Category: Female led film

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

Superb fantasy film, full of heart, visual imagination and beautiful story-telling, truly one from the heart

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Ivana Baquero (Ofelia), Sergi López (Captain Vidal), Maribel Verdú (Mercedes), Doug Jones (The Faun/The Pale Man), Ariadna Gil (Carmen), Álex Angulo (Doctor Ferreiro), Manolo Solo (Garcés), César Vea (Serrano), Roger Casamajor (Pedro), Pablo Adán (Narrator/Voice of the Faun)

What do you do when your world is terrible? Sometimes the only way to survive is to embrace your own world, even if that world has its own darkness and terrors. Guillermo del Toro’s masterful Gothic fairy tale mixes the terrors of Francoist Spain with one of untrustworthy magic and monstrous spirits and compellingly balances bleak horrors with the chance of hope. Visually stunning, thematically rich and heartbreakingly emotional, Pan’s Labyrinth is a Grimm’s fairy tale bought shockingly up-to-date, a uniquely heartfelt film from a distinctive director.

It’s 1944 in the woods of Spain and the Reds are still fighting their lonely crusade against Franco’s fascists. Captain Vidal (Sergi López) is here to stamp out these rebels and has summoned his heavily pregnant wife Carmen (Ariadna Gil) and twelve-year old step-daughter Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) to his distant command post so that he can be present at the imminent birth of his son. Ofelia hates the punctilious and coldly obsessive Vidal (rightly so – he’s capable of coldy indifferent but shocking acts of violence) and escapes more-and-more into her fairytale books. One night, she wanders into an old maze and encounters a Faun (Doug Jones), who tells her she is the long-lost princess of the fairy kingdom and must perform three tasks to return home. Ofelia now exists in two worlds: an increasingly Gothic fairy one of and a real one of violence, ruled by her monstrous father-in-law.

Pan’s Labyrinth is a beautifully balanced film of multiple interpretations. It’s never clearly stated whether Ofelia’s fairytale world is ‘real’ of a product of her imagination. It’s clearly a way a scared girl could process real world traumas – the death of her father, the appalling Vidal, the horrors of war around her – with many elements of the fairy world reflecting things happening around her. But on the other hand, the mandrake root the Faun gives her to help heal her sick mother by placing it under her bed has an immediate impact and Ofelia’s magic chalk and the labyrinth itself offer secret doorways that allow her to escape Vidal in the film’s final act (or perhaps a by then disoriented and drugged Vidal is just mistaken). Essentially, you are left to embrace the idea you prefer – much as it is implied Ofelia herself chooses the version of her life she wishes to embrace.

Choosing for yourself and not blindly following orders is one of the key lessons of Pan’s Labyrinth. The ‘real’ world of Franco’s Spain is full of regimented orders to be blindly obeyed without question. In this it has the collaboration of the Church – at Vidal’s dinner-party, a subservient priest self-satisfyingly fills his plate with food while shrugging off concerns of the starving poor – and Fascism echoes Church mantras (one of Vidal’s lieutenants repeats the same propaganda ‘prayer’ to Franco over-and-over again while he hands out the bread ration to the cowed villagers). Franco’s Spain is one of order and regimen, where individuality and choice is stamped out.

And there are echoes of this in Ofelia’s fantasy world. Played with a gentleness, vulnerability and strikingly earnest decency by Ivana Baquero, Ofelia refuses to accept the world must be the way it is (unlike her mother who has sadly accepted it must). But her fairy world, the Faun – expertly portrayed by Doug Jones’ lithe physicality – is a far from gentle guide. Creaking from the wood he is formed from, he’s sinister, mixes vague statements with subtly presented orders and constantly holds information back while presenting Ofelia with tight rules for her tasks. Just as Fascism takes choice away real world, the Faun presents Ofelia with a book that reveals the future (but only one page at a time) and her tasks increasingly demand complete obedience, under the threat of punishment.

This is not a comforting world. Ofelia – who at one-point wears costumes reminiscent of those other famous children in dark, surreal and dangerous fantasy-worlds Alice and Dorothy – confronts a vile toad and, most chillingly, an albino child-eater with eyes in his stigmata hands who lives in a room decorated with nightmare reflections of the real horrors of the 40s (most strikingly a Holocaust-reminiscent pile of children’s shoes). For all its fantastical, it’s also very much a nightmare version of a real-world that could have been dreamed up by a child processing horrors.

Pan’s Labyrinth celebrates individuality and choosing for yourself. Ofelia’s story is one of increasingly taking her own choices: from refusing to accept her mother’s new husband, to escaping into her fantasy world (twisted as it is), to finally outright refusing the increasingly dark instructions of the Faun. It’s in doing this that she can eventually prove herself a true hero, someone who does not accept the established order but can make her own decisions.

This makes her a contrast to Vidal. Truly he is one of cinema’s most loathsome monsters. In a superbly controlled performance by Sergi López, Vidal isn’t repulsive because he is a larger-than-life, sadistic monster but because he is a small, inadequate bully who has controls his small world in order to make himself feel important. Vidal is obsessed with order and detail – introduced tutting at the 15-minute-late arrival of his wife, his office is filled with the gears of the mill and he fetishistically cleans his pristine uniform, shaves himself and repairs his father’s watch. This watch – the only memoir he has of his hero father, who died when he was a baby – is the root of his obsessions, Vidal desperate to become his father and pass on his own toxic legacy of ancestor worship to his son. It’s striking that, as Vidal’s world collapses around him, his clothing and body becomes more and more scarred, bloody and disordered – his external appearance resembling the monster within.

In Vidal’s world everything fits neatly into place, governed by his Fascist ideology. Carmen – a fragile Ariadna Gil, struggling to accommodate to a world of harsh choices – is of interest to him only because of the baby she carries. He operates the mill as a tightly organised regime, in which the rebels are unwanted ghosts in the machine. He uses violence ruthlessly but as a tool, not with sadistic relish. He brutally beats a suspected rebel to death with a bottle with robotic indifference and tortures suspects with a practised patter. To him, everything is justified if it is obeying an order. So much so, that he literally cannot understand the refusal of Dr Ferreiro (in one of the film’s most moving moments) to blindly follow orders, no matter the consequences.

Dr Ferreiro (a beautifully judged performance by Álex Angulo) is one of two figures whose independent thought Vidal is unable to recognise, even when they are under his nose. His maid Mercedes (Maribel Verdú, one of the passionate hearts of the film) is fiercely independent, the sister of the rebel leader and working subtly against Vidal. She forms a bond with the gentle Ofelia while showing that refusing to be part of a blind system is a crucial part of humanity. She also provides possibly one of the most satisfying moments in cinema during a confrontation with Vidal.

Del Toro’s film beautifully balances these fascinating ideas of choice and independence within its brilliantly evocative design. It’s a beautifully shot film, in a gorgeous array of Velazquez-inspired tones, its moody darks and blues gorgeously captured by Guillermo Navarro while its design work is extraordinary in its texture and detail. But it’s a classic because del Toro’s superb creativity and quietly emotional direction. Pan’s Labyrinth makes us really care for this child just as it makes us despise the cruelty of her step-father. Combined with gorgeous design, del Toro’s film truly comes from the heart, a loving, very personal tribute to the power of stories and individual choices. The film is so powerful, you even forget that it opens as it ends, and that we know in our heart-of-hearts how this journey will finish. Nevertheless, Pan’s Labyrinth ends on a note of joy and acceptance so pure, it could only be from the fantasy world not the real one.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Deliriously overblown and full of demented imagination even if it never quite feels necessary

Director: George Miller

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa), Chris Hemsworth (Dementus), Tom Burke (Praetorian Jack), Lachy Hulme (Immortan Joe), Alyla Browne (Young Furiosa), George Shevtsov (History Man), John Howard (People Eater), Angus Sampson (The Organic Mechanic), Nathan Jones (Rictus Erectus), Josh Helman (Scotus), Charlee Fraser (Mary Jabassa), Elsa Pataky (Mr Norton)

Is there a more demented mainstream film series than Mad Max? Furiosa follows the balls-to-the-wall excess of Mad Max: Fury Road with more of the same and a mythic atmosphere of Godfather Part II-backstory deepening. What you end up with might feel slightly odd or self-important – over two and a half hours of direct build-up for a pay-off we saw almost ten years ago (perhaps that’s why Furiosa ends with a cut-down play-back of the major events of Fury Road spliced into the credits, so we can all be reassured the villains left alive here got their comeuppance later). Furiosa is frequently overlong, a little too full of its love of expansive world-building and never quite convinces you that we actually need it – but then it’s also so bizarre, Grand Guignal and totally nuts perhaps we should just be happy that, in a world of focus-grouped content, it even exists.

