Guy Lodge’s pick of other films: Freakier Friday, The Kingdom, Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore

Freakier Friday

(111 mins, PG) Directed by Nisha Ganatra; starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, Julia Butters, Sophia Hammons

You have to hand it to Disney for squeezing every last drop from Mary Rodgers’s 1972 children’s novel. Including assorted TV spin-offs, this belated sequel to the popular 2003 remake of Freaky Friday is the studio’s seventh variation on the mother-daughter body-swap tale, and there’s not a lot of juice left in the idea. Twenty-two years ago, with her career dewy and full of promise, Lindsay Lohan was Anna, the recalcitrant rocker teen switching places with her overbearing psychiatrist mother Tess, then zestily played by Jamie Lee Curtis. Now, as Lohan hits the comeback trail, Anna is a beleaguered single mum to spiky 16-year-old Harper (Julia Butters). Naturally, the two are at war in a manner only an inexplicable corporeal exchange engineered by a psychic can fix.

This being a sequel, however, things need to be bigger and busier, and so a second swap is contrived – this one between Curtis’s still-perky Tess and Lily (Sophia Hammons), Harper’s mean-girl classroom enemy, who also happens to be the daughter of Anna’s new fiance. Having a mother and daughter walk in each other’s shoes is a scenario still ripe for farcical chaos and bittersweet realisations. Having two effective strangers do the same proves less rewarding in Jordan Weiss’s plot-cluttered script, beyond the expected cross-generational jabs.

For those who grew up on the 2003 film, there are nostalgic pleasures and callbacks here. For everyone else, there’s less to hold on to. Curtis gets little to do this time, and while it’s poignant watching the long-embattled Lohan play a woman approaching middle age and reckoning with missed opportunities, both are handily out-acted by Butters, the young talent who made such a precocious impression in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Perhaps Butters will be on mum duty when Disney churns out Freakiest Friday in 2047, but other paths are available: Jodie Foster, after all, stood in her position in the first Freaky Friday 49 years ago, and hasn’t looked back.

The Kingdom

(111 mins, 15) Directed by Julien Colonna; starring Ghjuvanna Benedetti, Saveriu Santucci

The balmy island of Corsica provides a strikingly off-kilter backdrop to this hard, punchy blend of gang-war thriller and coming-of-age drama: officially French but its own defiant terrain, idyllic but untamed, heavy on hot sun and cold souls. Local director Julien Colonna’s impressive debut feature is tightly focused on Lesia (fierce newcomer Ghjuvanna Benedetti), a flinty 15-year-old whose idle summer plans are upturned when her aunt and guardian sends her to live with her father Pierre-Paul (Saveriu Santucci), a vicious fugitive mob boss wanted by parties on all sides of the law.

The teen is both awed by her dad and aware of his unsavoury livelihood, though a summer in his company proves brutally eye-opening: Colonna deftly infuses the hard-boiled conventions of the crime genre with the forgiving curiosity of an adolescent perspective. As a study of extreme parent-child disillusionment, it’s not altogether unfamiliar, but it leaves a raw mark.

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore

(96 mins) Directed by Shoshannah Stern

At just 21, Marlee Matlin won the best actress Oscar for the 1986 tearjerker Children of a Lesser God, becoming the first deaf person to win an Academy Award, and blazing a trail that, sadly, few have followed in the decades since. The ongoing scourge of Hollywood ableism is confronted with thoughtful candour and good humour in this conventionally assembled but affecting documentary portrait of the resilient star.

It touches on Matlin’s struggles with addiction and abuse but it’s no misery memoir. Rather, it stresses her perseverance as an activist for deaf artists and viewers alike, including years of lobbying for industry adoption of closed captioning, once groundbreaking, now familiar, which features in the film throughout.

Photograph by Glen Wilson/ Vertigo Releasing