Film Reviews by PD

This mile-a-minute mind-bender from absurdist duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert takes as its premise that every conceivable variation of our lives exists in some alternate universe or other, then proceeds to give its harried heroine Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) a whirlwind tour of all those possibilities, which endeavours to capture the staggering burden of trying to exist in a world of boundless choice. At its heart is the intense parent-child bond in one Asian family — especially the impossible demands that the immigrant mother puts on her daughter — and argues that letting go while loving unconditionally is the answer. A fair enough sentiment, but unfortunately, this is drowned in a bombastic, sensory-overload experience, which throttles us for a truly exhausting two hours and more. There's far too much overcomplicated sci-fi logic, based around the heroine's being some sort of big-brain physicist in another dimension, whereas she learns “you’re living your worst you” in this one — meaning that every other possible Evelyn made more successful life choices. One became a huge Hong Kong action star, others an opera singer, a maid or a teppanyaki-style chef. The Daniels present as many of these realities as possible in short, zany micro-sketches, and there’s even a universe in which everyone has hot dogs for fingers, a scenario which the directors bring back again and again as an extended joke which wasn't that funny first time round, and we get much the same thing with a running gag about a world where people are mind-controlled by raccoons; meanwhile, a giant CG everything bagel comes bursting through a parallel dimension to swallow up everything Evelyn holds dear. Inevitably, the real threat to life, the universe and everything is Joy, Evelyn’s daughter, on whom Mum has piled life’s many disappointments, to the point that Joy finally snapped and reinvented herself as an entity known as Jobu Tupaki, who jumps from universe to universe murdering Evelyns and leaving a trail of chaos in her wake. All of this, especially given the film's rapid editing and Son Lux’s broken-pipes score, just succeeded in giving me a headache and just left me pleased when it was finally all over, I'm afraid.

Set in 1990s Quebec, this tender, delicate film concerns Jaime (Anwen O’Driscoll), a teenager who has recently lost her father and who, to help her grieving mother, has been packed off to a remote community where her Aunt, a Jehovah’s Witness, lives and where Jamie is expected to attend religious 'meetings'. Jaime is rebellious enough to smoke joints with her new school chum, Nathan (it's a pity we don't see more of him than we do as he is useful at letting us hear some of what is going through Jamie's head), but she is also remarkably respectful enough not to be critical of her aunt’s beliefs. Before long she's attracting the attention of Marike (June Laporte), the minister’s daughter, and the pair become firm friends – and, soon, something more than friends. The slow-burning romance is beautifully done, and captured well by the cinematographer Gayle Ye: their stolen kisses and side glances feel both intense and poignantly innocent, although the score is something of an irritating distraction. Recent cinematic representations of Jehovah’s Witnesses, notably in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s 'Beginning', Richard Eyre’s 'The Children Act' and Daniel Kokotajlo’s 'Apostasy', have, inevitably, not been kind, and this compassionate story, co-written and co-directed by the former Witness Sarah Watts shows a lot more understanding towards the community, (indeed, it's perhaps too generous). As Jaime and Marike go door to door with brochures, it becomes clear – long before the elders intervene with a surprising lack of force – that each has very different ideas of how their relationship will work. Mercifully, the film eschews some of the more extreme tropes of religious dramas, and understands that the real drama, the tragedy of a young person denying herself love in the name of God, needs no embellishment. But you'd love to be a fly on the wall when Marike, as promised to her soulmate, is explaining it all behind scenes - the scriptwriters aren't up to this, sadly, for Marike’s commitment to 'the truth' waivers just an unexplored fraction, her story seemingly ending as Jaime’s is beginning.

Though the beats of the narrative are fairly predictable and the dialogue is rather cliched at times, there's seriously good chemistry between the two lovers, and you definitely feel for them, especially Jaime, who shows an understanding of life well beyond her years and is admirably restrained (I'd probably have shouted and screamed at these soulless brainwashed androids and then burned down the chapel, but that's just me). Well worth a look.

This coming-of-age story centres on Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), who becomes entranced by the spectacle of a train crash onscreen when his parents – Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano) – take him to watch Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, thus introducing him to cinema’s profoundly magical illusion of immortality. Sammy is inevitably a boyhood avatar for Spielberg’s own love affair with film, and in many ways the first half-hour is the most effective as we watch Sammy reaching towards his dreams. Unfortunately much of the rest of the action is characterised by a determination to smash the audience over the head with every dramatic note, the dialogue much too obvious and the plot points too emphatic, thus violating the golden rule of “show, don’t tell”.