We’re back on the desert wasteland of post-apocalyptic Australia as motorbike riding goons kidnap young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) from the Green Place hoping to use her to persuade crazed war lord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) to lead his forces there. Despite the heroic efforts of her mother (Charlee Fraser), Furiosa remains a captive with only a secret tattoo on her arm (guess what’s going to happen to that…) to guide her home. Dementus provokes a resources war with cult-leader Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), with Furiosa traded, then escaping a hideous fate as one of Joe’s wives, instead growing up secretly-disguised as a boy (becoming Anya Taylor-Joy) as part of Praetorian Jack’s (Tom Burke) War Rig crew. Then the war between Immortan Joe and Dementus explodes again, foiling Furiosa and Jack’s plan to escape and giving Furiosa a change at revenge against Dementus.

That sprawling plot outline hopefully gives an idea of the ambitious bite George Miller is taking out of his world. While Fury Road took place over, at most, a few days, Furiosa stretches well over twenty, so gargantuan in scale and newly invented locations (as well as the mountainous citadel, we get the oil-rig nightmare of Gas Town and the Mordor-like Bullet Town) that it squeezes most of the entire Act Five war between Dementus and Immortan Joe into a brief, tracking-shot, montage. Furiosa is actually rather like a fever-dream Freud might have had after reading an airplane thriller, split into on-screen chapter titles – each with portentous (and sometimes pretentious) names like ‘The Pole of Inaccessibility’ – and a self-important narration dialling up mythic importance. If Fury Road was like someone stabbing an adrenalin-filled syringe straight into your heart, Furiosa is a like being told a detour-crammed story by someone a bit the worse-the-wear after a long night.

Not that Furiosa shirks on the banging madness of Fury Road’s slap-in-the-face action. It features a mid-film War Rig vs motor-bike raiders pitched-driving battle that is so extreme you wonder no one got crushed under wheel while making it, perfectly capturing the addled madness of Fury Road. A Chapter 4 pitched battle at one of Furiosa’s Dystopian-on-speed locations sees destruction, devastation and disaster on an even grander scale than anything else Miller has done before in this series, with an entire mining crater turned into a whirligig of firey destruction. That’s not forgetting three desperate desert chases – the finest of which is the film’s opening sequence, which see Furiosa’s mother track down and ruthlessly dispatch Furiosa’s kidnappers with a velociraptor-like ruthlessness and efficiency. No wonder Miller can put a whole war into a single shot – and why he feels comfortable ending Furiosa with a surprisingly personal and small-scale confrontation.

The main confrontation is between Furiosa and her self-proclaimed warlord – and would-be surrogate Dad – Dementus. Furiosa gives Chris Hemsworth the opportunity he’s been waiting for, allowing to flex his comic muscles, chew hilarious lumps out of the scenery and still show his menace. He makes Dementus an overgrown child, brilliant at stealing but with no idea about how to use them, obsessed with self-improvement (his dialogue is full of verbose, overwritten phrases, like a psychotic thesaurus) and only really happy when he’s smashing something. Introduced framing himself like a zen-like messiah, it doesn’t take long until he’s charging around on a chariot drawn by motorbikes, tasting other people’s tears and giving self-aggrandizing speeches while torturing Furiosa’s nearest-and-dearest. It’s a gift of a part, funny, scary, loathsome but strangely likeable even when he does awful things.

Opposite him, Anya Taylor-Joy actually has less to work with as Furiosa (she only takes over the part almost an hour into the film). Although this is meant to be a Furiosa film, it rarely feels like its telling us much more than we already know, especially since much the skills that ‘makes’ Furiosa what she is in Fury Road takes place in montage and her desire for freedom and to protect others are swiftly established so that any new-comers can unhesitatingly root for her. If Dementus is all talk, Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa is silent and simmering, her humanity either shrinking or quietly growing from moment-to-moment. She has a quiet romance with Tom Burke’s world-weary Praetorian Jack, but this really about converting her into a mythic figure of vengeance rather than making her a personality.

A vengeance we’ve already seen pan-out in Fury Road. I’ll be honest, for all the grand scale of Furiosa, I don’t really feel I learned anything about its central character here I hadn’t already picked up from Theron’s brilliantly expressive performance in the first film. For all the impressiveness of the scale, a lot of Furiosa boils down to physically showing us things that were implied in the first (second?) film – from locations, to the reasons why Furiosa lost her arm to giving us clear reasons for her motivations. But all this is already there – and with brilliant economy – in Fury Road. Telling us all again feels like Miller giving us the footnotes (Furiosa Silmarillon perhaps?) rather than anything truly new and the Homeric backdrop Miller is going for never really clicks into place.

So the most successful swings are not narrative but visual. Furiosa reminds you what an absolutely insane extreme world Mad Max is. Death cults of radiation-deformed albinos? Villains who bottle milk straight from the nipple (not a cow’s), while another obsessively fondles his exposed, pierced ones? A villain who straps a battered old Teddy bear to himself? Action set-pieces that throw in everything – flying bikes, lava lakes and arms stoically lopped off? Even time-jumps are done imaginatively, like a wig, caught in a branch, decaying in front of our eyes. Every single design decision in this – and the gorgeously sun-kissed photography – is dialled up to eleven for George Miller’s very personal vision of pulpy, dystopian chaos.

You can wonder at times – as I did – whether we really needed a two-and-a-half hour film that’s expands the thematic depth of a chase movie which already outlined its characters motivations and personalities with impressive economy. But then, there are moments in Furiosa that just feel like they’ve been pulled out of someone’s crazy dreams. It’s put together with such a good mix of pulp poetry and head-banging craziness by George Miller that after a while you just go with it. And it sticks with you in a way focus-grouped Marvel films never seem to.

Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)

Lusciously filmed melodrama that might also be an exploration of dangerous obsession

Director: Max Ophüls

Cast: Joan Fontaine (Lisa Berndle), Louis Jourdan (Stefan Brand), Mady Christians (Frau Berndle), Marcel Journet (Johann Stauffer), Art Smith (John), Howard Freeman (Herr Kastner), Carol Yorke (Marie), John Good (Lt. Leopold von Kaltnegger)

Faded pianist and lothario Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan) plans to skip town in 1920s Vienna before his duel with a reputed crack-shot. He’s packed up and ready to go, but halts when his butler passes him a letter from a woman unknown to him that opens “By the time you read this letter, I may be dead”. The writer is Lisa Berndle (Joan Fontaine), a young woman who has loved Stefan since first seeing him when she was an impressionable 15-year-old living in his apartment block in 1900. All her life she has shadowed Stefan and twice they have met – once ten years before, spending a few romantic days together and then again recently under another name – but Stefan has no idea who she is.

