Bored of Superheroes

The Vatican is really made for the screen. Grand, echoing marble hallways, arcane rituals and elaborately-garbed characters. And power, lots of power. Amid this sweeping grandeur, Edward Berger has taken Robert Harris's 2016 novel and surprisingly, turned it into an unusual but classic whodunnit. The only death is that of an un-named pope, which opens the story, but the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Thomas Lawrence, finds himself turning detective when electoral rivalries threaten to hand control of the Catholic Church back to a reactionary patriarch. Lawrence, played with a visibly heavy heart and weary body by Ralph Fiennes, is in charge of the conclave where the new pope is voted in. To add another level of crime fiction tropery, the cardinals are sequestered in the Vatican itself, making this a locked-room drama of sorts.  The cardinals themselves are played by some of the best character actors working today: Stanley Tucci particularly stands out as the liberal Aldo Bellini...

Almost twenty-five years after the original, Ridley Scott has revived his Oscar-winning classic, Gladiator, with a new cast and a new story. Big sandals to fill, and does this big-ticket sequel do the business? As a rule, I'm not a fan of sequels, prequels or franchises. They encourage lazy storytelling and unsatisfying endings and there are too many of them. However, I made an exception for Gladiator, as it stars one of my favourite actors, Paul Mescal, and also because my mum wanted to come to the cinema with me for the first time since the 1990s. Both mum and I enjoyed the film and we agreed on the following. It really is best seen on a big screen; Scott's recreation of Rome is fantastically detailed, and the use of a 1:1 scale Colosseum set full of baying extras for the arena scenes really does makes it believable. It's a grand visual spectacle and the music, which includes Lisa Gerrard's classic Gladiator theme, is pretty good too. There's only so much you can ...

Last week I wasn't raving about Anora, a film from a director who likes to highlight the lives of marginalised groups.  This week, here's an example of a film about marginalised people that really, really impressed me. Matteo Garrone's Io Capitano is a story about two teenage migrants from Senegal, Seydou and Moussa, who try to travel to Europe in search of a better life. What could have been a very preachy and relentlessly grim experience is turned by Garrone into a classic adventure story, set against the terrifying beauty of the Sahara desert. It has a hero in Seydou, a teenage wannabe pop star who travels illegally with his cousin Moussa across the Sahara. Seydou is one of the most likeable characters you will meet in modern cinema, played with great skill and tremedous empathy by Seydou Sarr, in his first professional acting role. The equally inexperienced but still very talented Moustapha Fall plays his cousin, with a supporting cast of African talent including Issaka...

Sean Baker’s latest film took both Cannes and the critics by storm, but is it a real future classic, or a case of the Empress’s new clothes? Anora answers that question literally in its first moments. The Empress is pretty much naked. Opening in the strip club where its heroine Ani (Mikey Madison) works, there’s not much in the way of female clothing on show. A soundtrack of a Take That song does add an amusing counterpoint; the sensible tones of Gary Barlow were never meant to be the backdrop for dimly-lit crotch grinding and hair-flicking. There’s a good chunk of this before the film’s gritty-Pretty-Woman, postmodern Cinderella storyline kicks in: there’s a customer who wants a girl who can speak Russian, which Ani can. More grinding and a private housecall later, we discover that the Russian customer is Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a young oligarch’s son let loose in New York. At this point, the storyline switches to a sleazy iteration of an early-2000s teen comedy, all parties, adventu...