As you'd expect, much of the film's finer moments involve the power of film, but the dramatic range of the narrative – family issues, racial discrimination, creative ambitions, romantic frustrations, adolescent friendships as well as the joys and pains of growing up – only serves to weaken the central theme rather than enhance it. And in its all-too obvious attempt to produce a heartwarming crowd-pleaser these themes themselves fall rather flat. There's an annoying sentimentality throughout, and it's curious that the director doesn’t seem to have the heart to extend his parents beyond archetypes: Burt is smart and safe, Mitzi frustrated and impetuous; despite the director's intent not to romanticise his family, the film still ends up being frustratingly more self-celebration than self-interrogation. All in all, watchable enough but rather too light and fluffy for my taste.

To title your film after a year is a bold statement, but for Chileans, “1976” will conjure up a host of reactions tied to what was one of the most brutal years of Pinochet’s dictatorship. This piece is a subdued but totally engaging film, grounded not in the resistance movement against Pinochet, nor on the political manoeuvring that led to thousands having been disappeared, but cleverly focusing instead on a housewife’s day-to-day routine, as she slowly finds her insular world rocked by events that soon spiral out of her control.

The opening scene sets the tone as a shopping trip is disturbed by the screams of a woman, presumably being hauled away, right outside the shop and under Carmen's eyes. Carmen may not bat an eyelid when such screams mildly disrupt her errands, but when a priest requests that she help care for a wounded man, she soon realises her discomfort with looking the other way. The film then becomes the story of how radicalisation can take root even in the unlikeliest of places, and as Carmen finds herself further helping the priest and the young man, she discovers a larger network eager to push back against Pinochet’s craven politics. An eerie air of paranoia takes over the second half, arising from Carmen’s increasing inability to experience her normal life without fear and suspicion; pointed asides by house guests become warnings hard to unhear, while strangers on the street become threats impossible to ignore. Martelli hews so closely to this woman’s conservative, carefully curated world of lavish children’s birthday parties and vanity-driven renovations that the repercussions of Pinochet’s hardened policies — whispers of disappeared men and women, hushed calls for antidemocratic power — can only ever be felt on the edges of upper-middle-class life. Yet once you see it, as Carmen does, nothing is the same.

The film thus represents a different proposition from most period pieces about this dark era of Chilean history. That Carmen only becomes begrudgingly radicalised is conveyed in Kuppenheim’s captivating performance, which carries a wealth of budding realisations best limited to impassive gestures lest they reveal her own misgivings and increasingly dangerous alliances. But the shift is presented in a way that feels almost inevitable, if only because it’s driven by a deeply personal sense of empathy and compassion. At every turn, Carmen makes decisions based on purely personal and site-specific circumstances, yet toward the end, she can’t even enjoy daily errands without feeling the weight of what’s happening around her, for this bourgeois housewife cannot shake off the sense that to live the life she used to live is a form of complicity with the regime. Impressive stuff.

This beautifully evocative film centres on the intimate friendship shared by 13-year-old Belgian boys Leo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele), and especially the responsibility that comes with it. Unfortunately it's really two films - impressively subtle and sensitive in the first half, offering us as pure a portrait of innocent, innocuous same-sex affection as we’ve ever encountered on film, before, after a tragic twist, becoming something altogether different and rather less engaging.

It’s worth celebrating the first 45 minutes of the film, which will resonate deeply with anyone, gay or straight, who’s ever found themselves adapting their behaviour according to the homophobia of others. The pain and vulnerability of coming of age is tenderly and convincingly depicted, the young performers both heartbreaking and revelatory in their sadness – it’s hard to broadcast such deep emotion without losing an ounce of credibility. Dambrine plays Leo with wondrous innocence, while De Waele’s performance as his best friend Rémi is full of pain and tenderness. Seldom apart, Leo and Remi seem to be joined at the hip; even their nights are spent sleeping over at one another’s houses, limbs entwined, whilst their parents treat both children as their own (Léa Drucker and Emilie Dequenne play Leo and Remi’s respective mothers, and both are terrific). Director Lukas Dhont and co-writer Angelo Tijssens present observational scenes of everyday life, revealing character through behaviour rather than expository dialogue; so much of their technique is subtext, which relies on us to play detective. And yet, deprived of certain clues, audiences will construct whatever idea of these two boys they want in their heads, filling in the blanks with some combination of lived experience and personal prejudice. Are Leo and Remi gay? Might one of them be, but not the other? (These are not irrelevant questions, even if the film stubbornly refuses to address them).

