Review: Five Feet Apart

Cystic fibrosis sufferer seventeen-year-old Stella Grant (Haley Lu Richardson) is in hospital for her latest round of treatment when she spots brooding new patient Wil Newman (Cole Sprouse). He’s everything she’s not: she obsessively follows the rules and he’s the original bad boy of cystic fibrosis, right down to having an infection that means he no longer qualifies for the lung transplant that's a CF sufferer's big chance at a regular life. 

Thanks to the risks of cross-infection, all CF patients have to stay at least six feet apart from each other (yes, that’s not what the title says; yes, the film explains it), which obviously will never be a problem for these two. After all, they have almost nothing in common and no reason to spend time together, let alone fall in love, right? Right? It's not like opposites attract or anything...

Anyone who's owned a mobile phone for more than five minutes will spend much of this film wondering why the teens are so angsty about touching when there's a whole world of options for getting each other off literally in the palm of their hands - but this is clearly not that kind of film, and the carnal side of their desires is barely touched upon. Theirs is a connection of the heart, not the groin... though a bit more of that (or even just a discussion of the available options) would have made this a lot more memorable.

Without the endless naked selfies and graphic sexting this story desperately needed, what remains is utterly predictable in just about every direction, right down to a side character (who’s obviously doomed from the start) getting a big moment declaring he’s going to overcome his fears and finally live his life right. No prizes for guessing what happens in the very next scene.

Still, a genre film can be satisfying in its own right if it ticks the right boxes, and this does a decent job of balancing teen angst with sexy longing with "aww the cute teens are doomed". It's utterly medically indefensible and a complete fantasy on that front, but a grim slice of reality this is not: you're here for the hot teens in forbidden love, not any serious insights into a chronic and terminal condition. 

That said, the medical side of things is clearly just an obstacle to their love, nothing more. The balance between the demands of the romance weepie and the hard-and-fast rules around their medical condition is really the only thing (aside from a pair of decent performances from the leads) that makes this interesting. Stella learns to love, but any expression of that love will most likely kill her; the rest of the film might be cheesy, but that conflict gives it enough drama to stagger through to the end.

- Anthony Morris

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Review: Fighting with my Family

As part of a tight-knit but low-rent wrestling family, siblings Paige (Florence Pugh) and Zak (Jack Lowden) fight in the ring and look out for each other outside of it. Zak’s dream is to wrestle in the WWE: Paige might have the moves, but she isn’t quite as committed. Still, when they’re both offered the chance to try out when the WWE hits London, neither wants to pass it up – but only one (okay, it’s Paige) makes it in. 

Based on the true story of WWE wrestler Paige, director Stephen Merchant focuses as much on her scrappy family (Nick Frost and Lena Headey play her rough but loving parents) as on her journey to the top. It's a strange mix of working class family comedy and sports aspirational movie, one half jokes about her parents sordid past and wrestling in pubs, one half glossy training montages on Florida beaches.

It's not surprising then that some stretches of this drift a little, especially in the second half. But Vince Vaughn as the head scout / trainer is excellent (as is The Rock, who appears as himself in a handful of scenes), playing a character who is basically your typical Army movie drill sergeant - you know, he's gruff but he still (sort of) cares, plus he gets to let fly with a lot of choice "motivational" insults.

Meanwhile, Zak’s struggle to figure out a path in life that doesn’t lead to pro wrestling (or to selling drugs down the local council flats) is predictable but still packs a punch, in part because Paige isn't sure she wants the life she's lucked into either.  She's a goth in a world of blonde models (who she can barely hide her scorn for), but her rough and ready wrestling style might not fit in with the WWE's more polished approach.

Merchant (who also wrote the script) is more than happy to lean into the quirky side of his characters without sacrificing their heart. Frost and Headey take full advantage of this, going broad without going over the top. It's the combination of solid (if predictable) storytelling and offbeat characters that makes this drama so funny (or this comedy so moving). It's occasionally rough around the edges, but like its characters, that's a big part of the charm.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Sometimes Always Never

Scrabble and tailoring: this is most definitely a very English take on grief. Bill Nighy is Alan, a father who hasn't so much buried his grief over his missing-possibly-dead son as he's dropped it in an impeccably cut jacket pocket where his hand occasionally brushes up against it.

We meet him waiting on a windswept seaside foreshore passing the time by chatting happily to an extremely disinterested ice cream man. If Alan was played by just about anybody else, it'd feel like a parody of a certain kind of adrift English gentleman, and what follows would crumble in a heap.

