Friday reviews: 10 November 2023

The Marvels, EO, Headspace and Fingernails are in cinemas, Nyad is on Netflix. Fingernails is also on AppleTV+.

The best film I saw in a cinema this week was made in 1991. Last night’s fun­drais­ing screen­ing of Thelma & Louise at the Light House Cuba had all of us com­ing out nod­ding and say­ing, “yup, still holds up.”

To para­phrase a remark from Bob Dylan about music, the ques­tion “Why do you talk about old films so much?” can always be answered with “Because there are more good old films than there are good new films.” Novelty has its place, and I love that there is new stuff to talk about each week, but nev­er to the exclu­sion of past greats.

But, back to the present and the latest attempt by Marvel to stop stum­bling and get the MCU train back on the tracks.

It’s inter­est­ing to read oth­er reviews and to see responses split largely along gender lines. There seems to be an assump­tion in some parts that a female-led super­hero pic­ture will inher­ently be less inter­est­ing but that really isn’t the case here.

The strengths of The Marvels is in the rela­tion­ship and rap­port between the three ‘mar­vels’ that give the film its title: the ori­gin­al Captain Marvel (Brie Larsen), the most power­ful being in the uni­verse but essen­tially exiled to sort shit out in the out­er reaches of the galaxy; Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), grown-up daugh­ter of Captain Marvel’s best friend; and Kamala Khan (aka Ms. Marvel played with pizza­zz by Iman Vellani), fresh from the Disney+ series of the same name.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

The colo­ni­al Kree – the race that was so determ­ined to wipe out the peace­ful Skrulls all those films ago – has des­cen­ded into envir­on­ment­al dis­aster and a civil­isa­tion endan­ger­ing civil war. They blame this on Captain Marvel for des­troy­ing their AI lead­er­ship in a pre­vi­ous film and she’s now known to them as “The Annihilator”.

In order to save their home­world, the new Kree lead­er (a very good Zawe Ashton) has come up with a plot that will steal all of the things that their plan­et needs to sur­vive – atmo­sphere, oceans and sun­light. It’s a race against time for these three unlikely team­mates to save the places and the people they love.

For all its com­plic­ated ties to oth­er titles that you may or may not have seen or care about, I found very little of The Marvels to be dis­agree­able – the oppos­ite, in fact – largely because the run­ning time doesn’t suc­cumb to the bloat of oth­er films in the fran­chise and because there’s some delight­fully daffy moments that made me – at least – laugh out loud.

The pace does mean that there are moments that are not dwelt on when they pos­sibly should.

After a sequence where the Kree attack what is basic­ally a Skrull refugee camp – they are giv­en an ulti­mat­um to leave or face destruc­tion – and a vast num­ber of Skrulls have to be left behind to face their inev­it­able doom, the speed and ease with which every­one just gets over it and back to their banter leaves a sour taste.

Maybe it’s the unfor­tu­nate par­al­lels with this par­tic­u­lar moment in our his­tory, but the Marvel universe’s atti­tude to mass – let’s call it what it is – gen­o­cide is cal­lous. If your char­ac­ter doesn’t have a name, or any lines of dia­logue, you remain expend­able – in your thou­sands or your mil­lions. You will be mourned by the prin­cipals for about five minutes before they go back to their own per­son­al concerns.

Another film with strong female rela­tion­ships at its core is the bril­liant new Netflix pic­ture Nyad.

Annette Bening plays the real-life sports­wo­man Diana Nyad who made her name in the 70s as a long dis­tance ocean swim­mer. Despite many extraordin­ary ath­let­ic achieve­ments the fail­ure to swim from Cuba to Florida in 1978 haunted her and at the age of 60 she decides to recom­mence train­ing for a swim that every­one around her con­siders to be impossible.

She enlists – press-gangs might be a bet­ter word – her best friend Bonnie (Jodie Foster) to be her coach and ‘gofer’ and it is the rela­tion­ship between them that gives the film its core and most of its many pleasures.

One of the straight-up most sat­is­fy­ing films of the year, my only quibble is that it really deserved a soar­ing Vangelis-type score, rather than the chord-by-numbers nood­ling of Alexandre Desplat. It’s a per­fectly pleas­ant arrange­ment of notes but this film deserves a THEME. Something that would get you on your feet (even if it also means get­ting you off your couch).

One of the very best films out of this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival is return­ing to cinemas. EO is a stun­ning return to form for Jerzy Skolimowski who will be well known to cinephiles for The Shout in the 70s and Moonlighting in the 80s.

