My esteemed colleague Mark Kermode often talks of Altitude Adjusted Lachrymosity Syndrome (AALS), the tendency we have to vulnerably cry buckets while watching films – often wholly unremarkable ones – on planes. That would handily explain my reaction to Gifted (Fox, 12), a slick, soap-scrubbed and shamelessly tear-engineered child-custody drama, if not for the annoying detail that it caught me very much on terra firma. Perhaps it’s not that unremarkable after all.
A sore streak of honest feeling runs through The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb’s weepie; ditto the fresh, true performances from Chris Evans, as the adoring but no-bullshit uncle and guardian of a seven-year-old maths genius, and from McKenna Grace, beguiling but never cutesily camera-trained as the tyke in question. Together, they have an utterly credible, spontaneous connection on screen. The second that inevitable plot complications muscle in on their two-person family, you root fiercely for its protection. Tom Flynn’s script is closer to I Am Sam than Kramer vs Kramer in the complexity of its moral stakes: our sympathies are handed to dreamy, bristle-bearded Captain America himself on a plate. But it’s all about the sincerely anguished execution: I believe how the film feels, if not always how it looks, and that counts for a lot.
Performances are a saving grace of mustier material in Alone in Berlin (Altitude, 15), Vincent Perez’s slow, solemn, vintage-filtered tale of individual Nazi resistance, a subject that, at the time of production, the film-makers could hardly have imagined would be depressingly on-trend. See it for Brendan Gleeson, so quietly but plungingly sad as Otto, a compliant, grey-faced Berlin factory worker whose long-passive stance against the Nazi party turns active following his son’s death in battle. Secretly, he initiates a city-wide propaganda campaign of postcards inscribed with anti-Hitler messages. Emma Thompson, as his devastated but less politically decided wife, is also on form; their plaintive thespian duet lends dignity to a potentially starchy Europudding.
Dignity is not a virtue anyone gets to take away from the egregiously decayed summer bummer The Mummy (Universal, 15), a honking, murkily effects-buried, tomb-raiding reboot that wastes even Tom Cruise’s most minimal efforts. Knowingly and gleefully undignified, however, is Slack Bay (New Wave, 15), the latest loop-de-loop product of formerly severe French formalist Bruno Dumont’s sudden, surprising new interest in comedy. This one, more structurally contained but perhaps more tonally bananas than 2014’s P’tit Quinquin, spins over an eccentric, upper-crust family’s chaotic seaside vacation, its farcical points ranging from genderqueer identity crisis to cannibal grotesquerie to purest physical slapstick. Many viewers have proved highly allergic. Catch its wavelength, however, and you’ll be giggling over recalled details for days.
We’ve written a lot recently about the surge of Syria-themed documentaries; narrative cinema, however, has been slower to catch on. Despite being saddled with one of the year’s worst titles, Insyriated (Curzon Artificial Eye, 15) is a mostly commendable exception. A taut, curt chamber thriller, set in an overcrowded Damascus household weathering a day of extreme outside battle, it’s somewhat clunkily scripted but urgently paced and performed.
Cannily timed ahead of the release of Kenneth Branagh’s all-star, all-cheddar remake of Murder on the Orient Express, a quartet of glossy entertainments from Hollywood’s Agatha Christie revival of the 1970s and early 1980s have been smartly restored and repackaged. All awash in chintzy art direction and glazed-ham performances, they make for optimum Sunday-afternoon-under-a-blanket viewing as winter encroaches. Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express, despite its prestige veneer and smattering of Oscar attention, remains the stiffest of the lot. Death on the Nile, The Mirror Crack’d and Evil Under the Sun (all StudioCanal, PG) are spryer fun, leaning wholeheartedly into their camp potential. Maggie Smith and Diana Rigg bitchingly swapping verses on Cole Porter’s You’re the Top in the last one represents everything these films should aspire to be. Your move, Ken.
Finally to Netflix, now moving faster on films than most critics can catch them at festivals. Only days ago, Lucy Cohen’s stirring Kingdom of Us won best documentary at the London film festival. It’s already up to stream, which is perhaps just as well, since this tender, trauma-laced study of seven children – several of them autistic to varying degrees – and their mother, left behind and adrift by a patriarch’s suicide, isn’t most people’s idea of a night out at the cinema. It’s worth braving on a small screen, though, the format of which has no adverse effect on its hard-to-shake intimacy.
