ALSO SHOWING
Spider-man: Homecoming (12a)
There’s no escaping the titular significance of Spider-man:
Homecoming. The first Spiderman movie made in collaboration with Marvel Studios, it feels like he’s finally back where he belongs. That’s not to diminish Sam Raimi’s Tobey Maguire-starring take on the web-slinger. But after Marc Webb’s confused, Twilight-influenced reboot with the far-too-old-from-the-start Andrew Garfield, this new outing makes Spider-man relevant and distinctive again, modernising him without losing sight of what makes the character so appealing.
Neatly dispensing with the spiderbite back-story in a throw-away line of dialogue, the film introduces us to Peter Parker (British actor Tom Holland) as a super-powered 15-yearold whose desperation to take off his “superhero training wheels” and join the Avengers is making him more reckless than his mentor, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr), would like. Cast when he was still a teenager, Holland (who’s only just turned 21) can still credibly play a bouncing-off-the-walls school kid and his first scenes here are full of manic teen energy, shot, as they are, in the style of an iphone video diary. It’s a funny concept, and the vlogging format also slyly updates the character’s traditional interest in photography in a way that isn’t forced.
Song to Song (15)
Terrence Malick’s new film Song
To Song has a bit of an apocalyptic vibe. Like the Native American chief at the end of The New World and the mournful T-rex in Tree of Life, the solipsistic protagonists of this meandering tale about music scene hipsters trying to make sense of their various existential crises feels very much like a meditation on a class of people whose dominance of the world is coming to an end. Starring Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, Michael Fassbender and Natalie Portman, the film will likely infuriate many, but it also feels like Malick is genuinely wrestling with mortality in a way no other filmmaker is even attempting.
Tommy’s Honour (PG)
The most depressing thing about Jason Connery’s golfing melodrama is how predictably cliché-ridden it is. A film about the birth of the modern professional game told through the prism of a creaky father/son story, it stars Peter Mullan as Old Tom Morris, one of the first winners of the Open championship, whose acquiescence to the aristocracy that controls access to the game is challenged by the buccaneer attitude of his more talented son, Young Tommy (Jack Lowden). Though Lowden makes the best of a poorly written role and Mullan’s natural gravitas lends a degree of credibility to proceedings, the latter’s status as a caddy does seem appropriate: he does a lot of heavy lifting for very little reward. .
It Comes At Night (15)
2017 is already shaping up to be a banner year for subversive horror thanks to Get Out and The
Transfiguration. Now comes Trey Edward Shults’s sophomore feature, which marks him out as another great new auteur of the genre. A post-apocalyptic home-invasion drama about the way isolationism breeds deadly paranoia, it stars Joel Edgerton and Carmen Ejogo as a couple living with their 17-yearold son (Kelvin Harrison Jr) in a fortress-like woodland retreat in the aftermath of a plague that appears to have decimated the world around them. When a stranger (Christopher Abbot) arrives at their door one night, they’re forced to make a decision about whether or not to welcome him and his family into their home. ■