Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: Friendship, Four Letters of Love, Gold Songs and Smurfs

Friendship

(101 mins, 15) Directed by Andrew DeYoung; starring Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Kate Mara

The minefield of male friendship has long been a rich source of inspiration for film-makers, to the extent that a whole new term – the bromance – gained currency in the early 00s to describe a certain kind of boys’ club buddy movie. I Love You, Man, starring Paul Rudd and Jason Segel, was the classic example, but there are numerous others.

Friendship, the squirm-inducing feature film debut from TV comedy director Andrew DeYoung (Dave, Our Flag Means Death) shares some DNA with the blustering broad comedy of the bromance, but it’s a grotesquely deformed mutation of the genre. This is the kind of humour that is as likely to have you chewing your fists to bloody nubs from second-hand embarrassment as it is to generate laughter.

Tim Robinson stars as Craig, an unpopular dork with a soul-crushing office job, a wife (Kate Mara) who is drifting into a relationship with another man and a wardrobe consisting of the shade of brown that you find when you unclog the kitchen sink. When Craig meets his new neighbour, local news weatherman Austin (Rudd), it seems that he might finally have found a friend.

Unfortunately, Craig’s negligible impulse-control and nonexistent social skills inevitably make things weird. It’s entertaining enough, in a The Cable Guy-meets-The Office, teeth-grindingly uncomfortable way. But Craig is an extreme and unlovely creation.

Four Letters of Love

(110 mins, 12A) Directed by Polly Steele; starring Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham Carter, Gabriel Byrne

The country of Ireland is treated to another misrepresentation by a movie industry that seems compelled to filter all depictions through an emerald-green lens and a thick layer of whimsy. This adaptation of Niall Williams’s bestselling romantic novel features a bingo card full of Irish cliches, including meddlesome ghosts, rebellious convent schoolgirls and a character who plays his penny whistle so vigorously he lapses into a catatonic state.

Feisty west coast islander Isabel (Ann Skelly) and forlorn, waxy-looking youth Nicholas (Fionn O’Shea) are destined to be together. But his unreliable, aspiring artist father (Pierce Brosnan) and her meddling mother (Helena Bonham Carter) keep getting in the way. There’s also the small problem that Isabel is married to a feckless fellow she met while playing truant from her Catholic school. Fans of wide shots of vintage buses trundling through the most scenically blessed corners of the island may find much to admire, but this is a saccharine and insincere slog.

Gold Songs

(93 mins) Directed by Ico Costa; starring Domingos Marengula, Neusia Guiamba

Love is a luxury for young people in the small, rural town in Mozambique where this slow-burning story starts its journey. And despite the heady attraction between them, Neusia (Neusia Guiamba) and Domingos (Domingos Marengula) find themselves priced out of the market for romance. She’s still at school; he toils at a car wash for a boss who regularly fails to pay his workers. Both know that to build a future, they first need a financial foundation. So Domingos leaves, travelling to the north of the country to join his uncle hauling sacks of earth out of the precarious pits that pass for gold mines. The spark between Neusia and Domingos falters as time and distance take their toll.

The melancholy and rather lovely second feature from Portuguese director Ico Costa (Alva), the film’s use of non-professional actors blurs the boundaries between fiction and real life – Gold Songs was developed with the participation of local people who shared their stories. The growing gap between the two characters is elegantly captured by the shooting styles of their diverging stories. Domingos, on his fruitless quest for a better life, is in constant motion, with the agitated camera trailing behind him like a stray dog. Back in the village, Neusia finds herself pregnant, her sadness and stillness captured by a subdued and watchful lens. Deep down, they both know that the further they grow apart, the less likely they are to find each other again.

Smurfs

(92 mins, U) Directed by Chris Miller, Matt Landon; starring Rihanna, James Corden, Nick Offerman

Belgium’s small, blue and inexplicably popular cultural gift to the world gets a reboot in this revamped Hollywood animation directed by Chris Miller (Puss in Boots). Smurfs has an all-new voice cast (Rihanna takes over the role of Smurfette from previous incumbents Demi Lovato and Katy Perry) and a tone that veers between knowing irony and wigged-out surrealism. But the excitable colour palette, roster of familiar evil-doers and rigidly enforced nominative determinism remains unchanged.

This provides a premise: while Clumsy Smurf, Brainy Smurf, Hefty Smurf and the others have a unique defining characteristic, No Name Smurf (James Corden) has yet to find his “thing”. A wish tacked on to an underwhelming musical number imbues him with magical powers, but no sooner has No Name learned to shoot fireworks from his fingers than he inadvertently summons the forces of evil in the form of malevolent wizard Razamel (JP Karliak).

The picture borrows unashamedly and blatantly from Inside Out and the Spiderverse films, and the dimension-hopping plot line is tiresome. But the summer holidays are almost upon us and needs must, I suppose.

Photographs by A24; Vertigo