Smart retro sci-fi is out of this world
(Cert 12, 91mins. Streaming on Amazon Prime from today)
BIG budget sci-fi needs to be seen on the big screen, so it’s fitting that UK cinemas are planning to re-open with Tenet, Christopher Nolan’s latest spectacular. But if July 17 seems light years away, you may want to beam this ingenious B-movie into your living room.
We’re in Cayuga, New Mexico, in the late 1950s and most of its 492 residents are about to arrive at a high school basketball stadium for a local grudge match.
But it looks like our teenage heroes won’t be staying for the game. Fluid tracking shots follow motor-mouthed pals Everett (Jake Horowitz) and Fay (Sierra McCormick) as they walk through the court and into town.
He has the late DJ slot at the local radio station and she’s working the night shift at the telephone exchange so they will soon go their separate ways.
But this takes some working out. Because in a wildly unconventional move, first-time director Andrew Patterson shoots them mostly from behind as they step in and out of the light.As we can’t see their mouths and Everett is talking with a cigarette in his mouth, you have to work really hard to make sense of their overlapping dialogue.
But this ridiculously confident if slightly irritating opening seems appropriate as the plot develops. During the night, Fay hears an otherworldly signal coming through her switchboard which, a bit like her opening chat with Everett, sounds muffled.
When she plays it through Everett’s phone, the DJ is intrigued and decides to ask his listeners to identify it.A former soldier rings in to recount his role in a top-secret mission to bury a UFO in the desert and the story takes an even stranger turn. Last weekend,TheVast Of Night made its US debut in the old-fashioned drive-ins that have sprung up during lockdown and I imagine it went down really well. But it may work better as a late-night TV movie.
If you watch it, hit pause, then up, and select the swirly icon. It may be cheating but I’d make full use of Amazon’s subtitles. @NJStreitberger
players of the instrument, to her frustration and struggle with multiple sclerosis.
Rich and poignant, joyous and tragic, it tells a moving story while composer Philip Feeney incorporates some of the most moving and powerful music of Elgar, Beethoven, Fauré, Mendelssohn, Piatti, Rachmaninoff and Schubert into an exquisite score that pays homage to the cello.
Starring Royal Ballet luminary Lauren Cuthbertson as Du Pre and Marcelino Sambé as her living instrument, it is available free from tonight until June 11. (Cert 15, 91mins. Available today on all major platforms)
US NEWSMAN and hard-hitting interviewer Mike Wallace was a fixture on American TV for more than half a century. Here, director Avi Belkin borrows the format of Asif Kapadia’s documentaries about Amy Winehouse and Ayrton Senna, using archive footage with no talking heads or narrator.
Sadly, it seems when Wallace died in 2012 at the age of 93, he didn’t leave any candid home videos behind.Wallace was married four times and suffered from depression but the archive TV footage never gets under his skin.
If you’ve seen The Insider, you will know about his fight to get his 60 Minutes interview with a whistleblowing tobacco executive on air.
The real story is even more tense than the Hollywood version. Footage of him facing down Ayatollah Khomeini and Vladimir Putin make you almost feel sorry for them.