Friday new releases: 22 March 2024

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Wicked Little Letters and Immaculate are in cinemas, Spaceman is streaming on Netflix

I’ve been back writ­ing weekly reviews for nearly nine months and it is some­what hum­bling to real­ise that there has nev­er been any sci­ence behind the order these films appear oth­er than ‘this is the order in which I saw them’.

There should be some edit­or­i­al over­sight of these pri­or­it­ies, I sup­pose – some sense of a ‘head­liner’, and maybe that hap­pens when I book the tick­ets, I don’t know.

Anyway, at 10.20 yes­ter­day morn­ing I was at the excel­lent Event Cinemas facil­ity at Queensgate, Lower Hutt, for the latest Ghostbusters film. A few die-hard fans were also there. You can get a sense of how much pent-up anti­cip­a­tion there is for a pic­ture by how many are there first thing on a Thursday and, by that met­ric, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire should do ok.

This is the second film in the cur­rent reboot and I’d missed the first one (Ghostbusters: Afterlife from 2021) which intro­duced a new gen­er­a­tion of ’busters, led by Carrie Coon and Paul Rudd. Missing out on that chapter didn’t seem to mat­ter – none of it seemed to mat­ter, if I’m hon­est – but you will find your­self car­ried along in enter­tain­ing but for­get­table fashion.

The new Ghostbusters have arrived in New York, liv­ing in the old fire sta­tion, bust­ing ghosts the old fash­ioned way, trav­el­ling in the old white sta­tion wag­on. OG Ghostbuster Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) is trad­ing in occult mer­chand­ise, and YouTubing, when Kumail Nanjiani’s Nadeem brings him a bronze orb that appears to be off-the-charts with spiky spec­tral energy.

Inside, an ancient God of Ice is trapped but, of course, he soon gets out and starts mak­ing a big mess of things. All the ghost­busters – old and new – have to band togeth­er to fix things which means that there are rather a lot of char­ac­ters to keep track of. And give mean­ing­ful action to.

All fran­chise film­mak­ing is an exer­cise in nos­tal­gia, but I could feel it really clearly in Frozen Empire. But it’s not the box-ticking that’s most fun, it’s the decent story with good set-pieces, the genu­ine sense of dread at times, and a vil­lain that can only be defeated by every­one work­ing together.

Thea Sharrock’s Wicked Little Letters starts with some won­der­ful visu­al pan­ache – it’s a real bundle of energy – as Olivia Colman’s Edith Swan opens anoth­er anonym­ous pois­on pen let­ter in front of her age­ing par­ents (Gemma Jones and Timothy Spall). In high dudgeon, her fath­er walks the Littlehampton seafront to the police sta­tion to make a com­plaint, set­ting the wheels of the plot in motion.

Based on true events in 1920s sea­side small-town England, where the nation was scan­dal­ised by the vile and verb­ose abus­ive epistles that were being sprayed around all and sun­dry, the film is a bril­liant show­case for Colman and Jessie Buckley, play­ing her next-door neigh­bour and the tar­get for blame.

That first act crackles but, some­how, the visu­al energy seems to fade and we are left with a great script and great per­form­ances (all the way down the cast list, no duds) but you can almost treat it like a radio play. At first, I could­n’t take my eyes off it, then there was almost noth­ing to look at.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

I was delighted by the BBC-style colour-blind cast­ing, largely because we get to see some new faces in new roles, but also because it drives ignor­ant racists mad.

Sydney Sweeney seems to be all over the online dis­course at the moment for reas­ons that are, typ­ic­ally, noth­ing to do with her act­ing, or even very much to do with her as a human being.

She’s one of the best of the young gen­er­a­tion of act­ors and has her name on Immaculate as a pro­du­cer, indic­at­ing a desire to steer her career on her own terms. This also has the effect of driv­ing online ignora­muses mad.

She plays Sister Cecilia, a young American novice invited to an Italian con­vent that is also a hos­pice for eld­erly nuns. Her lack of Italian means that she misses out on some of the nuances of what is going on around her but she makes friends and enjoys the work.

But then she finds her­self preg­nant. An avowed (and con­firmed) vir­gin, how could this be? It’s a mir­acle! All of a sud­den, she is exal­ted and pampered and secluded from the world and she starts to real­ise that the con­vent lead­er­ship have a plan for her that she is not exactly on board with.

Immaculate has a 1970s Euro-vibe which I appre­ci­ated. It draws on vari­ous hor­ror tropes includ­ing slash­er, demon-baby, Catholic-horror – there’s been a lot of that – and prob­ably oth­ers, but I’m no expert.

I do like a good mor­al centre for a hor­ror film, though, and this one makes clear that if the pat­ri­archy only sees a woman as a ves­sel, there’s no oth­er solu­tion than to burn the whole thing down. 

Talking of Euro-arthouse vibes, if you’ve ever wanted to see Adam Sandler play­ing a Czech astro­naut alone in space invest­ig­at­ing a mys­ter­i­ous purple cloud hov­er­ing around Jupiter, as he forms a rela­tion­ship with a wise giant space spider, have I got the film for you!

That premise doesn’t do Spaceman justice, though. It clearly sees itself in the tra­di­tion of films like Solaris (both ver­sions) or Moon, where the ques­tions about what hap­pens to a person’s psyche when they are alone for months and hun­dreds of thou­sands of kilo­metres from home often res­ult in the answer that you just go nuts. We’re not meant to be up there!

Directed by Johan Renck (Chernobyl) and based on a 2017 sci-fi nov­el, the film does a good job of hav­ing us believe that the cor­por­ate sponsored Czech space pro­gram would win the race to the purple cloud, and that it would also invent a quantum com­mu­nic­a­tion device that allows people to video chat across those vast dis­tances with no time lag.

It shouldn’t come as a sur­prise any more that Sandler has ser­i­ous act­ing chops but he is extremely down­beat here and really looks the part of a lonely explorer, strug­gling with an exist­en­tial crisis.

I wasn’t entirely con­vinced that his rela­tion­ship with wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan) was ever won­der­ful enough to jus­ti­fy all the angst that he goes through, but maybe that’s the point.

Thanks to stream­ing, lots of people are going to stumble across this and end up con­fused and dis­ap­poin­ted, but if you know a little of what to expect – from reviews like this – I’m sure you’ll get some­thing out of it.