The profitable new recycling scheme that Disney has hit upon – remaking its own animated catalogue, minus the animation – is moving ahead so fast, one wonders how much time even their new cartoon efforts have got before getting expensively humanised. Perhaps a live-action Moana (Disney, PG) can be rustled up while its leading voice star, 16-year-old Auli’i Cravalho, is still suitably young. In the title role, her lively, lilting vocal presence is the most immediately winsome element of this Polynesian princess escapade – the gleamingly realised Pacific geography and sincere cultural curiosity of which give some sprightly lift to an otherwise formula-bound empowerment narrative.
In Moana herself , a bright teen explorer with a yen for what lies beyond, the film gives us a real character to root for; shame her environmentally motivated quest isn’t half as memorable, to say nothing of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s surprisingly insipid songs. But with directors John Musker and Ron Clements – veterans of The Little Mermaid, taking on their first CGI project – at the helm, there’s a sweet classicism at work here, down to the aqua-tastic animation itself.
It is, perhaps, a more lifelike exercise than the glitteringly silly Allied (Paramount, 15), a second world war melodrama that treats Marion Cotillard’s French resistance spy and Brad Pitt’s Canuck airman as dolls to be dressed up in a rolling collection of the most covetable period threads money can buy. That’s only half a criticism: cinema is primarily about looking, after all, and the stars shimmer up enough sheer visual pleasure between them to buoy Robert Zemeckis’s self-consciously old-school potboiler through its tangle of supremely well-cut cloak-and-dagger complications. It needs the residual sparkle, since Steven Knight’s script is more concerned with plodding plot points than champagne chemistry. It’s the costumes that are giving Pitt and Cotillard all the pointers.
Like Zemeckis, Oliver Stone is also some way off his 90s heyday – though he should be absolutely in his element with Snowden (Sony, 15), a broad, jacked-up biopic of the NSA whistleblower that plays as a manacled imitation of the director’s most heated political provocations. Careering around Snowden’s career highlights and low points with more brio than style, it doesn’t give Joseph Gordon-Levitt much to play with beyond a grim-faced impersonation. Framing proceedings around the filming of Laura Poitras’s more maturely illuminating documentary Citizenfour does Stone few favours.
If you need some soul to balance out all that sheen, Andrew Dominik’s aptly titled One More Time With Feeling (Bad Seed, 15) more than does the trick. What initially appears to be simply a sharply presented promotional project for Nick Cave – boasting as much visual and sonic finesse as you’d expect from Dominik – transcends even the most elegant rock-doc form to become something at once rougher and more graceful: a riven expression of grief. Following Cave as he finds the verbal and musical means to articulate the recent accidental death of his 15-year-old son Arthur, it’s a film in which stark sound and monochrome images (admittedly losing something in the shift from big-screen 3D) combine to give tactile shape and texture to bottomless emotion.
Finally, a tonic is called for, and Mubi.com has a doozy in Twentieth Century, a contender for the fastest, fizziest of all Hollywood’s pre-censorship code comedies. Starring John Barrymore as a selfish Broadway impresario and Carole Lombard as the incandescent lingerie model he turns into a star, it’s a love-hate story of the tangiest order, folding a vinegary streak of sadness into its creamily whipped-up farce. The resulting pavlova boasts push-pull gender politics of the sort Hollywood wouldn’t dare touch more than 80 years later. Above all, however, it’s a bounding joy: cannily uploading it on the day article 50 was triggered, Mubi clearly knew what we needed.
