Emma’s weird but wonderful award-winner
Visually stunning and very strange, it’s the first must-see film of 2024
Poor Things
Cert: 18, 2hrs 21mins ★★★★★
The Boys In The Boat
Cert: PG, 2hrs 3mins ★★★
The Beekeeper
Cert: 15A, 1hr 45mins Available on Sky ★★★★
Role Play
Cert: 15, 1hr 40mins Available on Amazon ★★
Lift
Cert: 12A, 1hr 44mins Available on Netflix ★★★
With the new year only two weeks old, the first mustsee film of 2024 has already arrived. You may come out of Poor Things thinking it’s just way too weird; you may come out thinking it’s a tad too long, but my goodness you’ll want to have seen it. Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek director whose last film, The Favourite, picked up no fewer than 10 Oscar nominations, has delivered his masterpiece.
Its star, Emma Stone, picked up the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy last weekend and it surely won’t be the last major award she’ll be taking home. She pours heart, soul and naked body into her portrayal of Bella Baxter, the extraordinary young woman at the beating heart of this visually stunning production.
But I can’t stress enough what a strange story this is, or the highly stylised manner in which it is told. Based on a novel by the Scottish writer, Alasdair Gray, it begins with the apparent suicide of an unhappy, pregnant young woman… only to resume in the Art Deco-meetssteam-punk London residence of the celebrated surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a man whose digestion is aided by machine and who routinely belches up, er, huge floating bubbles. The name ‘Frankenstein’ springs to mind as soon as we see his heavily scarred face.
In this house of padded carpets and bizarre chimeric pets also lives Bella who has the body of a beautiful young woman but whose tantrums, clumsy gait and habit of referring to her guardian as ‘God’ suggest the mind of a toddler.
But Bella’s mind is maturing fast and soon catches up with her body, and it’s at the moment she discovers sexual pleasure (‘furious jumping’ as she gloriously describes it) that Baxter’s caddish lawyer (Mark Ruffalo) sets out to have her for himself. But there’s something about this headstrong, straight-talking young woman that suggests no man will get the better of her easily.
What ensues is a peripatetic, episodic and often very funny cautionary tale that takes in heavily stylised versions of Lisbon, Alexandria and Paris, and calls to mind novels such as Vanity Fair and Fanny
Hill. Stone is quite brilliant, Ruffalo, a game hoot, and Dafoe quietly rather moving. But you’ll want to see for yourself.
By contrast, The Boys In The Boat is the totally conventionally told story of the University of Washington (that’s Seattle, not DC) rowing eight that unexpectedly won the gold medal at the notorious Berlin Olympics of 1936.
Based on the book by Daniel James Brown and directed by George Clooney, the story is told primarily from the viewpoint of Joe Rantz – well played here by Callum Turner. Joe may be studying engineering but, thanks to the Depression, he can’t afford his tuition fees and is sleeping in the back of a wrecked car.
But if Joe can only make it into the rowing eight, he gets a paid university job as well. And that’s more incentive than any Olympic medal.
The story suffers somewhat from Clooney’s decision to convince us that it all happened in a year, when in fact it took three. But as someone who’s rowed for much of his life, I enjoyed it, and do look out for Peter Guinness, who plays the crew’s boatman and quietly steals every scene he is in.
In The Beekeeper an elderly American woman falls victim to an online scam that not only robs her of every dollar she possesses but also of $2m owned by an educational charity she’s treasurer of. Ashamed and humiliated, she commits suicide, which does not go down at all well with her quiet, beekeeping tenant (Jason Statham). So it’s just as well that, along with knowing his way around a beehive, he also has a ‘very particular set of skills… acquired over a very long career…’ Let the murderous, avenging mayhem begin.
This is perhaps the definitive Jason Statham film. It is extremely violent, at times extraordinarily silly and some of the supporting turns are really quite poor. But it is hugely entertaining.
Which cannot be said of Role Play, in which an ordinary suburban mum (Kaley Cuoco) is exposed as a top professional assassin. Yes, another one. This, of course, comes as news to her hitherto devoted husband (David Oyelowo), particularly when her former employers come gunning for her. Derivative and disjointed, John Wick this most definitely ain’t.
Kevin Hart’s new art-heist caper sets off in attractive, glossy style, with clever, simultaneous art thefts in Venice and London. But soon after the gang has been reassembled, an ingenious gold-stealing plan hatched, and we’re all thinking how good Gugu Mbatha-Raw is being as an Interpol agent who’s got a little too close to the gang’s resourceful leader, Cyrus (Hart), Lift is let down by too much of the action taking place on a plane and by some distinctly underwhelming visual effects.
THIS IS, PERHAPS, THE DEFINITIVE STATHAM FILM – VIOLENT AND ENTERTAINING