Köln 75
(117 mins, 15) Directed by Ido Fluk; starring Mala Emde, John Magaro, Michael Chernus
In 1975, the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett (John Magaro) played a now celebrated concert at Cologne’s opera house. A recording of his entirely improvised performance went on to become the bestselling solo album in jazz history. This irreverent picture is not so much about the concert itself but the chaos and precarious catalogue of near-disasters that preceded it, as well as the remarkable teenager who organised it. It doesn’t take long before the young Vera Brandes (Mala Emde) has booked a tour for Ronnie Scott and is earning enough as a part-time music promoter while still at school to carve out some independence from her overbearing bully of a father.
But Jarrett’s performance, as explained in the cheeky fourth-wall-smashing jazz lectures by “critic-at-large” Michael Watts (Michael Chernus), is in a different league. It is a make-or-break moment for the 18-year-old German, and a creative crunch point for the cranky, exhausted and ailing Jarrett. Innumerable obstacles – from a defective grand piano to the patriarchy in general and the sexist jazz elite specifically – threaten to derail the event before it even happens. But Emde’s character is a tireless force of nature; the propulsive camerawork captures her energy and harnesses it as a storytelling device.
Jazz purists may sniff at a film about a Jarrett concert that failed to get the rights to the music, but it’s hard not to fall for Vera and the sunny depiction of countercultural idealism.
Masters of the Universe
(141 mins, 12A) Directed by Travis Knight; starring Nicholas Galitzine, Camila Mendes, Idris Elba
Hear that? That’s the sound of a barrel being scraped over in Hollywood. The search for an existing piece of intellectual property (IP) that hasn’t already been chucked into the studio meat grinder for franchise fare has finally stumbled upon the comic book character He-Man. Children of the 1980s may remember him as the protagonist of a short-lived animated series about good (generally a muscled, godlike being wearing tiny leather shorts) versus evil (cackling creature with a skull for a face).
Nicholas Galitzine dons the chest harness as Prince Adam of the planet Eternia, AKA weaponised beefcake He-Man. The director Travis Knight (whose previous work includes the acclaimed animation Kubo and the Two Strings and Bumblebee, arguably the best of the Transformers movies) correctly realises that Masters of the Universe is not an IP that needs to take itself too seriously.
Adopting the tone of the vastly superior 2023 film Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, the picture punctuates its thunderous metal guitar excesses (Queen’s Brian May wrangles the axe on the score) and cartoon violence with humour. Unlike D&D, however, the jokes – largely smutty innuendo and digs at Adam’s preference for de-escalation rather than smashing stuff – fall flat.
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Erupcja
(71 mins, 12A) Directed by Pete Ohs; starring Charli XCX, Lena Góra, Will Madden
Pop star Charli XCX continues to diversify her cultural reach with her first lead acting performance (the mockumentary The Moment doesn’t count, since she was essentially playing herself). She’s unaffected and natural in the underpowered role of British tourist Bethany, who has travelled for a short break to Warsaw with her partner Rob (Will Madden). Lovesick Rob is planning to propose, but Bethany absconds with her close friend Nel (Lena Góra), a Polish florist with whom she shares a heady, reckless connection.
What’s most notable about this thin, inconsequential picture is what a curious choice of project it is for a performer with the undeniable magnetism of Charli XCX. It’s a film with a challenging title (the Polish word for “eruption”) that exists at the most defiantly arty end of the arthouse spectrum: it evokes something of the quirky spirit of 1960s eastern European oddities such as Vera Chytilová’s Daisies, while borrowing the laconic narration of the Georgian director Aleksandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? For all its loose energy, there’s very little of substance in Ohs’s meagrely plotted curio.
Enzo
(103 mins, 15) Directed by Robin Campillo; starring Eloy Pohu, Pierfrancesco Favino, Élodie Bouchez
There’s a mass of expectations for a boy such as Enzo. The 16-year-old son of an engineer mother (Élodie Bouchez) and an academic father (Pierfrancesco Favino) lives in the south of France in an airy clifftop villa – all glass, aspirations and impeccable taste. His bourgeois background offers the very best of everything, from the wine quaffed poolside to the education opportunities available to Enzo and his older brother. But Enzo rejects this world, dropping out of school to pursue an apprenticeship on a building site. His father hectors and criticises; Enzo simmers and builds a wall between his family life and his work, escaping into his growing bond with Ukrainian labourer Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi).
The latest film from Robin Campillo (120 BPM, Red Island), Enzo revisits themes of coming of age and queer sexual awakening that the French writer-director has repeatedly explored during his career. This is a tentative story that deals in hinted rather than concrete intimacies, but forms a quietly compelling character study.
Photographs by Vue Lumiere, Vertigo Releasing, Giles Keyte/Amazon MGM, Les Films de Pierre