Finding Emily
(111 mins, 12A) Directed by Alicia MacDonald; starring Spike Fearn, Angourie Rice, Cora Kirk
It’s quite an achievement to take a genre as well-worn as the romcom and to make it feel fresh and vital. But this Manchester-set tale of a lovelorn musician, a cynical psychology student, a mystery girl and a missing digit from a phone number manages just that.
Owen (Spike Fearn), a sound technician at a student disco, has a fleeting connection with a girl wearing fairy wings. It’s only a couple of dances and some snatched exchanges, but it’s enough to convince Owen that she’s the one; he’s convinced she feels the same. He knows her name is Emily. Unfortunately, the number she gave him is one digit short. He sets out to track her down, with the help of another Emily (Angourie Rice), who decides to use the unwitting Owen as a case study for her dissertation on romance and self-sabotage. Alicia MacDonald’s peppy, irreverent direction embraces phone screens and social media: Owen becomes a meme and achieves internet pariah status on his ineptly pursued quest.
But this is not the reason the feature feels so alive and new. For me, the appeal is rooted in the sharply written characters of Rachel Hirons’s crackling screenplay and, particularly, in Fearn’s thrillingly unselfconscious performance. This is the kind of physically expressive, exposed and endlessly watchable acting that we are more likely to discover in a prestige drama than in something so supposedly lightweight as a romantic comedy.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
(132 mins, 12A) Directed by Jon Favreau; starring Pedro Pascal, Sigourney Weaver, Jeremy Allen White
Jon Favreau, Hollywood’s go-to guy for high-quality popcorn pictures (Iron Man, The Lion King), is an astute choice of director for the latest movie in the ever-expanding Star Wars universe. Not only does he know this particular world better than most (Favreau was the creator, as well as a writer-director, of The Mandalorian TV series), he is also undaunted by the pressures of working with the kind of monster-sized budget that might send other film-makers into a sweat-drenched panic.
The Favreau approach to effects-driven franchise spectaculars is to take the money and have fun with it. And fun, in this instance, largely means more action and less plotting, as Pedro Pascal’s bounty-hunting warrior clobbers a seemingly inexhaustible supply of droids and extraterrestrial lowlife scum, while his sidekick, the rubbery Grogu, adorably watches on.
The story is thin: Mando zaps around the cosmos bringing imperial fugitives to justice and accruing serious enemies along the way. But the execution is impressive, with the creature design a particular highlight: at one point, the Mandalorian finds himself participating in an alien cage fight against some of the most imaginatively repulsive monsters ever dreamed up by a CGI effects team.
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The feature’s real secret weapon, however, is not its visual impact but the shimmering, mercurial score by Ludwig Göransson. After his Oscar win for his work on Sinners, the Swedish composer is an artist at the top of his game.
Hen
(96 mins, 15) Directed by György Pálfi; starring Yannis Kokiasmenos, Maria Diakopanayotou, Argyris Pandazaras
The Hungarian director György Pálfi takes an off-kilter approach to storytelling. His 2002 feature debut, Hukkle, hinted at sinister goings-on in a small village in Hungary, but contained barely any dialogue, and foregrounded an elderly man with a nasty case of hiccups.
His latest film, set in Greece, is a tale of survival and courage against a backdrop of people smuggling and organised crime. Oh, and it’s told entirely from the point of view of an escaped chicken. The uncharitable might describe Pálfi’s style as gimmicky, but he commits fully to his quirky devices and shows considerable skill as a visual storyteller.
The resourceful hen is born in captivity: the first of several unnervingly intimate egg-laying closeups heralds her arrival into the world. She seems destined for a brief, sad life in a battery farm, but fate intervenes, and after a feather-raising road crossing and an incident with a dog, she winds up at a closed waterfront taverna used as a staging post for various illicit activities.
The jolly Balkan music of the score suggests this avian adventure will be a lighthearted affair, but the low, chicken’s-eye lens captures an increasingly bleak human drama as it unfolds.
The Balloonists
(86 mins, PG) Directed by John Dower; featuring Bertrand Piccard, Brian Jones
This engrossing documentary about eccentric dreamers and the race to achieve the last great aeronautical challenge – a nonstop circumnavigation of the globe by hot air balloon – feels, at times, like a Wes Anderson film.
Swiss expedition leader Bertrand Piccard is a third-generation explorer; his grandfather set a balloon altitude record, his father was in the first two-man voyage to the Mariana Trench, the deepest known point in the Earth’s oceans. The weight of the family legacy is evident in his obsessive need to succeed and in his unnerving, unblinking ice-blue gaze.
In contrast, his mission partner in the Breitling Orbiter 3 is an affable and unflappable British bloke named Brian Jones. Their history-making flight in 1999, guided by a pigeon-fancier meteorologist, faced numerous challenges, including the risk of being shot down over Africa and a near-fatal brush with carbon monoxide poisoning. This is a fascinating account of ambition and the vagaries of the upper atmosphere.
Photographs courtesy of Focus Features, Nicola Goode/Lucasfilm Ltd