SECOND SCREEN
Choose life: choose Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and hope that someone, somewhere cares.’ Renton’s brilliant reprise of one of the bestknown intros in film history is one of the bittersweet delights of T2 Trainspotting (18) HHHH, which isn’t as stomach-churning as the 1996 original but makes up for it with lashings of Irn-Bru and midlife poignancy.
Twenty years have passed since Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) made off with the £16,000 proceeds from the drug deal that he and his bungling Edinburgh mates had somehow set up. Since then he’s been living – apparently successfully – in Amsterdam, but those he left behind have not been so fortunate.
Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) now combines owning a rundown pub with a little gentle blackmail; Spud (Ewen Bremner) is still on the ‘scag’ and failing as a father; and the terrifyingly violent Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is in jail. Again.
So when circumstances force Renton back to Edinburgh… well, it’s a safe bet that no one is going to be pleased to see him.
Danny Boyle returns to direct and uses the same relentless mix of music, camerawork and editing to induce that familiar adrenaline-fuelled movie high. It only begins to flag as we enter the second hour, by when his by now middle-aged core audience might reasonably expect a little more substance.
It never really arrives, but the damage is modest to a sequel packed with affectionate references to the original.
I loved the joke about British Summer Time, the brave sequence set in a Unionist club, and the cameo from author Irvine Welsh.
Denial (12A) spends its first HHHH 20 minutes labouring under a rather clunky, wordy screenplay and some under-par performances, as we revisit the 1996 High Court drama that saw American academic Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) being sued for libel by the controversial historian David Irving (Timothy Spall) after she accused him of being a Holocaust denier.
But it completely changes gear
after her legal team – led by her claret-swilling barrister Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) – decides to visit Auschwitz and suddenly you realise what’s at stake.
Helped by an all-star voice cast that includes Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon and Scarlett Johansson, Sing (G) *** is a feature-length cartoon that combines a Zootropolis-style city of animals with an America’s Got Talent singing competition, as a koala (McConaughey) tries to save his decaying theatre.
It’s over-long and flags when we need it to build to a climax but it’s also colourful, funny and tuneful, and sometimes that’s good enough.
In Christine (15A) *** Rebecca Hall has the misfortune to be extremely good in a film that always feels somewhat exploitative and too miserable to be a rewarding watch.
She plays Christine Chubbuck, an intensely driven and already mentally fragile television reporter who, back in the 1970s, was driven to breaking point by her own perfectionism and the demands of the station where she worked. Mary Tyler Moore, alas, it is not.