbing and powerfully acted drama, guided with a distinctive kind of Zen wisdom by Sayles.

Celebrated Hong Kong martial arts actor and director Corey Yuen died two years ago during the Covid pandemic, it has been reported.

The Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers confirmed Yuen’s death following a social media post by action star Jackie Chan naming Yuen (also known as Yuen Kwai) among a list of late disciples of China Drama Academy head Yu Jim-yuen, who died in 1997.

Chan and Yuen were both members of the Seven Little Fortunes, a famous touring troupe of child performers from the China Drama Academy based in Hong Kong, along with other future notables, including Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao. Having appeared as a fight extra in Hong Kong films in the 1970s including Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury, Yuen gained a larger role in Tsui Hark’s landmark 1983 film Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain while acting as a stunt choreographer and becoming a director in his own right.

Yuen worked on a string of martial arts films in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 90s, including Dragons Forever, starring Chan and which Yuen co-directed with Hung, hit comedy All for the Winner, co-directed with Jeffrey Lau, and Michelle Yeoh vehicle Yes, Madam. Yuen also branched out into English language film-making, with No Retreat, No Surrender marking Jean-Claude Van Damme’s first significant film role.

In the early 1990s Yeun began a productive collaboration with Jet Li, directing a series of the latter’s successful Hong Kong films (including The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk, The Bodyguard from Beijing and My Father Is a Hero). He followed Li to the US, becoming a fight choreographer and stunt coordinator on a number of Li’s Hollywood pictures, including Lethal Weapon 4, Romeo Must Die and The Expendables. He was also credited as joint director on the Jason Statham action film The Transporter, along with Louis Leterrier.

Yuen’s final directorial credit was the 2006 video game adaptation DOA: Dead or Alive, starring Jaime Pressly and Holly Valance, but continued to work as a fight choreographer or second unit director on high profile titles including War, Red Cliff and The Man With the Iron Fists.

‘Ballet is fucking punk rock,” declaims corps de ballet member Shaelynn Estrada, towards the end of this absorbing documentary, which might be a bit of a definitional stretch for some viewers – but it sort of makes sense. I guess Estrada wants to celebrate the hardcore commitment the art requires from performers like her, or maybe its capacity to elicit raw emotion. Whatever she’s trying to say, there’s no denying Estrada herself is pretty punk rock herself, a ferociously likable character whose transition from home-schooled army brat (who paid for ballet lessons as a kid by cleaning the studio) to being member of the National Ballet of Canada’s corps makes up one of several very compelling stories in this solid documentary.

As the film’s director Chelsea McMullan and crew observe the rehearsals and lead-up to the company’s debut of a new production of Swan Lake in 2022, a diverse range of characters are introduced. First and foremost is the production’s director Karen Kain, a former prima who became the company’s artistic director, and is about to retire after this show debuts (hence the title). Diplomatic and relentlessly elegant, Kain seems as classical and echt-ballet as Estrada is punk, even if she remembers the night Rudolf Nureyev took her to a party where she met Andy Warhol among heaped bowls of cocaine. (She has a portrait of herself by Warhol to prove it.) Meanwhile, representing another facet of ballet identity, the company’s current superstar, Jurgita Dronina is struggling in near secrecy with a nerve injury. With the lead role of Odette/Odile in the show, Dronina is every bit the stoic star, suffering for her art.

After a series of awkward rehearsals and setbacks, it doesn’t seem like a sure thing that the company will pull it all together for opening night. The show in fact makes some departures from tradition, such as having the corps not wear white or pink tights that make them all look homogeneously Caucasian, a break with tradition that Black Australian dancer Tene Ward welcomes especially. Unfolding not long after the Covid-19 lockdowns that shut theatres and performance spaces everywhere, this offers an interesting snapshot of an art form struggling, like so many others, with changing expectations about representation. McMullan has a light touch with these deeper themes, and edits together the dance sequences seamlessly, tweaking the music in places to give the film an extra modernity. By the end, ballet as practised here does indeed look a bit punk rock.

Thank goodness Deadpool & Wolverine is still in cinemas, or Ryan Reynolds’ sweary mutant might have taken over Disney’s usually squeaky-clean D23 fan event in Anaheim, California. As it was, Reynolds only appeared briefly on the spectacularly giant screens at the 15,000 capacity Honda Centre for a recorded segment thanking fans for supporting his film to a likely $1bn global box office return this weekend. And naturally to remind Marvel boss Kevin Feige – tongue firmly in cheek – who saved the studio.

