SECOND SCREEN
In Coco (PG) ★★★, the latest offering from Pixar, our young Mexican hero Miguel has grown up in a family where music has been banned since his great-greatgrandfather, legendary musician Ernesto de la Cruz, chose fame over family and ran off.
Which is a shame for Miguel, as he is a born musician who loves the songs his forebear made famous and dreams of enjoying similar success himself.
So he secretly enters a music competition on the Day of the Dead, tries to borrow his greatgreat-grandfather’s guitar from his elaborate tomb… and ends up in the Land of the Dead himself. Which, of course, is where the great Ernesto can be found. Might he be able to help Miguel become a musician? Complicated? Yes, and a little slow, too. But the animation is as colourful as the story and emotions do eventually reach the desired level.
So much has happened in the year since Donald Trump entered the White House that The Final Year (12A) ★★, charting the last 12 months of the Obama administration, feels like it has missed its time.
Of the Obama aides that Greg Barker focuses his camera on, only John Kerry and Dublin-born Samantha Power will probably be familiar to audiences in this part of the world. But look out for the agonising moment when Power, US Ambassador to the UN, invites 37 of the UN’s female ambassadors to an election-night party where she expects them to share in the pleasure of watching America’s first female president being elected.
Liam Neeson, right, reinvented himself as an action hero with Taken. Since then, the quality of his output has been variable, but one thing is certain: he will never make a worse movie than The
Commuter (15A) ★. Neeson plays an ex-cop who is approached by a woman on a train. We know it’s going to be more complicated than that; what we don’t know is how ridiculous the story is going to get.