Poor things (18, 141 minutes)
Pronunciation: Rolling, rolling stone
The boys in the boat (12A, 123 minutes)
Pronunciation: Sinks like a stone
Emma Stone won a Golden Globe last Sunday for her performance in Poor Things, and if she doesn’t get an Academy Award for that, I’ll eat Mark Ruffalo’s hat. Which, considering the film is set in Victorian times, would be a mouthful.
It’s a wildly imaginative, irrepressibly naughty, exciting rollercoaster of a film, in which Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe excel in supporting roles.
They were also nominated for Globes, as were director Yorgos Lanthimos, screenwriter Tony McNamara and composer Jerskin Fendrix, whose suspiciously anagram-like name is unsurprisingly a pseudonym.
He’s actually Joscelin Dent-Pooley, from Shropshire, and this silly film score – the oboes, bagpipes and accordions that fit perfectly with the bizarre story, but not necessarily with each other – is his first. Dent-Pooley is not yet 30. Think of a footballer who makes his debut in the Champions League final and then scores from the halfway line with a bicycle kick. It’s so crazy.
Stone plays Bella, a mature but simple woman living under the care of a prominent Scottish surgeon, Godwin Baxter (Dafoe), whose facial deformities are reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein. In this story, which can best, if not very succinctly, be described as a feminist journey of discovery in the form of a gothic horror comedy, he is Dr. Frankenstein and the lovely but apparently corrupted Bella is his monster.
If you’re familiar with the inspiration for the film, the 1992 novel of the same name by the late Alasdair Grey, then you know the truth of it. If not, you should read on with caution.
Emma Stone (pictured) plays Bella, a mature but simple woman living under the care of a prominent Scottish surgeon
Emma Stone (left) alongside Mark Ruffalo (right) in ‘Poor Things’ (2023)
I first saw Poor Things at the Venice Film Festival last year (where it won the top prize, the Golden Lion), with no idea what to expect other than based on Lanthimos’ 2018 hit The Favorite (which also featured Stone sparkled), a great deal of strangeness. But part of the reason I loved it so much was the sheer surprise of it. Which for you may be undermined by the rest of this review. You have been warned.
I should add that, like The Favorite (which I also loved), it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.
Bella calls Godwin Baxter by an abbreviation of his name: “God.” That turns out to be quite ambiguous. He found Bella when she was clinically dead, after jumping into the Thames while pregnant, and resuscitated her by replacing her brain with that of her unborn baby, who was still alive. “Her mental age and her body are not completely synchronized,” he explains, but they will be in due time, as her mind and intellect mature.
That describes the film’s tantalizingly crazy trajectory. Baxter’s assistant Max (Ramy Youssef) falls hopelessly in love with Bella, who makes exciting discoveries about her own body in some of the film’s more, shall we say, gripping scenes.
Stone plays all this in the only way possible for an actress of her talent: with absolute dedication. It is an extremely committed performance. Then Ruffalo enters the picture, gloriously hamming it up as a lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn, a frontier and a villain almost twirling a black cloak, like a caricature of a Victorian villain.
He too has a fondness for Bella, but unlike Max, his intentions are purely dishonorable.
He takes her on an odyssey across the continent, telling her that “no other man would bring you the rapture that I have.” Sure, Bella finds herself enjoying sex immensely, but realizes she doesn’t need Duncan as her sole provider.
She asserts herself more and more and spends time as a prostitute in Paris to finance her social conscience. Feminists may object to the amount of female nudity on display, which is barely matched by the dudes, but it is nevertheless a story about a woman searing men’s controlling behavior.
It is truly a universal story that can be placed in any era, but the Victorian setting allows Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan to indulge in their craziness even more than in The Favorite.
At times it becomes downright surreal, like a Magritte painting in 3D, which makes Poor Things sound all challenging and even insufferable, but from where I was sitting it is a real tour de force, already bound to be the most extraordinary film in the entire world. year.
Bruce Herbelin-Earle, Callum Turner and Jack Mulhern star in ‘The Boys in the Boat’ (2023)
‘A unique vision to transform an inspiring story of rowing into a load of old rowers,’ says Brian Viner
George Clooney and his wife Amal Clooney pose for photographers as they arrive at the screening of the film The Boys In The Boat on December 3, 2023 in London
George Clooney’s film The Boys In The Boat is unique only in the sense that it takes a unique vision to turn an inspiring story about rowing into a load of old rowers.
Clooney isn’t a bad director, but he has made a hash of another true story, The Monuments Men (2014), and now he’s done the same with this adaptation of a 2013 book about the University of Washington junior rower who in 1936 gold medal win at the Berlin Olympics for, at least as the film tells it, a snarling Adolf Hitler.
The racing scenes are very nicely done, but apart from the boats speeding through the water, and compared to Chariots Of Fire (1981), which doesn’t try to mirror anything too subtly, the film is dramatically inert.
Callum Turner plays heroic rower Joe Rantz, with Joel Edgerton as taciturn coach Al Ulbrickson. Both are compelling actors, but faced with Mark L. Smith’s anodyne screenplay and Clooney’s clumsy direction, they flounder.
- Poor Things and The Boys In The Boat are in theaters now.
The beekeeper (15, 105 minutes)
It’s unlikely there will be any awards ceremonies for The Beekeeper, a monumentally silly action thriller starring Jason Statham as Adam Clay, the bee maker of the title. Confusingly, he finds himself lovingly tending his beehives after retiring from a shadowy special operations team known as… the Beekeepers. It’s almost like he’s too weak to realize he’s allowed another hobby.
Anyway, Clay is drawn back into crime fighting when a friendly neighbor commits suicide after being scammed by a ruthless cyber gang.
He bombs their office, but gradually discovers, to mingle invertebrate metaphors, that he’s opened a can of worms. Yes, there’s a nasty conspiracy afoot that leads all the way to Jeremy Irons and Jemma Redgrave, who play the former director of the CIA and the president of the United States, respectively.
It’s unlikely there will be any awards ceremonies for The Beekeeper, a monumentally silly action thriller starring Jason Statham
What all this means, of course, is a thunderously violent one-man murder where Clay deploys guns, knives, fists, bombs and even gas pumps to scare off a battalion of bad guys, none of whom ever figure out it makes sense. to tackle a virtuoso exterminator like a swarm, and not one by one.
The director is David Ayer, who has made some good films (Fury, Suicide Squad), but this one is summed up by the most hilariously bad line of the year so far: ‘Who the f*** are you, Winnie-the -Pooh!?’
- The Beekeeper is in cinemas now and on Sky Cinema later this year. Elevator is on Netflix.