On the first day of a new school term, surrounded by an unfamiliar group of students, the boys cling to one another especially tight in class and during breaktime. In the cafeteria, a surprisingly forward girl puts the question to them, “Are you together?” and Leo tenses up, explaining that they’re just “close,” like brothers. It’s a life-changing moment for Leo and Remi, and though neither one fully realises it at the time, they have just experienced a key jolt of heteronormative socialisation. They’ve been told that their friendship is not normal, and no one wants to be different. Leo in particular is figuring out what it means to be a man in the modern world, and one of the codes by which he’s expected to live is to be mindful of his emotional and physical proximity to other guys.

And then the second half. Because the film goes out of its way to present the boys as pre-sexual, the sudden tragedy seems all the more unfair, and though Dhont handles the attendant mysteries as delicately as one could hope, it’s not a little exasperating to think this is where he wanted the story to go, because from this point, “Close” has become a completely different (and not nearly as powerful) film, and unfortunately young actor Dambrine is nowhere near practiced enough to project Leo’s thoughts. Sincere as it may be, this tragedy feels like a narrative device, designed to prove some kind of ideological point, when the film could have taken the (admittedly far harder) dramatic road of watching how these two boys navigate the newly discovered peer pressures. As it is, for me the plot twist weakens the film enormously. Nevertheless, well worth seeing and hopefully more to come from a hugely talented director.

This piece is notable for a fine performance by Salma Hayek as the tender and dignified Beatriz, but whilst it's laudably well-intentioned the film is way too unsubtle to be entirely successful as an intended parable about haves and have-nots forced to mix socially with the inevitable disastrous results. It’s to the director's credit that they don’t make their title protagonist an eco-warrior secular saint, for Beatriz is a troubled soul, and putting her in the same room with the super-elite, notably the Trump-like Douglas Strutt, undoubtedly produces some telling, if excruciating, moments. But whilst it's hard not to agree with the disgust he feels at this privileged, entitled class’ complacency and complicity, unfortunately, a more nuanced approach to the dynamics of this culture clash would have made the film a lot more effective, and the final act feels like a cop-out, resolved with a magical-realist sleight of hand that cheats the viewer of a proper resolution while at the same time pushing the characters to the limits of credibility.

Simon Bird's big-screen debut is a tender but rather slight adaptation of Joff Winterhart’s 2012 graphic novel. Focusing on the fundamentally loving if frequently strained relationship between a middle-aged divorcee and her surly teen son, the sour-tinged comedy of excruciatingly English embarrassment deploys some talented performers on both sides of the camera, but the whole thing rather lacks the necessary depth to engage the viewer. The film depicts six semi-eventful weeks in the life of the amazingly patient and stoical librarian Sue (Monica Dolan) and her beyond-broody 16-year-old offspring Daniel (Earl Cave, son of Nick) who find themselves unexpectedly stuck with each other’s company for the duration of the school holidays. Over the course of three “chapters” plus a shorter coda, Sue and Daniel bicker their way through life and endure various mishaps of a generally minor nature, (although there are brief hints of greater pain underneath) but whilst there are some good moments between them, the script doesn't have the necessary weight to get us into their hearts, with the result that they both struggle to get beyond stereotypes throughout, particularly Cave's Daniel, whose sullen nihilistic teenager act gets very waring despite the director's attempt at sympathy - I just wanted to hurl him into the sea, frankly. The action isn't helped either by appearances from Daniel’s creepy history teacher, Sue's more worldly sister, a hippie-ish neighbour, and especially Daniel's best pal Ky, who's beyond irritating. Watchable enough, but ultimately rather forgettable.

Given his recent release from jail after being arrested last July (2022), Jafar Panahi's latest offering undoubtedly has a heightened impact as a result, but this artful telling of parallel narratives that intersect with Panahi facing the cost to himself and others of making films under an oppressive regime — completed before his arrest — would be a forceful statement even without the limits imposed on his freedom.

Deceptively simple at first, and then accumulating increasingly complex layers by almost imperceptible degrees, 'No Bears' deals with borders both physical and spiritual, with the divide between tradition and modernity, and the world of difference between Tehran and Iran’s rural backwaters. A character says at one point that it’s OK to lie if it’s in the service of peacekeeping; in the same way, the fear of wild animals in the title is revealed to be an unfounded superstition, designed to keep people in their place. But the film asks what do those restrictions really achieve and why do we give them such power.

