Friday new releases: 1 December 2023

The Old Oak, Godzilla Minus One and Trolls Band Together are in cinemas and The Velveteen Rabbit is streaming on AppleTV+

It has been a good year to be an 80+-year-old film director.

Martin Scorsese (81) picked up a New York Film Critics’ Circle Best Picture award for Killers of the Flower Moon overnight, an import­ant pre­curs­or for this summer’s awards season.

86-year-old Ridley Scott has an epic his­tor­ic­al drama in cinemas and the crit­ic­al con­sensus is that his director’s cut will be a marked improve­ment on the ver­sion that’s avail­able right now.

Images were even released last month of a smil­ing 93-year-old Clint Eastwood back behind a cam­era, the new film stars Toni Collette and Nicholas Hoult and is a leg­al drama called Juror No.2.

And then there’s 87-year-old Ken Loach. I’ve lost count of the num­ber of films of his that have crossed my path with the warn­ing that “this is going be his last one” but here we are once again with a film that eas­ily ranks with the very best of his work.

The Old Oak is a shabby and run­down pub in a former min­ing vil­lage in the North East of England. It’s the only com­munity facil­ity left but as the town is slowly drained of oppor­tun­it­ies, it too seems destined for the his­tory books. The pub­lic­an, T.J. Ballantyne (Dave Turner) is a decent enough bloke but also fun­da­ment­ally broken, like his pub.

Many of the empty houses in the com­munity are being sold for a song to absent­ee land­lords, redu­cing the prop­erty val­ues for the loc­als, and oth­ers are being made avail­able to resettled refugees.

When a coach load of Syrian sur­viv­ors of civil war arrive T.J. is one of the few to make them feel wel­come. But, as Margaret Thatcher knew all too well, sew­ing seeds of dis­con­tent among the dis­pos­sessed is the best way to ensure they don’t come after the power­ful and oth­ers in the com­munity think that the state should be doing some­thing for them before offer­ing a help­ing hand to strangers.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Beautifully mod­u­lated at all times, The Old Oak is one of my favour­ite films of the year. Loach dir­ects these char­ac­ters with respect – unob­trus­ively, in fact. There are barely any close-ups, noth­ing emo­tion­ally exploit­at­ive, but des­pite that I was still cry­ing so hard I could barely make any notes.

It’s a film that acknow­ledges that we are all but specks in the great scheme of things, but that we still have a choice about wheth­er we make things a tiny bit bet­ter for oth­ers or a tiny bit worse. Or pos­sibly a lot worse.

Despite budgets that barely scratch the sur­face of their Hollywood coun­ter­parts, Japan still pro­duces the best mon­ster movies around.

I don’t know what it says about a nation that has exper­i­enced some of the greatest phys­ic­al dis­asters to still want to see that level of carnage recre­ated on screen. Is it heal­ing? I sup­pose it must be.

The latest Godzilla film – the 33^rd – from the famed Toho stu­dio is Godzilla Minus One and, like its pre­de­cessors, this Godzilla is a giant fire-breathing scaly metaphor.

As WWII draws to a close, kami­kaze pilot Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is saved from going on a sui­cide bomb­ing run by the arrival on the small pacific island on which he is sta­tioned of a giant hacked-off liz­ard. Back in Japan, he is wracked with sur­viv­or guilt but man­ages to rebuild his life with a young woman and a baby girl, both of whom had lost everything in the bomb­ing of Tokyo.

The 1946 U.S. nuc­le­ar tests at Bikini Atoll wake the mon­ster up once again and Godzilla des­troys much of the pre­vi­ously untouched Ginza dis­trict. To pro­tect the people of Japan from a future attack, all aspects of soci­ety must join forces to find a tech­no­lo­gic­al – and engin­eer­ing – solu­tion to the Godzilla prob­lem. Maybe this will also provide an oppor­tun­ity for Koichi to dis­cov­er some kind of redemp­tion, a redemp­tion that he prob­ably does not even need.

While there is the usu­al amount of invent­ive destruc­tion on offer, Godzilla Minus One is also a prop­er film about guilt, loss, heart­break and how to nav­ig­ate those things inside a Japanese soci­ety which finds it hard to talk about them.

The recre­ation of 1940s Tokyo is simply spec­tac­u­lar – you know you are watch­ing a massive amount of CGI (because you simply must be) but it’s impossible to see the seams. 

Somewhere there is a pro­duc­tion line spew­ing out little plastic ‘good luck troll’ toys but I doubt it moves quite as fast as the Trolls movie-making fran­chise, the third of which lands in cinemas this weekend.

Most of the cast from the pre­vi­ous 2016 and 2020 films return for Trolls Band Together apart from Russell Brand, James Corden, Jeffrey Tambor and John Cleese. I won­der what could pos­sibly con­nect those performers?

Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake are back as the two leads, Poppy and Branch. At the begin­ning of this film we learn that Branch was once in a suc­cess­ful boy band with his four broth­ers. A fall­ing out dur­ing his debut con­cert saw them split up and not talk to each oth­er for years.

When they dis­cov­er that broth­er Floyd has been kid­napped by a nefar­i­ous broth­er and sis­ter who are steal­ing his tal­ent in order to build a suc­cess­ful career for them­selves, the oth­er broth­ers – and Poppy of course – real­ise that the body way to save the day is to, you guessed it, get the band back together.

I couldn’t quite work out who this was aimed at. If you were a young kid when the first one came out, you are in your mid-to-late teens now. The music choices are all cov­ers of music that would have appealed to those kids’ par­ents: Sweet Dreams, Night Fever, The Hustle. And then, the whole boy band nos­tal­gia – includ­ing an *NSYNC reunion – is for the gen­er­a­tion in between.

Maybe that’s the point? There’s some­thing recycled – and auto­t­uned – here for everyone.

Much more whole­some – at least there’s no obvi­ous plastic toy tie-in here – is the new adapt­a­tion of Margery Williams beloved 1922 children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit on AppleTV+.

The book has been adap­ted many times over the years – by Leonard S. Herman in 1973, HBO, Hanna-Barbera, Rankin/Bass, a dodgy out­fit called Features for Families and an audio ver­sion nar­rated by Meryl Streep, which just goes to show that the bones of the story are as strong as its heart.

William (Phoenix Laroche) is mov­ing with his fam­ily to a new house which also means a new school. He misses his old class­mates and the teach­er who was very fond of him and he finds it hard to fit in to this new situation.

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That Christmas, his par­ents give him a (to mod­ern eyes) a simple plushy toy rab­bit but that rel­at­ive sim­pli­city allows William to imprint his ima­gin­a­tion on it and Rabbit rap­idly becomes his favourite.

With the help of sev­er­al dif­fer­ent anim­a­tion tech­niques – stop motion, hand-drawn, CGI, etc. – the inner lives of this ador­able pair are brought to life and when the rela­tion­ship is threatened there’s some real trep­id­a­tion there for an audience.

Shot through with the kind of good taste that AppleTV+ has become known for, The Velveteen Rabbit is an exceed­ingly man­age­able 44 minutes in length and a very pleas­ant way to ease your­self – and your fam­ily – gently into the Christmas season.

Missing this week

Due to a com­bin­a­tion of per­son­al com­mit­ments and impossible to wrangle ses­sion times, the music­al nativ­ity Journey to Bethlehem and the French com­edy adven­ture Jack Mimoun & the Secrets of Val Verde weren’t screened in time for this newsletter.