El Conde is on Netflix, Till is on Prime Video and It Lives Inside, PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie and Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken are in cinemas.
The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet took power following a CIA-endorsed coup in 1973, and ruled until internal and international pressure in the late-80s forced him to make concessions toward democracy, eventually leading to his downfall.
Writer-director Pablo Larraín has traversed this territory before, notably with NO, a film about the 1988 referendum that opened the way for change in Chile. Now he turns his formidable skills towards Pinochet himself, but not in a traditional biography. El Conde is something much more interesting.
Imagine if Pinochet was not just an authoritarian leader of a brutal military junta but also a 250-year-old French vampire, keeping himself alive with hunting trips into Santiago and refrigerated human hearts.
El Conde is a wonderfully weird blend of political satire and gothic horror, narrated by Pinochet’s great friend Margaret Thatcher (Stella Gonet) and featuring a supporting cast of grifters and enablers.
Edward Lachman’s black and white cinematography is a stand-out and I really appreciated the channeling of justifiable rage at the damage done to Chile by this awful human being into something so singular. And funny.
In the summer of 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till took the train from Chicago to Mississippi to spend the holiday with his cousins. The confident and likeable young boy – not realising how seriously he needed to take his mother’s warnings – makes a friendly comment to a white woman shopkeeper and as a result is murdered and dumped in the Tallahatchie River.
Lynchings are not only hangings. The monstrous kidnapping, beating and then close range execution of Emmett Till was a lynching – a brutal reaction to the campaign for voter registration in the South and an expression of pure hatred for black people.
Chinonwe Chukwu’s Till, the film, deals with the lynching but spends more time with the aftermath – who was left behind and what could be built from what remained. Danielle Deadwyler plays Mamie, Till’s mother, unwillingly brought in to the Civil Rights movement by a desire for justice for her son. The film stays pretty close to facts of the case and we can see that Mamie was a remarkable woman at a dangerous time.
There’s one scene, relatively early on, that didn’t work for me and I was concerned that the film was going off the rails, but Deadwyler and Chukwu haul it back and the rest is quiet, steady, seething rage at the monstrous injustice.
It Lives Inside and Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken are surprisingly similar in lots of ways. Both are faithful genre pictures with a fresh context, both are set in high schools and about teenage girls keeping secrets about their bodies, both are also about the contest between the safety of assimilating into a dominant culture and the eventual power of leaning into your own.
In Bishal Dutta’s It Lives Inside, Megan Suri plays Indian migrant high schooler Sam, trying to be as American as possible while her parents demand her attendance at important Hindu festivals and community events.
Her former best friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan) has gone full goth with the black clothes, sunken eyes and a glass jar full of something mysterious and dark as a constant companion. When the jar is accidentally smashed an ancient Hindu demon known as a Pisach escapes and starts terrorising Sam and her friends.
Not as gory as many recent films of this ilk, there are the usual jump scares but also a lack of the nastiness that often infects modern horror. It’s not gratuitous.
The Dreamworks animation, Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken, may be the most misguided big budget family film of recent years.
As the title suggests, Ruby (Lana Condor) is a nerdy math-lete teenager trying to navigate high school with over-protective parents who refuse to let her attend Prom. This is because Prom is on a boat in the harbour and Ruby is not allowed on the ocean – despite living in picturesque Oceanside – because if she gets wet she will reveal to the world that she is, in fact, a kraken. This will involve her growing to 50 metres high, sprouting extra limbs and tentacles and glowing bright purple.
In this film, krakens aren’t the dangerous undersea monsters we have been led to believe – they are defenders of the ocean and it is the mermaids we have to look out for.
There is some nice stuff going on but the whole premise requires so much effort to sustain that I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie is my first exposure to this highly profitable Canadian franchise and my first thought is that Gerry Anderson and the Thunderbirds should be suing their asses off. It’s basically International Rescue with puppies instead of clean cut all-American boys.
“Mad scientist” (Taraji P. Henson) attracts a meteor to Adventure City which destroys the patrol’s HQ but the crystals inside give the doggos super powers.
The 60-second ad for a $250 plastic PAW Patrol aircraft carrier before the film starts gives you an idea of why this film even exists.
El Conde is streaming on Netflix, following buzz at the Venice and Telluride film festivals.
Till is streaming on Prime Video, following buzz from the New York and London film festivals.
It Lives Inside, Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken and PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie are all in cinemas.
