ALSO SHOWING
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
(15) JJ
Nicolas Cage’s brilliance as an actor has been mocked and knocked for the best part of 20 years, but the ironic love he now inspires in fans who primarily know his work from gifs, memes and Youtube supercuts of his craziest on-screen moments has transformed him into the sort of branded celebrity whose fame is largely based on a wilful ignorance of his actual movies.
Given this, the existence of a film like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is hardly a surprise. Casting him as a misunderstood movie star called – wait for it – “Nick Cage”, the film gives him the role he was born to play but remains far too content to coast by on its onejoke meta premise to do anything interesting with his unique persona.
Sharing the same filmography (and some of the same money problems) as his “K”-less counterpart, this Cage is a creatively insecure wreck whose narcissistic need to perform doesn’t impress his eye-rolling teenage daughter (Lilly Mo Sheen), his affectionate ex-wife (Sharon Horgan) or the auteur filmmakers who can smell his desperation a mile off. After blowing his shot at a comeback, Cage reluctantly accepts his agent’s offer of a million-dollar pay cheque to attend a birthday party for the mysterious Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascale), a wealthy Spanish businessman, and Cage super-fan, who secretly wants him to star in a movie he’s written.
Before long the “real” Cage finds himself in a scenario straight out of a mid-1990s Nicolas Cage action movie – a promising set-up involving the CIA and a kidnapping – let down by director Tom Gormican, whose inability to shoot Michael Bay-style set-pieces on a budget (a la Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz) does break the illusion somewhat.
Ennio JJJ
(15)
This new documentary sees Cinema Paradiso-director Giuseppe Tornatore indulge his professional
admiration for Ennio Morricone with an epic-length survey of the Italian composer’s career. Though Morricone shot to prominence scoring Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns in the late 1960s, and went on to work with numerous giants of world cinema (among them Pasolini, Malick, De Palma, Tarantino and Tornatore himself ), Morricone started out as a musical prodigy and avant-garde composer whose innovative film work was dismissed by the classical music establishment for decades. Bringing together a wealth of archive footage and interviews, the film is fascinating when focusing on the development of his unorthodox style and the elevating effect it had on Italian genre cinema, but Tornatore’s reverence for the maestro – whom he interviewed extensively before his death in 2020 – makes for a repetitious film as he repeats the same points in an effort to show the extent to which Morricone influenced pop culture at large.
Happening (15) JJJ
Set in France during the spring of 1963, Happening zeroes in on a youth culture decidedly less freewheeling than the ones depicted in the Nouvelle Vague films of the day. Adapted from Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel about a high school girl (Anamaria Vartolomei) whose dream of going to university to become a writer starts shrinking week by week after she falls pregnant, the film plays out like a grim tickingclock thriller about the bleak reality of life for young women in a country where legalised abortion is still more than decade away. Director Audrey Diwan cannily keeps the camera close to Vartolomei’s Anne, contrasting the sunlight of the school campus with the encroaching horror of her protagonist’s mission to terminate her pregnancy, a clandestine operation that brings to mind Cristian Mungiu's harrowing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
All films on general release