ALSO SHOWING
The True History of the Kelly Gang (18) ✪✪✪✪
Following his soulless videogame adaptation Assassin’s Creed,
Australian director Justin Kurzel
(Snowtown, Macbeth) returns to form with this punky, violent, pleasingly strange adaptation of Peter Carey’s Booker-winning novel. Simultaneously interrogating and burnishing the mythology of Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, the film pays tribute to the experimental, rough-hewn, punctuation-free prose style of Carey’s book with an almost wilful disregard for conventional biopic plotting. Jumping episodically around in Kelly’s life, it provides contextual horrors for his descent into criminality and his defiant rejection of colonial rule, but doesn’t fall into the trap of glorifying or excusing them. Played brilliantly as a kid by Orlando Schwerdt and as an adult by George Mackay (1917), this Ned Kelly isn’t the romanticised, bushy-bearded version portrayed by Heath Ledger in 2003 (or – gulp – the Mick Jagger version from 1970); instead he’s a damaged child, with an emasculated drunk for a father and a manipulative harridan for mother (Essie Davis) whose own talent for needling her first born becomes something that Ned finds increasingly hard to escape as he grows into a wiry, unsure-of-himself outlaw hurtling inescapably towards his fate. With Russell Crowe, Nicholas Hoult and Charlie Hunnam.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (15) ✪✪✪✪
The second most breathlessly received international feature of the last 12 months (after Parasite) finally arrives in British cinemas, having been hothoused on the festival circuit since its Cannes debut last May. The new film from French filmmaker Céline Sciamma (Girlhood) sees her blooming creatively with an audaciously constructed story of artistic obsession and romantic desire. Set in 18th century Brittany, the film revolves around a painter called Marianne (Noémie Merlant) who has been commissioned by an Italian noblewoman (Valeria Golino) to paint a portrait of her daughter, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), for the express purpose of landing Héloïse a wealthy Italian husband and securing both mother and daughter a luxurious existence back in Milan. Tragedy, however, has already complicated this arrangement, making it necessary for Marianne to pose as a companion for Héloïse and attempt the portrait covertly
– a process that intensifies their relationship and takes it (and the film) in more surprising and erotically charged directions as Marianne comes clean about her deception.
Color out of Space (15) ✪✪✪
The eccentric South African-born filmmaker Richard Stanley achieved infamy in the 1990s when he snuck back onto the set of his Marlon Brando-starring adaptation of The
Island of Dr Moreau as an extra after being fired as its director three days into production. Working on a more manageable scale (and with a more pliant cast), he returns now with this suitably wacko adaptation of the 1927 HP Lovecraft alien invasionthemed short story of same name. Nicolas Cage takes the lead as Nathan Gardner, an alpaca farmer whose livestock and family start exhibiting strange behaviour after a meteor crashes on his land. Apart from the alpacas, it’s a fairly standard alien invasion set-up and Stanley takes care to ground his characters somewhat by having Cage temporarily restrain himself. But from the moment someone loses some fingers carelessly chopping carrots, Stanley reveals this almost Spielbergian dynamic to be something of a ruse and soon enough both his star and the film go properly nuts. ■