In cinemas this weekend: The Zone of Interest vs All of Us Strangers
From Jonathan Glazer's holocaust drama The Zone of Interest to Andrew Haigh's poignant ghost movie All of Us Strangers starring Andrew Scott, here are the films in cinemas this weekend
The Zone of Interest, dir. Jonathan Glazer [STAR:4]
Imagine a house, two storeys high. It has a large garden, populated with sunflowers and vegetables. An ostensibly idyllic family lives there: father, mother, kids, a baby and a dog. If they weren’t speaking German, you might mistake the sight for picture-postcard American suburbia. And then: the father, Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Heidel), emerges in his Nazi uniform. Instead of a white picket fence, the property is bordered by a tall grey wall – beyond which stand the brick buildings of Auschwitz.
This is the tangible absurdity of Jonathan Glazer’s new film The Zone of Interest, loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis. The environment is almost Lynchian in its disparity: strolling across the threshold of the worst horror in human history. You can hear the screams and shouts of disorder. Kids play as gunshots snap in the distance. Smoke and flames erupt from a crematorium chimney, visible from the garden. The film relaxes into this eerie liminal space that isn’t properly acknowledged by the characters, like a 100-minute act of amoral disassociation.
Photo: A24
All of Us Strangers, dir. Andrew Haigh [STAR:5]
The concept of ghosts summarises two unanswerable conditions of human nature: the fear of death and the desire for immortality. These are devices favoured by horror movies and stories by torchlight, telling of phantoms that bump into and scream at and prey on the living. But in Andrew Haigh’s seductively somnambulant All of Us Strangers, the ghosts are kind, concerned and inviting.
They’re the dead parents of Adam (Andrew Scott), a lonely 40-something screenwriter working on a new project that dives into his own past. This process inspires a visit to his family home. After a walk through the park, he meets with his dad (Jamie Bell) and, later, his mum (Claire Foy). They’re not smothered in blood, they don’t whisper his name down narrow corridors, and they harbour no ill will in the slightest. They just have a chat. Paul Mescal also stars.
Photo: Searchlight Pictures
The Holdovers, dir. Alexander Payne [STAR:4]
Director Alexander Payne’s latest project is an in-between movie, where the story takes place in a somewhat purgatorial period. In this case, it's the universally experienced limbo of the Christmas Holidays. But whereas many see their families, dress a tree and sing Auld Lang Sine to temporarily anaesthetise their troubles, the characters of The Holdovers are confined to Barton Academy – an elite prep school in 70s New England. In Bruges cinematographer Eigil Bryld pictures the grounds beautifully. They're blanketed in snow and exude a prestige, academic atmosphere, institutionally resembling a more modern Dead Poets Society.
But the left-behind student Angus (Dominic Sessa in a remarkable film debut) is sick of the Barton sights, and would much rather spend the holidays with his mother and step-father. And Angus’s history teacher Paul Hunham (a brilliantly pompous Paul Giamatti), despite living at Barton for decades, would much rather not babysit the kids he holds in contempt. The unfestive task is a punishment for giving a bad grade to a child of good donors; Paul may be ruthless, but he never gives anyone special treatment.
Photo: Focus Features
Mean Girls (2024), dir. Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez, Jr. [STAR:2]
ChatGPT, make a Gen Z version of Mean Girls. And make it a musical.
Maybe that’s a disservice to writer/actor Tina Fey, but comparing her tedious remake of the 2004 cult classic to a bloodless OpenAI isn’t too far from the truth. This 2024 version closely traces the cliquey American high school schematics of the original and draws in all the modern developments that Zoomers are into: selfies, TikTok dances, diversity, whatever. Yes, Ok, diversity is commendable and perhaps offers the only justifiable motivation for a remake, but the pieces just don’t fit.
After growing up in Kenya, teenager Cady Herron (a decently geeky Angourie Rice) moves to the US and is thrust immediately into the difficult social dynamics of high school. She’s guided by the bottom wrung represented by Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Sivey), before being semi-snatched by the elite Plastics and the queenly alpha-female Regina George (Reneé Rap). Fey keeps venerated lines to inferior effect, spoken by the actors like formulaic throwbacks, and expurgates those that could offend a modern audience (Amanda Seyfried’s ‘Why are you white?’ is gone, despite being one of the original’s funniest moments). Strangely, despite these timely updates, Fey commits to the calorie-counting, body-shaming subplot…
What about the new elements? Rice’s awkward cluelessness is enjoyable; often the best moments involve Cady's efforts to entice Math class partner Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney). And although Rap is much, much better and reaches superior nuance in The Sex Lives of College Girls, she gives Regina an exaggerated flair befitting a musical. But the addition of music and lyrics is little more than a gimmick, which appears to be forgotten around midway through before it’s nervously remembered. There are a few good jokes, but they’re directed as if in a rush. The entire film is chaotically accelerated, pasted with limp messages of modern feminism that react like broken fireworks after the cultural explosion of Barbie.
