The sage of anxiety
CRITIC’S CHOICE While We’re Young 15 cert, 97 mins Noah Baumbach’s sparkling age-anxiety comedy is about the desire of every generation to usurp the position of another, whether it’s the one after or the one before you. While retro hip and vinyl are the domain of cool young things, their elders go digital in an attempt to keep their fingers on the pulse. Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play a childless couple in New York, who fall in with a pair of hatwearing, loft-dwelling urban hipsters (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried) and start feeling all the more desperate to keep up. Baumbach packs his film with the wit and vigour of a polished one-act play, right down to a climax which wants us to notice how much juggling he’s doing with his ideas – it’s very written, and we perhaps miss the bittersweet grace-notes he discovered in Frances Ha. But this is still intellectually supercharged entertainment, with an impressive laughline-per-minute count. Tim Robey ALSO IN CINEMAS The Dark Horse 15 cert, 124 mins This opens with a hulking, shawled figure taking refuge from a rainstorm in an antiques shop. Maintaining a furious stream-ofconsciousness babble, he initiates an especially quickfire game of speed chess. The figure is Genesis Potini (Cliff Curtis), built like Jonah Lomu yet displaying Kasparov-like levels of mental agitation. This very decent biopic of Potini, a transient Maori who overcame bipolar schizophrenia to school youngsters in chess, never quite slips into the expected lachrymose formula. James Napier Robertson’s sincere, inquisitive direction produces a valuable positive correction to recent on- and off-screen mental-health narratives. Mike McCahill
IFast & Furious 7 12A cert, 137 mins Paul Walker died part-way through the making of this film; it was completed with help from his two younger brothers, Caleb and Cody, and some subtle, unobtrusive computer graphics. As a commemoration of Walker’s always think of Christmas as my favourite time of year, which is stupid because I invariably enjoy Easter more. All being well, as you read this I am in bed, either completely asleep or eating cheap chocolate and watching a brainless film with Claire and all the children. I’m kippered. It’s been an almighty scramble to get everything in the ground for the talent – the ability to shine like a brilliant-cut gemstone the moment you climb behind a steering wheel – the film does him justice. You couldn’t mistake this for polished blockbuster filmmaking, but it speaks straight to your adrenal glands and might just make you cry. Robbie Collin start of the growing season this year. Although it depends to a certain degree on the weather and how the calendar flops, Easter is usually seen as the cut-off point for planting, and for the past couple of months mini diggers and excavators have been pirouetting around charging dumper trucks utterly transforming the landscape that I inhabit in an exhilarating frenzy of mud and decision making. The Water Diviner 15 cert, 111 mins He’s been Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North, and General of the Felix legions. He’s been captain of a Napoleonic frigate, engineerin-chief of an Ark, and, perhaps inevitably, the biological father of Superman. Let’s face it, Russell Crowe was bound to have his vengeance, and turn to directing sooner or later. He does so, and also stars, in this film about the fateful clash between Australians and Turks at the Battle of Gallipoli. As a bereaved farmer searching for the remains of his three sons, he shoulders the full burden of his film’s good intentions – in the end it took Russell Crowe to extract the most soulful performance Russell Crowe has given in years. TR However, as we hit the home straight this week, the programme was confounded by the arrival of a couple of dozen guinea fowl which Claire bought to protect the ducks from foxes and forgot to tell me were coming on Tuesday. And the five piglets she ordered for the children that turned out to be fully-grown, very hungry pigs when they arrived on Wednesday. But we’ve managed to whack in 500 new fruit trees, build a load of new vegetable beds, and a hillock. I’m going large on sunflowers and maize, too. But planting the wheat was the most fun. Fingers crossed it’ll be exactly ripe for Feastival at the end of August: the idea being kids can pick a handful or two, mill it and make a simple flatbread dough which they can then cook, all inside 15 minutes. We did a similar sort of thing Many hands: Alex and his little helpers with spuds last year and it was a big success. So, Roger the tractor man came over on his vintage John Deere and began ploughing the front field under the guidance of Dr Nicola Cannon from the Royal Agricultural University. She was properly excited. The head farmer at Home Farm, Highgrove, had given her some beautiful heritage varieties of wheat and rye. I’d never come across them before. But her enthusiasm and mine were nothing compared to the excitement of the kids from the local primary schools who came over to lend a hand. They scattered seeds everywhere, and then went crackers with rakes. And I think we’re in business. I’m still short of a few bushels of grass seed for my hillock. I don’t know whether to go for legume mix or wildflower. And hopefully that’s the only decision I have to make this weekend. That’s what I like best about Easter. It’s a pause, where you can actually do things you want to do. Or nothing at all. Which, when there are a hundred things you should be doing, is the best thing of all.