Unmissable Manchester By The Sea
Understatement of the week comes from Randi (Michelle Williams) in Manchester By The Sea (15) ‘I don’t have anything big to say,’ she tells Lee (Casey Affleck, below right) when they bump into each other in the street, and then proceeds to break his, her and everyone else’s heart. Randi and Lee were married once and the time-shifting, stream-of-consciousness structure of Kenneth Lonergan’s picture is designed to slowly reveal just why they’re no longer a couple. It’s not easy viewing, which doesn’t mean it’s possible to take your eyes off it. We open in Boston, where Lee is working as a janitor. One day he gets a call saying that his brother has died – and left a will stipulating that Lee is to take over the guardianship of his teenage nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges). This is a puzzler for both parties, altough Lonergan extracts much laughter from that bafflement. There are scenes between Lee and Patrick (who plays aggressive guitar in a rock band) that wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of The Young Ones. The joke is that it’s Lee who seems petulant and posturing. Such comic moments are vital, because the bulk of Lonergan’s movie is such a harrowing look at messedup lives that it might otherwise be dismissed as the kind of mood piece you can do without. You can’t.
From darkling to sparkling and the Ryan Gosling/Emma Stone (right, in blue) musical La La Land (12) right Brimming with colour and bursting with catchy tunes, this is the definition of a feelgood movie.
You know the story because you’ve seen it a hundred times before. Boy and girl fall in love; fall out of love; get back together – or maybe, as the constant references to the Bogart/Bergman weepie
Casablanca suggest, they don’t… On which classical Hollywood note, don’t be expecting a Fredand-Ginger rerun. Gosling and Stone might trip the light fantastic but they don’t trip it fantastically well. Still, there’s no denying they give the numbers everything, singing and dancing as if their characters’ lives depend on it. In an age when most musicals are laden with strident irony, such authentic feeling is no small thing.
Don’t miss the 75th anniversary Blu-ray of The Goose
Steps Out (15) Playing his stock-in-trade seedy schoolmaster, Will Hay is parachuted into Germany to get the lowdown on a new secret weapon. Hilarity duly ensues – never more so than in the scene in which Hay teaches a classroom of Nazi spies to give Herr Hitler the ‘Churchill V-sign’. Priceless.