And then, in a fog of champagne-fuelled anticipation, it was suddenly 2017. We’ve perhaps been idealising it a little: “I can’t wait for this year to be over,” people would say in response to every nightmare 2016 threw up, as if a mere change of digit would make all the difference. Still, if you fancy getting the new year off to a gentler start, you could do worse than Ethel & Ernest (Universal, PG), Roger Mainwood’s delicate, melancholic and adoringly realised animated adaptation of Raymond Briggs’s autobiographical graphic novel.
Detailing the half-century-spanning relationship between Briggs’s salt-of-the-earth parents, from first date to last goodbye, Mainwood has fashioned a film in which every dramatic conflict lands like a goose down pillow. It’s a very English, composed celebration of unconditional familial love and risks tipping into an overly romantic exercise in 20th-century nostalgia. Then again, as Ethel and Ernest, voiced by Brenda Blethyn and Jim Broadbent, repeatedly spar over their opposing politics, the film also plays as a wry blueprint of the Brexit voter’s rose-tinted England.
Alternatively, if you’re in the mood for quiet tenderness with a shade less cuteness, head over to Netflix, where Ira Sachs’s gorgeous teenage friendship study Little Men has skipped DVD to land on the streaming service, just in time to soothe some New Year’s Day hangovers. Exquisitely observed and immaculately cast, the film has an innate, unforced understanding of male adolescent breakability and bravado, embodied in the chalk-and-cheese pairing of withdrawn Jake (Theo Taplitz) and bolshy Tony (Michael Barbieri), who forge a deep bond as their parents fight a cross-class battle over Brooklyn property inheritance.
The unhappy practicalities of the adults’ world is presented in stark contrast to the boys’ purer, sweeter search for their own identities. Sachs hints oh so subtly at the crises they might eventually face, without preserving their innocence in amber. Though the adult players are uniformly terrific, notably Chilean actress Paulina Garcia as Tony’s hard-up seamstress mum, it’s Taplitz’s aching vulnerability and Barbieri’s eccentric swagger that stick.
As nasty and nihilistic as Sachs’s film is generous and humane, Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog (Signature, 18) at least finds the veteran chronicler of society’s seamier underside – an awfully long way from the insights of Taxi Driver – attacking lurid genre terrain with stomach-churning brio. You can’t accuse the film’s neon-nightmare atmospherics of being half-hearted. The film’s hunger to shock, coming straight out of the gate with a grisly, drugged-up double murder, is so all-consuming that its sleazily tangled yarn, involving Nicolas Cage and a bug-eyed Willem Dafoe ineptly kidnapping an infant, seems an afterthought. Perhaps London Town (High Fliers, 15) could borrow some of its surplus bad attitude: Derrick Borte’s peculiar musical semi-biopic welds a would-be gritty portrait of the Clash to a sentimental coming-of-age narrative to awkward effect.
The rerelease of the week is a cracker. As taut and terse today as it must have seemed in 1953, Carol Reed’s chiaroscuro espionage thriller The Man Between (Studiocanal, U) tends to get filed away in The Third Man’s shadow, but deserves its own platform. Anchored by a typically suave, opaque James Mason, this morally complex tale of a former Nazi caught up, along with prim, innocent Claire Bloom, in a border-blurring Soviet-German abduction plot startles even today with the tougher twists of its melodrama.
