The Promised Land and The Watchers are in cinemas, Blood for Dust is on both physical media and digital, and Am I OK? is streaming on Neon
As we approach the first anniversary of the reboot of Funerals & Snakes, I stopped for a moment recently to take stock.
Looking back at all the new reviews (and their associated star ratings on Letterboxd) I wonder whether I am being too soft.
I’m loving being back in cinemas on a regular basis, I’m really enjoying the reboot of my critical eye, and I feel like I have a mature respect for the creative process which is serving to delay my pan reflex.
Back in the day, I would have no problem rudely dismissing films that I believed weren’t worth your time. Looking back on some of those critiques, I still love the writing but I wonder why I was so grumpy about everything so much of the time.
Today, we feature four new releases and – while they all have some problems – I am glad to have seen them all. Am I losing my edge or discovering some kind of empathy I didn’t have access to before?
A perfect example of why I am enjoying being back in the cinema every week is The Promised Land. While I was on hiatus, I would have let this one slide on by, waited for it to appear on a streamer and probably ignored it then, too.
That would have been a mistake as it is a film that belongs on a big screen and deserves every filmgoer’s attention.
The time is the mid-18th Century. The Danish king has a dream to open up the vast and beautiful – but agriculturally unpromising – Jutland heath to settlers who can farm it. His Copenhagen courtiers are doing everything in their power to do no such thing.
A returning military veteran, Ludvig Kahlen (Mads Mikkelsen), has a plan and heads out to tame the gorse-laden, rocky landscape but finds that the people are much harder to deal with than the terrain. The local magistrate and bigwig, Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), is a brute and a bully and realises that settlers with the blessing of the King can only reduce his influence and bring attention to his ruinous régime.
He sets about to destroy whatever gains Kahlen can make, along with – in passing – anything he might feel some affection for.
Everything about this film passes muster, not least Mikkelsen’s performance which is grounded in gravitas but betrays deep-seated emotion with the tiniest of expressions.
The women are superb – and the film foregrounds their stories superbly. Amanda Collin is Kahlen’s housekeeper, temporarily escaped from the wrath of Schinkel, Kristine Kujath Thorp (from The Burning Sea) is Schinkel’s unwilling Norwegian fiancée, and little Melina Hagberg plays the dark-skinned child that even the brigands in the forest don’t want.
A great story – loosely based on truth – and exceptionally well told, The Promised Land surely won’t disappoint anyone who takes their chances with a ticket.
The original Danish title for The Promised Land is Bastarden which, incidentally, is the sound I make most often while I am playing Fifa on the Xbox.
Ishana Shyamalan is the daughter of M. Night Shyamalan and the twisty-turniness of The Watchers shows that apple has not fallen too far from the tree.
Mina (Dakota Fanning) works in a Galway pet shop and is asked to transport a rare golden parrot to Dublin for a customer. On the way, through a mysterious old forest, her car breaks down and she – and the parrot – find themselves stranded in a concrete bunker called “the Coop” which is beset by dangerous creatures as soon as the sun goes down.
Firstly, do they not have motorways between major Irish cities these days? And, secondly, where would screenwriters be without caged birds for their metaphors.
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Anyway, Mina and her three co-jailbirds, eventually discover why they have been trapped and conspire to manufacture an escape but that’s when they find there’s even more to discover.
Shyamalan’s script (based on a novel by A.M. Shine) is full of holes but the production design is good and the cinematography (and her direction) creates a decent amount of atmosphere.
See? Back in the day, I might have eviscerated this nonsense but today I feel quite generous about it.
Blood for Dust is playing in the same midwestern noir ballpark as classics like Red Rock West, Blood Simple or the great Hell or High Water, but while it aims high it doesn’t hit the target (even though many, many targets are hit in the film itself).
Scoot McNairy (one of my favourite actors ever since In Search of a Midnight Kiss and Monsters) is Cliff, a down-on-his-luck salesman hawking defibrillators across the mid-90s mid-west. (The metaphorical impact of his chosen product is lost on him but not on us.)
He’s down on his luck because at his last job he conspired with some co-workers to rip the organisation off and the company accountant took the fall by way of suicide.
He and his wife are also grieving the loss of a child to cancer – the reason why he broke bad in the first place – and the road is the easiest place for him to be.
That is until he gets an offer from one of his former collaborators, Ricky (Kit Harrington), who suggests that his ordinary citizen persona and his constant criss-crossing of those huge states might make him the perfect person to transport drugs for the cartel.
One bad decision leads to chaos – and brief cameos from the likes of Stephen Dorff and Josh Lucas.
Ricky is the kind of part that young actors love, all facial hair and firearms, and Harrington does his best to transcend that Game of Thrones persona but the script doesn’t give anyone quite enough to work with (apart from ammunition).
That’s especially true for the women in the film who are entirely drawn in terms of their relationships to our damaged but sympathetic men.
Inexplicably held back after a successful première at Sundance in 2022, Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne’s raunchy comedy Am I OK? has finally been allowed to drop thanks to Pride Month.
Dakota Johnson plays blocked L.A. artist Lucy whose best friend Jane (Sonoya Mizuno) has been offered a job in London and will soon be a long distance best friend.
Theirs is a relationship that appears to keep no secrets from each other but even Jane is surprised to discover that Lucy thinks she is attracted to women. Years of failing to set her up with potential male partners seems not to have been the clue that it might have been.
With time running out, Jane attempts to hook a reluctant Lucy up with a woman to either prove that she’s a lesbian or prove that she’s not.
You might want to be careful about the company you are in when streaming this one as the sexual frankness and vulgar language won’t be to everybody’s taste but it is often very funny and refreshingly down to earth.
A lot of this is due to Johnson’s devil-may-care attitude to movie cameras. In Madame Web that relaxation just looked like she didn’t give a shit but here you can see that she’s attempting to project normal grounded human behaviour, letting the script and circumstances do the work.
I wish films like this weren’t relegated to the LGBTQ+ ghetto, or Pride Month showcases, because at the end of the day they’re just funny relationship films that we all should be able to find some common ground with.
