Here's hoping these make your January pass a little quicker.
Jihad Jane
Paddy Kehoe says: Ciarán Cassidy's film hears the stories of two American women, imprisoned following charges related to terrorist conspiracy in 2010. The documentary consists in large part of separate interviews conducted with Colleen R LaRose and her accomplice, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez. LaRose and Ramirez became involved in a 2009 conspiracy to organise the killing of the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who had drawn a newspaper cartoon that caused offence to followers of Islam - and there's also an Irish dimension to the story. Jihad Jane is - in a certain sense - about sinister activity at the crossroads where different approach routes to notoriety meet. More to the point, it is is an utterly fascinating documentary that never loses its feel for the human texture behind the headlines.
The King of Staten Island
Alan Corr says: On paper, it looks like a 21st-century comedy dream team - Pete Davidson, the Young Turk of painfully honest confessional stand-up, teaming up with Judd Apatow, director of modern classics such as The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. Happily, it also works on screen. This is a "70% autobiographical" comedy-drama about Davidson's own upbringing in Staten Island and it marks somewhat of a departure from Apatow's usual play-it-for-laughs portraits of middle-aged ennui and angst. Davidson plays Scott, a stoner lost boy who channels his grief for his late firefighter father through passive aggression and bad taste quips. The King of Staten Island is the right parts of tender and funny. It's also pretty scattershot and uneven, but this is Pete Davidson we're talking about here, so that's just fine.
Fanny Lye Deliver'd
Harry Guerin says: This is one of the finds of 2020; a retro delight that will have The Wicker Man worshippers, lovers of The Lighthouse and anyone whose formative experience of appointment-to-view involved the horror double bills on BBC Two raising a toast to writer-composer-director Thomas Clay. Set in 1657, these desperate hours down on the farm throw two fugitives (Freddie Fox, Tanya Reynolds) at the feet of a woman who "has only known the land, the toil and the war" (Maxine Peake) and her cruel Puritan of a husband (Charles Dance). Bravura filmmaking, superb acting, big themes and a stunning score combine to create a classic that exists in its own little world while also deserving to be in the best of company. Digging for gold in the realm of cult cinema is the noblest of pastimes. The ground is full of it here - with no need for a shovel.
Queen and Slim
Alan Corr says: You may have been on some bad Tinder dates, but nothing will ever be quite like the one that throws together two mismatched young black Americans (Jodie Turner-Smith, Daniel Kaluuya) in this gripping tale of romance flowering in the festering gutter of racism. It's a grimy portrait of modern America that fair crackles with nervous energy, a freewheeling allegory that is also a romantic road movie and a serious indictment of the US's eternal and seemingly intractable problem with race. Making her feature debut, Melina Matsoukas (who has made countless pop videos and Beyoncé's game-changing long-form film Formation), directs in a loose and vivid style. Call it a metaphysical date movie but one that embraces black history, birthright, family, and protest - wrapped up with all the energy and tension of a neat little thriller.
Finding the Way Back
Harry Guerin says: Ben Affleck gives what could end up being the performance of his see-saw career in this basketball drama that reunites him with The Accountant director Gavin O'Connor. It's certainly the toughest watch - a quietly devastating depiction of addiction as a full-time job. Granted, the playbook for redemption movies is a source of comfort precisely because it is so tattered, and Finding the Way Back borrows plenty from those dog-eared pages. But as exciting as the game sequences are, it's in the scenes away from the bleachers that the film finds its real power, and ability to shock. Affleck gets everything right in this study of someone who can't see what's staring them in the face. For a man who constantly seems to be in an argument with himself about whether he should be a film star or an actor, the answer is, once again, glaringly obvious.
True History of the Kelly Gang
Alan Corr says: Director Justin Kurzel's visceral and lyrical re-telling of the Aussie folklore tale fair explodes with a punk clout that pulses in the bloodstream. George MacKay is excellent in the iconic role of the wild 19th-century colonial boy, who rose from brutal beginnings on the edge of the Outback to become a still-divisive folk hero. This film rocks with a combustible power and crackles with a feverish energy. It's dreamlike and scabrous and casts our anti-hero in a very sympathetic light with a strange, almost supernatural starkness. The hyper-surreal spectre of Sidney Nolan's paintings of the iron-clad outlaw may even loom over the mountains. Forget Mick Jagger in that hokey Seventies western and Heath Ledger's slightly mannered go at the part back in 2003 - this is the true movie of the Kelly Gang.
Broken Hearts Gallery
Alan Corr says: You've heard of meet cute. Well, here's meet kook. This zippy rom-com from writer and director Natalie Krinsky takes a meta approach to an ironclad genre and tickles all the obvious boxes in an almost self-parodic style. But it also serves up a winning performance from its leading lady, rising Australian star Geraldine Viswanathan. She plays Lucy Gulliver, a twenty-something and very ditzy gallery assistant in a kind of idealised New York, who has a talent for self-sabotaging her romantic relationships and then curating her blues with a growing collection of mementos. Broken Hearts Gallery is overlong and reverts to a very dull default mode in the third act, but the one-liners keep zinging and it all buzzes by in a blur of telegraphed inevitability. Only a stone-hearted cynic would conclude that this zephyr doesn't bring a spark of joy.
The Life Ahead
Harry Guerin says: Sure, "it's when you give up on hope that good things happen" is not wisdom that any of us wants to hear right now, but this is a film that we all need to see. In her first feature in 10 years, 86-year-old Sophia Loren returns in a simple and beautiful story about the healing power of relationships. It's directed by her son Edoardo Ponti and has family, however accidental, at its centre. Ponti's film - the second adaptation of Romain Gary's book The Life Before Us - manages to be tough and gentle, funny and heartbreaking, questioning our attitude to people on the margins and replenishing our compassion through its small gestures and big moments. The concept of kindness as love in plain clothing shines as bright as the Bari sun in so many scenes; in both senses we can bask in that warmth for 90 minutes.
Vivarium
Alan Corr says: Irish director Lorcan Finnegan's nasty little sci-fi shocker is in the proud tradition of The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror, with more than a dash of David Lynch. But it also serves as a droll and cautionary tale about the need to settle down and get on with the rest of one's life, sometimes against one's best instincts. Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg are excellent as the young couple struggling to get on the housing ladder but seemingly not too anxious about it either in this macabre and blackly humorous tale of resident evil. Not short on shiver-inducing moments of surreal madness and creeping dread, Vivarium also captures an all-too-believable sense of a slow descent into madness while also serving up a smart indictment of our housing crisis. There are few answers and many questions linger, not least whether this is the best movie about the perils of home ownership since The Money Pit.
Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
Two hours in the best of company - that's what's on offer here. And if your never-ending list of to-read authors doesn't include the late Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved), well, it should do after about 15 minutes. This unstuffy documentary lives up to its title as it charts the life of a literary icon from student to librarian to mother to editor to author to Nobel Prize winner, with special mention for her talents as a star baker along the way. Morrison makes for a brilliant interviewee: matter-of-fact about her work, with steel and a great sense of humour there to inspire newcomers to her novels and longtime fans alike. Her life, and the wisdom accrued along the way, also hold a mirror up to US society over the past century. There is as much to treasure in The Pieces I Am as there are things to think about. Now to those books...
