ALSO SHOWING
Unsane (15)
★★★★ Echoes of Shock Corridor reverberate around Steven Soderbergh’s delirious exploitation thriller about a young woman (Claire Foy) who finds herself committed to a mental health treatment centre. As in the aforementioned Sam Fuller classic, the asylum setting serves as a juicy metaphor for what it’s like to exist in a world gone mad and Soderbergh ramps up the paranoia by shooting the whole thing on an iphone 7, making the most of the smartphone’s cinematic limitations to convey the distorted, nightmarish reality of living at a time when nothing seems to make sense. After breaking through in The Crown, Foy stretches herself here as a woman backed into a corner but unwilling to play the victim. Soderbergh, meanwhile, revels in the digital challenge of exploiting new technology to craft a social horror film that examines how that very technology can be both beneficial and catastrophic to our wellbeing.
Here To Be Heard: The Story Of The Slits (not rated)
★★ Appropriately shambolic in style, this pieces together the history of the pioneering all-girl punk group with some great, rabble-rousing tales of defiance. Sadly there’s too little journalistic nous on display to make a solid case for the band’s legacy and too little storytelling skill to make its second-half focus on late frontwoman Ari Up’s determination to reform the band dramatically interesting.
The Third Murder (15)
★★★ Better known for beautifully sketched family dramas, Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda (Our Little Sister) changes tack with a slow-burning crime procedural that quietly rails against Japan’s continued use of capital punishment. When an ageing ex-con (Kōji Yakusho) is arrested for the murder of his boss, a young state defender starts to doubt the validity of the confession as inconsistencies in the case arise and the accused’s complicated relationship with his alleged victim’s family comes to light. The director keeps his cards close to his chest, letting his antagonist’s own conflicting accounts of the murder obscure the truth, Rashomon-style, further undermining the finality of a justice system with no room for human error. Though meandering in places, it makes its points forcefully enough.
Have a Nice Day (15)
★★★ A bag of stolen cash is the common factor linking four tales of woe in this animated gangster drama set in modern China. The four stories, which eventually converge, paint a pitiable view of life in new the capitalist age, with director Liu Jian’s deceptively basic visuals reinforcing the rich seam of corruption and unhappiness bubbling away just beneath the surface.
Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down The White House (12A)
★★ Better known by his long-held Watergate alias Deep Throat, former FBI associate director turned whistleblower Mark Felt (who died in 2008) is the subject of this latest film exploring Nixon’s downfall, aspects of which have previously been dramatised in All The President’s
Men and The Post. Unlike those films, there’s no cinematic flair here; as the title suggests, it’s very much a spell-everything-out affair, with Liam Neeson playing Felt as a loyal career agent who started talking to the Washington Post when it became clear his new boss was willing to be a puppet of the Nixon administration during the investigation into the Watergate burglary. Sadly, Neeson’s doggedness in the role can’t save it from director Peter Landesman’s sludgy approach, which confuses sombreness with gravitas. The story’s timeliness may generate some interest, but that’s killed by the ensuing film. ■