Nighy brings two essential things to this occasionally twee but never sentimental film - heart and a tough of ruthlessness. The heart takes time to develop: the ruthlessness we see when he and his son Peter (Sam Reily) - who assumed they were going on a day trip but now finds himself staying the night in a antiquated hotel - encounter a man and wife also staying at the hotel.

Alan suggests a game of scrabble; Peter, still haunted by childhood memories of endlessly playing a shoddy off-brand version, goes to bed. He wakes the next morning to find that Alan hustled the husband out of two hundred pounds. Worse, it soon develops that they're all there for the same reason: to identify a body that's washed ashore.

What follows is charmingly unpredictable in the details, but always firmly anchored emotionally. Alan has never stopped searching for his other son, who stormed out of the house years ago over an argument over a word in Scrabble; when he finds an on-line player with the same style as his missing son, he grasps at hope like a drowning man.

He does this while staying with Peter and his wife Sue (Alice Lowe)  in a room he shares with their son Jack (Louis Healy), proving to be a good influence on Jack - especially when it comes to romance and tailoring (the title is a reference to which buttons should be done up on a three-button suit jacket) - even as Peter's frustrations with his father's inability to move on grow.

This has the slightly heightened realism of a slightly damp Wes Anderson film. It never becomes cloying or distracting, partly because Nighy is so good, party because the core of the story is a wound that can't be healed. This sweet, good-natured film is constantly surprising, often insightful, and sure-handed about grief in a way many flashier films can only aspire to. It's a gem.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Captain Marvel

It's tempting to say Captain Marvel has arrived just a little too late. Marvel's strange reluctance to put a female character front and center in one of their films went on too long for them to score any brownie points now, but better late than never; the real problem is that this 90s-set movie feels like a superhero film that would have wowed audiences in 2009, and we've all changed a lot since Iron Man.

Like just about every Marvel movie of the last few years, the story (and character) feels like one step forward, one step back. There's the retro soundtrack and space strangeness of Guardians of the Galaxy, only now with the comedy double act of Thor: Ragnarok. Carol Danvers AKA Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) has both kinds of Marvel superhero powers: she can physically fight, and she can also shoot energy beams (and eventually, fly). The story seems straightforward, but there's just enough in the way of twists to keep things interesting until the action sequences (which are not interesting) kick in. At least the bad guys are decent.

Danvers herself is quick with a quip and approaches her job with a very Buffy-like combination of competence and ease. She's initially part of a Kree Empire military unit (led by Jude Law) who finds herself cut off on Earth and teaming up with S.H.I.E.L.D. pen pusher Nick Fury (a CGI de-aged Samuel L Jackson) against an infiltration of shape-shifting Skrulls (led by Ben Mendelsohn, using his Aussie accent to charming effect). It's a slightly odd mix of 2019 space action and 1995 paranoid TV drama complete with underground military base, and if the "1995" this takes place in is just a thrown together collection of kinda sorta vague references, who cares so long as we're all having fun, right?

So as a corporately-mandated origin story for a character designed to replace... let's say Iron Man?... in the next wave of Marvel films, this undoubtedly does its job. And there are definitely enough fun moments scattered throughout the film to make it worth the price of admission. But as an actual feature film that's telling a story? It's a bit shoddy.

Early scenes do a good job of setting Danvers up as someone who's lost her past, but when she gets it back she barely seems interested in it (and why would she be? It's basically "bad home life, became a test pilot"). At least that's more of an arc than Fury gets, and while he and Danver have some ok banter there's never much real chemistry between them - which may be the fault of the otherwise impressively seamless CGI taking 30 years off Jackson's face.

Larson does have strong chemistry with Law, which is nice yet throws part of the film off kilter, and she always seems slightly more comfortable during the rare serious moments than she is with the playful side of things. Mendelsohn is, unsurprisingly, the best thing in the film and sells a development that could otherwise have skewed the story badly with an effortlessness that shows just how good these Marvel films really could be if they weren't so constrained by their own conventions.

Captain Marvel is a mid-tier Marvel movie - it doesn't get anything seriously wrong, but it rarely gets anything especially right. Like most of their recent origin films, it feels more like its mission is to set up a character to carry the Marvel corporate universe forward than tell a story anyone felt really needed to be told. Maybe if Disney found a few more directors who could actually handle decent fights things would improve: for a genre based almost entirely around people doing impossible things, this is yet another Marvel movie where the action - whether on the ground or in the air - is all-too-grounded.

- Anthony Morris