Film Reviews by JB

Misbehaviour tells a remarkable story - what happened at the 1970 Miss World pageant where a Women's Liberation group caused chaos during the show and where a notable number of women of colour took part (and did pretty well in the competition), including - controversially at the time - its first black South African contestant.

The story gets a relatively unsubtle treatment, in a similar fashion to the movies Pride or Made in Dagenham. Although its speechifying and exposition-heavy style can feel clunky and contrived (people speaking in a way no real person ever would, but written to summarise debate at the time, in situations blatantly set up to let them do so), Misbehaviour gets away with it, with its otherwise lightness of touch, empathetic characters and humour. It's topped off with some energetic and memorable performances from a great cast: Jessie Buckley typically stands out but Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Lesley Manville are great too. Keira Knightley basically plays herself but she does it well.

Although not the most sophisticated movie about the themes of second-wave feminism and racism, Misbehaviour works really well as engaging, entertaining social commentary. It's endlessly watchable, very well acted and shocking in equal measure.

A mother's love is a powerful thing and this movie from writer-director Bong Joon-ho, made before his sensational crossover hit Parasite, dramatises this to an extreme and devoted effect.

The mother in question, just known as "Mother" (Kim Hye-ja) lives with her twenty-something son, Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) in near-poverty in a small South Korean town. Mother and son gain national attention when evidence implicates the son in the murder of a young woman and he is locked up, awaiting the outcome of the process. But he has been falsely accused - he has learning difficulties and the legal system favours the most articulate, and the rich, and his mother decides to step in herself to clear her son's name. She can't afford the supposedly necessary lawyer, who might not be interested anyway, but she has love on her side.

Fans of Parasite will recognise the mixture of shifting tones and attributes here; high drama and tension, mystery, violence, social commentary and off-kilter humour, to name but a few, often all existing side-by-side in a scene. It's a combination that constantly disarms and completely enthralls once you click into it. And that judicious use of an orchestral soundtrack… it's like stepping back into a warped Hitchcock movie, in the best possible way. Like Parasite, there are moments of real cinematic panache and beauty too ("Mother" in those fields… stunning).

This movie is also blessed with an extraordinary performance by Kim Hye-ja as the titular "Mother", who binds it all together. Like the film, her performance is a display of many facets… here, we have rage, anguish, determination, haughtiness, fragility and love. And that dancing at the beginning and end of the movie... Often, her son doesn't seem to understand what she's doing to help him, but that's not why she is doing it.

This is no dry essay on social inequality in South Korea, although that's the message we take away (quite rightly) from Mother. This is a full-blooded and unusual psychological, emotional, thrilling beast of a movie that ranks up there with cinema's most memorable depictions of motherhood of the last twenty five years, from Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother to Xavier Dolan's Mommy.

The great, prolific and incredibly versatile writer director Francois Ozon turns his attention to the real life case of Father Bernard Preynat, a Catholic priest who is accused of sexually assaulting countless young boys from the 1980s onwards. And, what's more, the Church has known about it for years.

By the Grace of God has an almost episodic structure: it starts with the case of Alexandre (Melvil Poupaud) a family man living in Lyon, and still a practicing Catholic. He goes to the church to seek some sort of closure after he's ready to talk about the assault he suffered from Preynat. At the same time, in other parts of the country, two very different and separate men are starting to come forward including Francois (Denis Menochet) and Emmanuel (Swann Arlaud). They join up forces, after conversations with the church break down, to seek justice.

There are obvious comparisons with the movie Spotlight, covering a similar topic but in the US. However, that had a narrative focus and tension, driven by the investigative journalist team at the centre of the story, that this movie arguably lacks especially with its open ended conclusion (that has now been resolved). But this movie works better on a human level, as we're much closer to the victims here and we can see how the emotional, psychological, physical and even spiritual aftermath of the abuse manifests in very different ways.

