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If Beale Street Could Talk 15A ★★★★★
Liam Neeson’s spectacular public relations own-goal last week may have scuppered the box-office prospects for his own film, Cold Pursuit, but he’s done a huge favour to the distributors of this, the story of a touching young romance that is derailed when the man – a struggling 22-year-old artist played by Stephan James (above, with KiKi Layne) – is arrested for rape simply because he’s black. Set in the New York of the early Sixties, it has a slow, almost theatrical feel, and while it may have struggled for relevance at the beginning of the week, it certainly has it now.
Alita: Battle Angel
12A ★★★★★ It’s not every film that gets an extra star simply for the quality of its visual effects, but then it’s not every film that is directed by Robert (Sin City) Rodriguez and produced by James (Avatar and Titanic) Cameron.
Both men are masters of the dark cinematic art and it shows in this adaptation of Yukito Kishiro’s 1990 graphic novel, Gunnm, a tale of a female cyborg cobbled together with spare parts by the slightly creepy Dr Ido (Christoph Waltz).
Yes, it’s unfortunate that Alita (Rosa Salazar) initially resembles an anorexic teenage girl, but a body upgrade soon puts most of that right as she sets about discovering who she really is, who she can trust and saving the 26thcentury world. See it on a big screen and, for once, the 3D is worth it.
The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
G ★★★★★Five years ago, the first Lego
Movie provided an extraordinary breath of fresh film air – totally original, dazzlingly clever and very, very funny.
Five years on and the second Lego Movie is, well… much like the first and inevitably struggles to have the same impact, as Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt), Wyldestyle (Elizabeth Banks), Batman (Will Arnett) and the rest of the brick-built, oftensuperhero-or-fantasy-figurebased gang confront gender roles and alien invaders. It’s still clever but the pace is so fast it’s hard to keep up with the gags, and despite a star-packed voice cast – Tiffany Haddish is particularly good as the alien queen – it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that everything, while still good, is not quite as awesome as it once was.
Boy Erased
15A ★★★★★
Exploring similar ground to last year’s The Miseducation Of
Cameron Post and based on real events, this is the story of Jared (Lucas Hedges) who, at the age of 18, is sent to a religious gay-conversion centre by his evangelical pastor father (Russell Crowe) and compliant mother (Nicole Kidman) to be stripped of his homosexuality.
It’s a tad predictable but genuinely shocking and well acted, although the impact of this Joel Edgerton-directed picture is slightly diminished by an over-long and largely unnecessary postscript.