While Panahi tries to keep a low profile to avoid being identified and reported to the authorities, he’s drawn into village politics as the elders descend to request a photograph he supposedly took of a young couple. As the situation escalates, the friction around him builds where once there was a welcoming curiosity. Meanwhile, there's a delicate reminder of how black-market traffic is the only commerce available to the village since the drought killed off farming. In a brief but memorable scene, Panahi jumps back as if on a rumbling fault line when he learns that the patch of dirt on which he’s standing is the invisible frontier separating Iran from Turkey. Thoughts sparked by that realisation are echoed in a film-within-a-film being played out before cameras in Turkey, with hesitancy prompted by questions about how much money is needed to survive in Europe, among other concerns. Late in the action, a character explodes in a stunning direct-to-camera rant about the frustration of spending ten years trying to get out of the country but being stuck there, forced to betray herself and others. The blurring of lines between scripted project and documentary is not new to Panahi, but it builds here with expert modulation to a shocking conclusion, whilst Panahi’s stoical presence at the centre of it all is rattled, forcing him to contemplate the repercussions of his work both to himself and to even his most guileless collaborators. The sobering final image resonates with the unspoken cry of an artist exiled in his own homeland, saying, “Enough.” Whether that means escaping the forces that would control him or seizing his creative liberty in more insurgent ways is the question that lingers. The one remaining certainty is that Panahi is among the world’s great filmmakers refusing to be silenced by authoritarian rule. Stirring stuff.

This absorbing Polish-Irish release is a showcase for Zofia Stafiej, a terrific young actor with a nuanced grasp of the complex protagonist Ola. The director succeeds in the difficult task of portraying a badly behaved young woman sympathetically - she may be a royal pain in the behind throughout, but she is also caring, smart and amazingly strong and uninterested in compromise - you mess with her at your peril. And whilst it's not the first time in fiction that a character has visited a foreign country to deal with a relative's death and learned queasy truths about that person's remote life, the personal element here is mixed with a a distinctly political undertow, namely, the gulf which still exists between the eastern and western ends of the EU, and especially the unkindness of the labour market and our wider responsibilities in society. Impressive stuff.

Perhaps one of those things that might have done better by being about a fictional character that we would have drawn comparisons to Diana, but this is still hugely enjoyable none the less, with a captivating performance from Kristen Stewart. She's on the edge of hysteria from the start - jittery, brittle, often abrasively defensive and yet deeply vulnerable in a film that puts her through a psychological wringer with shadings of outright horror. It's a world away from 'The Crown', for whilst the script certainly doesn’t lack compassion for the tragic figure at the centre of the whirlpool, the writer and director also make a lot of gutsy choices that deliberately put her at a distance from us — as Diana herself describes it in the film, like an insect under a microscope with its wings being tweezed off. Taking Diana’s maiden name as its title makes sense given that the Sandringham House weekend brings her back to the same estate where she spent her childhood in a neighbouring home - the arc of the film following her wrestling with the decision to stay and endure the agony of imprisonment in an artificial world that has proven inhospitable to her, or to bolt for freedom and reclaim her selfhood (although the film avoids the inevitable fact that this will mean sacrificing her children, which presumably must have been part of her mental torture in real life). Beautifully shot throughout, the opening of a simple shot of frost thick on the ground is an admittedly obvious but nevertheless apt metaphor for the reception that awaits Diana, and the first words we hear from her are “Where the fuck am I?,” muttered while she puzzles over a map. The regimented protocols of the royal holiday weekend are very well done, as is the ridiculously lavish catering supplies, and there's some very nice little touches, such as her the awestruck silence when she enters a motorway eatery, or her stopping to remove her father’s battered old coat from a scarecrow on the property. Monitoring Diana’s every move with hawk eyes and a permanent scowl is Major Alistair Gregory (Timothy Spall, excellent as always), balanced by beloved personal attendant Maggie (Sally Hawkins, also very good), whilst Jack Farthing's Charles and Stella Gonet's Queen Elizabeth remain predictably (and convincingly) inscrutable and silent except for a few, all-too brief encounters.

