Monday new releases: 25 November 2024

With only a month to go until Christmas, the battle for our atten­tion is heat­ing up with more and big­ger films arriv­ing in cinemas and online.

On Saturday night, we had to make a choice between two new Netflix films from their under-resourced ‘classy’ depart­ment – Bill Nighy and Thomasin McKenzie in the IVF his­tory Joy or the new adapt­a­tion of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Piano Lesson. We’ll try and get to Joy next week.

Steve McQueen’s Blitz is one of the biggest achieve­ments of the film year but – in a response that is utterly unfair to what he has made – I found myself feel­ing that it could have been even bet­ter and then dis­ap­point­ment when it didn’t turn out that way.

I’ve always said that crit­ics should respond to the film in front of them and not the film that you wanted so I’m in danger of fall­ing into my own trap but I hope I can explain why.

We’re in the East End of London in late 1940 and the Luftwaffe aer­i­al bomb­ing cam­paign that gives the film its name is des­troy­ing homes, factor­ies and fam­il­ies. Elliott Heffernan is nine-year-old George, liv­ing with his single moth­er Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and his grand­fath­er Gerald (Paul Weller).

Kids his age are being hur­riedly evac­u­ated to the coun­try and he is depos­ited on a train full of strangers against his will, even­tu­ally mak­ing the fate­ful decision to jump off and walk back to his fam­ily in Stepney. What makes George dif­fer­ent – and is largely the reas­on for this film to exist – is that George’s fath­er was from Grenada in the West Indies and that you can tell that race has already been a source of prob­lems for him grow­ing up.

McQueen makes clear that London in this peri­od was already a multi-cultural and multi-racial com­munity, des­pite the white­wash­ing of that history.

The por­trait of the city is revi­sion­ist in oth­er ways too. We are used to hear­ing the myth­o­logy of the Blitz as being Britain’s finest hour, com­ing togeth­er to res­ist the Nazi atro­cit­ies and rally around in sup­port of each oth­er. Well, there was a bit of that, for sure, but there was also incom­pet­ence, fear, anxi­ety, sus­pi­cion and opportunism.

Rita is called in to the manager’s office at the muni­tions fact­ory where she works and is told that George didn’t make it to his host fam­ily. We then swap between the two quests as moth­er and son attempt to find each oth­er in the ruined city.

The film opens with a dev­ast­at­ing sequence of out­stripped fire­fight­ers attempt­ing to bring a burn­ing build­ing under con­trol. The sequence reminded me of the war­time doc­u­drama Fires Were Started by Humphrey Jennings, but the shock­ingly mod­ern present­a­tion of the danger has the same impact as the Omaha Beach land­ing in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

It wasn’t the only time that I thought of Spielberg. George’s odys­sey through London and its char­ac­ters reminded me of his mas­ter­piece Empire of the Sun – and that’s where I found myself wish­ing that the film lev­it­ated like those Spielberg films but it nev­er quite man­ages to do that.

McQueen’s eye is tre­mend­ous and there are plenty of arrest­ing com­pos­i­tions and some jaw-dropping moments, but it doesn’t flow the way that a Spielberg ver­sion of this would. Like I say, it’s not a fair com­par­is­on, and I’m sure a rewatch would encour­age me to see more of what Blitz is rather than what it isn’t.

I was a big fan of Denzel Washington’s Fences, his 2016 adapt­a­tion of August Wilson’s 1987 play, so when I heard that he was going to pro­duce anoth­er Wilson play (and pos­sible even more) I was pretty keen.

For The Piano Lesson – Wilson’s follow-up to Fences and part of the Pittsburgh Cycle of ten plays record­ing 20^th cen­tury African-American life in one sub­urb – Washington has handed the cre­at­ive torch over to the next gen­er­a­tion (he also pro­duced the Wilson adapt­a­tion Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for Netflix in 2020). It’s writ­ten and dir­ec­ted by one son, Malcolm, and stars anoth­er, John David.

Like Fences, Wilson con­structs his story around one cent­ral sym­bol. The piano resides in the Pittsburgh home of Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler from the bril­liant Till a couple of years ago) and for some reas­on she chooses not to play it. Her broth­er Boy Willie (John David Washington) arrives from the coun­try with a truck full of water­mel­ons to sell and the chance of buy­ing some land for him­self to farm.