But the key issue with Mean Girls (2024) is the attempt to remake an early millennial teen movie and expect the current youth to flock. No. Just no. Every generation deserves its own high school movies and TV shows. Booksmart, Sex Education and Bottoms achieve and say so much more than this gaffer tape job. Even the less brilliant Moxie and Do Revenge seem more in touch with today’s adolescence than Fey appears to be. She’s more like Regina George’s mother, desperate to be down with the kids. This critic can’t imagine a world in which the kids will have her.
Photo: Paramount Pictures
Poor Things, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos [STAR:4]
The weird, the freaky and the fantastical are some of the most vital properties in art. They make you look at the real world with sliced vision, vivifying the pixie dust between tarmac and concrete. Even if you’re left speechless by the end of Yorgos Lanthimos’s adult, anatomical fairytale Poor Things, its shapes and colours and spectacular syntax superimpose themselves on your reality and enrich it.
Since emerging from the Greek Weird Wave film movement, Lanthimos has earned cult status with his surrealist English-language films The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer before turning down the bafflement (if only a little) for The Favourite. Poor Things returns the volume to where it was, but with a larger studio budget usually unthinkable for a film so bizarre and sexual.
Photo: Searchlight Pictures
Priscilla, dir. Sofia Coppola [STAR:4]
There's a certain fear and hesitancy when considering the story of Elvis and Priscilla Presley. Because they met when she was 14 and he was 24, the debate of historical contexts versus modern sensibilities always disrupts the nuances of what really happened. It's a tricky tale to tell in a post-#MeToo landscape. That's why Sofia Coppola's ambitious biopic Priscilla feels daring.
Coppola is too intelligent a filmmaker to opt for black-and-white portrayals that make abused women into helpless damsels and abusive men into ogres of toxicity. Instead, she observes from Priscilla's mindset – how she felt, how she saw things – shaving away the retrospective right and wrong. Dangling in this difficult territory, in which the King of rock 'n' roll has big groomer energy, the film provides a delicate, honest and empowering portrait of Priscilla’s journey from naïve girl to independent woman.
Photo: A24
Wonka, dir. Paul King [STAR:2]
Why did director Paul King retreat from Paddington to make an unwanted Willy Wonka prequel? It's baffling. But Wonka is here to fill the cinema schedules over the festive period, so we have to deal with it. This critic feels sorry for the obligated parents forced to sit through this colourfully co-ordinated mediocrity.
Originally played with ambiguously dark exuberance by Gene Wilder, the corporate chocolatier is now embraced by the still-boyish Timothée Chalamet – the introspective, existential wunderkind of Dune, Bones and All and Call Me By Your Name. The actor seems to be having fun in Wonka’s tattered suit, singing and smiling into a mishmash European city. But despite Chalamet's centre-stage ecstasy, the character is a bad fit. He discards his curious trademarks to perform a lacklustre eccentricity, like a Rodin sculpture trying to be a cartoon.
The ambitious, fortune-seeking Wonka wields elaborate contraptions to make his chocolate, but finds himself homeless. That is, until a pair of duplicitous landlords played by Olivia Colman and Tom Davis – resembling a mixture of the Wormwood parents in Matilda and the Thénardiers in Les Misérables – take full advantage of his naivety. Making things worse: when Wonka magically displays his wares in the town square of chocolate establishments, he’s dressed down by the police and the corporate magnates. Turns out, the town is a cartel collaboration between the companies, the authorities and even the Church – suppressing any kind of competition. Admittedly, this is decently creative world-building by King and Paddington co-scribe Simon Farnaby, bolstered by Nathan Crowley’s bedazzling production design.
But the film suffers from an almost compulsive lack of decent comedy. There are lots of jokes, few of them funny. There are bounteous British comedy talents – Rowan Atkinson, Paterson Joseph and Matt Lucas among them – but few to relish. With momentary exceptions, the only reason to open your mouth during this movie is to breathe, sigh, yawn or cough. That’s not to mention the little jar of orange nightmare fuel that is Hugh Grant, digitally sized down to resemble an outcast Oompa Loompa.