It was left to Disney’s more conventional franchises across its subdivisions Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar and what used to be 20th Century Fox to steal the show. And with a number of new movie announcements and impressive sneak peeks, this was a fan event to suggest the Mouse House has plenty up its sleeve to keep audiences interested over the next few years.

One of Marvel’s most highly-anticipated future episodes is Fantastic Four: First Steps, and attendees were treated to the first footage from Matt Shakman’s film, which seems to be set in an alternate reality 1960s. Imagine if Wes Anderson, in Asteroid City mode, directed a Marvel movie and you might get somewhere close to the look and feel of this one. Stars Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman), Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm/The Human Torch) and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm/Thing) look a cut above previous incumbents from earlier, misguided attempts to bring Marvel’s first family to multiplexes, while the fuzzy, Apollo-era vibes hint at a big screen take on WandaVision’s eccentric retro-futurism. The movie has just started production in the UK, and is due out next year.

Marvel boss Kevin Feige also treated attendees to an in-depth look at the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World, which seems to tease the arrival of the X-Men in the main MCU. The plot appears to centre around the discovery in a remote ocean of the element adamantium, famously the incredibly hard metal from which Wolverine’s claws are made in the comics. Harrison Ford takes over the role of General Thaddeus E “Thunderbolt” Ross from the late William Hurt in Julian Onah’s film, and there were gasps at the end of a segment of footage as the character transformed into a version of the legendary Red Hulk (with Ford’s face!)

Over in the former Fox corner of the Disney universe, James Cameron took to the stage to reveal that the new Avatar movie will be titled Avatar: Fire & Ash. The Canadian film-maker is determined to show us every mystical, photo-real corner of the cosmic moon Pandora, and this time it looks like we’ll be meeting a new tribe of Na’avi with flamey crests on their heads (though these might well be head-dresses). Footage was limited, but Cameron will be hoping to repeat the achievements of the original Avatar (from 2009) and its 2022 sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, which between them have taken more than $5bn at the global box office, and opened up the prospect of their creator making these movies well into the 23rd century. The new episode is due to hit multiplexes in December 2025.

Still basking in the remarkable box office success of Inside Out 2 (now the highest-grossing animated film of all time), Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter revealed that studio stalwart Andrew Stanton will direct the forthcoming Toy Story 5, the fourth sequel to the 1995 film that singlehandedly transformed the world of animation with its all-CGI approach. The new episode will focus on a battle for supremacy between Woody, Buzz et al and a new tech-based rival for the affections of the children who play with them. Perhaps a baddie from the video game Fortnite, or the nefarious Captain iPad, will be centre stage this time around. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Stanton is best known for directing Finding Nemo from 2003, its 2016 sequel Finding Dory and the wonderful Wall-E in 2008. He has co-written all four of the earlier Toy Story films, and will be regarded as an incredibly safe pair of hands for the new instalment. Docter also revealed that a third movie in the much-loved The Incredibles series about a family of superheroes has been greenlit, with Brad Bird (who else?) once again at the helm. Docter also showcased exclusive footage from the upcoming film Elio, about a young space fanatic who is beamed up to the cosmos and ends up being mistaken for Earth’s leader by an alien organisation known as the Communiverse, which sounds like precisely the sort of thing that Donald Trump invented Space Force to try and eliminate.

The D23 fan event is never complete without a Star Wars update, and the big news this time around was an exclusive first peek at the much-anticipated debut big screen outing for The Mandalorian and Grogu, which was introduced by director Jon Favreau and writer Dave Filoni. There were audible gasps in the audience as Star Wars Rebels’ pointy-eared Zeb made his first live action appearance, but rather less excitement at the prospect of Babu Frick (from 2019 entry The Rise of Skywalker) lining up alongside Baby Yoda. At one point, a planet that looked a lot like the ice world Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back made it into frame, while there were flickers of mini and giant AT-ATs. The sight of Grogu in his Mandalorian Beskar armour, meanwhile, almost had some fans passing out from the excitement.

