Activism is back with a vengeance in our parlous political age, so what better time to welcome 120 BPM as a reminder of an impulse that has never truly gone away?
film reviews
Saskia Baron
What is it about Brian Selznick’s ornate illustrated fictions that leads good directors to make bad films? Turning The Invention of Hugo Cabret into Hugo was a near disaster for Scorsese, and now comes Todd Haynes’s stifling adaptation of Selznick’s novel, Wonderstruck.
Two different narratives intertwine, one set in the 1970s, the other in the 1920s. Both centre on children battling with hearing loss who embark on a solo quest in New York searching for an absent parent. Eventually their lives overlap, but it takes forever to get there. At one point the Julianne Moore character tells a child, "I need you to be patient with this story", but by then it’s way, way too late.
The three child actors are not hugely engaging, although Rose (played by deaf actress Millicent Simmonds, main picture) is at least very striking to look at and gives it her all. The two boys are cute moppets (Oakes Fegley, pictured below) but don’t have much to do but hide out for days in the American Museum of Natural History dodging adults in a wholly unbelievable way. It’s amazing that they didn’t stumble into the crew setting up for the Night at … series.
As in his work on other period films like Carol, Haynes has put together an expert team of art directors and costumiers (including Britain's own wondrous Sandy Powell) and given them full rein to show their talents. The magnificent DP Ed Lachman does an expert job of capturing the grungy streets of Manhattan in the Seventies in Kodak colour. This homage to the mean streets of early Scorsese and the Harlem of the blaxploitation era is impressive. The lustrous black and white sequences set in the Twenties are perhaps a little weaker and a touch clichéd. There’s real artistry in Haynes' homage to DW Griffiths in the film-within-a-film, although Moore goes over the top as a melodrama star.
But ultimately one comes away with the impression that far more thought has gone into creating impressive tableaux and evoking the patina of the past than working on a dynamic narrative or getting absorbing performances out of its young stars. Towards the end, Haynes breaks into charming stop-frame animation, but it’s not enough to save Wonderstruck; it’s simply too mannered for children and too slow for adults. For a far more modest but moving portrayal of life as a deaf child, the Oscar-winning British short, The Silent Child, is currently on iPlayer.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Wonderstruck
Adam Sweeting
Recently the world has been entertained by the shameless amateur theatricals from some of Australia’s lavishly-paid cricketers, but Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country transports us back to a harsher, crueller Australia, where men might have justifiably shed a tear as they scraped a hard living from the land and broiled under a crushing sun.
Veronica Lee
This isn't a feature about London's former docklands (although much of it was made in a studio nearby), but rather Wes Anderson's second foray into stop-motion animation (after 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox) and a quiet hymn to two of his heroes, Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyasaki. Fittingly, it is set in Japan.
Jasper Rees
Boxing movies are often about redemption in the ring. From Somebody Up There Likes Me to last year’s Bleed for This via Rocky, the story stays the same: boxer seeks peace though punching. In Journeyman, Paddy Considine travels along a different path. The sporting action happens towards the start, but the heart of the story is in its aftermath.
Adam Sweeting
Suddenly Steven Spielberg movies are plopping off the production line like Ford Fiestas or Cadburys Creme Eggs. It seems like only seconds ago that we were greeting The BFG and the breast-beating earnestness of The Post, and now the director comes steaming back with this huge and hectic tribute to the gamer-world and his own long-lost youth.
David Kettle
A feature-length documentary on whaling in the Faroe Islands: you might think you can see it unfolding already. Hardy Viking fishermen battling the elements, gruesome killings of majestic sea creatures, implied or outright condemnation of the shocking brutality.
Scottish director Mike Day’s masterful film is no shock-factor exposé, though – although what it does expose is far more chilling than the low-level hunting it shows. The Islands and the Whales is a haunting, deeply troubling portrait of a modern community on the edge, a film that paints an uncompromisingly complex, contradictory picture of ancient traditions struggling for survival amid the dangers of the modern world, without ever jumping to hasty judgement.
Researched and recorded over four years, it revolves around a seemingly unsolvable problem. The Faroes have an ancient tradition of whaling – of fishermen dashing for their boats as soon as a pod of pilot whales is sighted, then forcing the creatures ashore, where they are butchered with hooks and spears by the locals. It’s one of the defining elements of Faroese culture, we’re reminded time and again by numerous interviewees in the film.
But it’s under threat – not from protesters, however, who jet in to yell their objections and scupper whale hunts (cue a cringe-inducing press conference with Pamela Anderson exhorting the Faroese to go vegetarian), to the frustration of locals only too aware of their ignorance of the hardships of Faroese life. No, the big threat is from mercury, now present at dangerously concentrated levels in whale meat – a result of the relentless pollution of the oceans, and whales, as top of the food chain, receiving the highest dose. That mercury is now being passed on to human whale meat consumers, with serious concerns for the long-term health of the Faroese.
