Film Reviews by PD

Emanuele Crialese’s autobiographical film, set in early 70s Rome, focuses on preteen, Adri (beautifully played by Luana Giuliani), and in particular her relationship with her mother Clara (Penélope Cruz). Cruz is perhaps rather too incongruously beautiful for the part, but remains largely convincing nevertheless, particularly in the scenes where she throws off social convention and we see the charismatic, free-spirit underneath the housewife.

The film deals with some success Adri's having to cope with not only the usual various teenage angst, but also a web of intersecting inequities, including domestic abuse, sexual harassment, and class prejudice. By turns wry and tragic, but never glib or sentimental, this is a visually rich and evocative drama about navigating the often treacherous path to adulthood. In an early scene, Giuliani’s character tells her mother that she’s 'Andrew', but seems to have compromised with her and the other adults in his life on the reasonably gender-ambiguous “Adri.” She never explicitly expresses a preference for masculine pronouns, but it could hardly be clearer that Adri thinks of herself as a boy, and she begins living a secret, second life among people who perceive her as male, notably a girl called Sara, with whom Adri begins a teenaged flirtation that allows her to truly be Andrew, at least for temporary stretches. And she soon has additional reason to escape her family’s well-apportioned but emotionally cramped apartment, as her parents’ marriage is crumbling, and her father, Felice, is becoming increasingly abusive (these scenes are a very hard watch at times, but generally very well handled). Meanwhile, Cialese styles the Sara subplot as Andri’s most material fantastical escape to a realm where the identities people are tied to in everyday life dissipate, and Black-and-white television is another such transitory non-place. In a wonderful, surreal dancing scene roughly half-way through, a mother-daughter/son collaboration is quite wonderful, but we are made aware that this can only be fully realised in fantasy in by a later scene where Clara attempts to join Adri and his cousins playing underneath a giant dining table but is rebuffed by Adri, who reminds her that she should be with the adults. Adri finds it very difficult to process the fact that some adults can't seem to ever grow up.

Giuliani is quite excellent as the steely eyed but deeply sensitive Adri, simmering with an angst that typically isn’t voiced in a deeply Catholic community within which he and her family live. One sees in Giuliani’s sullen, knowing glares the way Adri has already begun to choose their battles—to, effectively, save the trauma for later in order to survive the moment. Adri has reached that period of early teenagedom in which adults haven’t quite clocked the child’s enhanced understanding of their environs. “What’s more important: What’s on the inside, or what’s on the outside?” she asks his science teacher when the latter explains, in reference to cell anatomy, that inside everything is something different. Growing more perceptive with experience, Adri takes on much of the burden as her family begins to crumble. The immensity referred to in the title may be this burden, but Cialese intermingles the story’s heavier stuff with a lively sense of childlike wonder, so that the occasional dips toward melodrama never feel unduly onerous. The ending is by far the weakest part of the film for me, but this is a nevertheless a very affecting piece indeed.

Whether minor or major, the millions of decisions we make form the winding path of our lives, and specific reasons for taking certain forks in the road can often be lost to the sea of time. A not-quite-romance in three parts crossing nearly a quarter-century, playwright Celine Song’s directorial debut examines such universal experience with keen cultural specificity, telling the story of childhood friends who twice reconnect later in life. It’s a warm, patient film culminating in a quietly powerful, reflective finale.

It begins in Seoul, introducing Na Young and Hae Sung as primary school classmates forming a playful bond before the former’s family move to Canada. With no contact for 12 years, we then jump in time after Hae Sung finishes his mandatory military service and, per Korean tradition, moves back with his family as he begins engineering school. Na Young, now 'Nora' (Greta Lee - very good indeed), has meanwhile embarked to NYC to launch her career as an author in the midst of an MFA program. They reconnect thanks to the halcyon days of digital-chat Facebook, and so begins a flirtatious, long-distance relationship, although this section rather lacks emotional weight, being underwritten and simplified as if Song can’t wait to jump to the final, longest, and most rewarding section of her film.

This third part presents an opportunity for the childhood sweethearts to reconnect physically for the first time in 24 years. As the weight of what could have been hangs over, a wistful and bittersweet reunion commences, Song beautifully conveying the vast passage of time and how much the circumstances of our lives can change while we still carry the same yearning souls, their interaction fond yet distant as we witness two people now shaped by entirely different circumstances in their most formative years. This dichotomy is wonderfully realised by Song in both their cultural differences and ways their long, furtive glances say more than words ever could, as if every stare makes up for years of being apart. We're left with the question of whether Nora does actually have a connection with Hae Sung, someone she now barely knows, or whether is he just representative of life she never got to experience, the symbolic ghost of a country left behind.