Wonka bakes in some charms and nostalgia for fans of the 1971 film (the original songs briefly elevate an otherwise unmemorable soundtrack). But this is a pointless, tedious and drearily unfunny experience – serving only to fund a cash-greedy Dahl-iverse advent calendar for the next few years.
Photo: Warner Bros.
Maestro, dir. Bradley Cooper [STAR:4]
There are three prominent reasons you should be sceptical of Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro. Cooper’s ‘Jewface’ prosthetic nose is currently dividing the Jewish community. The casting of white British actor Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s Latin-American wife Felicia Montealegre has been seen as whitewashing. And Cooper’s previous film A Star is Born was an overrated melodrama, leaving little anticipation for his follow-up… Okay, that last one was just this critic’s experience, but the controversy remains.
However, as this spirited and curious examination of the legendary composer/conductor proceeds, you have to admit: Cooper does a decent job.
Napoleon, dir. Ridley Scott [STAR:3]
The risk you run with movies about historical titans is over-aggrandising the subject. To deify is to lobotomise any nuance or intrigue about the character. It’s jarring to imagine the French emperor and commander Napoleon Bonaparte as a character – he’s one of those ubiquitous names everyone knows, even if they understand little about the man. Regardless, Ridley Scott’s near-three-hour nominative biopic presents an unexpected portrait of the figure via Joaquin Phoenix, a good fit for the role considering his previous Roman collaboration with Scott on Gladiator.
The Napoleon of Napoleon is a great military strategist, like a choreographer of Imax-worthy battle scenes – complete with technological advances, perfectly timed attacks and genius diversions for his enemies. But his personal life is less victorious, the film delving into the funny and patriarchal inadequacies of his love life with Empress Josephine (a loving and loathing performance by Vanessa Kirby). He presents like an icky mother’s boy, bound in present-day red flags. But Josephine, despite a degree of garish agency, wants to fulfil Napoleon’s whims and wishes – mostly involving spontaneous sex and the heirs that’d hopefully result.
As well as catching you off-guard with this unflattering depiction – often brilliantly dismantling the fragile masculine ego – the tones of Napoleon are also surprising. All the ingredients for a cinematic epic are there: the armies of horses, the lavish period attire, the towering set designs ranging from a frozen Austerlitz to a burning Moscow. But often, instead of severity and honour, the film drops into comedy. It sometimes works, but often runs against the epic that was promised – occasionally looking like a $200 million version of a Monty Python movie or Blackadder special. Is Scott taking the subject matter seriously? Was he bored and felt a need to reinvigorate the story?
Thankfully, the clash makes the stretched runtime move quickly. And despite Scott’s public hatred of critical historicists ('get a life') and Francophobia ('The French don't like themselves'), he adeptly taps into the undying fascination about a man who led France into battle against the world.
Photo: Apple
Saltburn, dir. Emerald Fennell [STAR:5]
Writer/director Emerald Fennell broke into filmmaking with the divisive and much-discussed Promising Young Woman in 2020. It was a dark, amusing and uncomfortable triumph for revenge thrillers and post-#MeToo dramas, revealing an audacious new voice in cinema.
Fennell transplants many of those qualities to her new project Saltburn, a second feature that not only matches her film debut but outgrows it. Returning to the shores of Great Britain, she tells a strange, gothic tale of extreme social climbing that straddles the funny, the satirical, the disturbing and the kinky.
Anatomy of a Fall, dir. Justine Triet [STAR:4]
Nowadays, certainty is simultaneously elusive and everywhere. There are few genres that capture fractured realities as accurately as the true-crime drama, examples of which build hives of mystery – swarmed by infinite armchair detectives buzzing, analysing and obsessing. In a polarised world, filled with laborious disclaimers, this ambiguity is worth treasuring.
Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winner Anatomy of a Fall is a brilliant anomaly that will hopefully inspire a trend: maintaining the unknowability of a crime, but in a fictional framework. The fabricated crime drama tends to conclude with a clear answer, but Triet and co-writer Arthur Harari work only with debatable truths. They're unbounded from any provable reality and yet maintain a tangible uncertainty, crafting a thoughtful, loquacious and fascinating study of a novelist accused of murder.
Photo: Picturehouse Entertainment