I did wonder whether the stories would have worked better as a longer form TV mini series than a two hour film. Ozon clearly and rightly wants to unpick the ongoing human consequences of historic abuse. But by cramming three very different stories in one movie, he is perhaps doing a disservice to each one. His fractured narrative presentation does not help either. A thoughtful and thought provoking film for sure, but not an entirely successful one.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood tackles US children's entertainment icon Mr Rogers, whose sensibility could not be more spectacularly unBritish.

Frank Rogers perpetrates an aggressive kindness (a phrase Tom Hanks, who plays him here, has mentioned in interviews). Rogers talks on his TV show about expressing and talking about feelings, and almost paradoxically locks in on whoever he speaks with, with laser like focus. That attitude is itself interrogated in detail by Lloyd (Matthew Rhys), a reporter from Esquire magazine - a fictional character for the purposes of this movie. Lloyd is sent to Pittsburgh to write just a 400 'puff piece' on Rogers which precipitates an unravelling of Lloyd's own attitudes towards kindness, family, relationships and love.

I'm not convinced this movie finds a way to dramatise the unique Mr Rogers for anyone unfamiliar with him, but it gives it an interesting try. To capture that weird mixture of psychological insight and the childlike that Rogers portrays, there are various movie-within-a-movie moments: from the opening titles with its arts and crafts mockup of a cityscape, to a sequence where Lloyd finds himself shrunk down as a puppet in the set of the TV show. It's all a bit Michel Gondry, just not as consistently used or developed as something like Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. That's all juxtaposed with almost melodramatic sequences of father-son conflict (between Rhys and an excellent Chris Cooper) and the trials of becoming new parents (between Rhys and an underused Susan Kelechi Watson as his wife, Andrea).

I'd have preferred a more gutsy commitment to the movie-within-the-movie moments and less of the melodrama, which is pretty ordinary and does suck the movie down into a beige schmaltz. Those sequences only work as well as they do because of the performances. Tom Hanks is excellent and Matthew Rhys is always very watchable.

Maybe it's because I'm too British (although I do have a soft spot for a romcom), but I found A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood succumbs to the worst excesses of Mr Rogers without lifting the lid enough on his contradictions.

Alice (Emily Beecham) is a scientist and a mother: two things that come into sinister contact in this odd, detached but very intriguing movie.

One evening, Alice brings back a plant to her home and her son - something she has been working on, it needs special care and attention and could revolutionise the industry. Its presence and the hormones it releases, are designed to literally make the owner happy. She names the plant Little Joe, after her son. The plant has been designed not to reproduce by itself, for commercial reasons. However, the question is, is it finding another way to live on? And is her son one of its first victims?

I thought the movie took a cue from 70s horror. It's got this stillness about it and a crisp, clinical visual sense. It's full of these washed out blues, greys and greens, punctuated by shocking reds, purples and pinks. There's this atonal, jarring soundtrack by Teiji Ito which is reminiscent of Mica Levi's work from Under the Skin. In fact, this movie has a similar otherworldly atmosphere to Under the Skin.

Director and co-writer Jessica Hausner keeps many details and character motivations ambiguous, which may frustrate some. But I found the balance between revelation and restraint, heavily weighted to the latter and not the former, really intoxicating and it kept me interested. If anything, I'd have liked more restraint especially in the film's third act, as extra plot developments do paradoxically reveal the plot's occasional lack of drama.

However, this ambiguous, detached British indie sci-fi (horror?) is visually bewitching and really gets under your skin.

I'm writing this a few weeks after the death of George Floyd and the reignition of the BLM movement; something that becomes increasingly relevant throughout this deeply affecting and horribly watchable movie that takes a cue from Bonnie and Clyde but is ultimately unique and utterly, sadly, modern. If this movie came out just a few months later, it would have, I'm sure, received the attention it deserved.

Queen (Jodie Turner-Smith) and Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) have a first date never to forget, after they get stopped by a police officer on the way back from the diner. Due to a series of misunderstandings, triggered by the officer's racist hostility, Queen and Slim flee from the scene after shooting the officer dead with his own gun. The chase between the law and the almost-couple is on, with the pair becoming outlaw heroes. But do they want to be?