Song delicately juggles such questions of identity and longing in a powerful moment at the film’s conclusion as our lead considers if the life she leads is 'meant to be'. While taking its title from the Korean belief of In Yun––wherein the connections people make in this life are actually the culmination of thousands of others from past lives––it’s joked at one point that this profound idea is often used as a seduction tactic for courting. That gentle sense of wit, mixing the philosophical and the personal, sums up the film's power. Rather than instilling anxiety in contemplating another path one could’ve taken, Song provides comfort by suggesting everyone’s journey is uniquely their own. Thoughtful work.

This very lengthy but powerful and watchable film about the man who created the atomic bomb slices and dices chronology, psychodrama, scientific inquiry, political backstabbing, and history in roughly equal measure. Cillian Murphy gives a superb performance as Oppenheimer, making him fascinating and multi-layered: his “Oppie” is an elegant mandarin who’s also a bit snakelike — at once a cold prodigy and an ardent humanist, a Jewish outsider who becomes a consummate insider, and a man who oversees the invention of nuclear weapons without a shred of doubt or compunction, only to confront the world he created from behind a defensive shield of guilt that’s a lot less self-aware.

The film opens with a flash forward to the 1954 hearing of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission that ultimately resulted in Oppenheimer accused (among other things) of having hidden Communist ties, being stripped of his security clearance. This was the government’s way of silencing him, since in the postwar world he’d become something of a dove on the issue of nuclear weapons, a view that didn’t mesh with America’s Cold War stance of aggression. The film keeps returning to the hearing, weaving it deep into the fabric of its three-hour running time. As Oppenheimer defends himself in front of a committee of hanging judges, the film uses his anecdotes to flash back in time, and Nolan creates a hypnotic multi-tiered storytelling structure, using it to tease out the hidden continuities that shaped Oppenheimer’s life. We see how the Cold War really started before World War II was over — it was always there, shaping the paranoia of atom-bomb politics. We see that Oppenheimer the ruthless nuclear zealot and Oppenheimer the mystic idealist were one and the same. And we see that the race to complete the Manhattan Project, rooted in the makeshift creation of a small desert city that Oppenheimer presides over in Los Alamos, meant that the momentum of the nuclear age was already taking on a life of its own.

The film has a mesmerising first half, encompassing everything from Oppenheimer’s mysterious Princeton encounter with Albert Einstein to his far from utopian marriage to the alcoholic Kitty (played with some force by Emily Blunt). Just about everything we see is stunning in its accuracy, for this isn’t a film that traffics in composite characters or audience-friendly arcs; Nolan channels the grain of reality, the fervour and detail of what really happened. Meanwhile, the build-up to the creation of the first atomic bomb ticks with cosmic suspense, but the big bang itself, when it finally arrives, is something of an anti-climax as Nolan shows it impressionistically — the sound cutting out, images of what look like radioactive hellfire. Thus the terrifying awesomeness, the nightmare bigness of it all, does not come across, nor does it evoke the descriptions of witnesses who say that the blast was streaked with purple and grey and was many times brighter than the noonday sun. The Japanese experience is, perhaps inevitably, largely side-stepped, and although it's hinted at that bombing the defeated Japanese was less to save American lives and more designed to cow the Russians with a ruthless demonstration of the US’s nuclear mastery, the concentration on the effects of this on Oppenheimer seems rather morally incongruous given the forces unleashed. And once we're past that nuclear climax, the intensity rather subsides - we’re still at the A.E.C. hearing (after two hours), with an Oppenheimer who is now fighting the invention of the more powerful hydrogen bomb, as if it were some utterly different weapon from the one he created, and who is desperate to rein in the existence of nuclear weapons in general, but forgetting the key lesson of the revolution he was at the centre of: that human beings will always be at the mercy of what science makes possible.

