ALSO SHOWING
The Girl in the Spider’s Web (15)
Vacuum-packing more stupidity into two hours than a mid-period Bond flick, The Girl in the Spider’s
Web dumbs down everything that was great or interesting about Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon
Tattoo series and turns it into a grim, self-serious, avenging angel-style comic book fantasy. Based on David Lagercrantz’s contentious 2015 novel continuing the Millennium trilogy, it’s a soft reboot of David Fincher’s under-appreciated adaptation of Larsson’s first book that replaces Rooney Mara with Claire Foy as “righter of wrongs” Lisbeth Salander and, as a consequence of not being able to entice Daniel Craig back to the series either, downgrades the role of investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (now played Sverrir Gudnason) to little more than a cameo. As directed by horror filmmaker Fede Alvarez (Don’t
Breathe), it makes token efforts to create some continuity with the previous instalments, but as it sends Lisbeth on a mission to steal a piece of software designed to give the American government online control of any missile defence system, it mostly comes up woefully short in terms of the plotting, the atmosphere and the general conception of the character, squandering the morethan-capable Foy with set-piece after set-piece that undermines the tech savviness of this tech-savviest of cyberpunk heroines.
Assassination Nation (18)
A brashly entertaining treatise on sexual politics in the age of social media, this in-your-face horrortinged satire imagines what the Salem witch trials might look like for young women living in Donald Trump’s America. Set in a town called Salem (it’s not a subtle movie), the first half does a pretty good job of recreating the experience of being on Twitter in the middle of an outrage pile-on as a number of high-profile people in the town have their private data hacked and made publicly available while everyone else gleefully affects moral outrage. It makes for pretty hateful viewing in other words, something not helped by having the film’s narrator, Lily (Odessa Young), and her best friends Sara (Suki Waterhouse), Em (Abra) and Bex (Hari Nef ) among the toocool-for-school teens marvelling at anyone still decrying the loss of privacy. But as the Anonymous-style hacker reveals everyone’s secrets, the second half of the film transforms into something more akin to The
Purge as the town collectively starts to suspect Lily and her friends of being behind it and take it upon themselves to hunt them down. What follows is lurid and provocative in the way that good B-movies often are.
Shoplifters (15)
Modern Japanese master Hirokazu Koreeda (Like Father, Like Son; Our
Little Sister) delves once more into the complexities of family life with his Palme d’or-winner Shoplifters, this time focusing on a makeshift family of small-time criminals hustling to get by while also holding down poorly paid jobs in which they themselves are clearly being exploited. The catalyst for the ensuing drama is their “kidnapping” of a young girl they take in to save from what seems like an abusive home life, but the brilliance of the film comes from the way Koreeda quietly and nonjudgmentally observes this clan close-up as they care for and look out for one another before gradually pulling back to reveal the true nature of their various relationships. Like his other films, it’s deceptively gentle, full of beautifully nuanced performances (as the family’s “grandmother”, Koreeda regular Kiki Kilin is typically sublime), yet boasting a cumulative emotional power that lingers long after the credits roll. ■