There's a fair few weaknesses - some of the symbolism is laid on with a seriously heavy trowel, and some of the motifs are rather clumsy, notably an attempt to shoehorn Anne Boleyn into the action, whilst an extended dreamy montage involving a re-visit to her childhood home doesn't quite work. But mostly it's a compelling piece because of Stewart, who plays Diana as a messy, free-spirited outlier in an environment of suffocating order whilst also revealing that beneath the rebellion is lacerating trauma, which manifests in her bulimia, self-harm, paranoia and a resistance that lurches between crippling fear and contempt. Meanwhile, the presentation of the Royal family as a sinister body corporate, ready to inflict wounds and ice out any interloper who tarnishes their brand is, sadly, all-too believable.

This highly original, wonderfully acted and beautifully shot film from Panah Panahi (son of Jafar Panahi) is set amid the winding desert highways and emerald valleys of northwestern Iran - the format being that of a family road trip, albeit one fuelled by the growing suspicion that its characters have taken a major detour away from our normal mortal coil at some point along the way. 'Where are we?' a grey-haired mother (a very delicate, bittersweet Pantea Panahiha) asks into the camera upon waking up from a restless catnap inside the SUV in which so much of this film takes place. 'We’re dead,' squeaks the youngest of her two sons (the superb Rayan Sarlak) from the back seat, a wonderfully annoying 6-year-old who never stops talking and moving restlessly throughout the film. They aren’t dead — at least not literally, even if the adorable dog who’s been brought along for the ride seems to be on its last legs — but the further Panahi’s foursome drives away from the lives they’ve left behind in Tehran, the more it begins to seem as if they’ve left behind life itself. A purgatorial fog rolls in as they climb towards the Turkish border, and with it comes a series of semi-competent guides (one amusingly trying to steer a motorbike from behind a sheepskin balaclava).

We never know why Khosro (tenderly played by Hassan Madjooni) and his wife so urgently fled their home in order to smuggle 20-year-old Farid (a truly tortured Amin Simiar) out of the country and away from the autocratic government their introverted first-born must have offended somehow, but it’s clear that this family is speeding down a one-way street. 'We lost our house and we sold our car for him to be able to leave,' one parent cries to the other. 'Do you ever think of the future?' And yet it’s the past that’s being forfeited to pay for it. Later, the little boy will take stock of the situation and ask his dad if they’re cockroaches. 'We are now,' Khosro grunts in response, most of his attention focused on the metal wire he’s using to scratch at the toes sticking out of his leg cast. So it goes in a beautifully tender dark comedy that swerves between tragedy and gallows humour with some skill, and knowingly sabotages all of its most crushing moments with a deadpan joke in order to keep Khosro’s family from running out of gas. It's a story about people who have to laugh in order to stop themselves from crying, and Panahi commits to that dynamic with the unwavering dedication of someone who knows that his characters don’t have any other choice. Very impressive work indeed.

This period melodrama tries earnestly to be many things at once: a tale of mismatched romance, a portrait of nervous breakdown, a snapshot of Thatcher’s racially charged Britain, a love letter to cinema, but unfortunately ends up not being about very much at all, for despite Olivia Coleman's fine performance as the tormented seaside cinema duty manager, none of these themes are treated in any depth. There's some nice touches - shots of the once-grand cinema interiors are very evocative, together with period-accurate production design that transports us back in time to the early 80s very effectively, and there's a good turn from Toby Jones (the only character, strangely, who displays any enthusiasm towards the films on offer), but none of this can hide a painfully thin script, whilst the central racial theme is far too often laid on with such a heavy trowel that it (of course) only loses its intended impact as a result. Undoubtedly heartfelt, but ultimately forgettable, I'm afraid.

This original, very austere but often playfully anachronistic piece by Marie Kreutzer centres on the later life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, aka “Sissi” (1837-1898), superbly played by a suitably regal and linguistically dexterous Vicky Krieps of 'Phantom Thread' fame. Kreutzer deliberately eschews any attempt to conform to the conventions of period drama, finding instead in the Bavarian-born wife of the Emperor Franz Josef a woman with a very modern spirit who happens to be locked in a 19th century marriage and desperate to assuage her frustration with having no real political power. Kreutzer’s script keeps a reasonably tight temporal focus on these few years in Sissi’s life, although it avoids some of the more dramatic events in the historical record, and substitutes a distinctly different ending to her life.

