ALSO SHOWING
Gifted (12A)
JJJ
Starring Captain America’s Chris Evans as a slumming-it academic who becomes embroiled in a custody battle with his mother for trying to give his seven-year-old math prodigy niece (Mckenna Grace) a normal childhood following the suicide of her genius mother, Gifted isn’t quite the ruthless tearjerker it could have been. Directed by 500 Days of
Summer’s Marc Webb – returning to his smaller scale work following his swiftly forgotten Spider-man reboots – it’s still pretty contrived and manipulative, but the lead performances are charming enough and there’s decent support from Jenny Slate as a teacher who falls for Evans’s character, known around town as the “local damaged hot guy”.
Churchill (PG)
JJ
Britain’s greatest Briton finds himself in the odd position of being the central character in a biopic intent on following the template of The King’s
Speech despite focusing on a portion of his life wholly unsuited to such a treatment. Set in the run up to D-day, long after his nation-rallying “Fight them on the beaches” speech, it finds Winston haunted instead by the beaches of Gallipoli, the disastrous First World War campaign he orchestrated 30 years earlier when he was First Lord of the Admiralty and is played by Brian Cox as a depressed, boozy, bumbling liability who is being forced to confront his own obsolescence towards the end of a war in which the Allied cause has been overtaken by the Americans and the leadership of General Eisenhower
(Mad Men’s John Slattery). It’s an interesting aspect to dramatise, but the film botches the execution, so intent is it to force the darker elements into the framework of a more inspirational redemption story. Cox manages to look the part and is good at tapping into the performative aspects of political leadership, but sadly his domineering approach can’t raise the material above the level of caricature.
Whitney: Can I Be Me (15)
JJJ
Nick Broomfield has made a career out of crafting revealing documentary portraits of people whose closest confidants are reluctant to talk to him. What’s missing from his new film about the late Whitney Houston, though, is his usual intrepid on-camera efforts – boom mic in hand – to track down the prize interviewees: in this case Houston’s former husband Bobby Brown and her long-time associate Robyn Crawford, with whom she was rumoured to be in a relationship.
Instead, he has access to neverbefore-seen footage from an abandoned 1999 backstage documentary (shot by co-director Rudi Dolezal) and augments this with dozens of sit-down interviews with estranged family members and former employees no longer connected to the Houston estate. What emerges is still a fascinating story, one that gives a decent overview of Houston’s troubled background and career, but it lacks the scope and historical insight necessary to develop a trenchant thesis about how the touched-upon aspects of race, gender and sexuality contributed to her tragic downfall.
The Mummy (15)
JJ
Hollywood’s current obsession with creating cinematic universes instead of good movies ruins what could have been perfectly serviceable Tom Cruise vehicle. Laying out an overarching mythology for Universal’s so-called “Dark Universe”, Cruise, admittedly, is fun early on. Playing a glib reconnaissance officer for the US military who abuses his position to liberate rare antiquities from Middle Eastern war-zones, his character has a Mission: Impossiblemeets-indiana Jones vibe. But when he unleashes the curse of Sofia Boutella’s vengeance-seeking mummy, the film starts unravel, like a cartoon mummy spun free from its bandages. ■