SECOND SCREEN
There’s something nasty lurking behind the white picket fences of American suburbia; we know that. And maybe that’s why George Clooney’s Suburbicon (15)
a film set in one of those new towns created in the Fifties, doesn’t impress much. We’re too familiar with the idea and the heightened reality in which director Clooney tries to execute it.
We’re unsettled from the moment we realise Julianne Moore is playing two roles – Rose, who is in a wheelchair and is wife to company man Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) and mother to Nicky (Noah Jupe), and Margaret, her glamorous sister. Hmm, we think, that’s not going to end happily and, after a burglary, it duly doesn’t.
The screenplay is cowritten by Joel and Ethan Coen and feels like bits left over from their earlier films. Here, a familiar blend of infidelity and murder is mixed with a deliberately unpleasant point about racism, as a black family moves into the area and is besieged by furious neighbours.
Unexpected treat of the week is Jane (PG)
Brett Morgan’s moving documentary about primatologist Jane Goodall, who has spent her life studying a chimpanzee community in Tanzania. Her commitment is extraordinary but so is Morgan’s good fortune in gaining access to the archive footage shot of Goodall. Wonderful.
If you’re looking for a crowd-pleasing outing in the run-up to Christmas, you could do a lot worse than Daddy’s Home 2 (12A)
which sees Mel Gibson and John Lithgow joining the blended family fun for this sequel.
Manifesto (15) sees Cate Blanchett as 13 different characters spouting 13 artistic and political manifestos. It’s a tad tedious but there are some funny moments.