This enjoyable film is largely carried by its feminist philosophy, and features a very good, impassioned monologue delivered by America Ferrara (who plays a Mattel employee with a surly, anti-Barbie tween daughter) that lays out the many ways in which women are forever in conflict with themselves and within their societies. However, ultimately director Greta Gerwig rather shies away from dealing with this core theme in any great depth, instead urging her audience toward accepting that the best way to be in a broken world is by simply being yourself, whoever that may be - a fair enough sentiment, sure, but hardly a hard-hitting one. The film thus pushes its hero, and (less successfully) Ken, into that exploration and then leaves them to it, dropping all the clashes over patriarchy and corporate feminism in favour of a more palatable message about individualism.

Gerwig seems to take the view that her film can really only tickle and mildly provoke, and that it’s mostly there to be amusing - which it is, albeit more gently than I think was intended. There are a few laugh-out-loud gags in the film, but just as many jokes, if not more, clunk around like cheap plastic, whilst the script is so strenuously wacky that it runs the movie ragged pretty quickly. The film is willing to tease its commercial mission and its overlords, but really only if it is followed by a “hey, we’re just having fun here” pat of reassurance. And whilst Margot Robbie gamely commits to whatever bit is put in front of her in any given scene, she has as much trouble following Barbie’s emotional throughline as we in the audience do, whilst as the film heads into its third act it becomes just as much Ryan Gosling’s show, which is much less funny, and even less entertaining.

There is plenty here to enjoy, and it's not surprising that the film was a massive hit, cheered for turning a cynical I.P. project into a loopy treatise on being. But for me it could have been much stickier, more probing and indelible, if it had reined in some of its erratic energy and really figured out what it wanted to say about its key feminist theme.

If you don’t like a film by Wes Anderson, you certainly won’t like this. But for fans there’s much to enjoy here.

As with ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ or ‘Grand Budapest’ the film has a meta framing device: a 1950s black-and-white television broadcast of “a new play created for the American stage” presented by Bryan Cranston’s ‘Host’. The main story we then watch — of a sleepy 1950s desert town which plays host to a meteorite crater and, later, alien life — is told in parallel with a behind-the-scenes theatrical drama about that desert town. Admittedly this can be, at least until a bow-tie ending, more confounding than compelling, but you soon get used to it. From minute one, the retro setting proves ripe for Anderson’s artistic sensibilities: sunblushed, saturated hues, sharp costuming, and visually stunning, hyperreal production design; he remains cinema’s most astonishing stylist, the rigour and detail in every frame never better here. Wherever you care to look, his visual wit is all there, too, from the “Intermission (optional)” title card that pops up halfway through, to the highway-to-nowhere built due to “route calculation error”. Even Anderson’s camera moves are funny (as with one very droll extraterrestrial cameo swooping past the lens.) Anderson is often accused, some justification, of being detached from his characters, but, as with a Brecht play, the director still wants you to care for these people, and Anderson’s fondest, most familiar themes return here: family, parenthood, grief, love.

In yet another stacked, starry cast, the focus is mainly on Jason Schwartzman’s Augie Steenbeck; his son, Woodrow (Jake Ryan); Augie’s father-in-law Stanley (Tom Hanks); and film star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), who are all dealing with heartbreak in their own ways. When Stanley says, “I never really loved you,” to his son-in-law, there’s real pathos there, even if the performance is carefully hemmed in by typically Andersonian restraint. And whilst the notes of poignancy often struggle to break through, the point of the story is, perhaps, that human connection, enlightenment and healing are possible even in a climate of deep-rooted paranoia and in the mushroom-cloud shadow of atomic testing. You can't wake up (to reality?) without falling asleep (be vulnerable? daring to dream?).

I didn’t like the way that guy looked at us.

What guy?

The alien.

How did he look at us?

Like we’re doomed.

Maybe we are.

Since the 1950s, many children have been adopted internationally from South Korea. A programme initially started to find parents for orphans of the Korean War, it became a huge operation, with thousands of orphans or children of unwanted pregnancies sent overseas for a better life. Partly based on the testimony of a real-life friend of director Davey Chou, the film dramatises the story of one such adoptee: Freddie, now 25, superbly played by Ji-Min Park.

