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This Netflix film is going for Four Weddings status. What were things like before Four Weddings & A Funeral ? The costume and situations around a big posh wedding, and posh people swearing, a man in a kilt, and revelations from the lives of the people in the wedding… all are present plus a slightly sweary voice-over at the beginning. There’s an introduction scene with Jack ( Sam Claflin ) concluding a fantastic holiday where he has had good times with Dina ( Olivia Munn ), but their farewell is interrupted when Jack is waylaid by an old friend. Several years later Dina is at the wedding of Jack’s sister Hayley ( Eleanor Tomlinson ). The film takes a turn from classy wedding comedy to a Judd Apatow type film or maybe The Hangover films, when there’s an ex-boyfriend of the bride on the scene, and he has to be silenced. The method of doing this is to slip a sleeping drug into a champagne glass, but the table names get swapped around by a gang of out of control kids, and so ...

Thanks to the National Theatre, the Covid-19 Lockdown is being ridden out by many enthusiasts at home, with their Live filming of recent productions going out on YouTube. And Charlotte Brontë’s rich tale of a spirited woman’s journey through Victorian hypocrisy and Gothic romance is such an engaging work that it’s up there with the very best television. Jane (Madeleine Worrel) is seen at birth, and she’s on stage all the time amongst the wooden frames and ladders that comprise the modernist set. She makes the baby crying noises as, elsewhere, her parents love her and yet give her away to her wicked aunt Reed and her awful children. She is bullied and brutalised by all, not least the unpleasantly pious and wicked Mr Brocklehurst (Craig Edwards), a character whose wickedness was so plainly laid out in the novel that someone threatened to sue Brontë at the time of the book’s publication. Brontë had to assume a male name, of course, and all productions and adaptations of t...

Miss World might still go on but it doesn’t go on BBC television and might have been forgotten. And although objectifying people for their looks hasn’t gone away, the idea of selecting women from around the World and parading them in front of judges—like a Meat Market, perhaps, or like Crufts?—seems today like a terrible idea. Even if it was televised in the 80s and was part of growing up in that decade, this film concerns the 1970 contest, which was notable for many reasons, mostly because it was protested by the formative “Women’s Liberation” movement. The film tells the story from their point of view, notably Sally Alexander ( Keira Knightley ). Sally has a daughter from an ex, and at the beginning is being judged by a panel of men because she wants to enrol at a university—and it seems like Oxford or Cambridge. Finally being accepted by the University of London, Sally begins to study history and meets the women who will ultimately form the group with her. However there are ...

This latest Pixar movie manages to be a film that’ll make you examine your relationships, as well as mining solid fantasy and having the feel of an 80s caper film. It references High School comedies with the misfit character; it references those John Hughes type films with an absent father; it even references Indiana Jones. And it references a few more things… The premise is that a kingdom has been devoid of magic for a long time, and so those magical creatures like Dragons, Centaurs and Unicorns are mere creatures. Within a troll family, Ian Lightfoot ( Tom Holland ) turns 16. He is the dorky kid at school, and his older brother Barley ( Chris Pratt ) is into a fantasy role-play board-game. Barley has vague memories of their father, who died when Ian was very young, and Ian clings on to a view of the man—and aspires to be what his father means to him. He makes a list in a notebook (using the r etractable ballpoint pen with the multiple colours ) and ticks them off or crosses ...

Based on the group of ladies who contacted the BBC, leading to the excellent TV series, this is a typically British film: a successor to Calendar Girls and Brassed Off , and of course The Full Monty . It’s about what spouses do when their ‘other halves’ are fighting a war—the second Gulf War, in Afghanistan. And it’s a buddy film about the Colonel’s wife and the Regimental Sergeant Major’s wife. Kate ( Kristin Scott Thomas ) is the former: announcing herself immediately as important and in charge. Lisa ( Sharon Horgan ) is nominally in charge of morale amongst the families: she works in the base’s grocery shop and it monumentally low-key compared to Kate. Lisa has a teenage daughter who is frustrated by life on the base; Kate and the Colonel had a son who was killed in the previous Gulf War. This is why she is focused on taking everyone’s mind of their worries: she takes to it by recommending a choir and by learning how to conduct. Kate unearths a Casio keyboard and, althoug...

This is a film that reminds the viewer of Erin Brockovitch , in which the a woman learned Law in order to take on the people who were polluting the local water supply. This is that, but it’s a different kind of David And Goliath story in that the protagonist is a corporate lawyer for a firm that’s trying to win as a client the very company that it’s going to have to sue. Rob Billot ( Mark Ruffalo ) is that lawyer. Happily married to Sarah ( Anne Hathaway ), and happily working for a firm with Tom Terp ( Tim Robbins ) as his boss, he is contacted by someone who knows his grandmother. The farmer descends on Rob’s office with boxes of videotapes, and although Billot doesn’t really want to get into it, once he takes a cursory look he realises that he can’t let it go. The story is fairly tragic and is all based on true events. To say that your teflon frying pan “is killing you” is a crass summary of the situation, because what the film is about is how a company (Dupont) has so mu...

Jane Austen enjoyed quite the career as a rom-com screenwriter even before the form or the term existed, and even if you’ve not read this you’ve most probably seen some adaptation or other. Unusually, it is Clueless that is the most recent and highly regarded of them, although another straight adaptation starring Gwyneth Paltrow is probably the better comparison. In the modern age of movies about women being made by women, this version of the novel stays true to the setting (Highbury, which presumably is the same Islington Highbury before the football). It’s a straight costume drama with a slick, classic look and solid central performances. Anya Taylor Joy is the title character: wealthy and seemingly immune to the pressure to wed, she is always sorting out other people’s romantic tragedy in a society where a tragic woman of a certain age (well actually youth ) is a family problem. And when it comes to being set up financially, the poverty of a bad marital situation is equa...