Film reviews: The Marching Band, Hallow Road, Final Destination, Magic Farm, A New Kind of Wilderness

The Marching Band
(103 mins, 15) Directed by Emmanuel Courcol; starring Benjamin Lavernhe, Pierre Lottin, Sarah Suco

Two long-lost brothers, separated by the messy circumstances of their early childhood, are reunited in this uplifting, music-driven French film by Emmanuel Courcol. Best known for The Big Hit, an unabashed crowd-pleaser about a group of prisoners staging a production of Waiting for Godot, Courcol gives his latest film a touch of the robust humour and energy of The Full Monty combined with the Gallic tradition of stirring workers’ rights dramas.

When Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe), a conductor with a globe-trotting career to match his world-class reputation, discovers that he has leukaemia, his search for a bone marrow donor reveals a family secret. He was, he learns, adopted. And he has a brother, Jimmy (Pierre Lottin). The reunion between the two is rocky – the elephant in the room is the privilege gap between them. While Thibaut grew up cushioned by wealth, with music lessons from the age of three, factory canteen-worker Jimmy, a self-taught trombonist and member of an amateur marching band, had few opportunities. A long-running strike at a local plant and the threat of mass unemployment sharpen his sense of injustice at the meagre hand dealt to him.

The predictable elements (Courcol has never met a musical montage sequence he couldn’t milk for maximum heart-warming pathos) are mitigated by lived-in performances from an engaging cast of French character actors, and a closing sequence so shamelessly and cheerfully manipulative that any resistance is entirely useless. Bring a family pack of tissues.

Hallow Road
(80 mins, 15) Directed by Babak Anvari; starring Rosamund Pike, Matthew Rhys, Megan McDonnell 

What lengths would a parent go to in order to protect their child? In the case of Hallow Road’s embattled mum and dad, played by Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys, they include a frantic 2am drive to a deserted forest where their drug-addled adult daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell) has hit, and possibly killed, a pedestrian with her father’s car.

Largely playing out through fraught phone calls made from the vehicle, the film borrows a claustrophobic device from Steven Knight’s Locke, and, it has to be said, rather botches it as Alice’s parents realise, with mounting horror, the gravity of their daughter’s situation.

Things just about hold together, with Pike and Rhys compensating for a less than gripping screenplay and monotonous visuals (there’s only so much you can do when your cast and camera are squeezed into a 4x4). But then Hallow Road, which is directed by Babak Anvari (Under the Shadow), throws a supernatural spanner into the mix. Plot logic and coherence turn out to be the fatal casualty in this car crash of a film.

Final Destination: Bloodlines
(110 mins, 15) Directed by Zach Lipovsky; starring Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Gabrielle Rose, Richard Harmon

The sixth film in the inventively gory Final Destination horror series follows the same gruesomely efficient basic premise as the others. Characters cheat death by somehow avoiding their preordained demise; death comes after them with the relentless, single-minded focus of a TikToker looking for traction.

This time, though, there’s a twist. It took death so long to snuff out the original victims of a restaurant disaster (the opening sequence is a lip-smacking appetiser for the mayhem to come) that many have gone on to have families. Now death is coming for entire bloodlines, including that of Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana). Fortunately, Stefani has the gift of precognition – she can see death’s plans – and thanks to her eccentric survivalist grandma Iris (Gabrielle Rose), one of the original punters at the doomed restaurant party, a chance to beat death.

This latest instalment is one of the best in a consistently entertaining series: everything from garden rakes and wind chimes to garbage compressors and intimate body piercings are weaponised in eye-watering fashion. It’s an absolute blast.

Magic Farm
(93 mins, 15) Directed by Amalia Ulman; starring Chloë Sevigny, Alex Wolff, Joe Apollonio

A scrappy satire about crass, entitled Americans abroad, Magic Farm feels like a short film painfully stretched to feature length. Chloë Sevigny heads a cast that struggles to make much of worth or interest from an assortment of thinly written characters and a glibly absurdist scenario. She plays Edna, the presenter of a quirky, trend-hunting TV show. When the crew find themselves in the wrong South American country by mistake, they decide to invent a fake story with the help of the long-suffering local people. Meanwhile, a major health crisis is unfolding there, but the crew are too busy bitching about the lack of wifi to notice.

Director Amalia Ulman’s use of cheap and cheesy visual effects is presumably meant to be ironic but adds very little to this paltry offering.

A New Kind of Wilderness
(84 mins, 12A) Directed by Silje Evensmo Jacobsen

It’s an idyllic existence. Maria, her husband Nik and their four children live off-grid in the wilds of Norway, in harmony with the land and untethered from the rat race. But paradise is precarious. And when a devastating tragedy strikes the family, it soon becomes clear that this way of life is no longer sustainable.

Silje Evensmo Jacobsen’s sensitive, gorgeously photographed documentary changes pace, evolving from a portrait of an alternative lifestyle to a profound study of grief and healing, of the balance between staying true to a cherished ethos and simply surviving in the face of crushing sadness. This Sundance prizewinner is rather special: a story of pain and a work of heartbreaking optimism.