It’s hard to know at this longstanding corporate event whether attendees are just into literally anything with Disney written on it; they even cheered the studio’s chief executive officer Bob Iger as if he had just handed them all $10,000 each. Likewise, Tron Ares star Jared Leto was greeted with the kind of rapture you might have expected him to have received back in 2013, when he had just won an Oscar for a startling performance in Dallas Buyers Club, even though he has really done very little to deserve such garlands since. But it might just be worth reserving judgment on Tron: footage suggests the new episode will see the lightcycle-riding digital baddies entering the real world, which is at least a fresh approach, and one that plays on Hollywood’s ongoing fascination with everything nefarious AI. First introduced in 1982, when the original film marked an early use of CGI graphics, this sci-fi saga ought to be perfect for the Disney machine, if only the studio can get it right. That did not happen with 2010’s undercooked Tron: Legacy, despite that episode boasting music from Daft Punk and Jeff Bridges returning from the first film.

Ares boasts tunes from Nine Inch Nails, while Bridges (also in attendance at D23, though looking slightly baffled as to how he got there) is back again. Hopefully this time he won’t look so much like a CGI Jedi Knight moonlighting at a techno rave. Director Joseph Kosinski also returns after taking charge of Legacy, but with Top Gun: Maverick in his back pocket since that bloodless effort, Disney clearly trusts him to make sure the Master Control Program is operating on full power mode this time around.

Residential schools for Indigenous children have been a stain on the histories of both the United States and Canada, and although steps have been taken in making amends with the past, the new documentary Sugarcane reveals just how much of the process still remains incomplete.

These schools operated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, with Canada’s last residential school only closing in 1997, and they have been referred to as sites of attempted cultural genocide against Indigenous people. For many children, attendance at these schools was compulsory, forcing them to travel far away from their homes, where they were systematically separated from their language and culture and suffered various forms of abuse. Attendance at these schools has been linked to serious mental health consequences, including elevated rates of depression, substance use and suicide.

New light was recently shed on the level of atrocities that occurred at residential schools when in 2021 it was revealed that potential unmarked graves had been discovered on the site where the former Kamloops Indian residential school once stood. It was this news that spearheaded the creation of the documentary Sugarcane, which investigates the residential school St Joseph’s Mission.

The revelations of Sugarcane are many, but perhaps the most shocking one is the evidence that the film-makers bring forth that infanticide was practiced at this school, where the bodies of children of women abused by Catholic priests were incinerated on school grounds. As it turns out, this horrific discovery has serious implications for co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat, whose father, Archie, may have been the only survivor of these events. Julian makes the courageous decision to place himself into the movie, and we see father and son slowly work through years of estrangement and decades of history to learn the facts about how Archie came into this world.

NoiseCat’s is possibly the most compelling of the four entwined narratives that the movie follows, which include Chief Rick Gilbert, who travels to the Vatican seeking redress for the church’s actions, investigator Charlene Belleau, who painstakingly pieces together exactly what happened at the school, and Chief Willie Sellars, who has organized and led the inquiry into the school’s history.

Although the residential schools have had an immense impact on NoiseCat’s family, he shared with me in a video interview that for much of his life he knew virtually nothing about his grandmother’s experiences there as a young girl. During summers visiting with her, she would offer the strange story of how she and her fellow female students would say to one another “the black bear is coming” whenever they saw one of the school’s priests or nuns. “All I got from my grandmother was this very cryptic accounting of her experience at the residential school,” NoiseCat told me, “where she said that the people who were supposed to be looking out for us were predators.”

NoiseCat’s story about his grandmother indicates the larger silence surrounding these schools, even within the Indigenous community, and this is one of the reasons why this documentary is so important. According to NoiseCat, Sugarcane contradicts the popular view among many in the media that residential schools are well-known and thoroughly discussed within the Indigenous communities. “Every time I heard this,” he told me, “I thought, ‘This doesn’t ring true to my experience.’”

Indeed, when NoiseCat and his co-director, Emily Kassie, attempt to discuss the schools within the community, they are largely met with silence. As the film explores, part of the trauma faced by Indigenous people is that the things they suffered at the schools left them speechless, without a language to discuss the events, or people with whom they could share their experiences. One of the keys to processing and overcoming this past is to learn to talk about it, and for those who suffered to tell the story in their own terms. Both in terms of constructing this narrative, and in encouraging others to do so, Sugarcane is a powerful intervention for the health of the community.

One of the strengths of Sugarcane is how NoiseCat and and Kassie let this reality make its presence felt throughout their documentary. The movie plunges viewers right into the heart of the story, preferring the texture of the lived experience of the Indigenous people over a more straightforward accounting of exactly what happened. “Jules and I talked a lot about what the silences meant, and also reflecting the pacing of this world,” Kassie told me. “This is really what the world feels like, and it was very important to us that it felt representative of what we were seeing and feeling.”

