SECOND SCREEN
Annette Bening is one of the unlucky losers of this Oscars season – somehow she missed out on a Best Actress nomination for her performance in 20th
Century Women (16) ★★★★ , which is a shame because it’s a lovely film and she’s extremely good in it.
Set in the Santa Barbara of 1979, she plays Dorothea, a 55-year-old Californian free spirit who’s been a little late for everything – motherhood, the summer of love, punk rock… And now, in a huge ramshackle house that is constantly being renovated but never finished, she’s trying to raise her 15-yearold son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), as best she can.
But she’s divorced and painfully aware that there isn’t a male role model for him – doubly so when Jamie fails to bond with ex-hippy would-be lover and splendidly mustachioed live-in handyman William (Billy Crudup). So she delegates the job to her punk photographer lodger, Abbie (Greta Gerwig), and the lovely but royally mucked-up teenager Julie (Elle Fanning), who loves being best friends with Jamie but insists on there being no benefits.
The result is a low-key, beautifully acted if somewhat angst-ridden delight, as you might expect from writer-director Mike Mills.
Three years ago, The Lego Movie was one of the unexpected joys of 2014: nearly everything about it, as musically promised, really was awesome. Now – just in time for half-term – along comes the first spin-off in the shape of The Lego
Batman Movie (G) ★★★★ . And right from the very first silly injoke, delivered in Will Arnett’s deep, dark Batman voice – ‘a black screen: all important movies open with a black screen’ – it’s a hoot, as the return of The Joker (Zach Galifianakis) sparks something of an existential crisis for both characters. I mean, what is one without the other?
Plundering joyously from other franchises – Voldemort, King Kong and the Eye of Sauron are all prominent – the detail is exquisite, the humour nicely balanced between child-friendly and adult, and the all-star voice cast top notch. The only problems are sustaining the joke for 90 minutes and a shortage of the Lego-related gags that made the original so funny. Both Denzel Washington, its star and director, and Viola Davis have been Oscar-nominated for their performances in Fences (12A) ★★ and fine performances they are too. But they are theatre, not film, performances and they come in a movie that wears its stage origins – the late August Wilson adapted his own play for the cinema – far too obviously. So many words, so many speeches, so many slightly clumsy revelations… as Washington plays Troy Maxson, Pittsburgh bin-man and all-powerful family patriarch who sits in his Fifties back yard chewing the fat with best friend Jon Bono (Stephen Henderson), never quite building the fence that his long-suffering wife Rose (Davis) would like him to and looking back on his undeniably hard life. With an abundance of