Jonathan Romney’s pick of the week’s other films: The Last One for the Road, Life Support, Moana, and more

The Last One for the Road

(100 mins, 15) Directed by Francesco Sossai; starring Filippo Scotti, Sergio Romano, Pierpaolo Capovilla

Italian cinema rarely gets a look-in on our screens these days, barring star directors such as Paolo Sorrentino and Alice Rohrwacher. But Francesco Sossai is a new name worth watching, as shown by this laid-back comedy. Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla play Carlobianchi and Doriano, weatherbeaten old lowlifes on an unfinished-business mission in Italy’s northern Veneto region, and ever-thirsty for one more drink en route. Befriending a shy student, Giulio (Filippo Scotti), they take him on a trip that can always accommodate another detour, geographic or narrative; here a flashback, there a glimpse of an abandoned brutalist villa.

With a score heavy on country folk and Ry Cooder-ish twang, the film depicts a contemporary Italy increasingly prone to Americanisation. It also laments that the historic Veneto is being eroded, exploited for yet another stretch of autostrada.

Initially sinister, then oddly charming, Carlobianchi and Doriano are men who have lived to the full, if sleazily, but retained some soul. While Scotti, the young lead in Sorrentino’s quasi-autobiographical The Hand of God, nicely shifts Giulio’s uptight stiffness into a slowly burgeoning appetite for life. Sossai shares Sorrentino’s taste for the grotesque and for wilful left turns, but carries them off with a lighter touch than that director has shown for some time. Steeped in atmosphere, this film takes us to surprising places at its own sweet pace – just as you hope a good road movie would.

Life Support

(93 mins, 15) Directed by Daniele Rugo; featuring Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, Dr Victoria Rose, Prof Nick Maynard

Urgent and not a little harrowing, this documentary is about international doctors who have travelled to Gaza to help medical teams struggling with the horrific devastation caused by Israel’s continuing bombardment. Among them are specialists in paediatrics, gastrointestinal surgery, obstetrics and plastic surgery – and it quickly becomes clear how desperately all these skills are needed.

Interviews with those involved make it clear that this is not a feature about westerners bravely venturing into a war zone: rather, it’s about their bearing witness to the courage and tenacity of the local practitioners who they help, and providing their own accounts of conditions in Gaza, given the heavy restrictions on reporting. Along with interviews and on-the-spot video material, there is much shocking footage of casualties of all ages, of malnutrition, of the wreckage inflicted on Gaza’s hospitals.

Such images, and the thoughtful testimonies of the doctors featured, make Life Support – whose executive producers include Susan Sarandon and Asif Kapadia – an incisive, timely watch. However, amid the very occasional voiceover, read by Denise Gough, there is one brief mention of the events of 7 October 2023, described simply as “a surprise attack on Israel”.

The film, and many of its contributors, are clear that Israel’s policy in Gaza must be officially recognised as genocide and ethnic cleansing, yet somehow Life Support is reluctant to call Hamas’s actions in Israel a massacre.

Moana

(115 mins, PG) Directed by Thomas Kail; starring Dwayne Johnson, Catherine Laga’aia, Rena Owen, John Tui

There’s surely no form of cinema less necessary, or more literal-minded, than live-action remakes of digital animation hits. The latest to get the treatment is Moana, Disney’s 2016 feminist eco-fable inspired by Polynesian myth. Syrupy as it was, the original impressed with its spectacular ocean waves; rather less imposingly, this recreation mixes digitals with images of the real sea.

The result is similarly hybrid. Moana’s animal sidekick is still a CGI chicken, but now with photo-real textures in its eyeballs and skin – to singularly grotesque effect. And the cartoonishly hulking demigod-trickster-clown Maui, voiced in the original by Dwayne Johnson, is now actually a lush-maned Johnson – simply a different kind of cartoonish. The human touch in this Moana is supplied by Johnson’s genial self-mockery, by Rena Owen as the heroine’s wise, wily grandmother, and by newcomer Catherine Laga’aia in the lead, exuding candour and enthusiasm.

This is an unimaginatively faithful remake that leaves the original intact, complete with songs co-written by Lin-Manuel Miranda. But the replacement of animated beings with live actors – singing, dancing battalions of them – manages to ramp up the folkloric kitsch considerably.

Shoot the People

(86 mins, 12A) Directed by Andy Mundy-Castle; featuring Misan Harriman

Photographer Misan Harriman has been in the news lately, having stepped down as chair of London’s Southbank Centre, after (but not, he has insisted, a result of) allegations over a social media post. That, however, is not among the themes of this documentary, which is oddly positioned between being essentially by Harriman – at least, featuring him in a presenter/interviewer role – and being an admiring portrait.

Formerly a City recruitment executive, Nigerian-born Harriman is a self-taught photographer who, rapidly mastering his art, became known for his celebrity portraits and images in magazines, including Vogue. But Andy Mundy-Castle’s film is specifically about his committed documentation of protests for causes, among them Palestine and Black Lives Matter.

There’s an overextended section showing its subject in Los Angeles, where his short film The After was nominated for an Oscar in 2024. The real grist, however, is the political content. Harriman interviews activist Martin Luther King III, who discusses his father’s legacy. In the film’s most revealing section, Harriman pays tribute to the late South African photographer Peter Magubane, who tirelessly risked his life to document the struggle against apartheid.

We don’t get nearly enough chance to look closely at Harriman’s photos, but we do get a sense of his mission in the world. That is to capture and disseminate images such as the very resonant one that closes the film: the Minneapolis street seen four years after George Floyd’s death, painted with a list of American casualties of police violence.

Photographs by Simone Falso/Bulldog Film Distribution, Disney, Watermelon Pictures