Writer Lena Waithe combines thriller, romance and social commentary equally and consistently throughout and it's delivered with urgency by director Melina Matsoukas. The performance by Daniel Kaluuya is right on the money. Has he got the most expressive eyes in contemporary cinema? Probably, right? Lesser known (for now), but also excellent is Jodie Turner Smith. She has a piercing intelligence that grounds the movie and brings out the pain and anger in the script.

It's a real journey of a movie that ends in a situation that shouldn't really ever happen. Racism will, I hope, one day die. But Queen and Slim - the movie and the spirit of the characters - will live forever.

A quiet but resonant movie from writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose previous movie Shop-lifters won the Palme D'Or at Cannes.

Many other filmmakers would make a movie about a difficult family reunion full of screaming episodes and stony silences. But here, Parisian Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve) and her visiting daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche) don't have shouting matches, they almost shuffle around the house in a fog of resigned disappointment. Their drama is as much played out by proxy in the characters of the film Fabienne is shooting, as it is back home. And this is even with Fabienne publishing a memoir which drastically rewrites their family's history. Similarly low-key is Fabienne's attitude to her career: she has her moments of fire but otherwise is stoically resigned to a slow decay.

It's not a downbeat film; like the shots of the house's garden, there's bright beams of light everywhere. Ethan Hawke's husband and his relationship with his wife and daughter. The eventual exchanges Fabienne's book precipitate between her and her daughter. The simple beauty of everyday conversation between grandmother and granddaughter.

And it's a real pleasure to see these actors, particularly Binoche and Deneuve, so known for their emotionally charged performances, to really dial it back.

Perhaps The Truth is not essential Hirokazu Kore-eda; it's elegant, touching, very well written but not a revelation. However, it's an important film in his career being the first outside of Japan and one with such internationally well-known stars. He manages both changes with a characteristic ease, of course. And, inevitably, non-essential Kore-eda is still full of light and love.

Zac Efron delivers a performance ten times better than the film itself in this story of real-life serial killer Ted Bundy and his long-term girlfriend (played by Lily Collins), who has no idea of her partner's crimes until he is arrested.

Focusing on the years from Bundy's first killing to his execution on death row, the film is told from the perspective of Bundy's girlfriend. The problem is the film becomes increasingly less interested in the girlfriend and even Bundy, despite them being the main characters, and much more interested in the details of the murders (although there's no onscreen violence, in a well-thought-out decision from director Joe Berlinger). She becomes a non-descript character, despite her significant screen time ... he never becomes more than two-dimensional: we never truly get to the bottom of how Bundy hid everything from her, why she sticks with him even though it becomes increasingly clear he is guilty and he is lying to her too, or why he did what he did. It doesn't really work despite some nice touches on the way (the director, who has a background in documentary, puts in nice period detail and odd unsettling moments throughout).

Zac Efron is the reason to watch the film, though. As well as being alarmingly physically and facially similar to Bundy here (albeit with added Hollywood abs), he's got that heightened charisma of a psychopath nailed down and he becomes increasingly animated and delusional as the film goes on. He captures the cracks in the Bundy persona well, too. You can see why he was attracted to the role - there's a lot to work with here and it's another string to his bow. He's becoming really quite a different actor and he's now a long way from High School Musical.

Isabelle Huppert, Chloe Grace Moretz, Neil Jordan. So much talent. Even Zawe Ashton has a small role. So why is this film so rubbish?

I have two theories.

The first theory is that everyone thinks they're doing a different movie. Isabelle Huppert is making a campy psychological horror film, in a Fatal Attraction vein. She's obsessive, stalking Chloe Grace Moretz, thinking this poor lonely young woman, new in town, who expressed an interest in friendship with Huppert's older metropolitan woman experienced in New York City ways actually needs an ersatz mother in her life. Huppert's Greta will go to any lengths to do this and win over Moretz. Greta loves the piano and designer handbags. She wears massive sunglasses!