Adapted from a Stefan Zweig short story, Letter From an Unknown Woman becomes a richly elaborate display of film-making from Max Ophüls, a show-case for his gorgeous camera work and luscious sense of visual theatre. This is classic melodrama, the characters thrown together after years apart by chance and contrivance, heightened emotions guiding every scene, with the suspense hook at all times of wondering who will see clearly first: will Stefan recognise this woman who has loved him from afar all his life, or will Lisa acknowledge that what she wants from Stefan, a full recognition and genuine return of her feelings, he is unable to give?

It makes for perfect material for Ophüls almost-unmatched visual sense. Letter From an Unknown Woman is packed with the sort of elaborate, carefully planned tracking shots and fluidic camera movements Ophüls made his own. From the start, the camera roves upwards, following the young Lisa as she excitedly runs up a spiral staircase to creep into the apartment of Stefan. There is a superbly handled tracking shot through the street of Venice, as a mid-twenties Lisa walks with a soldier would-be-suitor whose proposal she will immediately reject. And, most triumphantly of all, a tracking shot through a grand society theatre, that roams past crowds of hoi-polloi with Lisa, before focusing on her reaction as she glances Stefan from a distance across the hall.

It’s a visual richness Ophüls triumphs at and he uses it to give an intensity to several scenes, in particular the lost opportunity weekend Lisa spends with Stefan. This is marked by a beautifully framed late-night café dance, before a walk full of romantic lingering in a nearly-abandoned fairground. What’s superb about what Ophüls does with these sequences is to make them look romantic while also suggesting a sort of broken decadence to them (the locations, like the slightly faded café with its bored band, are always slightly past their best). There is a faded grandeur in Letter From an Unknown Woman, with everyone clinging to something they’ve lost or never had, hopes of love or artistic success that are never quite going to happen.

It’s easy to see Letter from an Unknown Woman as a traditional romance of the loyal loving woman, who sticks with her love for a man for better-or-worse. But, particularly today, it’s also clear that the film walks a fine line where its possible to see its lead character as both richly romantic and a delusional, obsessive border-line stalker, fixated on a heartless seducer. Is love a force to be praised at all times, or a destructive force that prevents someone from maturing? For all the richness of the photography and music, it’s hard not to think it’s the latter. And I think Ophüls lets this play on the edges, the camera lingering at points on Fontaine’s face full of obsessive self-sacrifice monomania.

It make for a richly complex role for Joan Fontaine, playing the young Lisa from age 15 to 35, taking her from doe-eyed, love-struck teenager to a woman seasoned by years of regrets, obsessively clinging to has last chance of finding a love she has spent her whole life pining for. Fontaine is giddy, excited but that glimmer of obsession is always there. Ophüls presents her at one point standing, stalker-like, outside Stefan’s apartment, her eyes craning up for just a glance of the object of her affection. In his presence, she’s breathless and excited but also with a touch of pain and desperation, longing for him to give her some sort of validation after years of dutiful, unremarked-on love. Fontaine manages to keep Lisa vulnerable and sympathetic, even as she goes about her life with an obsessive self-destruction, discarding other suitors, spending years working a menial role in a dress shop on the off-chance it might lead to an encounter with Stefan.

Self-destruction is what this ‘relationship’ brings to Lisa, a woman who stubbornly refuses to move on in her life from the decisions and emotions she first experiences as a teenager and will discard attentive lovers, husbands and even children all to the chance of finding a few moments of bliss with the object of her affection. She does this with a real sense of fragility, a longing that keeps her vulnerable, but also something that keeps her from really living her life. Particularly since Stefan – and the film uses Louis Jourdan’s cool, detached arrogance to great effect – emerges as a heartless roué, who thinks only of the immediate and destroys his own promise in a hedonistic clinging to the moment rather than really building something.

For all its luscious romance, Letter from an Unknown Woman carries this air of self-destructive futility about it. Is cradling a teenage obsession healthy for Lisa? Especially as its object is scarcely worthy of the effort? After all, Stefan meets and seduces (as he sees it) the same woman twice several years apart without ever joining the dots up in his head- repeating the same smooth pick-up lines both time. It doesn’t stop Lisa, until the very end, lighting up with a sort of youthful joy you imagine she’s not felt at any other time But Ophüls is using it to build towards a moment where Stefan may perhaps finally remember Lisa – and even more strikingly may realise the shallow emptiness of his whole life and the lost opportunity of being genuinely loved by someone.

That feeling exists, even if you feel (as I do) that Stefan is the unworthy figure of an emotionally-immature woman’s unhealthy obsession. Perhaps Lisa’s life would have been better and happier if she had moved on, as we all do, from our first crushes. But Letter from an Unknown Woman also celebrates a sort of strength in this, by contrasting the morally pure and consistent Lisa with the shallow and mercenary Stefan. His flaws are obvious but, in a way, they also serve to cement Lisa’s own innocence and vulnerability – and add to the impact as Stefan realises the path not taken.

Civil War (2024)

An eye-catching concept disguises a film more about journalistic ethics than politics

Director: Alex Garland

Cast: Kirsten Dunst (Lee Smith), Wagner Moura (Joel), Cailee Spaeny (Jessie Cullen), Stephen McKinley Henderson (Sammy), Nick Offerman (President of the United States), Sonoya Mizuno (Anya), Jefferson White (Dave), Nelson Lee (Tony), Evan Lai (Bohai), Jesse Plemons (Militant)

A third-term President (Nick Offerman) speaks to an America torn apart by Civil War. It’s an attention-grabbing opening but actually, in many ways, politics is not the primary focus of Civil War. Rather than a state-of-the-nation piece, Garland’s punchy work is a study of journalism ethics. Should journalists have any moral restraint around the news they report? Civil War covers the final days of its fictional civil war, as four journalists – celebrated photo-journalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and her reporter colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), veteran correspondent Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and would-be war photography who idealises Lee, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) – travel to Washington in the hopes of capturing the photo (and interview) with the President before his defeat.

Perhaps worried about accusations of political bias, Civil War keeps the causes of its war – and, often, even which sides we are interacting with at any given moment – deliberately vague. There is a throwaway reference to Lee having gained fame for a photo of “the Antifa massacre”, phrasing which doesn’t tell us if Antifa were victims or perpetrators. California and Texas – unlikely bedfellows to say the least – have allied to form the Western Federation. We learn nothing about the President, other than casual name-checks comparing him to Gaddafi (he does vaguely resemble vocally, in his brief appearances, Trump). But so universal are the politics of Civil War it could, without changing a thing (other than wifi access) be as easily set in the time of Clinton or Reagan as Trump and Biden.

Instead, Garland’s point seems to be more if there was a civil war in the Land of the Free, the chaos we could expect to see would be no different than the chaos that has occurred in any number of other locations. On their journey, the journalists encounter UN-run refugee camps, lynch mobs, summary executions, street-by-street fighting, mass graves of civilians and a collapse of anything resembling normal life. We’ve seen the same sort of images countless times on TV, and it matters not a jot that the backdrop now are the streets of DC rather than, say, Mogadishu.

Instead, Civil War becomes the sort of ethical discussion you could imagine in a journalism school seminar. Lee is plagued with troubling memories of conflicts passed, where we see her photographing at intimate range, war crimes, atrocities and shootings without a flicker of emotion. It doesn’t take long for the viewer to find this passive observation of death uncomfortable. It’s something I already felt, watching Lee in the film’s opening photograph a riot over a water truck, camera clicking mere centimetres from civilians laid low by truncheons. When an explosion occurs, her first instinct (after pushing Jessie down to avoid the blast) is to reach for her camera, not to help.

