Wednesday new releases: The Bride!, Sirāt and The French Job

I’ve heard it said a few times that men should count them­selves lucky that women only want equal­ity and not revenge, a sen­ti­ment I was reminded of watch­ing Maggie Gyllenhaal’s capital‑F Feminist clas­sic The Bride! last weekend.

It comes from a gen­er­a­tion of Wimminspace war­ri­ors that ter­ri­fied me as a stu­dent but who con­tin­ue to have a jus­ti­fi­able rage at how far soci­ety has­n’t come. A miso­gyn­ist and seri­al sexu­al abuser has been elec­ted pres­id­ent twice. I see there’s a pris­on inter­view today with the hein­ous Harvey Weinstein where he still pro­fesses to have caused no harm. The Epstein files are full of evid­ence of power­ful men believ­ing that pay­ing for sex with chil­dren was a vic­tim­less crime.

The Bride! is fuelled by this anger but it has a wacky tone – it’s a com­edy first and fore­most, then a romance mak­ing it … a romantic com­edy? It’s a polit­ic­ally charged film made by a woman who is heart­ily sick of being told she should “smile more”. “You want laughs?” Gyllenhaal appears to be say­ing through grit­ted teeth. “How about this? And this? And THIS!”

It is crammed with stuff, and by defin­i­tion uneven, but its wild­ness is the point. Shave off the edges and all you are left with is polite and, dare I say it, ordin­ary. But the times demand more than “polite” and audi­ences deserve bet­ter than “ordin­ary”.

Jessie Buckley is Ida, a gang­ster­’s moll in 1930s Chicago. Disgusted by the men she is sur­roun­ded by and – thanks to either men­tal ill­ness or super­nat­ur­al forces – with the haughty voice of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley (also Buckley) bray­ing in her head, she is thrown to her death down some speak­easy stairs. And so her story, sup­posedly, ends.

At roughly the same time, Frankenstein’s mon­ster (known as “Frank” and played by Christian Bale with more than a little bit of Herman Munster) arrives in town to per­suade mad sci­ent­ist Annette Bening to “rein­vig­or­ate” him a part­ner. Centuries of loneli­ness is clearly tak­ing its toll but there’s some male enti­tle­ment there from the beginning.

When Ida is reawakened she has no memory of her past except for her rebel­li­ous nature, allow­ing Frank to shape new memor­ies and a new iden­tity. Frank loves the movies, espe­cially the smooth star of escap­ist music­als, Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal chan­nel­ling Fred Astaire), and the couple bond over pop­corn before their attempt to escape to a quiet life is thwarted by the media, dirty cops and Ida’s former crim­in­al associates.

While the Frankenstein ele­ments pay homage to Shelley, ori­gin­al Bride Elsa Lanchester, even Mel Brooks, The Bride! is also a love let­ter to clas­sic movies. The Astaire music­als we’ve just men­tioned, but also Bonnie & Clyde and Penélope Cruz play­ing Barbara Stanwyck play­ing a sec­ret­ary (won­der­fully named Myrna Malloy¹) with thwarted detect­ive ambitions.

And if you add the name of Buckley’s Ida to the name of the mob boss (Zlatko Buric), you get Ida Lupino, the best-known female dir­ect­or in the Hollywood stu­dio sys­tem and the first woman to dir­ect a film noir².

Which brings us back to the cent­ral reas­on for this film to be – Feminism. (Why are mod­ern crit­ics so afraid of using the word?)

I read some un-evidenced online com­ments that The Bride! had some­how been held back from release in order to not come up against a com­pet­ing Frankenstein pro­ject but it seems clear to me that it was always inten­ded to open every­where on International Women’s Day, indeed I would be sur­prised if that was not a con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tion from the dir­ect­or her­self³.

The men in the film are either pat­ri­arch­al arche­types or pat­ri­arch­al vic­tims (or both). Peter Sarsgard’s chilled out Chicago detect­ive knows that he has achieved his pos­i­tion on the back of a tal­ent for detect­ive work that isn’t his own. Even the mourn­ful Frank has the poten­tial to lash out with no warn­ing, remind­ing at least half of the audi­ence that they have to be hyper­vi­gil­ant – even around the men they love.

(One of the most sens­it­ive obser­va­tions in the film is that Frank is able to move rel­at­ively freely through the fringes of soci­ety because his scars resemble those of many who went to WWI – his escape into the magic of the movies would also have been far from unique.)

I’ve already gone on far longer than usu­al so I won’t repeat the praise for the craft (Sandy Powell’s cos­tumes!) that oth­ers have made. I’ll just ask poten­tial view­ers to sit back and enjoy some­thing weird at a time when The Bride!‘s stu­dio Warner Bros. – with their fabled his­tory of sup­port for cinema’s icon­o­clasts – is in danger of being sub­merged under a moun­tain of cor­por­ate debt and its new own­er­’s own polit­ic­al agenda. It’s an agenda that is unlikely to match Ms. Gyllenhaal’s.

I spoke about Óliver Laxe’s Sirāt with Emile Donovan on Friday night.

I won’t repeat myself here as I’ve already gone on far too long, but I will say that it’s an admir­able film but not an enjoy­able one.

Man travels to Morocco with his son to look for his miss­ing daugh­ter among the desert rave scene, coat­tails some fringe-dwellers who are head­ing even fur­ther off the beaten track and things go from bad to worse. Meanwhile, in the dis­tance, the world might be com­ing to an end.

One thing I did­n’t men­tion on air is that I was sup­posed to watch this weeks ago but instead did­n’t get around to it until after Trump had star­ted bomb­ing Iran. That sub­text hit me much harder watch­ing it now than it would have then which is one of the weird things about this job. Timing mat­ters but you don’t con­trol it.

Also land­ing in cinemas last week­end was anoth­er return­ing title from the 2025 Intrepid⁴ French Film Festival:

The pro­gramme launch film Les règles de l’art has the ter­rible English title, The French Job to kindle memor­ies of Michael Caine’s 60s heist film The Italian Job, a com­par­is­on that does neither film any favours. Based on an unlikely true story, it’s about a burg­lary at the Paris Museum of Modern Art and the attempts by the thieves to suc­cess­fully fence some of the most fam­ous paint­ings in the world. Actually, nobody knows for sure what happened to them and Dominique Baumard’s film is a fanci­ful and enter­tain­ing ima­gin­ing of the whole affair.

Melvil Poupaud plays a mild-mannered insur­ance assessor and watch valu­er drawn into the orbit of con­man Sofiane Zermani and burg­lar Steve Tientcheu. The “law-abiding” one of the trio being played by a white act­or while the genu­ine crim­in­als are of Algerian and Camerounian back­grounds felt like a tone-deaf choice to me, but the per­form­ances by all three got me past it.

Also fea­tured in that May 2025 pre­view: Frank Dubosc’s Un ours dans le jura – the lit­er­al trans­la­tion is A Bear in the Jura which is more use­ful than the title the loc­al dis­trib­ut­ors chose, How to Make a Killing, which has now been rendered almost un-Googleable by Glen Powell – and the Ravel biop­ic, Bolero.

1. Myrna Loy. ↩︎
2. The Hitch-Hiker (1953). ↩︎
3. This asser­tion is just as un-evidenced as the one I’ve just been com­pil­ing about. ↩︎
4. Intrepid is a spon­sor of the fest­iv­al, not a state­ment of artist­ic intent. ↩︎