SECOND SCREEN
Ah, the pretty girl next door with the incurable illness… you wouldn’t think there was much mileage left in such an overcrowded genre. Then along comes Midnight Sun (12A) ★★★★, the movie magic slowly starts to happen, the tissues come out and it’s floods of tears all over again.
Bella Thorne is Katie, a pretty, guitar-playing teenager with a potentially fatal allergy to sunlight, who’s been kept at home by her protective father for years.
But hormones will out and love will take its course.
This is based on a Japanese film from 2006 and has Patrick Schwarzenegger (yes, Arnie’s son) lending well-judged support. It takes a while to get going – and to end – but is unexpectedly charming in between.
Wes Anderson has already made one stop-motion classic, Fantastic Mr Fox, and now he comes close again with Isle Of Dogs (PG) ★★★★, set in an overcrowded Japanese near-future where the diseased dog population of Megasaki have been banished to an island. Here an enterprising 12-year-old comes looking for his beloved guard dog, Spots. Witty and with a fabulous percussive score, it’s marred only by a doggedly (sorry) slow-moving story.
Turning the conventions of the boxing movie on their head, Journeyman (15A) ★★★ begins with a successful world-title bout and gets more miserable from there, as veteran fighter Matty Burton (Paddy Considine) sustains a life-changing brain injury. What ensues doesn’t always convince but definitely has its moments.