A Kind of Murder... or a kind of dream?
a generous hatful of award nominations.
Marshall (12A) is a powerful drama inspired by the life of Thurgood Marshall (Chadwick Boseman).
Marshall would go on to be the first black judge on the US Supreme Court but in 1940 he was a brilliant young lawyer acting for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His job was not just to rush around the country defending people often charged simply because of the colour of their skin, but also to keep the NAACP’s fight for civil rights on the front page. With Marshall, you didn’t just get brilliant advocacy, you got a bit of showbiz too.
So when a wealthy married white woman (Kate Hudson) from Greenwich, Connecticut, alleges that her black chauffeur has raped and attempted to murder her, he is swiftly called in. The only problem is the judge (James Cromwell) won’t allow an out-of-state lawyer to speak in his court. A reluctant local attorney, Sam Friedman (Josh Gad), who, it is relevant to add, is a plump white Jew, is persuaded to take the case on, albeit with Marshall lurking constantly by his side, prompting his every intervention.
The result is a top-class courtroom drama, thanks to a beautifully balanced screenplay (which always remembers to entertain as well as grip), top-notch performances from the ensemble cast (Gad is particularly good) and a nagging sense that, even almost 80 years on, this sort of injustice still hasn’t gone away. Happy Death Day (15A) HHH unashamedly borrows the structure of Groundhog Day and injects it into a Screamstyle campus thriller played almost as much for laughs as chills. Jessica Rothe is Tree, a glossy sorority sister who keeps waking up on her birthday, knowing that she will be killed later that night. No matter how she changes her behaviour during the day, the result is always the same: the masked killer always finds her in the end. And then her phone starts playing ‘It’s your birthday’, she wakes up, and the whole thing happens again.
It’s nicely played – as you’d expect from a film co-produced by genre king Jason Blum – and it should entertain a younger crowd. And it does, eventually, acknowledge its debt to Bill Murray’s classic. But, frustratingly, every time it threatens to turn into something special itself, a clunky plot twist leaves you scratching your head. Really?
The first My Little Pony feature film was made in 1986, and now it’s back on the big screen in the shape of My Little Pony:
The Movie (G) HH and what is essentially 100 minutes of product placement for Hasbro toys is as loud, colourful and unrelentingly shrill as you could possibly imagine.
Still, the second half is better than the first, and the Storm King – you know, the one threatening the rainbow-fringed, cupcake-filled kingdom of Equestria – does get to deliver one great line: ‘I’m just so over the cute little pony thing.’