ALSO SHOWING
No Time to Die
(12A)
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First things first: Daniel Craig has been a great Bond. As the longest serving 007, he’s made the franchise relevant for the 21st century even if films themselves have been a mixed bag. Yes, Casino Royale was radical for a Bond film, but everything subversive – bar the posing pouch – had already been done in the first two Bourne movies and Quantum of Solace satisfied no one. Craig came fully into his own with Skyfall, of course, but the series blew it again with the bloated Spectre, which hedged its bets on whether Craig would return by sending the ageing 00 agent off into the grey dawn of retirement in an Aston Martin with a woman 20 years his junior.
Mercifully, No Time To Die gives Craig another chance to say adieu on his own terms and he more than delivers. Right from the blistering pre-credits opener, the much-delayed 25th instalment gives you everything you want from a Bond film – outlandish action, diabolical villains, gadgets, quips, glamour, call-backs to the classics – just in a way you’ve never seen before.
The particulars of the plot are best discovered for yourself, but suffice to say they involve Bond coming out of self-imposed retirement to take on yet another facially disfigured villain – Rami Malek’s suitably sinister Lyutsifer Safin – with a megalomaniacal plan to destroy the world.
Though stuffed to the brim with familiar faces from the previous films, it’s the new faces in front of and behind the camera that help distinguish it. Arthouse and prestigetv director Cary Joji Fukunaga (Beasts of No Nation, True Detective) gives the film a visceral immediacy that’s quite distinct from what’s gone before – and script contributions from Phoebe Waller-bridge have certainly beefed up the female characters, with Craig’s Knives Out co-star Ana de Armas brilliant as a newly qualified CIA agent and Léa Seydoux’s character given the sort of complex arc and no-nonsense attitude lacking in Spectre.
Lashana Lynch is pretty kick-ass in the role of Nomi, the first female 00 agent, more than holding her own against Craig and further helping No Time to Die leave the winking sexism of old behind once and for all. But this is Craig’s show. The “taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold” that Ian Fleming wrote about may have slipped to reveal a kind of playful mentor figure who’s grudgingly tolerant of the younger generation, but he’s still able to show them a thing or two. By the movie’s end Craig proves that nobody does it better. General release
Guilty (15) ✪✪✪✪
Jake Gyllenhaal teams up with Training Day director Antoine Fuqua
for The Guilty, a stripped-down
LA cop movie about a disgraced detective (Gyllenhaal) seeking redemption following a questionable use of force. The movie opens with Gyllenhaal’s character, Joe Baylor, doing professional penance as an emergency services dispatcher ahead of a court hearing that will decide his future. Though outwardly confident that he’ll soon be back on the streets, the inner turmoil that’s been gnawing away at Joe for months soon starts bubbling over when he gets a kidnapping-in-progress call from a woman whom he resolves to save himself.
Though this set up brings to mind Halle Berry thriller The Call, the film is actually a remake of an acclaimed 2018 Danish film and, for all the remake’s slick Hollywood gloss, it remains an edgier, more formalistically daring proposition. Its single-location setting (we never leave the soulless control room) keeps us in its character’s headspace and by transposing the story to the US, Fuqua and screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto (True Detective) tap into the the current moment by further dismantling the notion of the hero cop without being blasé about the complexities of the job.
General release