Feelgood fun, a grisly tale ... and a cow called Luma
Save The Cinema Cert: 12A, 1hr 49mins In cinemas and on Sky ★★★☆☆
Scream Cert: 18, 1hr 54mins ★★☆☆☆
Cow Cert: 12A, 1hr 34mins ★★★☆☆
Some of you will remember Dream Horse, one of the first British films to be released when cinemas reopened last year. It told the true story of a middle-aged woman from the South Wales valleys who hadn’t given up on her dreams and ended up breeding a horse that would eventually win the Welsh Grand National.
Well, Save The Cinema is more than a bit like that in that it tells the predominantly true story of a middle-aged Welsh woman from a bit further along the M4 who hasn’t given up on her dreams either and resolves to save Carmarthen’s Art Deco cinema when it is threatened with demolition by developers.
To some extent, it hits most of its intended targets – in that it’s sweet, lightweight and manages to be both amusing and touching. But it should be more of all those things, hampered by a screenplay that needed more work and by the realities of getting a film financed and made.
Just as Dream Horse required the Australian film star Toni Collette to give it box-office clout, so Save The Cinema has to rely on the considerable Nottingham-born talents of Samantha Morton to play the central role of Liz Evans and the fame of Surrey-born Harry Potter star Tom Felton. There must be Welsh actors gnashing their teeth from Swansea to Rhyl.
That said, director Sara Sugarman
is Welsh and imparts a decent – and in this case vital – sense of place, ensures Morton is pretty much spot-on with her accent and draws nice performances from a supporting cast of compatriots that includes Jonathan Pryce, Erin Richards and Owen Teale.
The end result is the sort of film people always say ‘they just don’t make any more’, a modestly funny, gently uplifting tale of a community coming together to do a good thing. And if you can’t track it down at a nearby cinema, you will find it – slightly ironically given the title – on Sky Cinema.
Twenty-five years after the bloodsoaked original was released, it would be nice to think the Scream horror franchise was finally limping to a body-strewn close with the release of its latest instalment, given that it’s a full ten years since Scream 4 and six years since franchise creator Wes Craven died.
But with the new film now titled Scream rather than Scream 5 and with fresh directors at the helm, I fear a reboot. After all, nothing actually dies in Hollywood if it’s still making money.
With its constant stream of references to both itself, the slasherkiller genre and other horror films entirely, Scream has always been able to argue that its cleverness and self-awareness make up for the endless grisly murders endured by the teenagers of Woodsboro at the hands of ‘Ghostface’. But I have never been convinced and there’s nothing in the new film to make me change my mind.
Still, it’s nice to see franchise stalwarts Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette loyally returning to the bloody fray, not just for fame and fortune but, as a climactic final dedication touchingly puts it, ‘For Wes’. Nevertheless, it’s for horror buffs only.
British film-maker Andrea Arnold is best known for hard-hitting dramas such as Fish Tank and Red
Road, but in Cow she changes tack dramatically to make a narrationfree documentary about the life of a dairy cow. Luma is her name.
How much you get from it depends on how much you know about dairy farming and, thanks to holidays spent on a Montgomeryshire dairy farm, I know quite a lot. So while my interest definitely lagged in the second half, I can see others might learn a lot and possibly be quite upset by what they see. A creative labour of love, undoubtedly, but leaves a slightly sour taste.