Although showing journalists as brave – putting themselves in harm’s way to bring the readers and viewers at home the truth – Civil War subtly questions the profession of war reporter, people often excitedly pounding the streets alongside killers. Lee’s mentoring of Jessie seems focused less on camera skills, and more on drilling into her the need to disconnect with the world around her. To see herself an observer, whose duty is to record events not to intercede. This boils down to a central idea that Civil War will repeat: if I was killed, Jessie asks, would Lee take the photo? This question becomes the dark heart of Civil War.

We increasingly realise many of the journalists are adrenalin junkies, hooked on the buzz from following in soldier immediate footsteps. “What a rush!” screams Joel after they drive away from a battle that ended with a series of summary executions. Many of the journalists don’t consider they hold any moral connection at all for what happens in front of them. It never occurs to them to attempt to prevent an act of violence or argue against something they see. You start to get the chilling feeling that some of them would as unprotestingly followed the Wehrmacht through the Eastern Front and recorded mass executions with the same emotional disconnection.

The journalists also have a cast-iron belief in their own inviolability, believing the simple waving of their press badge will be guarantee them safety. This delusion is seriously shaken by an encounter with a terrifying, mass-grave filling soldier played by a dead-eyed chill by Jesse Plemons. Even in the tragic aftermath of this, Joel’s grief at the loss of friends and colleagues is also tinged with regret that their potential missing of a crucial story means it was also all for nothing.

Only Lee – an excellently subtle performance by Kirsten Dunst, with the flowering of doubt and regret behind her eyes growing in every scene – shows any growing sense of the ghastly moral compromises (and even collaboration with the grisly things they witness) the journalists have made. It makes an excellent contrast with the increasingly gung-ho and risk-taking Jessie (an equally fine Cailee Spaeny), who becomes as hooked on the adrenalin rush of combat as Joel is.

Garland explores all this rather well under his flashy eye-catching concept. The film is shot with a grimy, visceral intensity – punctuated frequently with black-and-white freeze frames showing Lee and Jessie’s photos, which reaches a heart-wrenching climax for one pivotal scene. Interestingly it’s the dialogue and plotting that sometimes lets Civil War down: its character arcs verge on the predictable and the characters have a tendency to fill themselves in on events with on-the-nose journalism speak.

Civil War culminates in a well-staged gun battle towards the White House in Washington that, like much of Civil War’s America-based concept is about the shock of seeing these things “happening here” rather than in a land far away “of which we know nothing”. But this teasing of a political comment disguises the film’s real intent, a careful study of the moral complexities of reporting horrors rather than stopping them, of becoming so deadened to violence a friend’s death becomes a photo op. Civil War might be one of the most subtle questioning of journalistic ethics ever made, presenting it not as an unquestionably noble profession but one of moral compromise and dark excitement-by-proxy at death and slaughter.

Scoop (2024)

Interview dramatisation which mostly fails to turn news into drama, making empty points

Director: Philip Martin

Cast: Gillian Anderson (Emily Maitlis), Keeley Hawes (Amanda Thirsk), Billie Piper (Sam McAlister), Rufus Sewell (Prince Andrew), Romola Garai (Esme Wren), Richard Goulding (Stewart MacLean), Amanda Redman (Netta McAlister), Connor Swindells (Jae Donnelly), Lia Williams (Fran Unsworth), Charity Wakefield (Princess Beatrice)

It was one of those interviews that shook the world – largely because it was such car-crash TV. Prince Andrew (played, under layers of effective make-up, by Rufus Sewell) desperately wanted to distance himself from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and BBC’s Newsnight was seen as the most appropriate outlet for a reputation-restoring chat with a proper journalist, Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson). The interview was booked by producer Sam McAlister (Billie Piper) – whose book Scoops inspired this – and advocated for by Andrew’s senior advisor Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes). The revelation of Andrew’s priceless mix of out-of-touch privilege and shallow dimness, combined with his inability to understand the impact on anyone but himself, consigned him to royal oblivion.

Scoop tries its best to turn the behind-the-scenes story into drama – but, to be honest, it comes across as a hugely underwhelming Frost/Nixon-lite. It’s hard not to feel an episode of Netflix’s The Crown would have dealt with this with more depth and interest than this manages. Scoop commits the cardinal sin of any “plucked-from-the-TV-headlines” biopic: all its most interesting parts are pitch-perfect recreations of an interview you can watch at your leisure on YouTube. Once you’ve got over how well Anderson and Sewell have captured their subjects, that’s basically it.

That’s Scoop all over. It’s a film that’s all flash and no substance. Martin and screenwriter Peter Moffat work overtime to suggest that this interview was a seismic piece of journalism, a sort of David-v-Goliath reveal. It ends with the Newsnight team giving themselves a self-congratulatory round-of-applause for “having given a voice to the victims” – a bit rich considering neither the interview or this film gives them much more than a second or two. Maitlis and co are shown to be trembling with nerves before interviewing this Royal Spare who no-one ever took particularly seriously (as McAlister bluntly tells him at one point), something which feels a bit odd since we are repeatedly told Maitlis has quizzed Bill Clinton among a score of other names.

There is a Spotlight-ish attempt to show the Newsnight team verifying some facts before the interview takes place – Scoop is one of the few films you’ll see where a paparazzi photographer, played as a cheeky wideboy by Connor Swindells, presented as a noble crusader for the truth – but it never rings true. No real facts about the Andrew-Epstein case were either unknown, in dispute or revealed during the interview. Andrew wasn’t even undone because of “gotcha” questions: it was because he performed so catastrophically badly, painting himself as the “real victim” and revealing he existed in a reality no ordinary person could begin to recognise.

There is very little drama in Scoop. Based on McAlister’s book, Scoop is duty-bound to place her as centrally as possible. Problem is the slogging hard-work of building trust over time to land big interviews is quite undramatic. Instead, the film boils McAlister’s work down into a chance email, a pub chat and a bit of Hollywoodish-straight-talking from McAlister during a meeting with the prince. This sells her skills short. In fact, unlike Frost/Nixon which got chunks of drama out of the will-they-won’t-they dance to set-up the interview, Scoop gives the impression everyone wanted it to happen. In fact, it makes it look so straight-forward, you end up thinking McAllister’s bitter colleague might be right – how highly skilled is her job?

The desire to centralise McAllister creates further problems: their nominal lead’s key involvement ends before the stuff the film is really interested in (the interview) even begins prepping. Scoop falls back on plucky outsider to keep her involved, retrofitting McAllister (a producer with nine year’s experience with world leaders) into a working-class outsider, who needs to force herself into “the room where it happens”. Problem is as soon as she’s in the room, McAlister has nothing to say or do (one suspects the whispered legal battles connected with a rival mini-series on the same subject stopped the writing of any McAllister-ish insight here, for fear it would be promptly denied by the Maitlis-backed rival production).

McAlister becomes a side-bar, a largely silent background character in her own story. Not quite the message that the film wants to promote on female empowerment (even if her bosses are all women). There are similar odd notes in here. Amanda Thisk’s colleague, an aggressive male we are clearly not meant to sympathise with, resigns when the interview is agreed saying it’s a terrible idea. Scoop paints him as a chauvinist bully, furious at being over-ruled by a woman – problem is he’s right. The most effective moment on this subject is arguably more about privilege in general, as Andrew demeans a female cleaner for incorrectly sorting his teddy bear collection. As mentioned the actual victims remain voiceless and nameless on the margins, barely meriting even a post-credits mention.

Perhaps the real problem with Scoop is it wants to be an All the President’s Men style journalism film but the interview was really a soapish showbiz story. There is not investigation, no wrongs bought to light. There is no gladiatorial duel (compare to Frost/Nixon). Andrew essentially commits reputational suicide in front of his stunned opponents, when confronted with fairly routine, fact-based questions. It’s not like toppling someone really important – and the film is so careful about legal implications it avoids putting any stance on what Andrew may or may not have done, knowingly or otherwise.