Day allows his story to unfold slowly, with persuasive access to the Faroese community. He speaks at length to Faroese medical officer Pál Weihe, who first voiced concerns over mercury levels, and who risks attack for seeming to undermine tradition by suggesting that the Faroese should give up whale meat. Day personifies the nation’s dilemma in touching scenes with careworn fisherman Bárður Isaksen (pictured above), seemingly in serious danger from his lifetime of whalemeat consumption, and his young family. Is he threatening the health of his two toddler daughters through his dogged adherence to tradition? Are the alternatives in a tiny, remote community – turning to flown-in, heavily processed food, for example – any more appealing?
Its issues aside, The Islands and the Whales is a breathtakingly beautiful film, and Day divides his ruminations into chapters with brooding land- and seascapes in between. Even his scenes of whale slaughter, unflinching and stomach-churning as they are, border on a kind of mythic majesty, and his wind-driven soundscape makes an apt counterpoint to his austere imagery.
The big unasked question is: if it’s cruel, and if it’s damaging their health, why don’t the Faroese just stop hunting and eating whales? By the end of Day’s mournful, melancholy documentary, however, simple assessments seem irrelevant. This is a sensitive, profoundly moving portrait of a community forced to question its own identity as a result of environmental catastrophe, and a film with a serious resonance for all of us. As one interviewee remarks, the Faroes are like a barometer for the rest of the world. With no large industrial countries nearby, if it’s already that bad in the far north Atlantic, how bad must it be elsewhere?
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Islands and the Whales
Jasper Rees
Ever nursed an immoderate fondness for Ingrid Bergman? In Her Own Words, a bio-documentary released in the cinema then on DVD in 2016 and shown last night on BBC One as part of the Imagine... strand, was an entrancing, melancholy memoir in letters, diaries and above all personal footage.
Saskia Baron
I Got Life!, originally released in France as Aurore, is a lovely, funny low-budget comedy that should definitely appeal to female movie-goers with a fondness for quirky, feisty women d’un certain age. It’s the kind of film that one would probably go to with a girlfriend rather than a male date… even though it would do middle-aged men a world of good to see it.
Fabulous Agnès Jaoui, who also collaborated on the script with director Blandine Lenoir, stars as Aurore, an amicably divorced mother of two adult daughters, living in La Rochelle. She’s going through the menopause with annoying hot flushes and the realisation that she’s become invisible to men, even ones her own age, who seek out younger girlfriends.
The bar she works at has been taken over by a boorish new propriétaire who can’t be bothered to call her by her real name and insists that she is now Samantha and should be confined behind the bar. She needs a new job and a new lover, especially as her older daughter has just announced that she’s expecting a baby and the younger one is besotted with a selfish young oaf and leaving home. Aurore and her gutsy gal pal Mano (Pascale Arbillot, pictured below with Jaoui) aren’t willing to embrace sexless grandmotherly status just yet and they embark on amorous adventures involving old school mates (twinkly Thibault de Montalembert) and strangers. 
It’s fascinating to see everyday body fascism towards middle-aged women being tackled head on by French filmmakers – France is after all the country famous not only for its flirtatious culture but a nation which performs five times more bariatric surgery operations per year than the UK. It’s lovely too to witness a light-touched fight-back at grotesque stereotypes in a mainstream French comedy. While I Got Life! is not always entirely credible in its plotting – there’s one lucky coincidence too many and a perhaps over-hasty happy ending – this is still a highly enjoyable little gem of a movie.
Nina Simone belts out "I Got Life" on the soundtrack, there’s a cute reference to the William Wellman classic male-female grooming movie A Star is Born and clips of the late feminist anthropologist Françoise Héritier woven in. It’s interesting to compare I Got Life! with the over-engineered movies such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel that the British turn out or last year's frenetic Debra Winger vehicle, The Lovers. There’s a freshness and everyday comic realism to I Got Life! which puts those films to shame. It’s not as ambitious a piece of filmmaking stylistically as 20th Century Women which tackled similar themes, but it is warmly recommended.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for I Got Life!
Jasper Rees
Perhaps it’s fitting that Donald Crowhurst should once more find himself in a race. Even more aptly, it’s a race against himself. You wait half a century for a biopic about the round-the-world yachtsman who disappeared off the face of the earth, and then two turn up at once. This sort of clash sometimes happens in film, and one movie always ends up trouncing the other. Dangerous Liaisons seduced audiences away from Valmont. Capote killed off Infamous.