ALSO SHOWING
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
(PG)
Depending on your dedication to the kitsch karaoke musical atrocity that is
Mamma Mia!, this belated sequel’s lyricreferencing title will either function as a cheerful clarion call or a resigned acknowledgement that the torture is about to start all over again. Co-written by Richard Curtis and directed this time by The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’s Ol Parker, the new film is both sequel and prequel, allowing Streep to minimise her contribution to a ghostly cameo by having Lily James play the younger Donna in the extended flashbacks while Amanda Seyfried’s Sophie and the rest of the returning cast mourn her character’s passing in the present. The Abba hits are woven into the narrative in a slightly more polished way, but the conga-line choreography and variability of the singing remains true to the first film’s that’ll-do aesthetic. It all builds to a grand entrance from Cher that is as bizarre as you might imagine.
Hotel Artemis (15)
A-list screenwriter turned debut director Drew Pearce channels his inner John Carpenter with this nearfuture-set gonzo action movie about a group of rival criminals stuck in a private hospital in LA. Jodie Foster takes the lead as the establishment’s proprietress whose administering of medical aid to criminals injured in the field is predicated on a strict adherence to the rules, especially the one about not killing the other patients. Though the criminals-onlockdown premise echoes classic Carpenter fare like Escape From
New York and Assault on Precinct 13, Pearce imbues the film with enough weird flourishes to ensure it generates its own cult appeal, with Foster’s character especially fun.
A Prayer Before Dawn (18)
Even in a genre littered with extreme depictions of violence and institutionalised barbarity, this basedon-fact tale of a drug-addicted British boxer’s three-year ordeal in a Thai prison is a tough watch. But while there’s no doubting the commitment of British actor Joe Cole in the lead role, the film itself – stylishly directed as it is by Jean-stéphane Sauvaire –beats us into submission without providing the temporary enlightenment his real life counterpart, Billy Moore, apparently found.
Madame (15)
This unashamedly frothy drawing room farce offers a welcome showcase for Pedro Almodovar regular Rossy de Palma as a maid who pretends to be a visiting dignitary to help make up the numbers at a dinner party for her long-term employer (Harvey Keitel) and his socialclimbing second wife (Toni Collette). Michael Smiley co-stars.
Spitfire (PG)
Interviewing the last surviving men and women to fly Spitfires during the Second World War, this documentary serves a useful purpose in getting this firsthand testimony on film. It’s just a shame it didn’t do a better job of following the lead of its interviewees: they question the nostalgic obsession with a machine they pragmatically viewed as an instrument of war far more stringently than this overwhelmingly celebratory film does.
Generation Wealth (18)
There’s a distinct end-of-days vibe to Lauren Greenfield’s horribly compulsive documentary about the culture of excess and spiritual decline that’s gone hand-in-hand with globalisation and society’s increasing obsession with money and fame. Using her Oscar-nominated recession documentary Queens of
Versailles as a jumping-off point, Greenfield looks back over her 25-year-career as a photographer and filmmaker on the frontline of this cultural shift and makes a valid case for Trump’s presidency as the inevitable consequence. ■