Get Carter’s imitators tried to recapture the laconic violence of a very local gangster film. Get Carter’s makers swapped Newcastle for Malta, and a sunny, absurdist farce which is among British cinema’s unclassifiable one-offs.
Paddington 2 is that rare thing, a sequel that is more engaging than the original by dint of having a far better baddie. In the first film Nicole Kidman’s villainess was a bleached rehash of Cruella De Ville or Morticia – and it was far from her finest hour. She simply didn't convince as an evil taxidermist intent on giving Paddington a good stuffing.
The sequel replaces Kidman with Hugh Grant, who steps into the kind of role that the late Alan Rickman once made his own. Grant plays Phoenix Buchanan, a neighbour of the Brown family living in the same chintzy crescent. Buchanan is a washed-up actor reduced to starring in dog food commercials, given to lamenting the lack of decent stage roles and hectoring his agent. The plot revolves around Buchanan and Paddington pursuing the same hand-made pop-up book but for very different reasons.
While the bear wants to buy the book as a gift for his centenarian aunt back in Peru, Buchanan knows that it contains secret clues that will lead to a treasure trove of cash. Paddington gets into comic scrapes doing odd jobs to earn enough money to purchase the book, the dastardly thespian deploys all the costumes in his closet to steal it, framing Paddington in the process. Grant (pictured above) is clearly having a whale of a time with the silly accents and outfits; his dancing finale is well worth the ticket price.
The film is something of a rest home for British actors, all of whom provide predictable performances. The returnees include Hugh Bonneville as bumbling dad, Sally Hawkins as kindly mum, Julie Walters as salty housekeeper and Peter Capaldi as the local xenophobe. The novelty acts are comfortingly familiar – Brendan Gleeson (pictured below), Tom Conti, Joanna Lumley, Jim Broadbent, Imelda Staunton and Eileen Atkins all muck in. It must have been like a drama school reunion in the canteen. But one wonders if writer-director Paul King has consciously decided to avoid the criticism Richard Curtis regularly receives for all-white casting; there are also very decent cameos for Richard Ayoade, Sangeev Bhaskar and Meera Syal and much diversity among the minor roles.
Prettily made with some nifty animation and some very enjoyable slapstick gags, Paddington 2 is ultimately an insidious advert for the capital. This is a fantasy city made up entirely of Instagram-friendly locations – it becomes a game ticking off sightings of Primrose Hill, Little Venice, the Regent's Canal, Portobello, Albert Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral. In King's version of London, even a newspaper vendor can afford to live in a pastel-hued Victorian terrace and (nearly) everyone is essentially nice. It’s ironic that a tale of an illegal immigrant from Peru dreaming of bringing his elderly dependent relative into the UK will convince even more tourists to come and enjoy theme park London. If only it also included instructions about which side of the escalator they should stand on…
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Paddington 2
Sweet isn’t the right word; in Mike Leigh’s 1990 film, life is unfair, frustrating and confusing by turns. Though, despite the darkness, Life Is Sweet exudes positivity and remains one of Leigh’s funniest, most quotable features.
There are many outstanding things in writer-director Francis Lee’s remarkable first feature, and prime among them is the sense that nature herself has a distinct presence in the story. It brings home how rarely we see life on the land depicted in British cinema with any credibility. God's Own Country is a gloriously naturalistic depiction of the harsh life of farming, of an existence based on close connection to animals and to the earth, set in the Yorkshire countryside in which the director grew up. For a comparable sense of connection to the rural environment, and of the sheer back-breaking work that comes with that link, we have to look elsewhere – to Zola perhaps, or Italian neorealism.
Closer to home there’s much in God's Own Country that resonates with DH Lawrence, his sense of the primal rhythms of life and death, and the way in which the emotions of these working lives are often expressed with a minimum of language. Lawrence has a poem titled “Love on the Farm”, which could work as an alternative title for Lee’s film – except that love is as far from the mind of its main character, twentysomething Johnny Saxby (played by Josh O'Connor), when we first encounter him as anything could be. In an early scene his grandmother catches his character perfectly when she calls him a “mardy arse”, local vernacular for his being moodily withdrawn (it was a nickname that Lawrence was called at school).
