FILM

Remember The Imitation

Game, the very British film about the very British mathematician Alan Turing, who cracked the Enigma code? Well, Hidden Figures (PG) HHHH feels like America’s answer to it – and it’s very nearly as good.

Set in the still racially divided Virginia of 1961, it’s the story of three black female mathematicians who worked as ‘human computers’ for Nasa during the early years of the space race. A race that America was losing, of course, once Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth. And then Katherine Johnson (Taraji P Henson), the most mathematically gifted of the three, is transferred to the main space group, an exclusively white, male enclave run by the increasingly stressed Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), and slowly things begin to change. And not just in space.

Directed by Theodore Melfi, this fas Chiron’s cinating, hugely watchable and eventually heart-warming story does occasionally lack subtlety but it’s deservedly up for a Best Picture Oscar, Octavia Spencer has secured a Best Supporting Actress nomination, and the excellent Henson can count herself unlucky to have missed out. Highly recommended.

With eight nominations to its name, Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (15A) is definitely one to keep an eye out for at next weekend’s Oscars ceremony. It’s a painful, thoughtful and ultimately beautiful film about a young black boy growing up on the rough streets of Miami.

father is long gone, his mother (a brilliant performance by Naomie Harris) is a crack addict, and the only man who shows him any kindness, Juan (Mahershala Ali, also brilliant), is also the man who sells his mother the drug that threatens to destroy both their lives. Oh, and did I mention that Chiron is discovering that he’s gay?

Music, cinematography and some wonderful acting come together to produce a film with real emotional punch, although audiences here may struggle to follow some of the mumbled street-slang.

The Founder (12A) is a HH tale of extraordinary greed and betrayal, and you can see why Michael Keaton – an actor known for his unsettling intensity – was drawn to the central part of Ray Kroc. Unfortunately, despite being directed by the experienced John Lee Hancock, it spends far too much time looking like a corporate biopic for McDonald’s as we watch Kroc, who back in the Fifties was a struggling milk shake machine salesman, meet Dick and Mac McDonald for the first time and sense the business opportunity that would change his life completely.

He saw that the diner they were running so successfully in San Bernardino could be replicated all over the United States. But did he actually need the brothers? This certainly casts those golden arches in a whole new grubby light.

Squealing tyres, a rapidly rising body count and Ian McShane giving it plenty as the manager of the secret club for contract killers… yes, it can only mean that Keanu Reeves is back in John

Wick: Chapter 2 (16) HH. Reeves isn’t bad, in a monosyllabic kind of way, and I rather like the noirish comic-book touches, but the killings are endless and the plot paper-thin as Wick – the man you call when you want the bogeyman killed, apparently – finds himself not just hunter but hunted as well.