ALSO SHOWING
The Big Sick (15)
One of the most delightful things about The Big Sick is how casually it reinvigorates the romantic comedy. Based on star Kumail Nanjiani’s own relationship with his screenwriter wife Emily V Gordon (they wrote the movie together), it’s a film that feels so true to the realities of modern relationships that even though it’s filled with the sort of bizarre truelife scenarios that sound contrived in a movie, it’s easy to relate to the complications and dilemmas they generate. Playing a lightly fictionalised version of himself, Nanjiani plays “Kumail”, a 30-ish Pakistani-american stand-up comic who’s trying to negotiate the Chicago dating scene while simultaneously trying to deflect the efforts of his Muslim family to coerce him into an arranged marriage. For the sake of an easy life, Kumail dutifully goes on dates with the women his mother sets him up with, but this gets complicated when he falls for a white woman called Emily (Zoe Kazan) who promptly dumps him upon discovering he’s kept their relationship a secret from his family. If this sounds like a formulaic romcom, it’s not: Kumail’s determination to win Emily back is complicated by a swift and sudden illness that leaves her in an induced coma and Kumail suddenly having to deal with Emily’s distraught parents (played by Holly Hunter and Ray Romano), whose own faltering marriage seems like it’s being held together by their shared love for their daughter. That’s a lot for a comedy to juggle, but The Big
Sick invests so much in its characters that the messiness of its real life inspiration feels very natural on the big screen.
The Wall (15)
Sandwiched between two Tom Cruise blockbusters – The Edge of Tomorrow and the forthcoming American
Made – Doug Liman’s latest feels like something of a cinematic palate cleanser. Set in Iraq in late 2007, just as American involvement in the war is supposedly winding down, this real-time thriller homes in on Aaron Taylor-johnson’s marine as he’s pinned down by an Iraqi sniper in the baking heat of a bombedout settlement. What follows is a solid example of the sort of singlelocation thriller – Locke, Buried,
Phone Booth – that often ends up being more intriguing as a concept than a movie. Here, though, Liman keeps everything tightly wound to present a compelling look at how conflict is repeatedly escalated by underestimating the enemy.
Captain Underpants (U)
While you might not relish the prospect of sitting through a film called Captain Underpants with your kids, this CG animated adventure – about a couple of best friends who manage (via a spot of hypnosis) to transform their mean headmaster into their own titular comic book creation – is more inventive than most animated fare this summer. Though self-aware toilet humour is its default position, there are also some surprisingly pointed gags about cuts to arts education worked into a plot that sees its ethnically diverse heroes taking on a supervillain intent on robbing the world of laughter. In some respects it’s a bit too pleased with itself, but it breezes by fast enough to make those summer holiday trips to the movies a little more bearable.
Dunkirk (12A)
Redefining what epic cinema means, Christopher Nolan’s Second World War movie uses its massive scale to intensify the immediacy of the experience not drag it out. In keeping with the theme of a movie charting the desperate evacuation of some 300,000 British and Allied troops from the beaches of Northern France in 1940, not a second is wasted in the taut 105-minute running time, something Nolan emphasises by giving it the ticking-clock structure of a thriller, albeit a very Nolan-style thriller. See it on the biggest screen possible. ■