What the film doesn’t want to say is that Newsnight landed a big hit by giving us exactly the sort of easy-to-digest, car-crash, celeb news it’s staff start the film scorning. Now a film embracing that would be interesting! In the film McAlister says they need to rejuvenate the programme, to stop talking in an echo-chamber to the Metropolitan elite on subjects like Brexit but focus on the things people really care about and challenge its viewers with positions that differ from their own. Was this story about Prince Andrew in any way at all an answer to that challenge? No. Did it change the world? No. Did it really deserve a film – and that rival three-part series? Scoop never suggests it does.

Poor Things (2023)

Distinctive, challenging and hilarious film that mixes social issues with quotable dialogue

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Emma Stone (Bella Baxter/Victoria Blessington), Mark Ruffalo (Duncan Wedderburn), Willem Dafoe (Dr Godwin Baxter), Ramy Youssef (Max McCandles), Christopher Abbott (Alfie Blessington), Kathryn Hunter (Madame Swiney), Jerrod Carmichael (Harry Astley), Hanna Schygulla (Martha von Kurtzroc), Margaret Qualley (Felicity), Vicki Pepperdine (Mrs Prim), Suzy Bemba (Toinette)

“It’s Alive!” cries Frankenstein as his creation is sparked to life before abandoning it to become a revenging monster. Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things imagines a different creature – nurtured (admittedly as part of an eccentric experiment), maturing at an accelerated rate, discovering physical and intellectual stimulation and deciding they can’t get enough of either of them. Adapted from Alastair Gray’s novel, Poor Things is a vibrant and challenging film that, for all its sex, is a feminism-tinged Frankenstein that says no to societally enforced ideas of shame and conformity.

In Victorian London, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is the creature, a stumbling, barely articulate young woman when she is introduced to trainee doctor Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) by her guardian (her “God”) Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). “Bella” is resurrected corpse – the body of a suicidal pregnant woman, the brain of the child she carried. Developing at an accelerated rate, Bella is both Godwin’s experiment and his surrogate child. But as Bella discovers the pleasures of the body and the wonders of the world around her, she wants to experience life outside of the house. Eloping – with the agreement of her guardian – with roguish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), Bella discovers not only sensual pleasures but deeply engaging intellectual pleasures across Europe, determined to become her own woman defined by no-one.

Poor Things is practically a dictionary definition of a Lanthimos epic (fish-eyed lenses, spidery text captions, a jarring mix of period and modern) and is almost impossible to categorise. It is, in turn, serious and thought-provoking, laugh-out-loud funny, uncomfortable and challenging. Shot in a deliberately artificial manner, its cinematography and sets reminiscent of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it’s Victorian but also a remix of everything from Metropolis to the mansion at the heart of Sunset Boulevard, here turned into a Dr Moreau style den of freakishly spliced animals. It makes for something wildly, unpredictably unique visually, a smorgasbord of the real, the overblown and plain weird.

With a sharp script by Tony MacNamara, crammed with quotable lines (sometimes Lanthimos has a bit too much of an eye on creating GIF moments) Poor Things reinvents itself as constantly as its hero. Opening in rich black-and-white to chronicle Bella’s early years, it explodes into a gorgeously expressive Powell and Pressburger colours as she experiences the world. It superbly mixes the real with the weird, shaping its collection of bizarre characters into living-breathing people while keeping the world around them a melting-pot of styles and genres.

Poor Things has been attacked by some as semi-pornographic or exploitative. In fact, it’s a complex and daring look at female empowerment. On first discovering the pleasures of, well, self-pleasure (with a selection of vegetables), Bella is immediately told such things are not done in polite society. But Bella refuses to see “furious jumping” as shameful, but just a source of pleasure and experience like any other. If she takes pleasure in the act with someone, why should be ashamed? And if she makes all the decisions about what does and doesn’t happen with her body, who should judge her?

Bella is a curious hybrid her whole life: the body and feelings of an adult, with a swiftly developing brain, absorbing understanding of the world around her swiftly. Like a child she lashes out at the rules Godwin and his protégé Max place over her (partly for her protection, partly to continue their psychological development experiment). But this comes from her increasing frustration at having her horizons limited by these men, deciding what and who she can see. Lanthimos takes clear from the start Bella can take as much sensual pleasure in feeling fallen leaves under her body or watching fireworks in the sky as anything else and doesn’t feel she should be denied it.

Poor Things sees Bella demanding, and then making, her own decisions – and to hell with expectations. Whether throwing plates at dinner because she wants to leave or choosing to run away to Europe with caddish Duncan for the experience of it, she shall make her own choices. Decisions being made for her, infuriate her: Max’s refusal to let her leave or Duncan’s decision to take her, unannounced, on a cruise. Bella will talk to who she wants and experience anything she finds curious. If she decides to go on the game in Paris in a high-class brothel (on the basis that she enjoys sex, the hours are short and it pays well) who gives a damn if Duncan is appalled. He doesn’t – for all he might like to think so – own her.

These are complex and challenging ideas, as Bella jokes she has become “the means of her own production”. But Bella believes the only thing in the world should make us ashamed is the suffering of others: witnessing a slum in Alexandria she is moved to tears at the indifference that lets children die in poverty, with only platitudes for these “poor things”. And you can see her point: why flinch at personal misconduct but not even blush at the idea of others dying because of our inaction. That’s why she doesn’t want to be constrained by societies ideal, be that enjoying sex, reading Marxism, dancing all night long or wanting to punch a baby that won’t stop crying in a restaurant.

All these complex ideas are brilliantly captured in Emma Stone’s extraordinary performance. It is, of course, a physical marvel, her body slowly, jerkily, developing, but also a rivetingly complex embodiment of a hugely complex personality, absorbing everything around her, processing it and then shaping it into her own world view. It’s reflected in the gorgeous eccentricity of her dialogue – she is “a changeable feast” of views, peppering her sentences with astute (and funny) unique metaphors “finding being alive fascinating”. She makes Bella determined, naïve, exceptionally wise and insightful, uncertain, kind and unforgiving. It sits perfectly at the heart of a film about a woman refusing to be ashamed and determined to better the world around her. It’s a brilliant creation.

One of many in the film. Godwin, a hideously disfigured famous surgeon, was the subject of his own father’s experiments (Godwin describes with matter-of-fact scientific curiosity a series of repugnant surgical experiments, including the removal of organs to discover if the body needs them – “turns out we do”). Godwin seems at first a blinkered mad scientist, but in Dafoe’s brilliantly layered performance, a humanitarian with a sense of fair play is revealed, who genuinely cares for his creation and refuses to stand in her way. Although she calls him “God” he is far from a messianic tyrant, instead refusing to repeat the mistakes of his own tyrannical parent.

He contrasts neatly with Ruffalo’s rake. Ruffalo has a whale of a time in a ‘leave nothing in the locker room’ performance of comedic excess. Duncan seems at first a threatening rake, but becomes infatuated with the mysterious Bella (something she finds more and more wearing), crumbling from worldly-wise playboy to a spoilt schoolboy whining about things he can’t have. Ruffalo inverts Bella’s development: as she becomes more mature, he degenerates into a dependent child.

Which fits because Poor Things is a Frankenstein-in-reverse story of a woman not being defined by men. Those who try fail, left to choose either to support her or flail against her rights. Lanthimos’ work is striking, original and hugely dynamic, brilliantly mixing striking visuals with searching questions. Why shouldn’t women feel the same lack of shame in their bodies and accomplishments as Bella does? It’s an urgent question – that’s getting lost in discussions about the films. Often as wildly funny as it is freakily weird, its deliberate artificiality and anachronisms help create a film that is a playground of ideas. I’m still working out what I feel about it all now – and how refreshing to have a film as bold as that to consider?