Kreutzer builds up an episodic but compelling portrait of a disaffected woman, with more than a touch of Coppola's Marie Antoniette and Diana, Princess of Wales, about her. For example, Sissi is seen suffering from an eating disorder brought on in part by a world that views her as little more than an 'influencer', whose slightest change of hairstyle ripples through society. In fact, at one point, in despair over a number of recent emotional shocks, she decides to hack off most of her locks, provoking one lady-in-waiting to cry with despair on seeing what she considers her own (not Sissi’s) life’s work ruined. Krieps brings a strong sense of intelligence to the role, and her own imposing physicality perfectly conveys the regality of Sissi’s presence, but the supporting characters are less well drawn, apart perhaps from Ida Ferenczy (Jeanne Werner), Sissi’s sister and emotional-support courtier, one of the few people with whom she can speak frankly and honestly. Indeed, without making a big fuss of it, there’s a distinct sense throughout that the mostly female key crewmembers are pulling together to tell this woman-centric story through the lens of female identity. Here, Sissi is more of a depressive rather than a narcissist or someone suffering borderline personality disorder - being desired and considered beautiful is practically the only power Sissi has, and as that power wanes there’s little to replace it. Well worth a look.

Following the template of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight,” this one is a tense and absorbing film, one that sticks close to the nuts and bolts of what reporters do. We also see Twohey and Kantor at home, juggling work and husbands and children, and we feel their deep solidarity with the women they’re trying to coax into talking. Their reporting connects former assistants, film stars (including Ashley Judd, playing herself), as well as the financial executives who oversaw the payouts to silence Harvey’s victims. We see the journalistic juggling they have to do to build a sense of collective power in these women where there’s been none. This is a film about conversations in diners and restaurants, phone calls and surprise house calls, hunts for evidence that corroborates what is known intuitively. Schrader’s direction is restrained and respectful to the gravity of its subject matter, allowing the inherent drama to do most of the heavy lifting - moments which connect the past to the present establish one of the film’s most affecting threads: a generation of women forced to abandon their dreams and live alone with their nightmares.

However, after a compelling first hour, the film doesn't quite build to the electrifying payoff quite the way you want it to. This is, unfortunately, partly because of both Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan -there's a naturalistic chemistry between them as they develop a bond of their shared pursuit of the truth, but otherwise their performances are frustratingly bland and by-rote in a 'made-for-tv' kind of style - and partly because of a frustratingly stilted dialogue which dissipates the intensity at key moments. But the main problem is mainly because, despite an insistence at times in the script that the 'bigger picture' is Hollywood and a sinister corporate web, the film doesn't have the strength or scope to move beyond Weinstein himself. We learn a little about his method of buying his victims’ silence with expensive settlements and using non-disclosure agreements as a secret weapon against them, but Weinstein’s network of enablers—including the high-powered actors and directors who knew what was going on and looked the other way—get what’s essentially a free pass, remaining largely unmentioned. All in all, a worthy piece on a vitally important subject, but something of a missed opportunity, I fear.

This well-acted drama set at the time of Reagan's election has its moments but sadly ultimately fails in its depiction of its central theme of racial inequality.

James Gray's latest is presumably drawing on his own childhood to reflect on prejudice, privilege, and the eye-opening dangers of silence and complacency in American society, but whilst the intentions are admirable, the film isn't up to exploring the nuances of such complex topics in any depth and under-commits to sharing the truths of racial disparity when it comes to the American dream. Anthony Hopkins is unsurprisingly excellent as chorus-figure grandfather Aaron, whilst Michael Banks Repata turns in a worthy performance as his grandson Paul Graff, with good chemistry between him and Jaylin Webb as friend Johnny Davis - the childlike naivete of both is well-handled. But sadly Webb's character rarely gets beyond stereotype, his concerns being always in the background just as the privileged Graffs' are highlighted, and this means therefore that the attempts to explore class and race issues through the eyes of a child and his growing perspective fall rather flat. That's not to say that there aren't some telling moments - for example, when teacher, Mr. Turkeltaub's actions reveal that he almost expects delinquency out of Johnny, even when he’s not the culprit of classroom disruptions, thus neatly revealing the prejudice that Black children misbehave more often than their white counterparts, and these examples grow larger in scale as the film progresses. Yet, frustratingly, nothing ever comes from them on screen besides growing pains for Paul and his family, and whilst the family scenes are very well-done, this feels very uncomfortable indeed given the film's intended target. Ultimately, Gray's attempt to criticise how privilege paves the way to power and contributes to various levels of playing fields in pursuit of 'success', comes off as rather lazy and uninspiring.