ALSO STREAMING
Family Romance LLC (N/A)
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Werner Herzog’s new drama plays like a lightly fictionalised spin on the sort of documentary work that has buttressed his cult status over the last decade-and-a-half. Set in Tokyo and built around Japan’s rent-a-relative industry, the film’s title comes from a real company started by the film’s star, entrepreneur Yuichi Ishii, whom Herzog has play a version of himself. As the movie opens, we see this version of Ishii meeting a 12-year-old girl called Mahiro (Mahiro Tanimoto) whose own mother (Miki Fujimaki) has hired him to pretend to be her long-absent father.
Though the film doesn’t really dwell on the ethics of this business, their tender and burgeoning relationship provides a dramatic through line that allows Herzog to indulge his own penchant for the bizarre. The end result doesn’t cohere as an entirely satisfying narrative, but Herzog’s eternal search for what he once termed the “ecstatic truth” ensures it still has odd moments of transcendent beauty amid the everyday sights others take for granted.
Streaming on demand on digital
platfoms
The Booksellers (15)
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Plunging us into the dusty world of New York’s rare and antiquarian book trade, this documentary offers an illuminating look at the importance of this diminishing scene and the way its transformation in the digital age has helped confer value and importance on collections and ephemera detailing the histories of marginalised or hitherto ignored sections of society. Teasing these larger themes out with the diligence of a bibliophile hunting down an obscure first edition, the film presents an enjoyable portrait of the city that’s both steeped in nostalgia for the romance of its literary past but also cognisant of the limitations the stuffy, largely male establishment at the centre of that world imposed upon it. The message from the younger generation of bibliophiles entering the profession is that as long as people continue to love books, they’ll find ways to service that love.
Streaming on demand on digital
platforms
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (12A)
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Perhaps the best that can be said about Netflix’s painfully unfunny Will Ferrell comedy is that it doesn’t serve up the expected barrage of tartan clichés when the action shifts to Edinburgh. Cast in the role of “host city” for the annual celebration of campy musical ineptitude, Edinburgh may have digitally annexed Glasgow’s Hydro, but the city’s prominence is cringeworthy only in as much as it functions as a picturesque location devoid of anyone who sounds remotely Scottish. The film itself features Ferrell and Rachel Mcadams as a hapless Icelandic pop duo who end up representing their country when a tragic boating accident wipes out their competition. Ferrell, who co-wrote the script, does his usual man-child tantrum schtick, but it’s fairly pointless: the Eurovision Song Contest (which partnered with the filmmakers) already knows it’s ridiculous.
Netflix
A White, White Day (15)
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A revenge thriller wrapped inside a bleak meditation on grief, this Icelandic drama follows a widowed, semi-retired cop (Ingvar Sigurdsson) whose growing obsession with his dead wife’s possible infidelities sends him on a downward spiral. Only really getting into genre territory late in the final act, the film is more intriguing as a character study of a man slowly realising he has no idea who his wife was. ■
Curzon Home Cinemas