Monday new releases: 14 October 2024

A big week for new releases and I couldn’t get to a few of them. Sorry but I ran out of time for Rosalie (return­ing to cinemas from the French Film Festival) and Hold Your Breath (Disney+) and House of Spoils (Prime Video) were nixed by the editor-in-chief as she didn’t fancy hor­ror on a Saturday night. October being what it is these days, we may not be watch­ing many films together.

A Mistake is that rare thing these days – a mature, thought­ful, ser­i­ous loc­al drama built on the good bones of a well-regarded nov­el. Carl Shuker pub­lished the book in 2019 and it was inspired by what he was see­ing in his day job in the New Zealand health bur­eau­cracy. The intro­duc­tion of sur­gic­al ‘league tables’ – pub­licly avail­able records of patient mor­tal­ity tied to sur­geons and facil­it­ies – bothered him as they reduced com­plex situ­ations to simple bin­ar­ies and loaded unne­ces­sary addi­tion­al stress onto an already highly pres­sur­ised profession.

To their cred­it, Shuker’s book (and Christine Jeffs’ screen adapt­a­tion) don’t attempt to widen out the per­spect­ive, or assign broad­er causes of med­ic­al mis­hap. In our cur­rent polit­ic­al envir­on­ment, it might have been tempt­ing to argue that tightly con­strained fund­ing and deteri­or­at­ing facil­it­ies are con­trib­ut­ory factors to mis­ad­ven­ture, even though that’s prob­ably true.

But Shuker and Jeffs are inter­ested in how nor­mal human fal­lib­il­ity is treated by every­one it affects. There’s the cor­por­ate blame game, patients and fam­il­ies who demand to be treated as cus­tom­ers (with the often unreas­on­able expect­a­tions that brings), col­leagues who prefer avoid­ance to col­legi­al­ity. There’s pre­cious little in the way of for­give­ness to go around and that may have some­thing to do with the status assumed by top sur­geons – med­ic­al hier­archy is almost its own char­ac­ter in the film.

Elizabeth Taylor (Elizabeth Banks) also has to deal with treat­ment of her gender – there’s some shock­ing sex­ism on dis­play that you hope has been amp­li­fied for dra­mat­ic reas­ons and doesn’t reflect day-to-day real­ity – but you can tell that her haught­i­ness, her author­ity, is a shield that she car­ries through the world.

A young patient (Acacia O’Connor) is admit­ted with advanced sepsis. Taylor quickly deduces that she needs sur­gery but these things can be done with key­holes and cam­er­as. Her regis­trar (or train­ee sur­geon), played by Richard Crouchley, is clearly nervous. He botches the final incision. But whose mis­take is it? His, for put­ting too much pres­sure on after put­ting on too little? Or Taylor’s, for think­ing that he could do it in the first place?

The film is enga­ging for most of the run­ning time, includ­ing a well-disguised shock at the end of the second act, but piles it on a bit too thick in the final stages (pos­sible hav­ing to adhere to some plot that might have worked bet­ter in the novel).

Jeffs – miss­ing from cinema screens for 16 years – pro­duces some of her char­ac­ter­ist­ic ‘women in water’ sequences. (Her break­through short film in 1993 fea­tured Fiona Samuel in a swim­ming pool and was called Stroke.) Simon McBurney deliv­ers one of his trade­mark ‘snake in the grass’ per­form­ances and Banks, des­pite a wobbly accent, looks happy to be giv­en a meaty and grown-up role.

A Mistake isn’t per­fect but it is very respectable.

Next up, a film about the worst per­son in the world fol­lowed by one of the best.

The Apprentice is a super-villain ori­gin story about New York real estate developer turned politi­cian Donald J. Trump (Sebastian Stan) and his ment­or, the wicked law­yer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong).

