ALSO SHOWING
Blackkklansman (15)
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Spike Lee’s audacious new film kicks off by repurposing one of the most famous scenes from Gone With
the Wind to show how the highest grossing movie of all time codified and normalised racism. Coming at the start of a film that dramatises the incredible true story of Ron Stallworth, a black detective who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in 1973, it works as an ironic counterpoint: this is a film that refuses to normalise or codify anything. Instead it calls out the blatant, strange and downright dangerous ways racism manifests itself, allowing Lee to shrink the distance between the story’s period setting and Donald Trump’s America a year on from Charlottesville. That’s not to say the film is a hectoring slice of agitprop. Lee has always been an agile filmmaker, able to turn his hand to a diverse array of genres and make them politically relevant for the times. His under-appreciated mastery of both satire and drama, as well as his artist’s rule-breaking willingness to smash disparate styles and ideas together to reveal uncomfortable truths, is evident in the way, history, politics, even film criticism collide in what in an absorbing undercover detective film. John David Washington (Denzel Washington’s son) takes the lead as Stallworth, whose decision to call the listed number in a recruitment ad for the KKK in the local paper gives the Colorado Springs police department unexpected access to the upper echelons of the organisation. With Ron hoodwinking the hood-wearers over the phone and his Jewish colleague, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), pretending to be Ron in person, the operation plays out like an increasingly dangerous riff on Cyrano
de Bergerac as they gain access to the KKK’S odious grand wizard David Duke (a brilliant turn from Topher Grace). It’s crazy, jaw-dropping stuff but the surreal nature of surface details is precisely what makes it so compelling and powerful. This is a film that functions like an inverted magic mirror: continually reflecting the true horror and dangerous reality of a world in which distortion and absurdity have become the norm.
The King (15)
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Piling an assortment of well-known Elvis fans into the back of his Rolls-royce for a road trip across America in the run up to the 2016 presidential elections, Eugene Jarecki’s documentary appears to lose confidence in the freewheeling concept’s ability to use Elvis as a prism through which to view all of America. Nevertheless, the finished film does throw up some interesting ideas as various interviewees – Chuck D and David Simon among them – wrestle with notions of cultural appropriation while others reflect on what Elvis’s gluttonous career says about the country.
The Spy Who Dumped Me (15)
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Like The Heat and Spy, this vehicle for Mila Kunis and Kate Mckinnon provides another entertaining addition to the female-led action comedy. Kunis is the titular dumpee whose ex’s espionage past results in her and her best friend (Mckinnon) becoming embroiled in a dangerous conspiracy that necessitates a highoctane chase through Europe. The chemistry of the leads makes or breaks a film like this; luckily Kunis and Mckinnon are a blast.
The Children Act (12A)
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This is the second Ian Mcewan novel this year to be adapted by the author, so he’s only got himself and, in this case, director Richard Eyre, to blame for how facile and middlebrow it is. Emma Thompson stars as high court judge unprepared for the consequences of ruling against a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness determined to refuse a life-saving blood transfusion. ■