Category: cinema

Film-makers Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy have a restless creativity and alertness to ideas which continues to be uniquely valuable. Now they have made a vivid, intense, true-crime drama about the inner life of the late Rose Dugdale, the wealthy English heiress and debutante who was radicalised at Oxford, joined the IRA and in the early 70s was involved in an art theft from a stately home in the Irish republic – and also helped drop homemade bombs from a stolen helicopter on to a police station.

Baltimore should really be seen in tandem with Lawlor and Molloy’s recent personal essay film The Future Tense about the film-makers’ own complex sense of evolving identities in Ireland and England, inspired by their own experiences making this Dugdale movie. With great intelligence and care, they make the most of a mid-range budget; a bigger Hollywood biopic would undoubtedly have given us Rose’s debutante ball at Buckingham Palace and the later bizarre helicopter attack as two big set pieces (perhaps with two star names in cameo for the royals in the ball scene). Instead, Lawlor and Molloy stage something that is smart and supple and more intimate: the heist scene with three other IRA men, with its chaotic and paranoid aftermath, intercut with moments from her own girlhood, presented as memories or fragments, equivalent in dramatic value to Rose’s nightmares and her terrified sense of what she still might have to do.

Imogen Poots is excellent as Dugdale, seen almost throughout in searching closeup, wondering whether she has it in her to execute a possible witness in cold blood. Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Lewis Brophy and Jack Meade are strong as her conspirators and Dermot Crowley is outstanding as Donal, a gentle innocent bystander with fading eyesight, reading To Kill a Mockingbird in braille in his cottage as he receives a disturbing visit from Dugdale. An entirely absorbing, coolly low-key movie.

A frazzled widowed mother, Saori (Sakura Andô), suspects that all is not well with her preteen son, Minato (Soya Kurokawa). The boy seems subdued and withdrawn; she catches him hacking inches from his mop of hair. He asks odd, troubling questions: if the brain of a pig was transplanted into a human, what would the resulting creature be, human or pig? Or some kind of monster? And then there are the injuries – an ear yanked so brutally that it bleeds; a livid facial bruise. Saori soon deduces that her son’s new teacher, Michitoshi Hori (Eita Nagayama), at his provincial Japanese elementary school, is responsible for her son’s brooding disquiet. She confronts the school principal (a confounding reflecting prism of a performance from veteran actor Yūko Tanaka), but is frustrated by the school’s response: a suffocating blanket of meaningless apologies designed to stifle her complaints. Saori is understandably angry: her son, after all, is the victim of a cruel teacher.

Or is he? The latest film from Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters), and the first since 1995’s Maborosi that he didn’t also write or co-write (the screenplay is by Yūji Sakamoto), rewinds to the beginning of the story – a burning building is a marker point – and replays key scenes, fleshing out the tale, this time from the perspective of the well-meaning teacher. Hori feels, perhaps fairly, that he is being thrown to the wolves by the school authorities (“What actually happened does not matter,” says the chillingly dispassionate headteacher). His view of the classroom dynamic is that Minato is a bully who has systematically targeted a smaller, weirder child, Yori (Hinata Hiiragi), the social outcast of his class.

But then we rewind again, and the story plays out from the point of view of the two boys, showing the fragile new growth of a tentative friendship and the beginning of an understanding of deeper feelings for each other. The kind of feelings that Yori’s drunken, boorish father already suspects in his sensitive son, and is prepared to beat out of him.

It’s a difficult thing to pull off without it feeling a little disingenuous. This structure – the Rashomon technique of offering different perspectives on a single story, with each new angle subtly shifting the audience’s view – is by its nature manipulative. It only works when we, the viewers, accept that the film-maker is deliberately misleading us through selective omission and unreliable witness accounts; when we agree to be led astray and then guided toward some kind of truth and resolution.

