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Richard Curtis films present a joyous and widely exportable vision of Britain: everything gleaming and not much grit, and the suffering is normally of a romantic kind. The effect is to send the audience back into the world satisfied that the dream of happy life and love is just a few plot-twists away. Sometimes, as with About Time , Curtis tarries with very light sci-fi notions, which is topical. Director  Danny Boyle has confronted the yearning for happiness in a number of ways: sometimes through intravenous injection of hard drugs ; winning the lottery; winning the Indian Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and getting Freida Pinto; cutting your arm off to free yourself after being trapped by a boulder… Oh, and ruling Apple with single-minded and evil self-belief… So when you hear that Richard Curtis and Danny Boyle have made a film about a Britain where only one man can remember the songs of The Beatles, you know it’s bound to be fascinating and maybe also crazy. The Beatles dom...

T he ticket was bought before Covid-19 was a thing, and the preparation and the worry about doing the ordinary things turned into a determination to get there and back safely. Andrew Lloyd Webber has faced critics since the beginning of his career, and perhaps nothing surpasses Jesus Christ Superstar in terms of his work. The man who’s brought people to the theatre in their billions went up against the rules controlling the pandemic and was determined somehow to put Cinderella on. And although it is a shame to have to wear masks and see, and hear, only half an audience, it is an undoubted joy to see live theatre again. The ancient tale of the poor girl, the shoe, the prince and the fairytale ending has been twisted and turned by Academy Award winning writer Emerald Fennel. This is not a bloodthirsty tale like some of the versions, but it’s plenty sassy and sarcastic. Here Cinderella (Carrie Hope Fletcher) is dressed in black, with black hair and Doc Marten’s boots: ensconced in the hou...

This is a film that takes a Pixar-style narrative and puts a cheeky and irreverent spin on it. Plus it’s on Netflix. The story is about a phone-based AI which turns against humanity, and the line “It's almost like stealing people’s data and giving it to a hyper-intelligent AI as part of an unregulated tech monopoly was a bad thing” just shows who is in the firing line here. But the Mitchells though. A nuclear family who’s chaotic and tempestuous, and they think they’re the only dysfunctional ones, and that everyone else has it together. The focus is teenage film-maker Katie ( Abbi Jacobsen ) who is particularly embarrassed by her family, except perhaps her brother. Her father Danny ( Rick Mitchell ) struggles to connect with her and he makes things ‘worse’ by planning her trip to college for the first time as a family affair—much to her annoyance. It all takes a turn for the better after things get worse. A tech billionaire who has developed PAL (the voice of Olivia Coleman ) ha...

  The days of frothy Oscar-winning films are apparently gone. The Moonlight win was bungled and seemed like an over-correction in the first place. But Parasite was an incredible win too. Frothy, fun films like Shakespeare In Love with stunt-performer awards like giving someone a statuette for a brief performance: all that may be a thing of the past as the Oscars go into their Ninetieth decade. And even if the ceremony might have not been popular, and might have been weird—I didn’t watch it!—It’s certainly true that there’s a profound brilliance and simplicity about the overall winner: Nomadland . Not just because a woman has won Best Director for the second time. And also not because Frances McDormand won an award for the third time… The sensationally good McDormand is one of two names in the film, along with David Strathairn. McDormand is Fern: a woman who has chosen to live a life that’s away from working to pay down debts. She doesn’t understand why the objective of most peo...

Riz Ahmed is rightly being praised for his performance in this study of a man stripped of a sensation that’s central to his art—and is central to all of us. Ahmed plays Ruben, a heavy metal drummer in a band with his girlfriend Lou ( Olivia Cook ). During the tour he realises that his hearing is deteriorating—and fast. It isn’t just his performance that’s remarkable about this film, but the way it becomes so much about what you hear. The sound design moves from a ‘third person’ account of what’s heard to hearing what Ruben hears: what he hears when he’s tearing up the drums in concert; what he hears outside the venue and what he hears when he goes to seek initial advice in a pharmacy. The damage to his hearing—which may be because of previous drug abuse or it may not—will cost a lot to try and remedy. Ruben is accepted into a church-run retreat run by Veteran Joe ( Paul Raci ), and the environment is completely different for Ruben. He doesn’t know American Sign Language and if the aud...

This charming and scabrously funny romantic comedy has a time-loop plot that puts it in the same galaxy as Groundhog Day. It remains to be seen whether “Yeah he’s in Palm Springs…” will become synonymous with a boy meets girl scenario that goes in an endlessly repeating day. Nyles ( Andy Samberg ) wakes up on the day of a wedding. At this wedding he protects a drunk bridesmaid Sarah ( Cristin Miloti ) from having to make an impromptu speech, but shortly thereafter he flees the scene, having been shot with a crossbow by Roy ( JK Simmons ). Sarah follows him and ends up in a strange cave, wherein she becomes part of the repeating cycle of that single day. This is only somewhat like that other time loop movie though. There’s an immediate desire for Sarah to escape even though she likes Nyles, and he is kind of resigned to it—he has made quite a lot of having the same day again and again with no consequences. So we have an entertaining protagonist and a funny and pretty counterpart with Ag...

This is a family drama about a Korean immigrant family in the 1980s in Arkansas. It is mostly in Korean, and its mix of that language and American helps demonstrate the isolation of the immigrant experience. Jacob ( Steven Yeun ) takes his wife Monica ( Yeri Han ) and his two children from California to a patch of land which he plans to farm to supply the market for Korean ingredients. The film is Academy Award nominated for Best Picture in a year of Streaming movies, and it only seems a few years ago that the Oscars were not at all diverse and criticised heavily for it. Minari (the word is a Korean herb) is a small drama which places the viewer right in a family—and the outside world, the wider State and America itself seem completely beyond any interest. There’s hardly any reference at all to the era: it’s all in the substandard accommodation that’s the last thing Monica wanted for herself or her children. The younger boy has a heart problem, and when the Grandmother (Monica’s mother...