The sense of change feels somehow primal
It’s a world in which communication, particularly within the family, is virtually monosyllabic: the first words we hear Johnny speak, some minutes into the film, he addresses to a heifer, and he’s just had his hand inside her to check on her calf (we see a lot of hands exploring animals’ orifices in God's Own Country: Lee made his actors learn such tasks for themselves, no hand doubles here). With his father Martin (Ian Hart) in poor health, Johnny carries the responsibility for the farm on his shoulders, and there’s little else in his life to give it meaning. The fact that he’s gay isn’t an issue in itself – though it’s not spoken of at home – but sex has the same purely physical dimension as the drink he stupefies himself with at the pub every night. When he takes a cow to market, he has a cold fuck with a man who’s obviously an acquaintance, but the idea of continuing any human contact after the act is completed is alien to him.
Johnny’s world is a lonely one: his mother disappeared south at some stage in the past, unable to deal with the isolation and hardship of the farm. Grandmother Deidre (Gemma Jones, playing well beyond her accustomed range) has a sort of scolding affection for him, but she’s more than reserved with her emotions. A childhood friend has come back home for her university holidays – she notices how Johnny has changed, no longer “funny, like you used to be” – and suggests they have a night out in Bradford. When Johnny mentions the idea to his dad, the latter looks at him like he was talking about the moon.
All of which makes the arrival of an outsider an unwelcome disruption. Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) has come from Romania to help for a few weeks with the lambing – he was the only applicant for the job – and Johnny’s hostility is immediate as he taunts him as a “gyppo”. They are going up to the higher pastures for the lambing, to sleep in a ruined hut and subsist, it seems, entirely on pot noodles. Then up there, when least expected, fate stumbles in: in this stark isolation the hostility between the two men turns into something else, Johnny’s anger giving way to tussling, and that into physical contact. At first they fight in the mud, rutting like animals, before a deeper contact slowly grows between them. They may still guy one another, but their words – “freak”, “faggot” – are no longer insults, rather signifiers of an new, joshing intimacy.
Lee convinces us of this changing dynamic with absolute filmic subtlety. There’s a sense that the bleak beauty of their surroundings, to which Gheorghe is receptive, has started to infect Johnny too, as does the sheer gentleness of the outsider. We see the Romanian bring the runt of a litter back to life and then, in a truly beautiful scene, coat it in the pelt of a dead lamb so that the mother sheep will allow it to suckle.
All of this is conveyed with such tenderness, expressed far more through images than in the very spare words of Lee’s script (his minimal use of music, principally tracks by A Winged Victory for the Sullen, is also all the more powerful for its sparseness). The sense of change feels somehow primal: simply, the two men come down from the hills different people. Johnny has started to feel things that he never knew he could, while for Gheorghe – everything we hear about his back story and homeland is unremittingly pessimistic, “My country is dead” – the possibility of settling, rather than wandering may have become real.
For these two who have felt so out of place in their different worlds, the chance to create a home has suddenly appeared, but Lee’s closing reel will test everything. Johnny, although capable of being surprised by joy, remains his own worst enemy: Josh O'Connor’s face has a remarkable, somehow lopsided vulnerability that conveys all that, and more. In these troubled days of Brexit, it’s salutary to find an outsider portrayed with such total respect. However he may have acquired it – most likely, we guess, though the school of hard knocks – Gheorghe has a self-awareness, and a self-sufficiency, that is both beyond his own years, and aeons beyond Johnny's.
Cinematographer Joshua James Richards portrays these landscapes, these faces with a subtle, surprise beauty that matches Lee’s pacing of his emotional narrative. It’s somehow cyclical, how from the barren earth of winter a new harvest will come forth; over the film’s closing credits we see just that, home-movie archive scenes of harvests past. There’s no praising God's Own Country too highly. Francis Lee may have come out of nowhere, but if we see another film as good this year, we will be lucky.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for God's Own Country
How many more throats must be slit in 19th-century London before the river of blood starts to clot? The Limehouse Golem follows the gory footprints of Sweeney Todd and various riffs on the Ripper legend. Based on Peter Ackroyd’s 1994 novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, this belated adaptation sensibly ditches the reference to a star of the music hall whose name recognition value isn’t what it was in the late Victorian East End.