Monster is an interesting case. Aided by a delicate, crystalline score by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kore-eda deftly carries us through the shifting perspectives of the story with an ease born of extensive practice – the director of films such as Broker and Our Little Sister is no stranger to elegantly handled emotional manipulation, after all. There are a few too many red herrings, and some nagging questions. Why, for example, if the teacher suspected that Yori was being bullied by Minato, did he somehow fail to notice the campaign of terror being run by the other little shits in the class?

But when it comes to the payoff, that satisfying clincher that ties everything together, we are confronted with not one but two starkly contrasting readings of the ultimate “truth” at the end, one optimistic of a new start, the other involving the deaths of several characters. After the first viewing I veered emphatically towards the bleaker option. A rewatch opened up the possibility that the more hopeful take was the correct one. For what it’s worth, Kore-eda said after the film’s Cannes premiere that the cast and crew opted for the positive reading of events, but he conceded that the tragic interpretation was equally valid.

Does it matter that there is such ambiguity about the film’s ending? Perhaps not as much as you might expect, although there’s a sense that Monster pulls its punches throughout, forever stopping short of making a bold statement. The decision to focus on the relationship between pre-adolescents rather than older children is a key example – the film hints at questions of sexuality but neatly sidesteps actual sex. Ultimately, the question of what actually happened is just another red herring. The real point of the film is its heartfelt, if slightly trite, message: that it’s the wider world that needs to adapt and accept the differences of children like Minato and Yori, rather than the other way around.

Gary Oldman as Cary Grant, J-Lo doing the tango … British film-maker Peter Chelsom, director of Funny Bones, Shall We Dance and Serendipity, captures his actors in a different light

• Dream Role, an exhibition of photographs by Peter Chelsom, is at Fortino, Forte dei Marmi, Italy from 22 June to 14 July

Here’s a documentary following the Glaswegian standup comic Janey Godley on her Not Dead Yet Tour; in 2022, Godley was diagnosed with stage 3 ovarian cancer, and she does the first gig in Inverness a day after chemotherapy. And God, is she funny, with jokes running the gamut from the disgraced peer Michelle Mone living in a static caravan to cancer. Her daughter, Ashley Storrie, also hilarious, does the warm up.

The title of the film is just Janey; no surname necessary – not in Scotland anyway, where Godley has a special place in people’s hearts. During Covid her voiceovers of first minister Nicola Sturgeon’s press conferences went viral (I remember watching one feeling almost guilty for laughing so hard). Before that, in 2018, she hit the headlines protesting outside Donald Trump’s golf course with a “Trump is Cunt” placard. Fans will not be surprised to learn the film has an 18 certificate for “very strong language”.

Godley grew up in the East End of Glasgow in the 60s, covered in “nits and fleas” and left school with no qualifications. In 1982, when she was 21, her mum drowned in the Clyde; murdered, the family believes, by her violent partner. By then, Godley was already married and running a pub – what she didn’t know was her husband’s family ran a gang. In her routine, she tells the stories, hilarious and heartfelt, never sentimental. As an adult she reported her uncle to police for sexually abusing her when she was a child; he was convicted.

Director John Archer takes us behind the scenes of the tour. Godley talks about being cancelled after offensive tweets she wrote in 2010 came to light. She discusses dying with daughter Ashley and her friend Shirley, who is on tour and brings the cheese sandwiches to chemo. Even in a hospital bed hooked up to drips, Godley is laugh a minute. She had a dream about David Cameron last night she tells the nurse and Shirley. “I’d rather be dreaming about an Alsatian dog shagging me, to be honest.”

What is in each of your pockets right now?

Some poop bags. Because I took my dogs out earlier. And they weren’t as productive as I had hoped. So there’s still two poop bags in here.

What are your dogs’ nicknames?

I have two that I share with my ex-wife. They get two homes and two parents and they’re very modern dogs. Frankie and Freya. Frankie gets called a lot of things – Frizzy, Fizzle, Dankles, Danky, Griswold, Skip. I won’t get into the origins of all of these. Freya mostly gets called Frey Liottie after Ray Liotta.

I’ll say their nickname and their ears go back a little bit.

What animal do you most relate to and why?