The water­mel­ons will only provide a third of the down­pay­ment, how­ever. His sav­ings are anoth­er third. And his share of the sale of the piano would com­plete the deal. But Berniece is hav­ing none of it.

The piano con­nects her to her ancest­ors and not much else does. The play becomes – among lots of inter­est­ing things – a debate between hold­ing on to the past or invest­ing in the future. And can you even have a future if you can let go of the past so easily?

Wilson was one of the great dram­at­ists of the last cen­tury with a knack for put­ting mul­tiple hon­est con­flicts togeth­er in a room through the vehicles of strong char­ac­ters and sharp dialogue.

Daughters is more of a recent rather than new release – it arrived on Netflix back in August – but some­how the gods of the algorithm kept it from me until this week.

I thought I would drop it in here, though, rather than giv­ing it a column of its own, because it con­nects to our oth­er remain­ing titles this week – all three are about the broken bonds between fath­ers and daughters.

Chad Morris and Angela Patton’s doc­u­ment­ary is about the all-too-rare pro­gramme of ‘“Daddy Daughter Dances” that bring incar­cer­ated men back into con­tact with their chil­dren, and back into con­tact with their own human­ity and sense of hope at the same time.

In a Washington D.C. pris­on, we meet a group of men who have been selec­ted to tri­al this exper­i­ment. Part of the deal is that there will be ten weeks of group work done with a facil­it­at­or to pre­pare for the emo­tion­al wrench of the vis­it and we get to listen in as these men tell the stor­ies of repeated trauma and loss that has brought them – and in many cases will keep them – there.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

For cost – or cruelty or both – in-person vis­its are very rare in American pris­ons now. The author­it­ies – many of them private busi­nesses – prefer to rent vir­tu­al vis­its to their pris­on­ers mean­ing that many of these men have not hugged or held their chil­dren for years.

We also see what life is like on the oth­er side of the bars for these small humans, deprived of a par­ent through no fault of their own.

It’s a power­ful film with a heavy point to make. If your sys­tem is set up to dehu­man­ise people then don’t be sur­prised at what that sys­tem pro­duces. But that’s still just a choice, and we can make dif­fer­ent choices and – hope­fully – get dif­fer­ent outcomes.

If you wondered what the “Han gets his name” scene in Solo (“I don’t have people. I’m alone.”) would be like spun out to two hours and forty minutes with songs, you’ll have an idea of what Wicked: Part One is like. Foreshadowing and fan ser­vice comes first, char­ac­ter and dra­mat­ic con­flict come second.

The oth­er prob­lem with Wicked as a music­al exper­i­ence is that there is really only one (maybe one and a half) hit song. As my dad says, audi­ences nev­er come out of the theatre hum­ming the set, which is a shame because these are superbly craf­ted sets, cos­tumes and props.

But all that craft is going into some­thing that feels deriv­at­ive. The fan cros­sov­er between Harry Potter and Wicked must be enorm­ous because we some­how spend an inor­din­ate amount of time world-building a new Hogwarts, Shiz University. It even has its own magic train! And the cos­tumes – fant­ast­ic­ally detailed though they are – feel like cast off designs from the Hunger Games.

We are very lucky that the cast­ing is so good – Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West and Ariana Grande as Galinda, her pink coun­ter­part, are both ter­rif­ic but they can only sus­tain interest for so long when everything is so pad­ded out. Defying Brevity, indeed.

I chose to review Goodrich for RNZ Nights last Friday because I had quite enjoyed the trail­er and it wasn’t going to cost me nearly three hours to pre­pare for.

More fool me, as it was an even big­ger dis­ap­point­ment than Wicked (which I’ve just decided should be renamed Wigged). An insin­cere upper-middle class fantasy of Los Angeles in which a self-absorbed art deal­er named Goodrich (because deep down he’s good and he’s rich, just not in the way you might think) has to become a prop­er par­ent when his wife heads off to rehab form 90 days.

Enlisting the help of his adult (also preg­nant) daugh­ter, he learns to be the dad he nev­er was and to let go of all the mater­i­al things he had been chasing.

Michael Keaton played a role-reversed stay-at-home dad 40 years ago in Mr. Mom and we don’t appear to have moved on at all.