BUT IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR HARMONY (AND HEART)...
MY FAVOURITE release of the week is the least glitzy by a very long way. It’s a documentary called Men Who Sing (★★★★I, 78 mins, 12A) and it’s a real charmer, made with manifest devotion by Dylan Williams, who also made a lovely film 11 years ago called Men Who Swim.
That was about the camaraderie within Sweden’s all-male synchronised swimming team, of which Williams was a member. This, too, is deeply personal: inspired by Ed, his elderly father in North Wales, who has been singing with the same male-voice choir for 65 years.
And it is also about camaraderie — friendships between old men who, apart from their weekly rehearsal, come together all too often to perform at the funerals of the latest of them to pass away. Unsurprisingly, there is a melancholic feel to all this, but it is also tremendously life-affirming in its way, full of humour and warmth, not to mention a glorious finale as the choir competes again for the first time in 15 years. I would defy anyone to watch with dry eyes.
The Card Counter (★★★II, 15, 111 mins) is a hard watch for very different reasons, as it gradually becomes clear why a brilliant professional gambler (Oscar Isaac) suffers from a form of post-traumatic stress. The writer-director is Paul Schrader, to whose long list of illustrious credits (he wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull for Martin Scorsese) this is a worthy addition.
I couldn’t quite shake off a sense that the two distinct narratives would have been better served by separate films, but Isaac is splendid and gets top-notch support from Tye Sheridan, Tiffany Haddish and Willem Dafoe.
Red Notice (★★★II, 12A, 115 mins) is a tongue-in-cheek art-heist caper starring Ryan Reynolds, Dwayne Johnson and Gal Gadot. Reynolds does his standard jaunty turn as a wisecracking rascal, and there’s nothing particularly original about any of it — apart perhaps from an unexpected glimpse of The Great British Bake Off. Doughy, but easy to digest.
IN CINEMAS, with Red notice also showing on netflix from november 12.