Reviews: The Phoenician Scheme, Mongrel, When the Light Breaks, Lilo & Stitch and Fountain of Youth

The Phoenician Scheme
(101 mins, 15) Directed by Wes Anderson; starring Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera

Film lovers have long agreed to disagree: either you adore Wes Anderson’s oeuvre or you find his finicky frame design and quirky characters irritating in the extreme. Perhaps this latest movie – the film-maker’s third in two years – will break that truce? Because even the superfans must be getting a little sick of this shtick by now?

So much is so familiar: the side pan and the deadpan; the scoundrel protagonist given to obscure intellectual pursuits and fighting his brother(s). This time it’s Benicio del Toro as Zsa-zsa Korda, a dashingly amoral, meta-governmental operative – realpolitik in real Prada suits – who runs the world for his own benefit. Or maybe he does have one additional underlying motivation? Maybe he’s also seeking absolution via his novitiate daughter, Liesl (played by Kate Winslet’s daughter, Mia Threapleton), who is persuaded to join Korda’s scheme with the sly suggestion that only she can save him from damnation.

There ensue several striking tableaux – a crash site in a cornfield; a black-and-white Bergmanesque afterlife. But then Anderson’s shot compositions always were pleasing to the eye. It’s the heart and the brain that are starved when every emotion is kept at such a vast ironic distance. Admittedly, some actors do flourish under these conditions, and Michael Cera has been successfully added to the rotation as Prof Bjorn, an eager entomologist with an absurd accent and one very funny scene.

Still, you may decide to side with pious Liesl on the moral matter, as it pertains to film-making as well as our immortal souls: such diversions, however delightful, must ultimately be grounded in deeper meaning. Every Anderson film is a contraption of many fascinating, intricate pieces – but what does it actually do?

Mongrel
(130 mins, 15) Directed by Chiang Wei Liang and You Qiao Yin; starring Lu Yi-ching, Wanlop Rungkumjad

This striking debut feature from Singaporean film-maker Chiang Wei Liang, co-directed with You Qiao Yin, is a sombre and painterly work revolving around Oom (Thai actor Wanlop Rungkumjad), a care worker for disabled adults in rural Taiwan. But he also acts as an overseer, keeping the other migrant workers in line for his gangster boss, Hsing (Daniel Hong Yu-hong).

European cinema has produced several films about the struggles of exploited labourers in the global gig economy. Most recently there was Laura Carreira’s On Falling, co-produced by Ken Loach’s company Sixteen Films. But while the social realists favour natural light, Mongrel is lit like a Turner painting. Passing car headlights sweep across damp-stained walls, revealing all the blues, blacks and greys of a permanent moral twilight.

And Oom himself is as much exploiter as he is exploited. Lingering shots invite us to examine his face for flickers of compassion or conscience. What is he thinking as he witnesses people trafficker Brother Te (Akira Chen) negotiate for human lives, like so much cargo? Does he still have it in him to stand up for anybody else? Or is he as survival-focused as the stray dogs that wander the highway? These questions are answered definitively, in one devastating final scene.

When the Light Breaks
(80 mins, 15) Directed by Rúnar Rúnarsson; starring Elín Hall, Katla Njálsdóttir, Mikael Kaaber

Youth is brief. So brief, its essence can be captured in a film set over one Icelandic summer’s day. Una (Elín Hall) is a pensive, pansexual Reykjavik art student whom we first see as she shares a spliff on the rocky beach with her lover and bandmate, Diddi. They’re keeping their affair secret – although it’s certainly true love – because Diddi is still involved with his unsophisticated home-town sweetheart and the news must be broken gently. Then a sudden tragedy upends all plans, forcing Una to endure a storm of emotions that would sink most people twice her age.

Some scenes play a little too much like Scandi TV’s answer to teen soap Skins – as when Una seeks oblivion in binge-drinking and techno death metal. But Hall is a fine actor whose elfin face registers every ripple of grief emanating from that first shock of impact. This performance, combined with the film-maker’s post-credits dedication to the memory of lost friends, casts these intense emotions in a useful new light. It’s the fresh pain of first heartbreak, sharpened by the lens of maturity.

Lilo & Stitch
(108 mins, U) Directed by Dean Fleischer Camp; starring Maia Kealoha, Sydney Agudong, Chris Sanders, Hannah Waddingham

We first met them in 2002’s original animated feature. Now three sequels and a TV series later, Stitch’s giggle is still being gargled by franchise creator Chris Sanders. Only he’s in a forgettable live-action remake – it’s the Disney way – squandering the talents of an ensemble cast that includes Zach Galifianakis.

Stitch, AKA Experiment 626 from the planet Turo, arrives on Kauai island after lonely Lilo (Maia Kealoha) wishes upon a shooting star (it’s the Disney way). There, his relentless mischief makes Lilo’s already precarious home life with her big sis guardian, Nani, totally untenable.

Luckily, the trio are ensconced in the warmth of their “Ohana” – that’s the Hawaiian concept of extended family – and there’s never any risk this won’t end in a group hug set to a ukulele Elvis cover. It’s cliched, but the pure love that exists between a kid and their pet – or furry blue alien – is also timelessly touching. It’s the Disney way.

Fountain of Youth
(125 mins, 12A) Directed by Guy Ritchie; starring John Krasinski, Natalie Portman, Eiza González, Domhnall Gleeson; on Apple TV+

There’s nary a cockney gangster to be found in Guy Ritchie’s new globetrotting caper. Probably because he’s directing from a script by James Vanderbilt, which weaves in the Vanderbilts’ own storied history along with just enough erudition to make the plot plausible(ish) yet still pacy.

John Krasinski plays Luke Purdue, a charming thief; think Indiana Jones meets Thomas Crown, albeit unburdened by any of the former’s brooding archaeological expertise or the latter’s sex appeal. This leaves Luke free to pursue his quixotic quest for the mythical (surely) elixir of life, in a PG-cert-seeking fashion, bankrolled by a terminally ill billionaire (Domhnall Gleeson) and aided by his museum curator sister (Natalie Portman). If he can just persuade her to loosen up a little.