ALSO SHOWING
Game Night (15)
Sort of like a goofball version of David Fincher’s The Game, this high-concept comedy arguably piles on too many twists and turns but is otherwise so tightly written, performed and packed with jokes, it’s easy enough to forgive its somewhat indulgent finale. Jason Bateman and Rachel Mcadams are on particularly sparkling form as a hyper-competitive married couple whose weekly game night with friends takes a dark turn when Bateman’s more successful older brother (Kyle Chandler) decides to up the stakes by ditching charades and signing them all up for an expensive kidnap-themed role-playing game. Needless to say, the fake kidnapping coincides with a real kidnapping, leading to a chaotic, danger-filled night involving gunshot wounds, underground fight clubs and Fabergé eggs. It’s ludicrous, of course, but all the characters are rounded enough to make you care and the cast – including Jessie Plemons as Bateman and Mcadams’ creepy cop neighbour and Catastrophe’s Sharon Hogan as a sarky new addition to the group – are so in tune with each other it’s a joy to watch.
Red Sparrow (15)
Revolving around a former ballet dancer turned Russian spy, this Jennifer Lawrence thriller comes on like a sexed-up John le Carré film. But don’t get the wrong idea. It’s sexed-up only in the sense that Lawrence’s character, Dominika, has been trained in the art of deadly seduction at a facility she contemptuously describes at one point as “whore school”. The film itself – perhaps desperate to counter any charges of exploitation – adopts a mood of grim severity regarding her profession that dominates the rest of the movie, turning what could have been a trashy, salacious action fest into a relentlessly downbeat affair full of brutal violence and scenes of wince-inducing torture that extend beyond the British and European supporting cast dusting off their ripest Russian accents. Lawrence, whose inscrutability is the film’s biggest asset, is compelling enough, particularly as the spy-vsspy plot mechanics kick into gear in the second hour when her character targets Joel Edgerton’s Nash, a US agent who is in turn targeting her. The
Hunger Games’ Francis Lawrence directs; Matthias Schoenaerts and Jeremy Irons co-star.
A Fantastic Woman (15)
Transgender actress Daniela Vega more than lives up to the title of this moving Chilean drama about a trans woman dealing with the prejudices of her recently deceased partner’s family. Vega plays Marina, a waitress and an aspiring singer whose happiness at having recently moved in with her older partner Orlando (Francisco Reyes) is brought to an abrupt end when he suffers an aneurysm and falls down the stairs of their apartment building. Almost immediately the authorities treat her with suspicion, humiliating her with their insensitive questioning. But even worse are Orlando’s family and his ex-wife, none of whom care about the life they were building together or seem willing to recognise her right to their apartment, their dog or even her right to grieve. It’s a subtly instructive film about the need for society at large to recognise the world is changing that never resorts to didacticism.
Monster Family (PG)
A voice cast comprised of Brit stalwarts Emily Watson, Jason Isaacs, Nick Frost and Celia Imrie fail to inject life into Monster Family, a poorly written, cheaply animated kids film about a stressed-out bookseller (Watson) whose attempts to make family life fun are scorned by her ungrateful kids and passive husband. After a particularly disastrous Halloween, they’re cursed by a witch at the behest of a lonely Dracula (Isaacs), who wants to make Emma his bride without turning her into a soulless vampire. The ensuing film only gets more incomprehensible. ■