Friday new releases: 14 June 2024

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-18^th 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.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

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.