Park Ji-min is very impressive as the film’s charismatic, mercurial protagonist, embodying Freddie's multiple contradictions with some skill, and while Chou’s screenplay gently challenges many preconceived assumptions about the effects of adoption on adoptees, it also perceptively realises that whether biology affects identity or not, the mere possibility that such a link exists can exert a powerful attraction on a searching spirit not quite sure what it is searching for. Set across eight dramatically transformative years in Freddie’s life, the film is divided in three, and rounded off with a short, gently ironic coda. The first section, detailing a first visit to Seoul, is the longest and most straightforward. Glimmers of the self-possessed Freddie’s erratic extroversion do appear, as when she suddenly exhorts a whole restaurant full of strangers to gather and carouse around a single table, or when she casually picks up and sleeps with an acquaintance only to coldly rebuff his more sincere subsequent attentions, but mostly, the film’s opening hour loosely follows the expected arc of the adoption drama, as French-speaking Freddie, with useful new friend Tena in tow as translator, hesitantly goes about tracking down her birth parents. Her mother remains elusive, whilst Freddie’s biological father is quite the contrary - his overeager attempts to reconnect after two-and-a-half decades of absence is perhaps the one reaction most certain to make his prodigal daughter recoil. Freddie is more affected by her origin story than she’ll admit, but she’s also prickly about it, as though resenting the idea that the complex, oddly magnetic person she has become could be reduced to a simple set of adoption-related psychological cause-and-effect.

The film seems to settle into a placid, melancholy rhythm, as Freddie’s brief stay nears its end: there’s a nice line in culture clash as Tena not only translates Freddie’s blunt demurrals, but softens and sweetens them so as not to hurt her father’s feelings. Then, abruptly, the setting changes. We’re still in Seoul but it’s two years later, and Freddie is slinking vampishly through the nighttime city having jettisoned her old friends and become part of the city’s glamorously seedy underground. Then the last act leaps forward again, this time by five years, with Freddie putting her edge of amorality to work as an arms dealer, employed by one of her former hookups and apparently happily coupled up with supportive French boyfriend Maxime. This time, her return to Seoul on business is reluctant, and by this stage, the film itself has transformed, from adoption drama to character portrait and ultimately into an intriguing and intricate investigation of place and belonging. One that will obviously mean much to adoptees and emigrants, but also for those of us blessed and cursed with that rootless, wanderlusting gene, where home isn't the place of your birth, or the house you were raised in, or the place where you keep all your stuff, but where you are always subconsciously coming back to in your heart. Powerful stuff.

It’s no secret that Morocco is one of the most homophobic places on Earth, punishing certain acts with prison sentences. Maryam Touzani’s tender and compassionate piece involves Halim (perfectly played by Salem Bakri), and his wife, Mina (Lubna Azabal - also superb) who own an old-fashioned garment shop in the town’s medina. Halim works as a maalem, or master tailor, struggling to keep the trade alive. These days, machines accomplish the work that artisans like Halim once did by hand, and apprentices are hard to find, and quite a bit of the film is dedicated to this disappearing craft: as with Paul Anderson's 'Phantom Thread', Touzani details with some skill the care with which Halim sews the embroidery to the hem of a caftan, featuring shots of characters preparing the thread, testing the fabrics and so on. These sensual details evoke the sensation of touch, taking the place of the more explicit scenes found in so many LGBT-themed art-house films; the film is thus admirably restrained and understated, even if it perhaps overstays its welcome a little at over 2 hours.

We are clearly meant to identify with Halim, who has been forced to repress his true identity for many years, but the most empathetic character is arguably his seriously ill wife, whom Azabal imbues with more layers than the screenplay suggests. We think of her feelings even in scenes when Mina remains off-screen — as when Halim slinks away to the local hammam, where he’s found a way to have anonymous sex with other men. There’s little satisfaction in these trysts, which take place behind closed doors, but Halim silently hopes for more when a fair-featured young man named Youssef (Ayoub Missioui) expresses an interest in learning the trade. Mina picks up on the threat almost immediately, catching her husband staring discreetly — but not nearly discreetly enough — at Youssef’s bare torso as the apprentice changes clothes across the workshop. How much does she understand about Halim’s true nature? That question floats beneath the surface of the film, unanswered till nearly the end. There is also the matter of the eponymous caftan, which a client has commissioned for a special occasion. An ankle-length tunic made of petroleum blue silk, embellished with ornate gold trim, it appears to be the most beautiful garment Halim has ever made. But this time, he isn’t working alone. Touzani showcases practically every step of the creation, using the process as a kind of slow-motion seduction between Halim and Youssef. The woman who ordered the caftan stops by every few days to check on its progress, but Mina doesn’t like her attitude; the job takes weeks and would earn them a fine sum, but Touzani has introduced the caftan as a symbol, and it’s touching to see how the film uses it in the end.