While I can admire the craft of it, I am ambi­val­ent about the fin­ished product. I don’t feel a par­tic­u­lar need to learn any more about Trump – he may turn out to be more inter­est­ing to me after he’s dead and that’s a chance I am will­ing to take soon­er rather than later – and any film where you find your­self feel­ing sym­pathy for the evil mass of con­tra­dic­tions that is Cohn is a film I want to be dis­in­fec­ted from.

Too close for com­fort, too soon for any perspective.

My psyche was healed by Super/Man: the Christopher Reeve Story, a fam­ily and DC-approved bio­graphy that nev­er­the­less man­ages to hint at some com­plex­ity in the all-American boy character.

Reeve had played – and become tired and typecast as – Superman in four films before suf­fer­ing a spin­al injury fall­ing off a showjump­ing horse in 1995. It was touch and go wheth­er he would sur­vive – there’s a jaw drop­ping moment in the film where we hear how his moth­er argued to turn off the vent­il­at­or that breathed for him, even though he was far from brain dead.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

The film altern­ates between Reeve’s early life and career and the stages of his response to the injury, the con­sist­ent factors being the love of his fam­ily and friends (espe­cially former room­mate Robin Williams) and his com­mit­ment to mak­ing the best of whatever cards he had been dealt. He went from being extremely for­tu­nate to being one of the unluck­i­est men alive in the blink of an eye.

His wife Dana’s story is cru­cial and, if any­thing, more moving.

Apparently the selling point of the new Hellboy movie (The Crooked Man) is the deep par­ti­cip­a­tion of the com­ic character’s cre­at­or Mike Mignola and all the authen­ti­city that implies. I’m sorry to say, it doesn’t help a flat story about a remote Appalachian com­munity and their witches and portals to Hell and all that.

Relative unknown Jack Kesy dons the sawn off horns this time around and brings noth­ing mem­or­able, in fact no one does. Director Brian Taylor was once part of the part­ner­ship with Mark Neveldine that made Crank and Crank: High Voltage but I’m sorry to say that neither has made any­thing of note since.

In The Last of the Sea Women, Korean free-diving shell­fish har­vesters are wor­ried that chan­ging social atti­tudes and envir­on­ment­al degrad­a­tion are threat­en­ing a long stand­ing way of life. The fact that many of these women are in their 70s and have been diving for 50 years or more gives their situ­ation a sense of urgency – where is the next gen­er­a­tion and what would they har­vest even if they could be found?

When Japan announces a thirty-year pro­gramme to release irra­di­ated sea water from the dam­aged nuc­le­ar plant at Fukushima, with that water fol­low­ing the cur­rents down to the islands off the south coast of Korea where these women live, the situ­ation becomes crit­ic­al and a cam­paign is launched that cul­min­ates in a vis­it to the United Nations.

I knew noth­ing about these women, their his­tory or their cul­ture, and was pleased to learn about them. They are right to be worried.

Apple has a stream­ing brand that emphas­ises good taste. They don’t pro­duce as much as Netflix but you know there’s a good reas­on why everything exists and it will prob­ably be – for want of a bet­ter word – classy.

Amazon also has a brand and it is much more pop­u­list. Shows like Reacher, Citadel, Bosch and Jack Ryan are unashamed pop­corn fod­der, although with big budgets.

They’ve dis­covered Scandi-crime writer Jo Nesbø and one of his short stor­ies is the basis of the list­less thrill­er Killer Heat. Even the title is boring.

Alcoholic private eye Nick Bali (a mis­cast Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is summoned to Crete to invest­ig­ate the acci­dent­al death of a Greek ship­ping mag­nate by the man’s wid­ow (Shailene Woodley). The twist here is that he had an identic­al twin (both played by Richard Madden) who may well have had a reas­on to rid him­self of a prob­lem or two.

There’s com­pet­ence here but zero pas­sion or endeav­our. The writers have good cred­its (Bridge of Spies, House of Gucci) and Ivorian dir­ect­or Phillipe Lacôte is bit of an up-and-comer, but it’s all so lacklustre. It actu­ally made me quite angry as we only get so many Saturday nights in front of the telly and this felt like a waste.