ALSO SHOWING
Aftersun (12A) JJJJJ
Edinburgh-raised/new York-based filmmaker Charlotte Wells delivers one of the best debuts in recent years with Aftersun. Revolving around a young Scottish father on a package holiday to Turkey with his daughter sometime in the late 1990s, it may come on like another artfully made, ominous-seeming coming-of-age film, but it gradually deepens into remarkable exploration of memory and family and that difficult moment where parents become real people in the eyes of their children.
When we’re first introduced to Calum (Paul Mescal) and Sophie (newcomer Frankie Corio) they have the sort of partners-in-crime bond of family members who like spending time with each other. Sophie is a sweet kid and Calum is a good dad; in the uniquely high-pressure environment of a foreign holiday resort where forced jollity is the order of the day, he’s the calm centre, never loosing his cool the way he sees other parents doing. In private, though, it’s a different story: Calum seems to be white-knuckling his way through something he instinctively wants to hide from Sophie.
All of which is subtly teased out. Mescal’s performance is delicate and restrained and his scenes with incredible newcomer Frankie Corio are shot through with genuine warmth and tenderness. But Mescal also infuses them with an underlying melancholy.
Wells pulls off this off with astonishing verve, shooting the resort scenes in an unobtrusive style and intercutting these joyous sequences with shaky holiday videos shot by Calum and Sophie on Calum's newfor-the-time digital video camera. General release
Armageddon Time (15) JJJJ
Aftersun would make a great double bill with Armageddon Time, Ad Astra director James Gray’s semiautobiographical coming-of-age film about a working class Jewish kid negotiating a tricky adolescence against the backdrop of Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the presidency. Though America’s near-permanent lurch to the right remains in the background, it informs everything about its artistically inclined 12-yearold protagonist Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta), who gradually becomes acutely aware of the rigged nature of the American Dream as his nascent friendship with Johnny (Jaylin Webb), the only Black kid in his class, becomes a bone of contention for his parents (Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong) as they struggle to connect with their son.
Paul does have an ally in his beloved grandfather (Anthony Hopkins), but the film puts white privilege under the spotlight in a nuanced and uncomfortable way by showing the extent to which Paul lives in a world of second chances, a luxury not afforded Johnny.
General release
The Menu (15) JJJ
Pitched as a sort of social horror movie version of Netflix’s high-end foodie show Chef ’s Table, The Menu stars Ralph Fiennes as Slowik, the obsessive chef of an island restaurant whose wealthy clientele fork out $1,200 per reservation and dine on conceptually pretentious delights.
Into this plausibly ridiculous world come a group of blithely monied patrons, among them a trio of arrogant tech bros, a washed-up movie star (John Leguizamo), food critic (Janet Mcteer), and a Chef Slowik fan-boy (Nicholas Hoult).
If this set up also brings to mind a classic Agatha Christie-style whodunnit, co-writers Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, and director Mark Mylod, are more interested in serving up a who-done-what, using each course to reveal something despicable about each of the diners in preparation for just deserts that will soon be served up all round. It’s a bit of a shame, then, that the film undercooks the ending. General release