Monday new releases: 22 July 2024

Twisters, Longlegs and Divertimento are in cinemas

Welcome new sub­scribers. This is the weekly run­down of new releases (or at least as many as I can get to!)

Twisters is as enjoy­able a block­buster as we’ve had in ages, mainly because the big dis­aster set-pieces are expertly paced and staged and the digit­al tor­na­dos are so utterly believ­able that at times I found myself grip­ping the arms of my theatre seat. What’s that old cinema promo gag? “We’ll sell you a seat but you’re only going to use the edge of it!”

But once the adren­aline wears off, there’s noth­ing left. This is mainly due to the two leads act­ing as if they are in dif­fer­ent films – one try­ing too hard and the oth­er not try­ing hard enough.

Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People, Where the Crawdads Sing) plays Kate, a met­eor­o­lo­gist burdened by a tra­gic storm-chasing acci­dent which took sev­er­al of her young col­leagues. She’s temp­ted back into the field by Javi (Anthony Ramos) who has a star­tup that can 3D map tor­na­dos and – hope­fully – help pre­dict them.

Since the mid-90s days of the Paxton/Hunt Twister – or per­haps even because of it – storm chas­ing has become big tour­ism and online busi­ness. When they get to Oklahoma, Tornado Alley is covered with adrenaline-seekers and influ­en­cers, includ­ing Glen Powell’s YouTuber, Tyler. At first he’s annoy­ing but we soon find out there’s a heart of gold behind all the hair and teeth.

There’s a bit of online fuss at the moment about the dis­cov­ery that a romantic finale was shot for the film in which a pas­sion­ate kiss is exchanged between our two her­oes but that it was cut from the fin­ished film, ren­der­ing the whole thing some­what chaste.

Well, I can see why that choice might have been made. There is very little actu­al chem­istry between these two which would have made an end­ing like that unearned. I cer­tainly didn’t notice its absence.

Chemistry is not auto­mat­ic. Here we have a prob­lem of bal­ance. Edgar-Jones is play­ing for an intern­al emo­tion­al truth foun­ded in her character’s trauma, loss and vulnerability.

Powell is play­ing for charm – and he’s milk­ing it – but there’s no back­story to him. He talks about once being a pro rodeo rider but that’s story, not character.

She is three-dimensional but not really present. He is so present you can’t avoid him but is play­ing on one note.

Longlegs is also bring­ing people kick­ing and scream­ing back to cinemas. A styl­ish serial-killer hor­ror by Osgood Perkins (son of Psycho’s Anthony Perkins), this about as classy as these things get, helped by a won­der­fully bizarre turn from Nicolas Cage.

Maika Monroe plays a juni­or FBI agent with pre­dict­ive as well as deduct­ive powers. It’s the mid-90s, sav­ing us once again from any plot holes that a smart­phone might get in the way of. A series of unsolved occult murders are test­ing the feds who know from coded mes­sages that there is a con­nec­tion between them all but noth­ing forensic­ally conclusive.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

This is a film that I have ended up respect­ing rather than lov­ing, des­pite it hav­ing lots of the qual­it­ies that I love in movies. It looks like some­thing for a start. Aesthetically, Perkins has chosen to be influ­enced by the greats – Kubrick’s The Shining, bravely, among oth­ers – while knit­ting togeth­er a com­bin­a­tion of story tropes into some­thing that resembles novelty.

But it left me cold. I went look­ing for a point to it all but couldn’t find one.

The long inter­min­able intern­al debate in France about what con­sti­tutes ‘Frenchness’ gets anoth­er run in Divertimento, based on the true story of twin sis­ters – daugh­ters of Algerian immig­rants – who try and make careers in the rar­efied world of clas­sic­al music, over­com­ing class and racial pre­ju­dice in the process.

It took me a while to real­ise that the sub­titled use of the word ‘sub­urbs’ didn’t mean to the film what it means to us here. When the entitled young dick­heads who give our her­oes such a hard time at the con­ser­vatoire use the word, they don’t mean owner-occupied, pick­et fenced, middle-class secur­ity. In the film, ‘sub­urbs’ mean ‘the pro­jects’, the inner-city high-rises full of eth­nic­ally diverse, hard-working, Parisians, destined to be ‘oth­ered’ away from a European cul­tur­al tradition.

Anyway, the film makes a strong and heart­felt argu­ment against that non­sense and Oulaya Amamra (Zahia, the con­duct­or) and Lina El Arabi (Fettouma, the cel­list) por­tray char­ac­ters with almost infin­ite levels patience when con­fron­ted by so much arrog­ant bour­geois jackassery.

Divertimento is a romantic­ally told ‘over­com­ing the odds’ story but it builds to a strong con­clu­sion and presents the inar­gu­able pos­i­tion that clas­sic­al music is for any­one who wants it, and cul­tur­al gate­keep­ers can go to hell.

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Further listening

Breaking news of a glob­al com­puter melt­down on Friday night meant I was bumped from my reg­u­lar chat with Emile on Nights but the week before we had a chat about Twisters, the Classic Albums series and my new favour­ite TV show: Bluey.