ALSO SHOWING
King of Thieves (15)
The 2015 Hatton Garden diamond heist gets The Best Exotic Marigold
Hotel treatment in this typically naff and patronising slice of cheekychappy British cinema. Sacrificing the story’s potential as a star vehicle worthy of its cast of veteran acting legends – Michael Caine, Tom Courteney, Jim Broadbent, Michael Gambon, Ray Winstone – it gives the story the sort of dumbed-down populist treatment that fails to get beyond the headlines that so captured the public imagination. That in itself might be its own kind of metacommentary on Britain’s spurious legacy as a once-great nation in the run up to Brexit; if so, it feels entirely accidental, a consequence of casting Caine and co and giving these formerly angry young men little to do except trade stories about the necrotic state of their own ailing bodies. The film devotes most of the first half to the robbery and the second half to exploring the postheist mistrust that apparently did for this neo-lavender Hill Mob, but director James Marsh (The Theory of
Everything) is too reluctant to break from the contravention the popular narrative that viewed their actions as an Ealing-style caper to seriously explore their hinted at violent pasts.
Lucky (15)
Harry Dean Stanton’s final film provides the late character actor with a wonderfully low-key sendoff. Cast as the eponymous resident of a small town where everyone knows everyone, he’s the perfect embodiment of a wizened straightshooter whose acceptance of the fact that “he’s old and getting older” is in perfect accordance with the defiant way he’s lived his life. Co-starring David Lynch – one of Stanton’s many directors over the years – as a barfly mourning the escape of his pet tortoise, the film may feel a little stagey in its collection of wonderful weirdoes and meaningful monologues, but its meditation on the ageing process goes from the ridiculous to the sublime with blissed-out ease.
The Rider (15)
Like Debra Granik’s recent Leave
No Trace and the collected work of Kelly Reichardt, Chloé Zhao’s second feature is an example of regional American cinema at its finest. Revolving around a rodeo rider coming to terms with a potentially life-altering head injury, the film is stylistically sparse, devoid of contrivance and so subtly observed it plays like an anti-drama – albeit one that gradually builds to an emotional pay-off that hits with the force of a wrecking ball. Working with a cast of non-professionals playing narrowly fictionalised versions of themselves, Zhao’s trump card is the beautifully layered performance she gets from her lead, Brady Jandreau, who inscribes his character, Brady Blackburn, with a rawness that’s hard to fake. A modern-day cowboy living a hard-scrabble life in the Dakota prairies with his learning disabled sister and his combative father (respectively played by Jandreau’s real-life sister and father), Brady is just starting to face the fact that his recent accident is going to bring his dreams to a premature end. What follows is a quiet exploration of the difficult-to-articulate grieving process he experiences as he’s forced to adapt to an existence that can’t help but suddenly seem devoid of purpose. Though it’s undoubtedly a tough watch, Zhao never wallows in misery here; instead she takes her cues from the community in which she’s embedded herself, finding moments of transcendence wholly appropriate for a group of thrill-seekers who live for those eight seconds in the saddle.■