I dir­ect you to the review I wrote dur­ing NZIFF:

This was an abso­lute gut punch of a movie, as power­ful a con­clu­sion as I have seen in recent years. But like the pro­ver­bi­al iron fist inside a vel­vet glove, it’s also one of the most beau­ti­ful and ele­gi­ac­al films I have seen in the same period.

It’s a film in which a humble don­key becomes the way we see mod­ern Europe, our exploit­at­ive rela­tion­ship with anim­als, and the hypo­crisy of humanity’s so-called love of nature.

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It’s a road movie of a sort, and we fol­low the don­key EO (played by six dif­fer­ent don­keys, in fact) from a Polish cir­cus to … well, no, I can’t tell you where we end up but I can say that we meet sev­er­al char­ac­ters whose eco­nom­ic or polit­ic­al des­per­a­tion causes them to mis­treat the non-human char­ac­ters around them

Inspired by Bresson’s 1966 clas­sic Au Hasard Balthazar, EO in fact stands as a mas­ter­piece in its own right. Polish writer-director Jerzy Skolimowski is a vet­er­an who was mak­ing his early films at the time that Bresson’s film came out and EO is the best of his illus­tri­ous career.

My first film from this year’s NZIFF cata­logue, I came out think­ing that noth­ing I could watch after­wards could top it. We shall see.

Headspace is a curi­os­ity. An anim­ated fam­ily fea­ture made in South Africa and fea­tur­ing a South African voice cast, it is set – for sens­ible com­mer­cial reas­ons – in gen­er­ic small-town USA in a gen­er­ic American high school.

Sadly, that’s not the only thing about it that’s generic.

A galactic peace­keep­ing star­ship is dam­aged in a fight with the evil Zolthard (Zak Hendrikz) and his robot min­ions. Forced to Earth for repairs they dis­cov­er that they are, in fact, almost micro­scop­ic by our stand­ards and can hide out inside the brain of day­dream­er stu­dent Norman (Bonko Khoza) and can talk to him and con­trol his actions.

When Zolthard fol­lows in order to fin­ish them off, he takes over the brain of the high school prin­cip­al, and zom­bi­fies some of the staff.

The anim­a­tion is about as good as the first Toy Story from 1995, which is prob­ably enough to sup­port the clichéd story and characters.

Another entry in Apple’s stream­ing fas­cin­a­tion with tech­no­logy and its impact on our lives – I really should write some­thing longer about this – Fingernails is also in the off-kilter Greek film­mak­ing tra­di­tion known as the “Greek weird wave”. Filmmakers like Jorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster), Athina Tsangari (Attenberg), Elina Psykou (The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas) and oth­ers, seem to delight in subtly sub­vert­ing the rules of reality.

The first chal­lenge in Christos Nikou’s Fingernails is to work out when the film is tak­ing place. It appears to be a par­al­lel 1980s New York where a new tech­no­logy has been inven­ted that can tell the part­ners in a couple wheth­er they are really in love with each other.

The res­ults of the test are simple: zero per­cent, fifty per­cent or one hun­dred per­cent. The prob­lem is, if the answer is fifty per­cent you don’t know which part­ner has ‘failed’ the test.

Actually, argu­ably a big­ger prob­lem is that the test requires the remov­al and destruc­tion of one of your fin­ger­nails, hence the title.

Trust in love has dipped dele­ter­i­ously across all of soci­ety and the test is sup­posed to give couples con­fid­ence to part­ner with each oth­er. Except that the fail­ure rate for the test is very high giv­ing rise to ‘love academies’ where couples are coached by experts at how to be ‘in love’ suc­cess­fully – or suc­cess­fully enough to pass the test and become certified.

Jessie Buckley plays Anna, an ele­ment­ary school teach­er who takes a job at one of these academies. Successfully cer­ti­fied with her part­ner Ryan (The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White) she imme­di­ately sug­gests the flaw in this whole sche­mozzle by lying to him about where she is working.

Worse, she starts to have feel­ings for her co-worker Amir (Riz Ahmed) but the test is infal­lible. Or is it?

Fingernails could drive you mad with its logic­al imper­fec­tions or delight you by dram­at­ising one of those aspects of being human that we are all pain­fully aware of but rarely talk about – that even when we are in love we can nev­er know everything about the per­son we are in love with. And what we risk when we make that matter.