Not quite Tracy and Hepburn... but they’re not far off
Ticket To Paradise
Cert: 12A, 1hr 44mins ★★★★★
Moonage Daydream Cert: 15, 2hrs 15mins ★★★★★
Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song Cert: 12A 1hr 58mins ★★★★★
Hatching Cert: 15, 1hr 31mins ★★★★★
For sensible reasons, the release of Ticket To Paradise has now been diplomatically postponed until Tuesday, but it’s well worth the extra 48-hour wait. This, after all, is surely what an exhausted nation needs to cheer itself up – an old-fashioned romantic comedy led by two of the biggest stars still working in Hollywood: Julia Roberts and George Clooney.
OK, so we’re not quite talking Hepburn and Tracy or Bogart and Bacall but, come on, it’s not far off. Roberts has three of the best rom-coms ever made to her name – Pretty Woman, My Best Friend’s Wedding and Notting Hill – while Clooney, possessor of that deep rumbling voice and great film hair, has cooked up sizzling screen chemistry with the likes of Michelle Pfeiffer (One Fine Day), Jennifer Lopez (Out Of Sight) and Catherine Zeta-Jones (Intolerable Cruelty).
Clooney and Roberts themselves have already worked together a handful of times, most famously on the first two films in the Ocean’s 11 franchise.
You can see why, at the film’s London’s premiere, producer Tim Bevan described Ticket To Paradise as like ‘a sequel to a film you might have seen 20 years ago’.
In fact, it’s a standalone original, directed and co-written by British film-maker Ol Parker, who has the Mamma Mia! sequel, the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films and Imagine Me And You to his name, and it sees Clooney and Roberts playing a long-divorced couple who can’t bear the sight of each other.
Yes, they’ll reluctantly come together for the graduation of daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever), but they still bicker and fight like a couple who separated last week, not the best part of 20 years ago.
But it’s when Lily departs for Bali for one final big holiday before starting work as a lawyer, and promptly falls deeply in love with a handsome young seaweed farmer, Gede, played rather well by the FrenchIndonesian actor Maxime Bouttier, that David (Clooney) and Georgie (Roberts) are united by one single awful thought.
On no account must Lily be allowed to make the same mistake they did 25 years ago. Her hastily planned wedding must be stopped.
What ensues is not always subtle but, in an unrepentantly commercial way, it is sweet and funny and makes the most of Clooney and Robert’s undeniable screen chemistry.
This is a middle-aged couple who really do look as if they once belonged together.
With the island setting calling to mind the likes of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Six Days Seven Nights, and a game supporting performance from Emily In Paris star Lucas Bravo, rom-com fans and, indeed, Clooney and Roberts fans, should find themselves suitably cheered up.
There have been several documentaries about the extraordinary life of the late, great David Bowie but absolutely none like Brett Morgan’s Moonage Daydream.
It has no dates, no narration and no conventional contributors. Instead, Bowie himself is allowed to make sense of his amazing creative life, while the tireless Morgan blends a fabulously curated selection of Bowie’s music with frame after frame of stunningly chosen and exhaustingly edited visual images. It’s on the long side but quite brilliant.
Far more conventional is Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, which tells the story of how the Canadian songwriter and poet, who died in 2016, wrote his most famous song.
The movie is at its best when it concentrates on the charismatic Cohen but flags when it moves on to the separate story of the song itself.
Hatching is a dark Finnish horror film – akin to a scary, modern-day fairy tale – about an unhappy and lonely girl on the verge of painful adolescence, who rescues an egg from the nest of an injured crow.
Taking it home, she incubates it in her giant teddy bear where it grows and grows and grows. Until it hatches. But what exactly is the horrific, semi-skeletal creature that emerges?
With a fantastic central performance from Siiri Solalinna, Hanna Bergholm’s nightmarish exploration of female puberty and dysfunctional family is at its best when we don’t know the answer.