Thursday, April 3, 2025

The idea to drop Jennifer Coolidge into the middle of A Minecraft Movie is a decent joke. If nothing else, it forced the parent sat next to me to patiently explain to their child the concept of The White Lotus. In the film – a CGI-slathered children's movie, adapted from the multibillion-dollar video game – Coolidge plays a high school principal who ends up on a date with one of the source video game's "villagers", flat-nosed NPCs who converse in bunged-up honks. She's reliably hysterical in the role because she's able to land a line like "we stuck it out for the dogs", while talking about her divorce, with an air of total spontaneity.

There's a whiff of desperation to it, sure, but it at least suggests – unlike the vast majority of brands-turned-into-movies – genuine intent, rather than mechanical obligation. In other words, she's not Chris Pratt. And there are, in fact, early stretches of A Minecraft Movie that seem to justify the hiring of Jared Hess, director of the oddball comedy Napoleon Dynamite (2004) – a brief promise that this could be a similarly likeable tale about unlikeable dorks living aggressively as themselves.

Read the full review here. 

Out this week: 

While A Minecraft Movie (**) and Death of a Unicorn (**) disappoint, there's more to seek out at cinemas this week: a tale of London teendom in The Last Swim (****) that's both lively and tender; noisy neighbours causing psychological torture in the deeply unnerving Restless (***); and while Mr Burton (***) might be conventional, Harry Lawtey's take on a young Richard Burton is truly impressive stuff. 

Written by Clarisse Loughrey

Death of a Unicorn might have been better if it were made for much less – let's say, somewhere between a million dollars and the spare change found at the back of the sofa. The extra fanfare feels unnecessary: the cast led by Jenna Ortega, Paul Rudd, Will Poulter, Téa Leoni, and Richard E Grant; the aspirational modern interiors masked by bare minimum "eat the rich" sentiment; the fact it's distributed by A24 and produced by a company co-founded by Midsommar's Ari Aster; the herd of CGI-rendered unicorns engaged in an impalement rampage.

In terms of substance, this is really about as basic as creature features get. It might have benefited from embracing some of the (intentional or unintentional) camp of real-deal, low-budget horror – the kind birthed on scuzzy VHS tapes, with their robotic performances, vats of corn syrup, and puppets that look like they've been through the wash a few times. There's a mixture of practical and digital effects here, yet debuting writer-director Alex Scharfman leans too enthusiastically into Jurassic Park homage. It's hardly sincere enough to be Spielberg, so instead just ends up a little dry.

The problem is already there, in the bones of its script: Ortega and Rudd, as Ridley and Elliot, are a rigidly straight-faced, father-daughter duo whose already icy relationship has only worsened after the death of the family's matriarch. He buried himself in work, serving as a compliance lawyer for a pharmaceutical company run by Grant's Odell Leopold. And he's now dragged poor Ridley along to the dying CEO's wilderness retreat under the illusion he's about to be promoted to the executive board.

Only – smack – he hits a unicorn with his car on the drive up. And what happens when the 1 per cent find out that unicorn blood possesses magical healing properties? They lock into exploitation mode. Bloody, equine vengeance ensues. Odell and his wife Belinda (Leoni) cover the basic territory of the nefarious elite: greed, vanity, callousness towards the staff (Jessica Hynes and Anthony Carrigan), white silk blouses. Yet, there's none of that demented glee of a good caricature, nothing like how Parker Posey has been pronouncing the word "Buddhism" over on The White Lotus.

Read the full review here. 

A document of where I've gone and the things I've seen 

Monday, 31 March
I think a lot about Rami Malek's deeply underrated performance in Short Term 12, so it was pleasure to see him back in a lead role for The Amateur. I attended the European premiere, in my most spy-appropriate attire. 

Wednesday, 2 April

I visited Worthing's lovely Connaught Theatre & Studio to see Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. It's the first David Lynch film I'd watched since his death and its poignancy felt more striking than ever – we lost a truly special artist this year, someone who could capture the fracturing, disassociative state triggered by abuse. I'm so thankful he existed in our world. 

Thursday, 3 April  

I attended an early morning presentation for Pixar's new scifi animation, Elio. And, no, it's not a covert prequel of Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name. 

A standee for Pixar's 'Elio' 

A man, Józef (Jan Nowicki), travels to a sanatorium to visit his ailing father, Jakub (Tadeusz Kondrat), only to discover that he is in a state both dead and alive. Jakub will die, or has died, but Józef, it appears, has placed him in the care of an institution existing some interval of time in the past. The only true power here is unresolved grief. Józef wanders from fantastical scene to fantastical scene, as he meets his father again well, unwell, industrious, and debauched; a boy who may be his younger self, clinging to a stamp book that regales of empires past; his mother, and women who are not his mother, who all treat him like a naughty schoolboy.

"The barometer must be showing a disastrous fall," Józef is warned, as he crawls under beds, like Alice into the rabbit hole, deeper and deeper into history's decay. Dusty batallions, colonialism's rotted bones, industrial progress filling the pockets of the rich – it's a fruitless search, through nothing but "a vomited time, second-hand goods", where the past has little to teach when all that's inscribed and written down, all literal meanings, are empty and inauthentic.

Wojciech Has's The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) adapts Bruno Schulz's Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), while weaving in several additional, crucial allusions to the Holocaust and to the destruction of Polish Jewish culture. Schulz was shot and killed by a Gestapo officer in 1942, after he'd ventured too far outside of the Jewish ghetto. Has, who was born in 1925 to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, had not only experienced the German occupation of Poland, but the 1968 expulsion of approximately 30,000 Jews. It offers the cynicism of The Hourglass Sanatorium a certain context. "My father is lucky to be dead, actually," Józef reflects. "None of this affects him at all."

The Kinoteka Polish Film Festival is taking place in London and eight other cities across the country from 6 March to 25 April. 

Val Kilmer attends the Premiere showing of new film ''Muppets from Space''.

(Picture by Dan Callister Online USA Inc)

Arrow Video will release the The Long Kiss Goodnight on Limited Edition 4K UHD next week, on 7th April. I'll be revisiting Shane Black's well-loved action thriller. 

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