Hello Dolly! (1969)

Bloated, miscast and over-produced musical that nearly sank the genre and studio

Director: Gene Kelly

Cast: Barbra Streisand (Dolly Levi), Walter Matthau (Horace Vandergelder), Michael Crawford (Cornelius Hackl), Marianne McAndrew (Irene Molloy), EJ Peaker (Minnie Fay), Danny Lockin (Barnaby Tucker), Joyce Ames (Ermengarde Vandergelder), Tommy Tune (Ambrose Kemper), Judy Knaiz (Gussie Grander), David Hurst (Rudolph Reisenweber), Louis Armstrong (Band leader)

The old-fashioned musical had always been a winner for Hollywood. So, I guess it made perfect sense to pump $25 million (just over $200 million in today’s money) into Hello Dolly!. Reality didn’t agree though. Hello Dolly! was a massive box-office bomb which, despite its seven Oscar nominations (including Best Picture, due to intense studio lobbying) pretty much killed the traditional, Freed-style musical stone-dead. After this, musicals would have drama at their heart (like Fiddler on the Roof or Cabaret) and scale down the production numbers.

It also didn’t help that the mega-budget, colossal production values across its bum-numbing two-and-a-half hour run time ruthlessly exposed Hello Dolly! as a perilously slight story, in a way its years playing on Broadway hadn’t. Dolly Levi (Barbra Streisand) is a widowed matchmaker, hired by grumpy “half-a-millionaire” Horace Vandergelder (Walter Matthau) to find him a wife. However, Dolly rather fancies getting back into the game with Horace herself. Around them other parties flirt, such as Horace’s niece Ermengarde (Joyce Ames) with artist Ambrose Kemper (Tommy Tune) and his clerks Corenlius Hackl (Michael Crawford) and Barnaby Tucker (Danny Luckin) with fashion store owner Irene Molloy (Marianne McAndrew) and her assistant Minnie Fay (EJ Peaker).

I’ll grant the scale and sets are impressive. Whole streets and parks were built. Grand, elaborate costumes (some of Streisand’s costumes cost thousands and thousands of dollars by themselves) add wow factor. If you believe “more is more” Hello Dolly! is for you, it’s Oscar for set design well deserved. But as you watch Streisand hit a high note in long shot while an entire parade of thousands takes place around her, you start to realise you’ve not formed a bond with the characters. When we finally get them all in one place (a crowded restaurant in New York) the best part of thirty minutes is taken up with three massive numbers (Dancing waiters! Streisand’s entrance number! Comedy foot-tapping from Crawford! Louis Armstrong cameo!) that piles so much stuff on, that you almost forget what the scene was meant to be about in the first place.

What this probably needed to be is a tighter, American in Paris style romantic comedy, the sort of stuff Arthur Freed would have run out in 100 minutes with a few set pieces. Instead, it’s a bloated mega-production with colossal sets, 12,000 extras, widescreen soaking up the action and vast, never-ending dance numbers that fail to progress either story or emotion. After being bludgeoned by balletic leaps, you suddenly realise not only has nothing much happened, but you are being asked to invest in the future happiness of characters you barely know and often hardly even like.

It’s not helped by the chronic miscasting of the leads. Barbra Streisand was the hottest star in town – the studio was (correctly) convinced mega-stardom was inevitable after watching the rushes of Funny Girl – but she is wrong on almost every level for Dolly Levi. A part intended for a slightly-over-the-hill widower in her late 40s, was barely retrofitted for a glamourous diva aged 26. Streisand, clearly painfully aware she was wrong for the part, struggles to work out how to play it. Sometimes she’s coquetteish, other times she goes for a mother-in-law largeness, most of the time she ends up channelling Mae West sauciness. While her singing is (of course) outstanding, she never looks comfortable. Equally out-of-place is Walter Matthau, whose grouchy comedy style never meshes with the tone of the film (although he has a great bit of business with a walking stick which he hammers down onto a table with such irritated force it almost rebounds and hits him in the face).

It also doesn’t help that Matthau and Streisand all-too-clearly can’t stand each other (their closing kiss is hilariously awkward – try replicating their physical positions to see how unnatural and unromantic it is). On set Matthau felt Streisand was too big for her newcomer boots while Streisand saw him as envious of her star quality. The two frequently fell into heated rows: this at least meant they fitted in naturally on a set where almost no-one got on. Streisand and Kelly’s working styles (both being demanding perfectionists) proved incompatible, Kelly stopped speaking to the official choreographer who also stopped speaking to the costume designer.

With the leads struggling, most of the film’s charm actually relies on its secondary leads. Hello Dolly! is, actually, an effective showcase for Michael Crawford’s physical dexterity (some would say recklessness) and his sweet romance with Marianne McAndrew’s charming Irene Molloy is the film’s emotional heart. It’s a shame both their film careers effectively ended here (though Crawford would go on to greater things on stage). Their dance number Elegance is one of the film’s most engaging while their duet It Only Takes a Moment is the simplest filmed and most moving moment in the film.

Bloat and bombast overwhelms the rest. Although Kelly knows how to shoot dancing – effective camera moves and having the dancers move towards the camera, increasing their dynamism is very well done – he’s far less suited to the character moments which Stanley Donen and Vincente Minnelli excelled at. The gags very rarely land, either because the timing is off or the camera is so focused on getting the mammoth sets in that the bits of business look like minor irrelevances.

Fundamentally, Hello Dolly! bet the house on throwing all the budget on the screen to wow audiences the way something like The Great Ziegfeld had over thirty years ago. But audiences needed an emotional connection with what they were watching. Hello Dolly spectacularly fails to deliver on this. What we were left with is a very slight story about matchmaking, basically a chamber piece with about six characters, transposed onto the sort of epic backdrop that makes Gone with the Wind look humble. The mismatch never works and the entire enterprise eventually collapses under its own gravitational pull. A box office dud that nearly sank the studio, the musical would never be the same again.

Nyad (2023)

Swimming biopic relies on strong performances as it delivers expected strokes

Director: Elizabeth Chair Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin

Cast: Annette Bening (Diana Nyad), Jodie Foster (Bonnie Stoll), Rhys Ifans (John Bartlett), Karly Rothenberg (Dee Brady), Jeena Yi (Angel Yanagihara), Luke Cosgrove (Luke Tipple), Eric T Miller (Jack Nelson)

Diana Nyad was a champion endurance swimmer in the 1970s, but one major achievement eluded her: the 110-mile swim from Cuba to the tip of Florida at Key West. Estimated to take about 60 hours, it involves wild currents, difficult weather conditions and wild sea creatures with a support crew who can do nothing to help other than advise, keep her on course and provide food. The swim must be completed unassisted and without rest. A failed attempt in 1978 aged 28 was one of her last swimming feats for almost 30 years. Turning 60, Diana decides to dive back into the water and attempt it once again.

Nyad brings this story to the screen, refashioned into a comfortably feel-good sports biopic that presents Diana’s story within the expected framework of the cliches of the genre. There is almost nothing in Nyad that you haven’t seen before. Lessons are learned, people walk from the swimming campaign only to return for “one more adventure”, we discover there is no I in team and no solitary athlete ever truly works alone. Settle down for seeing the same sort of material you’ve seen in many other films before, and you won’t be disappointed.

The thing that makes Nyad different is the performances at its heart. Annette Bening (Oscar-nominated) trained for a year in preparation for this role, large chunks of which are spent watching Nyad charge forward through choppy open waters. On land, Bening skilfully balances Nyad’s prickly self-obsession with a vulnerability and fear of defeat. A demanding perfectionist who accepts no compromise, Nyad frequently rubs her team up the wrong way, but Bening never makes her unsympathetic. She’s a woman keen to prove something to the world and to herself, not least that age doesn’t define our horizons.