However, Neil Jordan and Chloe Grace Moretz are making a completely different picture... a French arthouse movie but in English. It's about desire, loss, longing. Everything is Very Serious. Stephen Rea shows up in the last thirty minutes Acting (they're all making a film with an excess of capital letters).

My second theory involves Neil Jordan not having made a decent film in years, with everyone else willing him on to turn a corner, but his lack of engagement and understanding of the material making that impossible.

So, this isn't Neil Jordan turning a corner, not even close. The result not only doesn't work, it makes you wonder why you're still watching it. But you do, because surely the talent here will make it work, right? But does it? No. Why does Neil Jordan's film keep putting Chloe Grace Moretz into a box? Don't really care.

"I came for the bodycount... let's go!"

Partly in Brazillian-Portuguese and partly in English, this genre-straddling movie is a mishmash of arthouse slowburn, atmospheric and faintly futuristic Western and violent grindhouse/exploitation.

Bacurau is an uber-rural fictional hamlet in northern Brazil, partly tropical, partly in deserty scrub land, where everyone knows everyone else. The whole village sharing a sense of civic pride, embodied by the local museum (any visitor to the place is asked by one of the population if they've been to it). One night, Bacurau awakens to a group of horses running through the streets, set loose from the local farm. It's an omen for the arrival of some outsiders who are going to change the face of the place forever in a most violent way.

The movie can take its time but is punctuated with surprises - from Udo Kier's otherworldly extended cameo to what the locals shockingly watch on TV. The stylized blood and murders (which gradually stack up to a grimly impressive bodycount from about a third of the way in onwards), may put some off - but this is a unique and visceral world cinema curio - with shades of everything from Deliverance, Sergio Leone to the surveillance and allegorical themes of Michael Haneke movies.

The Amazing Mr Blunden is a sweet-sad (but not entirely bittersweet), family-friendly, time-travelling ghost story set in 1818 and 1918. It's made by the late, great actor/writer/director Lionel Jefferies (who is probably more famous for writing/directing The Railway Children and appearing in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang).

We follow a mother, Mrs Allen (Dorothy Alison) and her three children, who move from grubby 1918 London to a remote country pile to act as guardians of said estate. Whilst there, two of the children - Lucy (Lynne Frederick) and Jamie (Gary Miller) - befriend another young girl and boy. It turns out these new children are ghosts - of a sort - from 1818, where an unfortunate event occurred. Lucy and Gary set themselves on a mission to attempt to change the course of history to 'save' their new friends from an otherwise sad end.

Some - including film critic and broadcaster Mark Kermode- consider this is a forgotten classic. Perhaps it would work better as a film to watch with children or to re-watch if experienced in childhood - speaking as a childless (and possibly embittered) 30-something approaching it for the first time, I only enjoyed it up to a point. I liked Diana Dors as the grotesque housekeeper most of all, and the story was engaging enough. I sort of felt it was not one thing or t'other, though; not creepy/ghostly enough to compete with the great Victorian ghost stories, and a little bit too saccharine to leave much of a melancholy feeling despite an otherwise bittersweet story.

Also: the film is 'blessed' with a curious coda, where all the characters wave goodbye to the viewer, which was both very sweet and very awkward?!

László Nemes has created an intoxicating film here... I found it completely absorbing and almost hypnotising although I understand why some find it dull and incomprehensible. But there's clearly nothing like it.

Irisz Leiter (Juli Jakab) is quite a blank central character. Which can be frustrating, particularly because she's barely ever offscreen. From the opening minutes, it looks like she will spend the course of the film pounding the streets of pre WW1 Budapest trying to locate the brother who she's only just discovered exists and become less opaque. But it becomes apparent that director Nemes is more interested in finding out about the soul of Budapest and Hungary... And exposing the corruption of the elites and the simmering tension on the streets. The blankness of Irisz then makes more sense... She's an everyman type, and a focal point the events can reflect off. This becomes particularly clear when we see the unsettling relationship between the millinery company she initially wants to work for and the royal court.