There's a kind of wishful thinking to the film's politics, for as Morocco modernises, Halim’s field seems increasingly outdated, but by the same token so long as the country remains conservative about aspects of homosexuality, he cannot love whom he wants. “The Blue Caftan” dares to imagine a world where there’s room for both appreciation of the old ways and room to evolve. Serious work.

Adapted from the bestselling novel by Rachel Joyce, this one's deliberately aimed at a senior audience and involves solid performances from Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton, who just about save the day from what is ultimately a pretty predictable and terribly sentimental piece. Broadbent's Harold sets off — to his wife’s consternation — in his hopelessly inadequate deck shoes on a secular-but-spiritual mission from Devon to Berwick-Upon-Tweed in order to keep Queenie Hennessey, a former colleague dying in a hospice, alive. Inevitably, the people he encounters along the way irrevocably change him, from a (rather too good be be true) Slovakian cleaner who bandages his bleeding feet, to an idealistic teenage boy who reminds him of his estranged son, whilst wife Maureen, played by Wilton, is angry and bereft, eclipsed by his sudden devotion to Queenie. It involves a curiously weak, unsubtle script which simply isn't up to displaying the depths of any character, favouring as it does far too much in-your-face exposure which borders on the banal at times, and whilst cinematographer Kate McCullough does her best to keep things grounded, pursuing Harold along motorways as well as rolling hills, and injecting his traumatic memories of his son with a nightmarish quality thanks to stark spotlights illuminating these flashbacks, the few snatches of genuine pathos are few and far between (as often, a truly cloying score doesn't help matters). Lots of heart, but its attempt at dealing with weighty issues such as grief and guilt falls rather flat, I'm afraid.

This one's a watchable backstage drama, but for me despite an imposing performance by Renée Zellweger, the film doesn't succeed in exposing the dark heart of Garland’s last years, failing as it does to get under its protagonist’s skin. As with the (much better) Stan & Ollie of the same year, Tom Edge’s screenplay examines Garland through the prism of a late-in-life UK engagement peppered with flashbacks to key moments in her early years as a child star (including a distinctly creepy scene with Louis B Mayer). The 'present day' theatre scenes are by far the strongest, but by the same token the correlation between Judy’s treatment as a child and her later-in-life troubles feels terribly simplistic, with an overload of pop psychology that undercuts any attempts at complexity. Equally banal is a truly irritating plot thread back in London involving Garland and two gay fans that feels entirely engineered to pay homage to Garland’s status as a gay icon rather than offer any sense of convincing organic drama. And whilst Zellweger goes some way to etching Judy’s loss — there’s a touching late-on moment when Judy phones home to her daughter — and goes for broke on stage, barnstorming her way through classics such as ‘The Trolley Song’ or smouldering on ‘Come Rain Or Come Shine', the film really stumbles in its big climax, pulling a rather cheap trick in parlaying one of Hollywood’s saddest, most tragic stories into a strangely sentimental moment. I'm going away thinking Garland — and Zellweger — deserved so much more.

This one's a fairly predictable, bittersweet relationship drama - with perhaps a little too much 'soap opera' at times - but as with many facets of Mia Hansen-Løve's filmmaking, there’s an intelligence, a sadness, a more literary undertow to its seeming simplicity. “Un beau matin” in French, the title is lifted from a haunting poem by poetic realist Jacques Prévert, which describes the conflict of facing absence in your life, all while pretending there’s literally nothing there. At no cost to its calm, loping pace, the film is about many things at once: separate personal crises alternately surge and recede over the course of a year, given equal prominence in the script’s loose one-day-at-a-time structure. It’s a welcome change of pace for the ubiquitous Léa Seydoux, recently seen on screen as almost everything but an ordinary woman, and projecting here a warm sense of human wear and tear that we too rarely get to see from her. De-glammed inasmuch as it’s possible to deglam her — with minimal makeup, a short, practical hairdo and an oft-recycled wardrobe of slouchy floral dresses, she’s casually chic in the manner of someone you might plausibly know — Seydoux plays Sandra, a bright, independent, long-single mother with a freelance translating career that just about pays the rent of the teeny apartment she shares in Paris with her eight-year-old daughter Linn. We meet her en route to another cosy Parisian shoebox, this one belonging to her father Georg, a former philosophy professor who has almost totally lost his sight — one consequence of the neurodegenerative disorder Benson’s syndrome, which is gradually claiming his mind and memory too. No longer able to live independently, he and his family are thus thrust into the administrative nightmare of the national care home system, barely able to secure him a room of his own amid a logistical tangle of waiting lists and exorbitant fees. With Sandra stretched even thinner than usual, anxiously fretting over all aspects of her father’s situation, it’s an awkward time for a complicated new relationship to present itself, but life being what it is, that’s exactly what happens. Enter charming 'cosmo-chemist' Clement, and thus to Sandra's reawakened need for intimacy. In dramatising these two chaotic factors in Sandra’s life, Hansen-Løve is at pains to avoid tidy, swelling arcs and grand narrative collisions. Instead, the film accrues subtle power through repetition, as characters put themselves through the same banal ordeals again and again hoping for different outcomes: as the increasingly disoriented Georg is shuffled from one unsuitable facility to another, losing his bearings a little more each time, Sandra and Clement repeatedly attempt to forge new romance without disrupting the status quo. In both cases, the concept of home — not just a place to live, but the companions and care that anchor life itself — is held as precious and elusive. The director hardly stretches herself here, but enjoyable viewing nevertheless.