Uncovering the identity of the eponymous golem is the hospital pass handed by his superior to Inspector John Kildare (Bill Nighy). The so-called golem, a killer so grim he is popularly assumed to be some sort of Talmudic phantasm, has been carving up randomly selected victims with horrifying thoroughness. At one crime scene a taunting message is scrawled on the wall in blood. Among the suspects are various scholars at the British Library including, randomly, Karl Marx and George Gissing. But Kildare’s more pressing concern is to solve the apparently unconnected death of John Cree (Sam Reid), who has been poisoned in his bed. The maid drops the wife in it and Lizzie Cree (Olivia Cooke) is soon in prison with the mob baying for her to swing. Kildare alone is convinced of her innocence.
The accused is a demure little thing who, long before her husband’s death, was already in mourning for the termination of her career as an actress. A series of flashbacks establish that Lizzie has risen to gentility from the poorest circumstances. Her mother turned a blind eye to the molestations of randy old pervs. Orphaned, she drifts towards the local music hall, a place of magical enchantment staffed by dwarves and trapeze artistes, presided over by the celebrated cross-dressing Dan Leno (Douglas Booth, pictured above with Olivia Cooke) and his managerial sidekick known as Uncle (Eddie Marsan in a bald wig).
Lizzie, at this point still a glottal-stopping Cockney sparrow, seizes her chance to become an entertainer by wowing the audience with a popular ditty, and a star is born. She is soon being courted by Cree, a stalker fan/aspiring playwright who eventually persuades her to tie the knot, only to insist she give up the stage. Men are besotted with Lizzie, music hall audiences adore her, and old stage lags think the world of her, while Kildare believes passionately in her innocence. She has to embody virtue, frigidity, pizzazz, ambition, and a little something extra, which is a lot to ask of any actress and it’s no criticism that it feels just beyond the reach of Olivia Cooke.
It’s curious to witness Bill Nighy play someone so intensely buttoned up (Kildare’s rumoured homosexuality goes for nothing). The role was originally destined for the late Alan Rickman, and it’s possible to imagine what he might have done with it. Nighy turns in a gimlet-eyed tribute performance which is shorn of all his trademark tics and tricks and doesn’t quite compute. As Leno, Booth channels his inner Russell Brand without conveying the hypnotic appeal that, you assume, was his signature. Daniel Mays plays a PC Plod turn he could do in his sleep. There’s a nice turn from María Valverde (pictured above) as a smouldering other woman.
London’s underbelly is imagined by an outsider in the form of American director Juan Carlos Medina. There’s a slight school-of-Guy-Ritchie buzz to the chopping edits. The art direction, particularly pleasing in the theatre scenes, leaves little to the imagination at the various Gothic murder scenes. Though the pieces of The Limehouse Golem don’t quite fit together, Jane Goldman’s proto-feminist script saves the best with a splendidly clever twist that rewards your patience.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Limehouse Golem
It’s fitting that the first name on The Hospital Club's h.Club 100 film list for 2017 is that of Ken Loach. But though the director has a cinema career of more than half a century behind him – and had even officially retired before he came back to make I, Daniel Blake – his presence here is in no sense a Lifetime Achievement award. If you follow the adage, “You’re only as good as your last film”, this was Loach at his urgent best.
Summer's here, which can only mean Hollywood blockbusters. But it's not all Spider-Man, talking apes and World War Two with platoons of thespians fighting on the beaches. There's comedy, a saucy menage-à-trois, a film about golf and even a ghost story. It's called A Ghost Story. We hereby bring you sneak peeks of the season's finest and more titles anticipated in the autumn (and hey, the trailer might even be the best part).
AUGUST
Gareth Tunley, director of the psychological drama The Ghoul, and Alice Lowe, one of its stars, are a duo with eclectic tastes. They share a background in comedy, but cite everything from punk to surrealism and the occult as influences on Tunley’s directorial debut, which was produced by Ben Wheatley.
The Ghoul is an occult British thriller about depression, with a bleakly poetic view of London, and a seedy sadness at its core. This sensibility is greatly helped by its star Tom Meeten, who as police detective Chris is haggard and run-down, ready to flinch at the world.
Victim was released in 1961. Six years would pass before the passing of the Sexual Offences Act cautiously exempted from prosecution men over 20 who had consensual sex in private. Yet the Basil Dearden suspenser probably played an equally important part in de-stigmatising homosexuality by highlighting the ugliness of homophobia.