Because of these choices, Sugarcane is a movie that moves at a very deliberate pace. This may challenge some viewers accustomed to punchier rhythms, although this choice gives space to the silences that continue to permeate the community, and it makes the few words that do eventually escape feel hard-earned and substantial. “We didn’t want to tell a story from 10ft away,” Kassie said. “We wanted to tell it from people living it.” This makes Sugarcane extremely effective at reflecting the larger challenges still faced by the Indigenous community as it begins the long, difficult work of confronting its trauma by piecing together the story and speaking about what happened at residential schools.

As the film also makes clear, this is very much an ongoing story. When Gilbert heads to the Vatican to have an audience with a bishop, he does receive an apology but responds that this is not enough: noting that the Bible says that apologies are only the first step in righting a wrong, he tells the bishop: “There have been apologies, but nothing has happened.”

This nothing is a significant part of the systematic failure that traumatized the attendees of the residential schools. Sugarcane notes how attempts were made at the time to report that children were being abused at the schools, but these reports fell on deaf ears. The attempted infanticide of NoiseCat’s father was reported to the police but nothing ever happened. “This was reported to the police, along with records of other victims,” Kassie said, “like finding a body of a baby in a shoe box, and other accounts of babies being taken and forced into adoptions. Nothing was done to follow up on these crimes.” In fact, as Sugarcane reports, the only person to face any criminal liability was the baby’s mother, who was sentenced to a year in jail for neglect of her child.

It is too late for many of the Catholic priests who abused children in the residential school system to be held accountable, but simply sharing the truth of what happened can still have a powerful healing effect. NoiseCat has discussed how screenings of the film often end with audience members experiencing catharsis, and the film documents how the process of being involved with this project has helped many process and overcome their trauma.

“This film is also about the resilience and the love of the community and the families that you see here,” said NoiseCat. “They have endured in spite of how these schools were designed to tear families apart.”

If you haven’t seen Coraline – the spooky animated dark fantasy film based on British author Neil Gaiman’s novella and produced by American stop-motion animation studio Laika – now’s your chance. But don’t forget your 3D glasses (also available in the foyer) because it’s been remastered in 3D to mark its 15th anniversary. A creepy story about people with buttons for eyes, Coraline features the voices of Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, our old friend Ian McShane – and Teri Hatcher who’s kindly agreed to take the reader interview.

So … what to ask? Hatcher has been a Bond girl of course, in Tomorrow Never Dies; in fact, she plays Bond’s former girlfriend whom Pierce Brosnan is sent off to seduce for information. So you can probably guess how that ends. Not well. Or if it’s celeb goss you’re after, she starred with Kevin Bacon in Christopher “Spinal Tap” Guest’s The Big Picture, Sly Stallone in buddy cop action thriller Tango & Cash, Robert Downey Jr in Soapdish and Dolly Parton in Straight Talk. On TV she’s been in episodes of Seinfeld, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Quantum Leap and Frasier and gets it on with Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men. There’s the tiny matter of playing Lois Lane in the 90s for four series of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Oh, and something about some sort of housewife. A desperate one, wasn’t it?

Please post your questions for Ms Hatcher below by 6pm BST on Sunday 11 August and we’ll do our best to buff up like Jesse Metcalfe mowing the lawn with his shirt off in the meantime.

Here it is, in all its seedy absurdity and shame-filled grandeur, the controversial 1979 Romesploitation shocker Caligula, originally released towards the end of the movies’ porn-chic period. It is about the rise and fall of obscene tyrant Caligula, the Roman emperor who married his sister and ennobled his horse, extravagantly played by Malcolm McDowell. It is now rereleased in an extensively reconstructed and restored form, with a wittily designed new opening title sequence showing the animated McDowell doing the “Caligula” dance.

This is the version originally envisaged before producer Bob Guccione took over at the editing stage and tried to raunch the whole thing up for commercial purposes by adding extraneous porn footage, which infuriated the director Giovanni “Tinto” Brass – hardly, as they say, a choirboy in these matters – and screenwriter Gore Vidal. Both wanted their names taken off the credits. Had he been around today, I suspect Vidal might well have whimsically announced he still wanted his name removed; he originally told interviewers he saw Caligula as an essentially ordinary person corrupted by power and fate and said that his preferred casting in the lead would be a young Mickey Rooney in clean-cut Andy Hardy mode.