Well, first off you'll have to have a heart of stone not to enjoy much of this one. But as an adaptation of Judy Blume’s landmark 1970 young adult novel it's rather too undemanding. That's not to say it isn't broadly faithful to the book, in which of course an 11-year-old girl talks freely to the reader, and God, about the anxieties, fantasies and contradictions tripping her up on the path to maturity, and preteen Margaret’s concerns are timeless — peer pressure, crushes, menstruation, faith, and so on. But Blume treated them seriously, neither passing judgment on her protagonist’s immature mistakes, nor over-dramatising, whilst this adaptation, written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, rather shies away from putting the funny, flawed and all-too-realistic Margaret on screen exactly as she is. Today, inevitably, it’s not enough to be representative: Margaret must be a role model, too, and the result is rather too much sentimental artificiality at the expense of the messy realities, although it's fair to say also that young audiences may not miss some of the original novel’s more honest truths, especially as they’ve been trained to expect tidy stories where protagonists fix their faults and here even (gasp!) assure the adults in the film that they’re raising them just fine.

Abby Ryder Fortson gives us a convincing performance as Margaret, who spends the entire film in flux, notably when it comes to religious faith, a vacuum she attempts to resolve by visiting various Jewish temples and Christian churches and chatting with her loose concept of a deity. “I’ve heard great things about you,” she says in her first prayer. On top of all this is the sudden adjustment to suburban lawns and sprinkler parties, and her new friends’ fixation with the signposts of womanhood. The bossy ringleader Nancy (Elle Graham) adds a welcome burst of energy to proceedings, insisting that Margaret and pals Gretchen and Janie must wear bras — even as Nancy meanly gossips about the one developed girl in sixth grade, a wallflower named Laura, who towers over the class like a poppy among dandelions (the erratic roll-out of puberty is well-depicted). The standout scenes are the ones involving the friendships, and there's a great and all too-brief scene involving a class film on “menstroo-ation,” as over-enunciated by its host. But here, annoyingly, the film snips out novel Margaret’s outrage to discover that the lecture was “like one big commercial” for a line of feminine products, vowing to never buy the brand when her period starts. Can't today's children absorb a little of Margaret’s anti-corporate cynicism? However, Craig does a good job cutting to each of the girls’ faces as they gaze at the presentation in horror, hope, and suspicion. Still, it only intermittently feels like we’re observing this world through a child’s eyes. Instead, the running time is padded with a wholly unnecessary subplot about Margaret's mother's struggle to adjust to becoming a stay-at-home housewife, especially since her daughter barely seems to register it at all. All in all, as charming as the film is in its best moments, it’s hard not to be frustrated as it backpedals from the book’s awareness that not all wrongs are righted. Sometimes, our heroines might stay friends with bullies. Sometimes they might run from conflict and never explain themselves. Sometimes, they might even hurt people without making amends. Welcome to life's realities.