This makes it all sound horribly dry but I'm pleased to say it's really not. What makes it work is the atmosphere, the glorious costumes and sets, the epic setpieces we only glimpse (the fair/festival in particular), the camera work, the point of view it's all told from. Like Son of Saul, Nemes' camera stays in tight close shot to the protagonist. It's history from an incredibly intimate, human vantage point. We see the grime on the otherwise glorious period costumes as they sweep across the dirty city streets. We see the frustrations in the eyes of the workers.

Perhaps it's too long, perhaps it did need a stronger backbone of plot. But taken on its own terms, it's unique and kind of wonderful.

Director Jacques Audrillard usually specialises in bruised masculinity and melancholy but here he seems to have taken the wrong tack with the source material in his English-language movie debut, an adaptation of this bittersweet Western, a Coen-brothers-esque novel of brotherly strain by Patrick DeWitt.

Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly play somewhat to type as, respectively, a brooding loner and a hangdog sweetheart - brothers who live a peripatetic existence as hitmen in the Wild West. Things get complicated on their current job when a private detective (a miscast Jake Gyllenhaal, with a wandering transatlantic accent) gets involved with their intended victim, Hermann Kermit Warm, played by Riz Ahmed.

It's a tricky balancing act - on one hand a Western, on the other a character study of two very emotionally wounded brothers. The novel binds all this with a dry sense of humour, which binds the violent horror of their job to a melancholy undertone. Here, Audrillard lets the weirdly large $38 million budget get away with him and ends up just making a beautifully shot (and tastefully scored) so-so Western with the odd more thoughtful touch. When Gyllenhaal's private detective dramatically intersects with the main narrative, it threatens to completely unbalance the film. It never becomes a good Western or a good character study after this point - the development of the two leads stalls and despite a peppering of moments of actually really quite touching intimacy, it becomes emotionally neutered and rather plodding in its plotting.

It really needed a low-budget indie movie maker working on the fly with some offbeat casting choices to bring out the source material's pleasing contradictions and edges. Instead we have either safe or inappropriate starry casting, and something that feels more bland, the longer it goes on. I did like the eleventh-hour appearance of an unrecognisable Carole Kane, though.

If you've never seen, or even heard of, a David Lynch movie, then perhaps you'll get something more out of this than I did. Because this feels like a love letter to him, his two most recent movies in particular (Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive). I love those movies but I didn't need to see a ersatz semi- stoner version of them.

You've got the same almost voyeuristic obsession over a female character, here in the form of Riley Keogh. Andrew Garfield's Sam meets her as she moves next door to him. You've got a cod-detective narrative... Keogh goes missing, causing Sam to seek her out in the uniquely weird LA combination of glamour and sinister situations. And to add to the surrealism so beloved of Lynch, Sam experiences increasingly violent and bizarre visions, partly inspired by a fugitive pet killer (reminiscent of the bunny head skit in Inland empire).

Andrew Garfield does his best to make his paper-thin character less creepy than he's written to be, but he doesn't completely succeed. Appealing as Garfield is, his character's extreme paranoia and apparently charming lack of basic hygiene seems at odds with his bedding of various women, in some rather eye rolling wish-fulfillment fantasies from writer-director David Robert Mitchell. The end result is a movie that has its moments of inspired lunacy for sure, but delivers little of the shocks, laughs, sexiness or mystery needed.

Charlotte 'The Look' Rampling has had a wonderfully idiosyncratic film career giving a lot of great performances in some fascinating and distinctive movies (who else would have starred in Max Mon Amour, as a woman having an affair with a chimp?!) but this could be her best role and she acts everybody off the screen with it.

As a woman grieving, she's caught between a sort of fantasy existence imagining her missing, probably long-dead, husband by her side as she's almost falling into a new life without him. Rampling employs 'The Look', of course but there are many layers here... Passion, longing, horror, resilience, profound sadness, hope.

The film is understated almost restrained, but also quietly sophisticated. Occasionally director Francois Ozon lets the soundtrack and imagery overwhelm. It's not the best film Rampling has been in, although it is broadly excellent. But it's possibly the best performance she's ever given.