A trio of treats this week
Beginning with Robbie Williams biopic A Better Man, which cost roughly 110 million dollars to make. Within a few minutes, the bananas choice to portray Robbie as a CGI chimpanzee starts to make sense, and the influence of the Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey is clear (the Regent Street dance sequence is particularly incredible, and involved 500 dancers!). Gracey says shutting down Regent Street was one of the most incredible things of his life, and dancing on top of gumballs is certainly something I've never seen before.
I wonder if Williams might have mellowed with age a bit, as I was expecting his take on the Take That years to be slightly more caustic, especially when it comes to his well chronicled tricky relationship with Gary Barlow. The musical numbers, the cinematography, the story...all come together to make this one of my favourite cinema events of the last 12 months
Expect bad language from the start, and a standout performance from Alison Steadman as Robbie's beloved nan. It's raw, unfiltered, and honest, and even if you don't count yourself as a Williams fan, I think anyone with an interest in pop culture and the madness of fame would enjoy this movie. Issues with drug addiction are not sugar-coated, and there's an authenticity to the whole thing that is so often filtered out in films like this. Deserves some awards, in my book. You forget Robbie was only fifteen years old when he joined Take That, and the pressure of fame must be crackers at any age, let alone when you're still at school trying not to let your mum know you failed your exams. He doesn't shy away from his demons here.
A Real Pain is a road trip movie that sees two cousins tracing their grandmother's roots in Poland, and includes a whole load of family history bubbling to the surface. The trip includes a tour of a concentration camp, and a moving scene that sees standout star Kieran Culkin break down in tears afterwards. It's fully deserving of its high Rotten Tomatoes score, and fits neatly into my 'ace films that are 90 minutes or under' category. The script is quirky, intelligent and smart and tonally everything works just right. To quote my favourite film critic Wendy Ide of the Observer, it has "perhaps the most devastating final shot of any film you will see this year".
And We Live In Time was good, but not great, in my book. I didn't feel Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield's chemistry was particularly authentic, but I liked their characters individually, if that makes sense. A chef and a Weetabix salesman's lives intertwine, and we are taken through the timeline in a messy and chaotic way, jumping between key events. I didn't have an issue with the odd way of presenting the story, but I didn't think the film itself was all that memorable, to be honest. Pales into mediocrity in comparison with the other two films.
