Heartstopper Forever
(114 mins, 15) Directed by Wash Westmoreland; starring Kit Connor, Joe Locke, William Gao
The aggressively inclusive teen LGBTQ+ Netflix series Heartstopper gets a movie spin-off that follows adorable schoolboy couple Nick (Kit Connor) and Charlie (Joe Locke) as they navigate the next stages of life.
Having – over the course of three seasons – already worked through high school homophobia, Charlie’s anorexia and OCD diagnosis, and Nick’s rocky relationship with his father, the boys are now in a stable, happy relationship with a supportive peer group. Of course, the dramatic stakes are low if everything is rosy in Nick-and-Charlie world, so the film resorts to clunkily engineered discord, including a wholly unconvincing breakup.
Director Wash Westmoreland, leaning a little heavily on musical montages, keeps things breezy, even when Nick is downing shots to cope with his anxiety about university, Charlie’s eating disorder threatens to flare up, and both are mooning around like wounded puppies. Written by Alice Oseman, who also scripted the hit series and created the webcomic and graphic novel on which the story is based, the film is as upbeat and celebratory as a Pride parade. This is entry-level queer cinema, but for the YA and younger audiences who saw themselves represented in the series, this sweet, undemanding picture will be a welcome opportunity to reconnect with much-loved characters one final time.
Synthetic Sincerity
(72 mins, PG) Directed by Marc Isaacs; starring Ilinca Manolache
This docu-drama from the film-maker Marc Isaacs (The Road: A Story of Life and Death) is a confounding curio that explores the evolution of the human face in the age of AI. In this uneven blend of fact and fiction, the director’s past films are licensed by an AI research facility at the “University of Southern England”. Technicians map the emotional expressions of the characters in his documentaries to fine-tune the authenticity of AI-generated faces. In return, Isaacs is invited to film the process.
Isaacs is guided through all of this by a stern AI assistant (a character created with the collaboration of Romanian actress Ilinca Manolache). But Isaacs’ documentarian instincts get the better of him and he starts to probe into the lives of the staff at the institute, ultimately contributing to a work-place tribunal involving a feisty researcher. To what end? I couldn’t begin to tell you. While hybrid films that blur the line between documentary and fiction are frequently fascinating, using this approach to explore AI – a subject already loaded with questions of fakery and inauthenticity – feels self-defeating.
A Year in London
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(89 mins, 15) Directed by Flaminia Graziadei; starring Melanie Liburd, Nina Pons, Matteo Bassi
A soapy Anglo-Italian drama about the gay sexual awakening of a student at the “London Academy of Couture”, A Year in London is endearingly clueless about pretty much everything it claims to represent, from the city in which it is set to the world of fashion. And while I can’t speak on behalf of lesbians, I would be surprised if many recognised themselves in this shoddy, soft-focus silliness.
Olivia (Nina Pons) grew up in her family tailor shop in an absurdly picturesque corner of rural southern Italy (cue a montage of establishing drone shots of vineyards, sun-dappled courtyards and tables groaning under the weight of antipasto). Groomed to take over the business and engaged to marry the chiselled, characterless Paolo (Matteo Bassi), Olivia instead opts to study in London on a postgrad course run by charismatic fashion designer Nina (Melanie Liburd). Quite how Nina finds the time to design a collection while mentoring students and trawling lesbian bars for hookups is rather glossed over.
The frisson between Olivia and Nina is immediately evident, but a desperate late-stage intervention by Paolo puts a bump in the road to romantic fulfilment. This is a chiffon-thin wisp of a story.
Photographs by Netflix, LonRom Films, Sincerity Films