Charlotte Regan’s film inevitably invites comparison with fellow Briton Charlotte Wells’ 'Aftersun', since both revolve around the relationship between a working-class adolescent girl and her single-parent father during the summer holidays. But whilst 'Aftersun' is a seriously moving work of some depth and beauty, 'Scrapper' is ultimately a sweet bit of fluff that’s trying too hard to be funny and offbeat and ends up being too often simply annoying. But that's not so say that there isn't much to enjoy here. At the heart there’s a brace of superb performances from Harris Dickinson, who brings a certain soulfulness to the hitherto-absentee dad Jason, and newcomer Lola Campbell, who brings a truly remarkable natural comic timing to her turn as 12-year-old protagonist Georgie. Regan clearly has a knack with younger performers and elicits a relaxed, laconic air of confidence from Campbell (although sadly the supporting ensemble, which includes Alin Uzun as Georgie’s best friend Ali, Freya Bell as her nemesis Layla, and a chorus of bit players are much weaker). Meanwhile, the highly saturated colours of Elena Muntoni’s production design, Oliver Cronk’s costumes and Molly Manning Walker’s cinematography create a stylised, semi-magical world out of a shabby housing estate on the outskirts of East London. That quirky quality, much loved by British filmmakers these days, is undoubtedly fun, but only gets you so far. For what lets the film down is Regan’s underdeveloped script, which can’t manage the tonal shifts between grief, the various ethical conundrums, and comedy hijinks. And it takes a huge suspension of disbelief to accept the basic conceit that, after the sudden death of Georgie's mother, somehow no one from the adult world has worked out that this means Georgie is living entirely on her own, especially since she has somehow managed to bamboozle inquisitive social workers into thinking that she’s being minded by a fictitious uncle (the brief scenes involving the social workers are terribly mean). To survive, she's taken to stealing bicycles and selling them for cash, and we are invited to view this is charming and endearing, which would be very awkward were it not for the fact that Dickinson and Campbell make such a great double act. But what’s harder to swallow is that Georgie, Ali and, by extension, we the viewers should just shrug off the fact that her father has been an inarguably rotten, and utterly absent father up until now (and if you think about it, Georgie’s mother is more than a little culpable too given she made no arrangements to secure support for her child even though she knew she was going to die very soon). But emotional logic is clearly not being prioritised here in a film that’s more invested in visually interesting and touching moments where, for instance, father and daughter dance together in an abandoned building while backlighting pours through the empty windows. All in all, a film with many weaknesses but whose quirky quality and central performances carry us through.

This one's a romantic comedy with a dash of philosophy, its “Groundhog Day”-esque premise casting Andy Samberg as Nyles, a guy repeating the same day over and over, although the show is rather stolen by Cristin Miloti as Sarah, who provides much of the maturity and philosophy on offer. It's an enjoyable enough watch with some good moments, but even with the clever tweaks introduced by its sci-fi-flavoured premise – referencing “infinite time-loop situations,” – the film turns out to be a fun but ultimately rather thin construct. Granted, there’s nothing completely original, and there have been plenty of variations on this formula, but even making those allowances, this feels derivative almost to the point of distraction. The scenario unfolds against the backdrop of a destination wedding in the titular California locale, just the place someone might stumble upon a mysterious cave that leaves the hero in this strange predicament. Nyles isn’t completely alone in that, though as with all time-bending concepts, the less one knows going in – or dwells on the logistics – probably the better. As the sister of the bride, Sarah exhibits a sense of sadness, which will gradually be explained, whilst this being a romantic comedy, the question of two unlikely people being given the time to bond inevitably figures into the plot. Ultimately the film finally falls a little too much under the heading of 'been there, seen that', but the central theme of the possibility of personal growth for certain types of young men in a kind of emotional stasis is a worthy one nevertheless.

For those who grew up in the era of 'prog rock', this is an enjoyable trip down memory lane. Introduced to us are the two main creatives of album-cover designers 'Hipgnosis' - the late Storm Thorgerson, the eternally prickly visionary of the two, and, still around, and the key interviewee of the film, Aubrey “Po” Powell, Strom's long-suffering partner, who accomplished or oversaw the actual execution of Thorgerson’s often insane ideas, invariably on location. We get brief glimpses into the Cambridge art scene alongside the young members of Pink Floyd and their first design for the band’s second album, “Saucerful of Secrets,” an uncharacteristically psychedelic cover that soon gave way to much more interesting pieces. If you’re a Floyd fan, you may have spent much more time contemplating the “Atom Heart” cover and its meaning than the band ever did, or Powell himself, who, he claims, just hopped over a fence after he spotted a cow by the side of the road. There may not have been much more to it than that (although I recall a story about a farmer saying that they'd just been milked and were therefore in a good mood - suggesting more planning than Powell lets on here) but, whatever the truth of it, a template of marrying blue skies with natural objects or beings that took on near-mystical value was born. The three surviving members of Floyd all give fresh interviews (which is probably about as close as Waters and Gilmour will ever be to one another again, sadly). Throughout, there is more personal affection for Thorgerson’s brilliant imagination than for his apparent lifelong rudeness and brusqueness, so it’s somewhat ironic that Thorgerson’s character and personality is praised highly by Waters despite their friendship ending after Thorgerson doing the one thing Waters couldn’t forgive, which was to take credit for the concept of the flying pig. Plus ca change ...