Growing up I had this book called For The Love of Monkeys. And I took it everywhere with me. I loved monkeys and I always wanted one. But when I was in India one time, they didn’t have a lot of safety measures at the zoo. I walked up to a cage and I was like: it’s a snow monkey, I know that from my book! I put my hand in to shake its hand. It grabbed my hand and started pulling me in. It opened its jaw; it was like something out of Alien. I saw the sharpest teeth.

From that day, I decided I probably didn’t want a monkey any more.

What’s the weirdest thing that’s happened to you on stage?

This is classic Australia – I’m gonna say it was somewhere on the Sunshine Coast. A possum dropped out of the ceiling on to the stage and just ran off. I love those guys; I was more concerned for the possum than anything, because it was quite a drop. But he seemed like he was OK.

Would you rather die at the bottom of the ocean or up in space?

Probably up in space, because at least I’d get some good views on the way out.

If you had to be a contestant on a reality TV show tomorrow, which one would it be?

I wouldn’t mind doing one where you have to survive in nature, where you’re actually just on your own and you have to figure out how to find food and shelter.

Like Naked and Afraid. Although I’m not super comfortable with nudity. So I might do Partially Clothed and Afraid. Or Board Shorts and Afraid. Or Board Shorts and T-shirt and Afraid, actually. It depends how many sit-ups I do before we start shooting.

What do you think is the ideal length of men’s shorts?

I like the knees covered. I don’t want to see men’s knees. I don’t want people to see my knees. But the style now is above the knee. So when I want shorts, I have to buy pants and then modify them myself. And I do! And I will keep doing it until the fashion industry catches up with my decree.

What’s the most memorable first date you’ve been on?

One time I had a crush on this girl in high school. And somehow she agreed to go watch the Pink Floyd laser show at the planetarium. And I was so excited. We were gonna go out to dinner first, so I was like, here’s my chance.

When I got to her house she said, “Oh, can we just go to the early show? Because I have something to do.” And I said, “Sure – but what about dinner?” And she handed me a piece of cold chicken in a Tupperware thing. I was literally eating the chicken while driving my parents’ station wagon. It was pretty brutal. It was nice of her to offer something, I guess.

What is the most recent book you’ve loved?

The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman. I can’t understand a lot of it because he goes into such lofty discussions about evolution theory. But the general idea is that consciousness is primary, and what we call the physical world is a product of consciousness, not the other way around. A lot of science advocates the materialist view that everything’s built from atoms. But spiritual traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism – they’re more like, everything is a dream. The world is a dream.

Mainstream science wants us to believe that atoms come together and form in such a way that suddenly we’re having a conscious experience. Yet, with all our technology, we have no clue how the brain creates conscious experience – the ability to take a sip of coffee and experience that, or look at someone on a Zoom. That’s inexplicable. And Hoffman says they’re looking in the wrong place. You’re not going to get it out of the brain because the consciousness is creating the brain, not the other way around.

I find it awesome. The world is quite bleak when you have a materialist outlook. You just think this is all there is and I’m going to die and then there’s nothing. But one of my best friends passed away. I can’t just think, oh, he’s gone, and that’s it. I like to think that death is an illusion. Time is an illusion. Space is an illusion. I love all that stuff.

Your upcoming film is called The Nut Farm. Do you have a least favourite nut?

Almonds. I like the way they taste, but the little shards get caught in my throat if I eat dry almonds. I once tried to make a joke like: why does the mafia bump people off when they don’t want them to talk? They should just give them some almonds, because you can’t talk after eating them. But the joke never worked. Like many jokes.

• Arj Barker stars in The Nut Farm, out in Australian cinemas 14 March. He is touring his new standup show The Mind Field all around Australia starting 22 March, including Melbourne international comedy festival dates 28 March to 21 April

It’s yet another sub-par day at the Blumhouse factory, production line operating at full, breakneck speed, yet machinery on the perilous verge of total collapse. The house of horror, behind hit franchises like Insidious, Paranormal Activity and The Purge, has become something of a franchise in itself, a branded string of low-budget films making a high profit, yet quality control has forever been an issue and in the last year or so, it’s barely existed.

