Is Penélope cruising to a new award?
Any film directed by the prolific Pedro Almodóvar and starring his regular collaborator Penélope Cruz is almost certainly bound to be worthy of attention, and so it duly proves with Parallel Mothers. This is intelligent, well-acted film-making and you can see why Cruz has been picking up award nominations.
But it does require a modest health warning. Not only is the often high-spirited Almodóvar in serious mode here, but he bookends his central story – about two mothers giving birth in the same hospital – with a particularly dark chapter from the Spanish Civil War. There’s no doubt the latter gives the film gravitas, but arguably rather more than it actually deserves.
Cruz is playing one of the mothers, Janis, a glamorous photographer who finds herself pregnant after a brief affair with a married academic. She shares a maternity suite with troubled teenager Ana (Milena Smit), who has a neglectful actress mother and a completely absent father.
But it’s when the father of Janis’s baby expresses doubts about his paternity that things start to get interesting.
For a short while, you’ll think you’re ahead of Almodóvar, who supplies his own screenplay, but he quickly catches up, only to race ahead courtesy of some characteristic surprises, some more convincing than others. So, serious but still unmistakably Almodóvar.
Call me old-fashioned but I don’t think a children’s cartoon essentially about happy singing animals should contain serious death threats and fighting between rival gangs of ‘security’. Which is why Sing 2, which arrives a full five years after the original and sees Buster Moon (amusingly voiced by Matthew McConaughey) and the rest of the musical gang heading off to a Las Vegas-style resort in search of even greater tuneful success, never quite hits the high notes. It’s good but it could have been better. Still, it’s colourful fun for the most part and has a top-class supporting voice cast that includes Reese Witherspoon and Scarlett Johansson. And while a menacing, Simon Cowell-style impresario – voiced by Bobby Cannavale – seems a little old-hat, Letitia Wright is spot-on as a street dancer with a talent for calming stage fright. The show must go on, of course.
Actress Romola Garai joins the growing band of female filmmakers embracing the horror genre with Amulet, a film she both writes and directs.
And for a good hour she does an impressively chilling job as we watch Tomas, a former soldier and possibly illegal immigrant, being rescued from a fire by a kindly nun (Imelda Staunton) and given a fresh start in a dilapidated suburban house where a young woman is looking after her dying mother.
But as the bumps in the attic grow progressively more alarming, Garai gets herself in a terrible tangle with an ambitious story involving demons, deities and eternal damnation.
Flag Day is the emotionally overwrought story of a girl who grows to discover that her perennially impoverished but classical musicloving father is actually an arsonist, bank-robber, counterfeiter… oh, and serial liar.
Sean Penn, who also directs, plays the father and casts his own real-life daughter, Dylan Penn, as the daughter.
The actor being most indulged, however, turns out to be himself.