Leaving in the spurious porn might actually have added to the film’s time-capsule value. You have to imagine yourself watching it in the huge, echoingly empty Empire cinema in London’s Leicester Square in 1980 among a matinee-scattering of filth enthusiasts disappointed and irritated by its relative tameness. You might have also possibly been disappointed and irritated by its lack of subtlety compared to the far superior 70s BBC TV drama I, Claudius; this featured John Hurt as Caligula, his career shrewdly and indirectly shown via the unholy innocent and imperial successor Claudius, played by Derek Jacobi (Giancarlo Badessi plays a pretty forgettable Claudius here). In addition, leaving in the spurious porn might have let us reimagine the Guccione Caligula as conceptual art: Roman decadents haunted by prophetic indecencies yet to come.

Well, this spruced up version certainly hangs together as a kind of sub-late-Fellini dark erotic reverie, and I admit it has ambition and reach, though tinged with a cynicism and violence that Fellini would never have countenanced. There is a rather amazing execution sequence in which Caligula, positioned on a forward-moving red platform, looks on as a grotesquely circular scythe device inexorably advances to behead supposed traitors buried up to the neck. And it has to be said there is a big intentional laugh when Caligula, at a moment of crisis which needs his personal attention, snaps to an attendant: “Take my horse to his own room.”

McDowell’s extraordinary cruel-cherub face makes him a very vivid villain and he is giving it everything he has, but he is surrounded by actors who are doing the ancient-Rome equivalent of phoning it in: writing it on a scroll and handing it over. Helen Mirren is poutingly sensual as his wife Caesonia; she has an amazing “birth” scene, but she’s given nothing much to work with elsewhere. British-born Teresa Ann Savoy, a veteran of adult-themed Italian movies of the era, is self-conscious and subdued in the potentially explosive and transgressive role of Caligula’s sister Drusilla (looking back, that should have been Mirren’s role). Peter O’Toole is roisteringly over the top as Tiberius, but most weird is surely John Gielgud as Nerva, Tiberius’s sorrowing and disapproving courtier in Capri. Gielgud has an expression of infinite pain, a kind of eternal suppressed wince, perhaps of his own pain at being involved in this film.

The death of Drusilla makes for a break in the proceedings (an old-fashioned intermission in fact) and then Caligula, having mingled incognito with the despised public, returns to behave ever more bizarrely until his inevitable gruesome assassination, quite without the historical import of the first Caesar’s end. This Caligula was very much as eroticism was imagined at the time, and that monastic droning that accompanies the group-sex scenes is not unlike the ambient orgy sound in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. It all makes for something startling, amusing and bizarre.

The expression “feelgood” is usually just an indicator of cheerful and positive content, but don’t forget it also works as an imperative. As in, you better feel good about this movie or its admirers will get very cross and maybe call you names. Such may well be the case with this Mexican comedy-drama about an unorthodox schoolteacher (winningly played by Eugenio Derbez); it is a film that a certain constituency of viewers is going love so passionately that woe betide any who might suggest that it is profoundly manipulative and unabashedly sentimental.

That said, there’s no gainsaying the skills of director Christopher Zalla and the cast, which is why, by the end, Radical earns the tears of bittersweet joy it yanks out from even the grouchiest of grouches. Zalla co-wrote the script with Laura Guadalupe, working from a 2013 Wired article by journalist Joshua Davis about a real-life teacher and his students called A Radical Way of Unleashing a Generation of Geniuses.

Despite those based-on-a-true-story bona fides, the script is taut as piano wire, strings of inciting incidents strung like steel cables between concrete coincidences, ironies and tragedy. Derbez’s Sergio arrives at a failing school in border city Matamoros, Mexico, and promptly starts in with the O Captain! My Captain! Dead-Poets-style inspirationalism, inspiring his charges to think for themselves. Naturally this ruffles the feathers of the local authorities, who only care about exam results, as well as the many impoverished parents who need their offspring to finish sixth grade and then come home – in one case to help raise the younger siblings so mom can keep working in a factory and assist at the landfill site where the family earns a living from foraged scrap.

This last situation is the one that dogs serious young Paloma (Jennifer Trejo), but Sergio spots the girl has an extraordinarily beautiful young mind and a natural aptitude for maths. Will he be able to help her stay in school, along with boy-band-cute young Nico (Danilo Guardiola), a kid carrying a torch for Paloma but who is being pressured to join the local criminal gang with whom his brother now runs.

