At a time when nearly every day brings news – or just a Donald Trump tweet, really – that augurs ill for the future, it’s hard to overstate the virtues of stubbornly refusing to move forward. Bridget Jones’s Baby (Universal, 15) is the cinematic equivalent of burying one’s head in the sand, except the sand turns out to be a plumped-up down pillow big enough to envelop one’s entire body.
Twelve years have passed since we left Helen Fielding’s bumbling singleton at the abysmal edge of reason, but it’s the time-swallowing continuity that comforts here. The jokes, it turns out, are much the same, whether they’re about being alone and panicked in your 30s or being alone and panicked in your 40s, though they’re kinder than they were in the second film, which made Bridget a stooge rather than a mistress of her own muddled destiny. She’s back on the latter path, played with sweet, game dorkiness by the long-absent Renée Zellweger, whose own eagerness to regain her stride feeds happily into that of her klutzy alter ago. For two hours, Bridget Jones’s Baby makes everything seem warmly normal. For that reason, I might just love it a little bit.
Though its comforts are far less cuddly, I feel just as heartened by Deepwater Horizon (Lionsgate, 12), a rousingly humane blockbuster spectacle with a tough sense of personal consequence and tragedy beneath its brutal inferno. Peter Berg’s film is based on a true story – that of the catastrophic explosion on the eponymous offshore oil rig in 2010 – but doesn’t rest on those credentials for its pathos and sensory authenticity. As resilient engineer Mike Williams, Mark Wahlberg is an anchor of troubled decency amid the fiery carnage, giving the film a conscience that tempers the vivid, potentially morbid pyrotechnics of the accident. What pyrotechnics though. For sheer tactile horror, amplified by stunning, justly Oscar-nominated sound design, this takes an immediate place in the disaster movie pantheon.
War on Everyone (Icon, 15), meanwhile, trades very much in carnage without humanity, and if that calls Cards Against Humanity to mind, so does the haphazard structure and irrational nastiness of this bad cop-bad cop thriller. A disappointment from the writer-director John Michael McDonagh, this Albuquerque-set rampage finds the Irishman’s typically acrobatic writing style go splat in America. Some of the blood-soaked banter between corrupt boys in blue Michael Peña and Alexander Skarsgård lands, but much of it feels strained, even effortful, in its nastiness. The pairing of Skarsgård and the ever-spry Peña never quite combusts either. The former’s part feels more like a mission for Idris Elba, who surely has better things to do than 100 Streets (Signature, 15), a well-meaning but essentially naff British attempt at the Crash model of criss-crossing morality plays, in which disconnected London malcontents don’t so much collide as cross the street in vague view of each other.
On the arthouse front, a number of my learned colleagues claim to feel ravished by The Childhood of a Leader (Soda, 12), Brady Corbet’s roaringly ambitious directorial debut, while I find myself admiring its architecture from a distance. This opulently designed, head-crunchingly scored (by Scott Walker) and Sartre-inspired parable of a monstrous child’s upbringing (or is just a child’s monstrous upbringing?) between world wars has prompted Trumpian analogies in the current climate. But beyond the auspicious, undeniable brio of Corbet’s craft, there’s nothing terribly complex or stimulating about his film’s thumpingly obvious political metaphors.
Two film-related documentaries this week entertain in very different, equally generous ways. An Oscar nomination was probably going overboard for Life, Animated (Dogwoof, E), a rather blandly assembled but nonetheless heart-squeezing study of a withdrawn, autistic child who finds a language for the outside world in his beloved Disney animations. One wonders if he’d have made quite such cheering progress if he’d focused instead on the films of De Palma (Studiocanal, 15). Still one of the most perverse stylists in American genre cinema, the veteran director proves an entirely winning, self-effacing raconteur in Noah Baumbach’s simply constructed film-by-film conversation. Full of tasty anecdotal nuggets and passages of genuinely dynamic analysis, it’s a gloriously overgrown DVD extra in the best sense of the term.
It also sent me shuffling over to Shudder.com, the growing, horror-specific streaming service to which I’m a late arrival. I didn’t find the De Palma I was looking for, but its menu covers a pleasingly broad trash-to-art spectrum. On the latter end it yielded a very satisfying discovery in Laotian film-maker Mattie Do’s Dearest Sister, a quiet, slinky ghost story that plays certain loyally upheld gothic conventions against the invigorating factors of its south-east Asian setting and stark feminine perspective. A million miles from Bridget Jones, it offers its own kind of soothing escape.