The film is nothing if not a testament to absurdly high record company budgets in the ’70s, and the amazing lengths Hypgnosis would go to get the 'perfect' album cover (one would have liked to see some of the 'rejects', but hey-ho). There's the familiar-to-many stories of the creation of the prism on 'Dark Side', the burning man on 'Wish You Were here' and, of course, the inflatable pig on 'Animals', plus a very interesting tale of Led Zepplin's 'Presence' cover, and other nice contributions from the likes of Peter Gabriel and Beatle Paul (there's a nice brief moment when, after Storm's gone off in a sulk after some disagreement over Wings' 'Venus & Mars' cover, Paul simply says - 'that's ok man, Po can do it himself - he's the photographer anyway, right?'). Then there’s the great, if painful, tale about the shoot for a 10cc cover that involved finding a sheep and a psychiatrist’s couch and putting one atop the other in the shallows of a lake in Hawaii (because of course). Powell remains aghast that he went to all that work and then the image was perversely reduced by Thorgerson nearly to postage stamp size on the finished mockup.

The tale of how the era of Hipgnosis is portrayed as coming to an end, how the primary murder suspect is MTV and its frothy synth-pop acts of the early ’80s — illustrated on screen by Depeche Mode - is over and done with very quickly and, though obviously deliberate, probably deserved more serious treatment and is clearly a story in itself. And one is left truly baffled by the tragic ending of financial ruin and Powell having to go to David Gilmour with a begging bowl. The director doesn’t tarry or wonder aloud about what transpired after the point at when this film abruptly ends, amid changing tastes, and there’s also no discussion of how music mogul Merck Mercuriadis, (who appears in and exec-produced the film) ended up with Hipgnosis as the name of his massive song publishing rights company. However, as an appreciation of the golden age of 'album art', this is a hugely enjoyable piece.

Farhadi's latest perhaps lacks the emotional punch of his best work, but there's still plenty to admire here as he constructs an ethical clusterfuck whilst keeping us rooted in place even as our sympathies fly in every conceivable direction.

The film centres around Rahim (an extraordinary Amir Jadidi) whose every strategy fails at every turn despite his best efforts (although its fair to say there's probably one or two plot twists too many which means the film feels much more contrived than his earlier work). Soon there are other reputations on the line, and possibly other lives as well. Farhadi's flair for stacking rights on top of wrongs until they all topple over into a single mixed-up pile on the floor is again on display here — and what the film lacks in brute force sentiment it makes up for in the childlike simplicity of its central question: What’s the difference between doing a good deed and not doing a bad one? And whilst Farhadi's work doesn't usually tackle the emotional ramifications of social media, here, in his low-key way, he manages to spin Rahim’s diffidence into a shrewd portrait of how random faces in the crowd can sow doubt into someone’s own self-understanding. It's subtle, but always there in the shadows — the flipside of a story about the pitfalls of treating decency as a public spectacle. Iran is a complex and bureaucratic country, but it is also the role of social media and so-called ‘fake news’ that lend the piece a contemporary relevance, even as it feels like an ancient morality tale.

So much of this film’s slow-churning power comes from the growing tension between what people decide about Rahim’s actions second-hand, and how he feels about them himself. The brilliance of Jadidi’s performance isn’t in his soft likeability, but rather in the character’s performance of it; how Rahim both leans into it and pushes against it, and how he then tries to pull himself out from a tailspin of bad decisions even as he keeps making them worse - indeed, it almost feels cruel to see how Rahim is forced into complicity with his own ruin as his possible plans of action become ever narrower. Meanwhile, each new character who’s introduced to the story comes equipped with their own preconceptions, the judgements of which escalate at the same rate as the lies that Rahim — and his roster of collaborators — have to tell in order to undo the damage of the lies they’ve already told. Powerful stuff.