All the outcomes feel pre-ordained, right down to a climactic late arrival at the exam hall. But Zalla refrains from making the musical cues excessively weepy, and there’s enough grit and darkness around the margins to roughen things up. Meanwhile, he gets lovely, just-so performances from the kids: neither too knowing or drama-school pert, but still full of feeling, especially the copiously talented Guardiola.

J Lee Thompson is a British director who could maybe do with a bit more auteur respect: here is a double-bill rerelease of two of his early black-and-white films from the 1950s. The Weak and the Wicked (★★★★☆) is a melodrama that came out in 1954 just before his wrenching classic Yield to the Night, which featured Diana Dors on death row. It is a tough women’s prison film as well, one that quickly morphs into a social-issue sermon; it is richly flavoured, speckled with comic interludes and gloriously cast with Glynis Johns as Jean, a young society beauty and gambling addict whose dud cheque leads to an appearance in court and whose head-girl demeanour never falters in the clink. She becomes a good pal inside to brassy blond Betty Brown, played by Dors.

The movie is adapted by dramatist Anne Burnaby from the sensational autobiographical novel by the real-life upper class ex-con Joan Henry who also wrote the original source material for Yield to the Night. Henry married Thompson, helped him quit drinking and stayed with him through subsequent movies including Woman in a Dressing Gown, Ice Cold in Alex and The Guns of Navarone, until they divorced. (Startlingly, Burnaby was herself imprisoned in 1960 for stabbing a man with whom she had reportedly become obsessively infatuated.) Like the book, The Weak and the Wicked fudges the issue of Jean’s guilt by claiming that while she did bounce a cheque in a gambling club, the insurance fraud that got her arrested was an elaborate frame-up masterminded by the vengeful casino manager. It delivers the time-honoured frisson of the women’s prison film: hatchet-faced wardresses telling the new inmates to “strip”, with the scene subsequently held just long enough to let the audience think they are actually going to see something.

It also gives us some of the prisoners’ Ealing-esque backstories: blackmailers, shoplifters and one genuinely horrifying tale of a lonely woman who left her two young children alone in her flat to go dancing with a seedy gentleman admirer and returned at dawn to discover a ghastly tragedy. All these people are either weak or wicked; Jean is in her way claiming to be both or neither, and never explicitly says that the prison experience has cured her of gambling. It’s a rather buttoned-up British picture but with some gorgeous cameos from Rachel Roberts, Sybil Thorndike, Irene Handl, Sidney James, and, as Jean’s stern arresting officer, Ballard Berkeley, later to find immortality as Major Gowen in TV’s Fawlty Towers.

Thompson’s later film No Trees in the Street (★★★☆☆) from 1959 is bit less limber and more stage bound, a kitchen-sink crime thriller adapted by Dixon of Dock Green creator Ted Willis from his own play, and starring a young Melvyn Hayes as desperate teen tearaway Tommy, a mixed-up unhappy kid who gets involved in some bad business. The setting is a prewar slum in London’s East End, a place of much cockney backchat, warbling songs and screeching arias of despair, with news of Neville Chamberlain on the radio and graffiti about Oswald Mosley on the walls. It’s similar to, but more grim than the setting of Carol Reed’s A Kid for Two Farthings. Tommy lives with his gentle, beautiful sister Hetty (Sylvia Syms) and their mum (Joan Miller) in a cramped pair of rooms. Hetty and a local concerned copper Frank (Ronald Howard) are worried sick about Tommy, while the family’s cheeky mate Kipper (Stanley Holloway) is always coming round for a drink, singing and spinning tall tales about his former career in the music halls. He takes illegal street corner bets on behalf of brooding turf accountant Wilkie – played with magnificent menace by Herbert Lom – who is not-so-secretly involved in all sorts of mob crime.

Wilkie is in love with Hetty, who can see he’s no good. But will Wilkie simply wear her down with promises of the good life away from all this mess? The minute we see that poor, foolish Tommy has somehow got hold of a gun, it’s clear this is leading just one way: a colossal armed standoff with the police, led by grievingly upset Frank. In a later sequence Frank gives a huge ticking off to another kid, played by a young David Hemmings, who lives with his mum in the postwar high-rises that replaced the nasty slum and which, for all their faults, were a big improvement; they have trees in the street. It’s staged with robust panache, but under a proscenium arch.