Go down to the basement and you’re in for a brilliant surprise
Barbarian
Cert: 18, 1hr 42mins ★★★★★
Bros
Cert: 15, 1hr 55mins ★★★★★ Triangle Of Sadness Cert: 15, 2hrs 27mins ★★★★★
Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues
Cert: 15, 1hr 44mins Also on Apple TV+ ★★★★★
We’ve all seen the moment in a horror film when the young central character hesitates at the top of the stairs leading down to the sort of darkly sinister basement that no creepy American house can apparently be without. And we all know what happens next: either the door to the stairs closes behind them, the basement lights flicker and then go out, or there’s something really nasty down there. Just waiting.
But it’s a sign of what a good and effective horror picture Barbarian is that when just such a moment presented itself in the press screening, battle-hardened critics who really ought to know better found themselves shouting at the screen. ‘Noooo, don’t go down there…’
But Tess, played very nicely by British actress Georgina Campbell, ignored us completely. Down into the darkness she duly descended, as genre rules dictate she must. Big mistake. Huge.
But not her first in a film so cleverly set up by film-maker and actor Zach Cregger, who hasn’t directed a feature film for more than ten years but may find himself pretty busy after this.
What Cregger, who supplies the screenplay as well, does so impressively is anchor his story in a modern world we recognise all too readily. So when Tess arrives at her Airbnb and finds it double-booked, it feels like the sort of foulup that might happen to any of us. She should leave but it’s late at night, there’s a medical convention in town and her fellow occupant, Keith (Bill Skarsgaard), seems nice enough, even if she doesn’t trust him completely.
So, having taken the precaution of washing his sheets first, she takes the bed while he kips on the sofa. I’m not going to spoil what happens next, but look out for a brilliant switch of direction halfway through and the best use I’ve seen to date of Detroit’s suburban decay, where empty homes are literally returning to the forest. If you liked Smile, you’ll love this.
First things first: Bros is pronounced not as in Matt and Luke Goss and When Will I Be Famous? fame but as in the American contraction of ‘brothers’, which rhymes with ‘toes’. That duly established, it is also camp, touching and wickedly funny.
This is essentially a gay romcom with Bobby (Billy Eichner), an uptight New York intellectual who has turned campaigning for the LGBTQ community into a fulltime job, falling almost instantly in love with hunky Aaron (Luke Macfarlane) who, when he’s not prowling dark nightclubs with his shirt off, is actually a probate lawyer.
It won’t be for everyone, but if you’re mystified by the minefield of modern gender politics – as the film begins Bobby has just won ‘Cis White Gay Man Of The Year’ – it’s refreshing to find a film that confidently pokes fun at the subject while, deep down, taking it very seriously indeed. With Eichner also co-writing, look out for an almost endless stream of one-liners that includes gags about AIDS, Glee, the musical Dear Evan Hansen and even Albus Dumbledore.
Triangle Of Sadness – a title that refers to the frown lines between the eyebrows – may have won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival but turns out to be a ponderous, overlong satire addressing the evils of capitalism.
With the world’s financial markets in disarray, it couldn’t be more timely, but it’s hard to enjoy spending time with this ghastly collection of the mega-rich on board a luxury yacht where the captain is drunk and a big storm is approaching. There are no prizes for spotting the metaphor and, be warned, with seasickness featuring spectacularly, you won’t want to eat beforehand.
With his hallmark growl of ‘Oh, yeah’, the legendary jazz trumpeter and singer Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong undoubtedly played up to his largely white audiences. But as Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, Sacha Jenkins’s documentary on Apple TV+, acknowledges, he did what he did to survive. He also deserves better than this flat medley of archive footage, dodgy graphics and audio tributes. Oh, yeah.