Thursday, April 10, 2025

When Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) tells his wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche) in The Return that she couldn't possibly understand what he went through in the two decades they were apart, you have to wonder what exactly he means in this case. Is it the burdens of war and meaningless bloodshed, which form the core of Uberto Pasolini's adaptation of the last third of The Odyssey? Or does he mean, you know, the nymphs, cannibals, sirens, sea monsters etc etc?

There are no gods or monsters in Pasolini's film, which the producer-turned-filmmaker (and nephew of the great director Luchino Visconti) co-wrote with John Collee and Edward Bond. It opts for material realism (though not historical, since the Bronze Age people of Ithaca appear to be living in what looks to be a medieval fort). Yet plausibility is not the same as emotional veracity. And not only does The Return root out any and all mentions of the supernatural, but it does away with the emotions that power what is one of the most influential yet sparingly adapted stories in existence.

Read the full review here. 

Out this week: 

The Return (**), a stiff adaptation of The Odyssey, will soon hopefully be rectified by Christopher Nolan, while Rami Malek makes the pleasingly silly just believable enough in spy thriller The Amateur (***).

Meanwhile, Christopher Landon balances the real-life terrors of domestic abuse and a nonsensical premise involving threatening memes to mixed but surprisingly effective results in Drop (***), while Louise Courvoisier brings her own experiences of rural life on the French–Swiss border to Holy Cow (****) a sweet and warm coming-of-age story about competitive cheese making. 

Written by Clarisse Loughrey

Considering tech nerds are the ones now systematically destroying the planet, they don't particularly deserve the Jason Bourne rebrand that The Amateur provides. Still, Rami Malek plays to type so well, having first come to the world's attention playing a hacker in television's Mr Robot, that you can't really begrudge him running around London, Paris and Istanbul, breaking into CCTV cameras and shattering sky pools with a bit of code.

This thriller, a reimagined take on Robert Littell's 1981 novel, is both deeply conventional and pleasingly silly, shot with the sleek minimalism of a car ad by director James Hawes, known for his work on Apple TV+'s Slow Horses. It not only kicks off with a dead wife (Rachel Brosnahan's Sarah), but then has said dead wife periodically waltz back onto screen in the form of a grief-struck hallucination, tossing her deep-conditioned brown hair and smiling like the most beautiful woman you've ever seen in a stock photo.

Malek's Charlie Heller at least has an unusual way of enacting bloody vengeance on her killers. He's a CIA cryptographer with such an elevated IQ (170, as someone makes sure to point out), that he out-nerds the little clique of nerds he sits with at lunch. They gawk at the special friendship he's forged with genuine spy Jackson O'Brien (Jon Bernthal), having once saved his life.

In fact, he's a little too good at his job, which is how he ends up with his mitts on damning evidence that the CIA has been covering up its own war crimes – here, writers Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli strive to be pointedly apolitical, with a story that's sceptical about power but happy to lay the blame on a few bad eggs in an otherwise honourable system. It's enough ammo for him to blackmail his boss, deputy director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany), into offering Charlie the training needed to take out his wife's killers himself.

Read the full review here. 

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

Thursday, 3 April
I attended the UK premiere of The Penguin Lessons, with Steve Coogan in attendance and (understandably but disappointingly) no flightless birds on the red carpet. You can read my review of the film next week. 

Monday, 7 April

I caught a double bill of some of this week's releases: The Drop and The Return. They didn't share much in common. 

Wednesday, 9 April  

With Hollywood now increasingly fixated on adapting Broadway musicals for the screen, I wonder whether they'll ever get around to Hadestown. I saw it for the first time, at London's Lyric Theatre, and found its blues-driven retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice to be both beautifully crafted and performed. 

The stage for 'Hadestown' at the Lyric Theatre

I love Charly Baltimore in The Long Kiss Goodnight. I mean, she's a platinum blonde Geena Davis telling everybody to suck her dick. That's feminine power unleashed, the irrepressible anger of feeling the years in the fight and still seeing the assholes win. But she also occupies that weird, tilted space of the nineties action heroine (standing side-by-side with The Terminator's Sarah Connor). It's easy as a woman to root for her, but just as easy to imagine how she's been built to scare, titillate and then ultimately soothe men.

In The Long Kiss Goodnight, written by Shane Black, whose script sold for a record $4m, we're first introduced to Davis as Samantha Caine, a happily married homebody who suffered a case of "focal retrograde amnesia" and woke up on a beach with no memories eight years ago. Of course, she discovers she actually used to be a high-level assassin who confused herself for her cover, Samantha, after a serious head injury – and the real her, Charly Baltimore, starts to emerge like a sexually confident Hyde to Samantha's Dr. Jekyll.

So, the Madonna discovers she's really the whore, all while her buddy cop partner Mitch Henessey (Samuel L Jackson) gets to float the idea that there must at least be a little bit of Samantha in Charly for her to have fallen into the role so easily. This proves especially crucial when Samantha's daughter Caitlin (Yvonne Zima) comes under threat, and suddenly Charly's maternal instincts magically arise. A few scenes earlier, she was snapping, "I didn't ask for the kid!", and before that, looking the little girl dead in the eyes and telling her, "Life is pain. Get used to it." The Long Kiss Goodnight ends with the perfect for compromise (for the men, at least): Charly still looks like the whore, with her blonde locks and cigarette, but she's been sufficiently tamed. 

The Long Kiss Goodnight is now available Limited Edition 4K UHD. 

John Boyega, Daisy Ridley and Oscar Isaac attend Star Wars Celebration 2015 on April 16, 2015 in Anaheim, California.

(Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney)

Vertigo Releasing are rereleasing on digital Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love, with Tilda Swinton, on 14 April. I'll be checking out this early work from the Challengers and Call Me by Your Name director. 

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