On the first cursed weekend of January 2023, usually home to the most unintentionally horrifying horror films, M3gan upended critical expectations and scored reviews as impressive as its box office total. But normality soon resumed with a limp Insidious sequel, a junky time travel slasher, a loathed Exorcist reboot, an astonishingly dull video game adaptation and, most recently, a soggy haunted pool horror. Yet somehow, the very worst was yet to come and now here it is, crash-landing into cinemas with an embargo so late, some preview audiences will have already started watching it. Imaginary, teased by an audio-first, cinema-only trailer far smarter than the movie itself, is a shameless grab bag of stolen parts clumsily stitched together with such carelessness, it’s a miracle it’s even getting a theatrical release. The bar might have fallen to its lowest ever point for studio horror but it’s still a surprise to see just how bad things can really get.

I was kinder than most about writer-director Jeff Wadlow’s first Blumhouse offering, the gimmicky yet fun franchise non-starter Truth or Dare which worked just about enough in a low stakes kinda way, a Final Destination rip-off for the sleepover crowd. His follow-up Fantasy Island was a disordered mess, trying and failing to do far too much and there’s a similar level of unearned confidence on display in his latest, world-building done with an unsteady hand and an unfocused mind.

Things start off in familiar genre territory as a woman named Jessica (played by DeWanda Wise) returns to her childhood home with new family in tow, husband Max (British actor Tom Payne) and his two children from a former marriage. Both Jessica and Max have some sort of trauma in their past – her absent father, his mentally unwell ex-wife – and both are hoping that a new start will help them heal. But when youngest daughter Alice (Pyper Braun) finds an old teddy bear and claims it as her new imaginary friend Chauncey, their dream home becomes a nightmare.

While red flags start to fly pretty early on – some bad acting, some even worse dialogue – the build-up is at the very least competent, if entirely derivative, recalling the 2005 Robert De Niro thriller Hide and Seek as well as Poltergeist and M3gan, a child falling into dangerous fantasy dragged deeper by a nefarious presence. But like so many horror films these days, it’s a logline scrawled on a napkin rather than a fully-formed and fully thought-out script and so when the plot inevitably thickens, the cracks turn into chasms and a two-star time-waster descends into a one-star catastrophe.

Along with the year’s other Blumhouse misstep Night Swim, Imaginary feels like the sort of bottom-shelf shocker that would have littered video stores decades ago, modernised only by its almost parodic obsession with trauma, the word that has ruined many a horror film of late. The last act, as drip-drip creepiness turns into flash flood chaos, is a laughably incoherent string of question marks – how did they, how could she, what was that – which plays out as if it were being made up on the spot, sloppy enough for a refund, Wadlow and his co-writers Greg Erb and Jason Oremland in need of a stern sense-checker. There’s such lumbering gracelessness to how rules are introduced – characters stumbling over nonsensical realisations and reveals – and such shamelessness to how other, better films and shows are copied. There are too many to list but you can feel elements of It, Beetlejuice, Housebound, Come Play, Stranger Things and most obviously Coraline with a visual trick so brazenly similar, legal action should follow.

Wise can be a charming presence elsewhere but there’s only so much that can be done with the suffocatingly soapy dialogue she’s lumped with and she quickly gets lost in the murk surrounding her. Even the promise of Betty Buckley playing a mysterious neighbour frantically ranting about demonic mythology isn’t as much fun as it should have been.

Wadlow has spoken of his desire to make a four-quadrant horror intended for a broader audience, the likes of which audiences saw more of in the 1980s, operating like a roller coaster that’s exciting in the moment but unlikely to leave a mark. It’s an admirable mission statement and given how self-serious so many horror films can now be, aiming for more fun is no bad thing but Imaginary is far too dumb and ungainly to move at the pace required and bring the thrills it should, a theme park ride that should be closed for repairs.