SECOND SCREEN
The last time I saw a film based on the extraordinary life of Frankenstein creator Mary Shelley, it was Rowing With The Wind from 1988, in which a young Hugh Grant played Lord Byron and an even younger Elizabeth Hurley played Mary Shelley’s stepsister and Byron’s lover, Claire Clairmont.
Thankfully, Mary Shelley (12A) ★★★★ is a somewhat classier affair, with the American actress Elle Fanning (right) doing an impressive job of bringing the title character to life and Douglas Booth being suitably handsome as the romantic yet radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who so fatefully stole her heart.
Certain liberties appear to have been taken with the details but the underlying story is such a good one, and with a new generation of feminists discovering Mary, it’s ripe for retelling.
Combining bittersweet comedy with mental illness can’t be easy but Jo Brand, making her feature-film debut as a writer and drawing on her years as a psychiatric nurse, does an impressive job with The More You Ignore Me (15) ★★★★.
It’s the story of Alice (Ella Hunt), an intelligent teenager trying to enjoy a normal childhood in rural northern England in the late Seventies and early Eighties, despite the fact that her often manically impulsive mother, Gina (Sheridan Smith), is steadily succumbing to schizophrenia.
The one thing mother and daughter do share is a passion for Morrissey, lead singer of The Smiths, but even that looks unlikely to end happily. Director Keith English makes a decent debut, Cold Feet star Hunt is hugely watchable in the lead role and Brand, adapting from her novel, should be praised for stubbornly avoiding narrative convention.
In Ideal Home (15) ★★★ Steve Coogan and Paul Rudd play Erasmus and Paul (below), a wealthy gay couple whose long-standing relationship comes under pressure (Erasmus is a vain television cook, Paul his long-suffering producer) when Erasmus’s young grandson turns up unannounced.
Suddenly, they have someone else to worry about, other than themselves. It’s well acted and laugh-out-loud funny at times but has its longueurs, too.
In Darkness (15) ★★★ feels like the sort of sexy, psychological thriller that the likes of Sharon Stone or Faye Dunaway used to appear in, with Natalie Dormer (she also co-writes and co-produces) playing Sofia, a blind pianist who befriends glamorous Serbian neighbour, Veronique (Emily Ratajkowski). But when Veronique falls to her death and Sofia lies to the police about what she has heard, we know there is more to Sofia than a good working knowledge of Wagner. Directed by Kevin Macdonald, Whitney (15)★★★ is a well-assembled documentary about the late singer Whitney Houston, but tells us little that Nick Broomfield’s Whitney: Can I Be Me didn’t tell us last year. As for Terminal (15) ★, despite starring Margot Robbie and Simon Pegg, this derivative, over-stylised, noir-ish urban fantasy must be a candidate for most annoying British film of the year.