Friday new releases: 15 December 2023

Wonka, Silent Night & Dicks: The Musical are in cinemas, Leave the World Behind is on Netflix

Apology for the service outage

Due to an error, yesterday’s recom­mend­a­tion update was not sched­uled when the edit­or­i­al staff* had assumed that it had been. I was in a screen­ing at the time and didn’t notice and by the time I did, it was too late to do any­thing about it. Yesterday’s “Something to watch tonight” update will be delivered on a later date. By way of mak­ing good, today’s edi­tion is free for all.

From a dis­tance, the exist­ence of an ori­gin story for the fam­ous magic­al con­fec­tion­er Willy Wonka – pre­vi­ously essayed on screen by an unfor­get­table Gene Wilder and a totally for­get­table Johnny Depp – sounds like the kind of naked franchise-loving, IP-exploiting cash grab that stu­dio bean coun­ters just love.

It’s thanks, then, to writer-director Paul King (and screen­play col­lab­or­at­or Simon Farnaby) that Wonka tran­scends whatever lim­ited expect­a­tions the suits might have had and is genu­inely good-hearted whole­some hol­i­day entertainment.

King, as we know from two out­stand­ing and beloved Paddington films, knows how to delight an audi­ence, which – who knew – should also please the account­ing depart­ment of Village Roadshow, Heyday and Warner Bros.

Timothée Chalamet is the young Willy, an orphan with all the nar­rat­ive bag­gage that brings, fresh from sev­en years trav­el­ling the world on a rusty steam­ship, determ­ined to make his for­tune as a chocol­ati­er. Arriving in an unnamed European city – we thought it was a mix of Paris, Vienna, Edinburgh, Oxford, and Lyme Regis – he soon dis­cov­ers that break­ing in to the biz is not just a mat­ter of tal­ent. Capitalist car­tel beha­viour means that the Galeries Gourmet is a closed shop.

Worse, he fool­ishly signs a con­tract in exchange for a night’s lodging that bonds him to the town laun­dry – run by Dickensian Olivia Colman – for thirty years. Only his candy innov­a­tions, his new found friends in the laun­dry, and an irrit­able little orange man (Hugh Grant) can save him.

I remain largely immune to the charms of Monsieur Chalamet but, off the top of my head, can’t think of any­one bet­ter. The pro­duc­tion design is out­stand­ing – witty and detailed – and the new songs from The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon are excel­lent, even if they don’t yet send a shiver down your spine like Bricusse and Newley’s “Pure Imagination” (from the 1971 Wilder film) which haunts the film until it gets a per­fect run out near the end.

Yes, Wonka is a music­al and it’s not one of those new-fangled hip-hop or juke­box music­als either. This one has the West End and Broadway – and your loc­al music­al theatre soci­ety – in its DNA. Oliver!, Annie, Sweeney Todd (and pos­sibly even Schmigadoon!) are all touch­stones. It also man­ages to retain its neces­sary Dahl-ishness which could eas­ily have been watered down.

My only real qualm is that Wonka fails to bridge the char­ac­ter gap between the open-hearted Willy, who believes in his mother’s mes­sage that “who you share it with” is more import­ant than the chocol­ate itself, to the reclus­ive, cyn­ic­al, mis­an­thrope played by Wilder. That might mean we are in for a sequel, but I sus­pect that story is a much dark­er one than audi­ences are ready for.

Talking of dark­er, John Woo’s Silent Night is a really nasty piece of work. Joel Kinnaman (For All Mankind) is an aver­age Joe, driv­en to extremes when his son is acci­dent­ally killed in a gang­land drive-by gun battle. That same exchange also takes Kinnaman’s voice box mean­ing that the film is all-but dia­logue free – a con­ceit that saves us from all the curs­ing that a film like this would nor­mally contain.

Singing from the crypto-fascist song­sheet that gave us oth­er vigil­ante fantas­ies like Bronson’s Death Wish, Silent Night is also pretty racist and the sav­ing grace – if you can call it that – is that we are reminded of what a great action dir­ect­or John Woo once was, even if he is well into self-parody ter­rit­ory here.

There are a sur­pris­ing num­ber of story par­al­lels between Wonka and Dicks: The Musical, prob­ably only appar­ent when you see them on the same day as I did.

Children sep­ar­ated from their par­ents in infant-hood and dis­ap­pear­ing into sewers/storm drains are the two that come to mind. And the tend­ency of char­ac­ters to spon­tan­eously break into song.

Based on a suc­cess­ful off-off-Broadway show from 2015, Dicks is the anarch­ic story of two high-flying vacu­um clean­er parts sales­men – com­pany motto: “We only sell the parts” – who dis­cov­er that they are, in fact, identic­al twins who were sep­ar­ated at birth when their par­ents split up.

They make it their mis­sion to reunite the fam­ily, des­pite the fact that their fath­er (Nathan Lane) is now gay and a sur­rog­ate par­ent to two repuls­ive mutant “sew­er boys” and their moth­er (Megan Mullaly) has lost what’s left of her mind.

One of the cheapest ways to cri­ti­cise a film is to ask, “who is this film even for?” but that’s not val­id for Dicks because it knows exactly who its audi­ence is: our Queer cous­ins and their Queer-adjacent friends. It is campy, nasty, dirty, silly fun and I haven’t seen big stars shred their dig­nity to quite this extent since the truly repel­lent Movie 43 (2013).

Compared with that, Dicks: The Musical is actu­ally kind of whole­some in a dis­gust­ing sort of way.

If, like me, you are a bit sick of post-apocalyptic storylines and also pretty over liv­ing in a pre-apocalyptic real­ity, Leave the World Behind is a bit of anti­dote. Set in the lull between pre-apocalypse and post-apocalypse – what’s the word for that? Oh right, “apo­ca­lypse” – Sam Esmail’s film presents a scar­ily plaus­ible scen­ario for the col­lapse of civilisation.

Middle-class Brooklynites Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke take their kids to a vaca­tion rent­al on Long Island. The first weird thing that hap­pens is that an oil tanker runs aground on the beach where they are sun­bathing. Shortly after that cell­phone cov­er­age goes down and an unex­plained gov­ern­ment emer­gency alert shows up on all their TV channels.

That night, the house’s own­er, a suc­cess­ful money man­ager played by Mahershela Ali and his daugh­ter (Myha’la) arrive unex­pec­tedly, escap­ing a giant New York black­out and look­ing for some­where safe to stay.

Roberts’ char­ac­ter doesn’t trust them – doesn’t trust or even like any­body for that mat­ter – but the deteri­or­at­ing situ­ation forces them to band together.

Esmail is best-known for the futur­ist­ic Mr. Robot and this film is exec­ut­ive pro­duced by the Obamas with their Higher Ground shingle and it’s a cut above the usu­al Netflix rub­bish (and even most oth­er films about soci­et­al breakdown).

The char­ac­ters are well drawn, the plot makes alarm­ing amounts of sense and the isol­a­tion – even if they are only an hour away from Manhattan, when the free­ways are blocked there’s nowhere to go – cre­ates a palp­able sense of dread.

There’s a deli­cious gag at the expense of Tesla and the run­ning joke about the teen­age daughter’s obses­sion with Friends pays off hand­somely. Leave the World Behind is a film about anxi­ety, in all its forms, and it’s an anxious watch, let me tell you.