Our warmth to the tunnel-focused Nyad largely comes from the delightful chemistry between Nyad and her coach, ex-girlfriend and best friend Bonnie Stoll, delightfully played by the Oscar-nominated Jodie Foster. This is some of Foster’s finest work in years, an exuberant, playful, incredibly natural performance of a woman who is, in her way, as driven as Nyad, determined to protect her charge. It’s Bonnie who frequently needs to salve the wounds left by Nyad, hold the team together and make the difficult calls to continue or abort Nyad’s attempts. Foster’s performance is a burst of life in the film, providing its real heart.

The two dominate much of the film, although there is a room for a fine performance of curmudgeonly decency from Rhys Ifans as late navigator John Bartlett. But this is film that works best when focused on the two leads, be it Bonnie surprising Nyad with a birthday party, the two unashamedly celebrating watching a competitor’s attempt fail on television, Bonnie tending Nyad’s injuries, or the two arguing with the honesty that platonic life partners have. All of the film’s most memorable moments feature Foster and Bening bouncing off each other on land.

So, it’s a bit of a shame that a large part of the film takes place in the water. One of Nyad’s major failings is that it never really finds a way to make the act of swimming either truly dramatic of visually interesting. It is a tough challenge – after all, marathon solo swimming is (by its very nature) silent, monotonous, and in long stretches not exactly compelling to watch. But Nyad falls back too often into sequences that feel either artificial – look out there are sharks in the water! – or reliant on Life of Pi style visuals (no coincidence surely that film’s Claudio Miranda also shoots this one) to try and bring to life the hallucinations long-distance swimmers can suffer from after over 50 hours of non-stop physical effort. We get Bening swimming through magical light shows and an underwater Taj Mahal, but this feels like an attempt to give us something to look at rather than a flourish that gives insight into theme or character.

It’s a common theme of the film. Nyad often has watery-framed flashbacks to her younger self, pushed to achieve great things at an early age and suffering sexual abuse from her coach as a teenager. But, again, these revelations feel unconnected with the drama we are watching, making the repeated flashbacks to it feel unnecessary. The only time the subject comes up in the main plot line, Nyad brusquely closes the conversation down, insisting she has not been made into a victim and briskly moving on. The film concurs in wanting to avoid defining Nyad in any way by this abuse. But it does leave you wondering why in that case the film so frequently returns to the issue.

At times it feels like Nyad has struggled to turn the act of someone swimming into drama. Instead, it relies on those standard sporting movie events. The initial success, the struggle, the break-up, the lessons, the heart-warming triumph. Nyad doesn’t find any time to explore the on-going debate around Nyad’s achievement (her poor record-keeping led to Guinness Book of Records refusing to recognise it) but that would get in the way of the triumphant ending. It’s a middlebrow film that relies pretty much exclusively on its actors for spark: fortunately, especially in Foster’s case, they provide it.

What’s Love Got to Do With It? (1993)

Tina Turner biopic sails into dark marital waters in a hard-hitting film

Director: Brian Gibson

Cast: Angela Bassett (Tina Turner), Laurence Fishburne (Ike Turner), Vanessa Bell Calloway (Jackie), Jenifer Lewis (Zelma Bullock), Penny Johnson Jerald (Lorraine Taylor), Phyllis Yvonne Stickney (Alline Bullock), Chi McBride (Fross), Jame Reyne (Roger Davies) Richard T Jones (Ike Turner Jnr)

How did Tina Turner become the Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll? The hard way. Possibly the hardest. Tina Turner’s relationship (and marriage) to her initial discoverer, Ike Turner, lasted almost twenty years after their first meeting in 1956. During that time, Ike helped form her style – and viciously beat and assaulted her on a regular basis, increasingly in drug-fuelled bouts of jealousy as her talent and fame surpassed his own. What’s Love Got to Do with It? sees Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne bring this biopic and spousal abuse drama to the screen.

Well directed by Brian Gibson, with neat mixture of mock-documentary and home video footage carefully spliced into the film, What’s Love Got to Do with It? is practically the dictionary definition of a tough watch. It doesn’t flinch in showing the escalating violence in the Turner marriage. Bleeding noses, black eyes, furious fists and a rape scene in a recording studio that is almost unbearably visceral, What’s Love Got to Do with It? indeed: this is marriage as Dantean hell.

Tina Turner later felt the film went too far in depicting her as victim, but also not far enough in showing the violence in their marriag [AN1] e. (Ike Turner, needless to say, was equally unhappy – but who cares.) What she praised though was Angela Bassett’s performance. Cast at short notice, Bassett worked overtime to master Turner’s vocal and physical mannerisms. It’s a nailed-on performance, but Bassett also completely drills down into the heart of a woman who finds herself lost in a situation outside of her control, terrified but discovering the inner strength needed to lead her own life.

It’s a hugely emotional performance. Bassett makes Tina fiery, determined and talented – but even the strongest person can find themselves trapped in (and defending) destructive relationships. Despite the early example of Ike’s previous girlfriend Lorraine (a very good Penny Johnson), driven to a suicide attempt by Ike, despite his vanity and jealousy being clear early on, (as well as his control freak desire to dictate every inch of her life ,including changing her name to Tina Turner without her agreement), Tina is captivated by Ike.

As their relationship deteriorates, for all his vileness, Bassett’s Turner defends and excuses her husband. Whether he beats her up at home in front of the kids (and brings a dress home later as an apology) or smashes a cake into her face in a restaurant, it’s never quite his fault. He’s fragile, he’s an artist, sometimes she just makes him mad. Bassett brilliantly shows how this Orwellian double think can settle in, so that a woman like Turnerstays with her abuser for 16 years of marriage, until she realises she can break free.

Bassett’s electric performance is perfectly complemented by Laurence Fishburne’s burning, self-pitying performance of weakness and insecurity masked by anger and fury. Fishburne turned down the film five times (it was Bassett’s presence that eventually persuaded him). He felt the film didn’t do enough to show why Turner became the man he did. To be fair, he’s probably right. Turner has an early scene where he speaks of his childhood trauma (a fig leaf for his bullying) which Fishburne gives a real humanity, and he invests the early sequences with charm and charisma.

But Fishburne, like Bassett, doesn’t slack on the energy. As cocaine and envy eat Ike up, his body language becomes more bear-like, his speech ever more mumbled. His eyes cloud over with a look of hate. Only actors who trust each other completely could play these appalling scenes of domestic violence with such complete and utter commitment. Both Bassett and Fishburne give a horrible life to these shocking and sickening moments of hurt and pain.

Both actors essentially elevate material that, at heart, is standard biopic stuff, built around the usual obstacles – albeit the obstacle this time is hideous domestic violence. We see the roots of Turner’s career, the early hits, the terrible turmoil, so appalling that the final act triumph really moves. Gibson recreates Turner performances with expertise, each packing a real punch. Bassett’s capturing of Turner’s performance style is spot-on and her lip synching is flawlessly convincing.

What’s Love Got to Do with It demonstrates how hard it is to escape abusive relationships. But, the film though doesn’t quite manage to fully build the real life behind the characters. I can get why Tina Turner felt the film positioned her as too much of a victim, as it prioritises this aspect of her life before all others. While it’s made clear that Ike lived a life in which he victimised a series of women, the film’s focus on this issue diminishes the other aspects of Tina’s life and the building of her own career, making her for a large part of the film a punching bag for an abuser.

So, the survival makes for deeply affecting viewing. To see Tina return the punches and flee from a hotel in LA to find refuge in another hotel (she was granted a free room by a deeply sympathetic hotel manager who can read between the lines). Her refusal to be scared when, like all bullies, Ike comes crawling back begging forgiveness and then switches smoothly to threats when that doesn’t work. And above all the triumph of her career. The only thing she wanted from the divorce was the name “Tina Turner” – she had bled for it. And we saw it. What’s Love Got to Do with It might be, in many ways, a standard biopic but with two such forceful performances it has special moments.

Persona (1966)

Bergman’s masterpiece, a fascinatingly brilliant Rorschach test that challenges and rewards the viewer

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Bibi Andersson (Alma), Liv Ullman (Elizabet Volger), Margareta Krook (Doctor), Gunnar Björnstrand (Herr Volger), Jorgen Lindstrom (Boy)

Even Bergman considered Persona a moment he “had gone as far as I could go…touched wordless secrets that only cinema can discover”. Persona, Bergman’s most consciously artistic and psychologically challenging work is a mass of contradictions and puzzles that defies easy categorisation (even Bergman claimed to be only half sure what definitively was happening). A whirling mix of themes, haunting moments and unknowable incidents all within a framework that constantly reminds us we are watching a film, Persona has been influencing, challenging and fascinating viewers for over 60 years. If cinema’s Everest is Citizen Kane, Persona is its K2.

The plot seems simple. Famed actress Elizabet Volger (Liv Ullman) fell silent for a minute during a production of Electra, then carried on. A day later she stopped speaking and hasn’t spoken since. Her doctors can’t find an answer so she is sent to an island to recuperate, with the support of a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). On the island, Alma fills the silence with long monologues that become more and more confessional, intimate and personal. Does Elizabet betray these confidences in a letter to her doctor? Does Alma plot revenge? Are these events even happening? As the personalities of the two women blur, merge, swop and consume each other the film fractures (at one point literally so) until we are left as uncertain of who and what is real as perhaps the women themselves.

There is, in some ways, no understanding Persona. It perhaps best resembles a cinematic Rorschach test. I’d argue it’s a fool’s journey to stare at it for a definitive answer. Different days, different moods, different conditions will make the picture re-shape and resemble something else. Bergman has created a film devoid of traditional ‘clues’, that provides no trace of an ‘answer’, but instead asks – demands? – us to take away only what we choose.

Throughout, Bergman makes it vitally clear film is a constructed, artificial representation of reality. Persona starts and ends with film literally spooling through a projector, the arc lights cranking up to project a reality. The opening prologue is a host of suggestive images which may, or may not, relate to what we are about to watch. Their meaning is almost deliberately vague – much as the epilogue’s brief shot of Bergman and crew shooting the film is – but it lets us know beyond doubt this is a subjective presentation of a series of images, not real life. Perhaps reading meaning into it is as impossible a task as trying to interpret the contents of a library from the page of a single book.

Which is to say, I think Bergman is both inviting us to interpret the film but also warning us that this isn’t a jigsaw, but a deliberately obtuse and open-ended work, our experience of it controlled by the director. Film is after all a dream – a world where we think we move freely, but in fact we never do. Which might make you think Persona is Bergman’s punking the world, a Thermot’s Last Theorem designed to infuriate. It isn’t because it’s made with such grace, humanity and honesty.

To understand Persona you can only discuss – and wonder – at the complex, multi-layered themes and decide which speaks most to you on the day. A lot of this boils down to how you are affected by the breathtaking, seismic performances from Andersson and Ullman. Playing two characters whose identities merge, shift, mirror and absorb each other both performers give outstandingly intelligent, infinitely challenging and unreadable performances. For Andersson the film is virtually a monologue, where the more Alma talks, the more our grasp on who (or what?) she is slips through our fingers. Ullman’s impassive face, awash with micro-expressions (caught in scintillating close-ups) constantly disorientates – is that a sneer or a smile? Is that head-turn impatience or a desire to know more?

At several points I find myself falling into the trap Bergman lays of wanting to categorise the film, as I became convinced first one than the other of these women was just an element of the psyche of the other. It’s not as simple as that. They are both the same and different, two people and one. Bergman frequently frames their bodies overlapping and, in one horrifying moment, their face literally merged half-and-half. Elizabet, we think at first, is a near vampiric figure sucking the life out of Alma, drawing confessions from Alma to restore herself. Then Elizabet becomes a ghostly figure, moving in the margins of Alma’s life, a horrific silent figure from her subconscious holding her back. Then you feel Alma to be nothing more than Elizabet’s id, demanding her right to be independent.

The unreadability of the film becomes ever more acute at the half-way point. After an enraged Alma deliberately leaves Elizabet to cut her foot on glass, the film pauses, burns away and then restarts with an echo of its earlier montage. Has the story restarted? Did all or any of what went before actually happen? Or is everything from this point a cinematic fantasy? Later in the film Bergman throws in a sequence with Alma and Elizabet back in the hospital before returning to the island – is this a flashback or a dream or a vision or something else entirely?

Bergman’s mastery of horror comes to the fore. The haunting repeated shot of Elizabet embracing Alma from behind, the two of them starring into a mirror (and the camera) at times seems sexually charged, at others disturbingly possessive at others supernaturally controlling. Is Bergman’s point that the context of an image can change its meaning? These hazy definitions of truth and reality lie throughout. The confrontations between the two taking on an increasingly surreal nature.

In a stunning sequence, Bergman repeats the same Alma monologue twice, one focused solely on Elizabet (her face contorted with pain as she hears of her rejection of a child), the second on Alma (now dressed identically to Elizabet), Alma’s bitterness now taking on a totally different light. Alma, back in nurses’ outfit, confronts Elizabet screaming that she is her own person even as her words collapses into an incoherence that might as well match Elizabet’s silence. Which is projection and which reality? When they leave at the film’s end, do they go their separate ways or merge? Does Alma imagine herself with Elizabet’s husband, or when Elizabet’s husband recognises Alma as his wife is he tipping the nod to us?

Bergman gives no clear reasons for Elizabet’s silence. It could be connected to horror at the world’s terrors (Vietnam and the Holocaust are referenced). It could be shame at her own post-natal depression. It could be that the silent Elizabet is a projection of the Alma-Elizabet’s own turmoil and isn’t real in the first place. After all the hospital we are introduced to Elizabet in doesn’t feel like a real place but a sparsely dressed film set (and shot like it).

Sex weaves it’s way tellingly through the film. The sexual bond between Alma and Elizabeth, physically, seductively close and possibly sleeping together is clear. Alma relates a hugely erotic monologue about an orgy she and a friend initiated on a beach, the only time she describes herself a purely happy and content. Is this her memory or a fantasy of Elizabet’s? If Alma is Elizabet, is this what she longs for or the thing she finds missing now from her own life? Alma talks of wanting a family – but in a haphazard, casual way and has already had an abortion. Elizabet has a son but doesn’t want him – is Alma what she dreams she could be, or is Elizabet the truth Alma doesn’t want to face? At various points both, all or nothing of the above could be true.

The film opens with a mysterious boy starring at a blurred series of images of female faces. We never learn who he is (theories abound from Elizabet’s son to Bergman himself). He wakes seemingly from the dead, but perhaps he is given life by the film. Perhaps, Bergman is saying, Alma and Elizabet are themselves given life only by the film. That both of them are fictious illusions, as unreal as the blurred pictures on the wall. Persona is the sort of film only a director of pure courage could have made. An object that fascinates and frustrates but always leaves you wanting to reconsider and reposition it to see if the picture becomes clearer or if new truths are presented if you look at it from a different angle. Maybe Elizabet is a succubus. Maybe Alma is an angry inner self, longing to escape and liver her own life. Maybe Alma is the silent actress. Maybe Elizabet longs for the simpler life of the nurse. Perhaps every single idea is true and perhaps none of them are. That’s part of the mystery that makes Persona one of the greatest films ever made.