Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: Power Ballad, Fairyland, Moss & Freud and more

Power Ballad

(98 mins, 15) Directed by John Carney; starring Paul Rudd, Nick Jonas, Jack Reynor

The Irish director John Carney (Once, Sing Street, Flora and Son) has a formula that has served him well over the years. Lost souls, adrift in a world that has little use for them, connect and find a shared love of music in a heart-swelling combination of affectionate comedy and catchy guitar bangers. His latest picture, Power Ballad, revisits this formula but also flips it on its head by bringing that moment of creative synergy – usually the feelgood final act – to the beginning. What follows is darker and spikier, a film that balances its chipper humour with an examination of betrayal, creative disappointment and frustration.

Paul Rudd stars as Rick, a Kansas-born rocker who traded in his dreams of stadium success when he met his Irish wife Rachel (Marcella Plunkett). Now he’s the lead singer of Bride & Groove, a Dublin-based wedding band that bangs out cheesy dancefloor fillers for church halls full of well-lubricated party guests. At one such event, he meets Danny (Nick Jonas), a failing former boyband star. They jam together over a long night, the passing hours marked out in empty beer bottles. Some months later, Danny releases a comeback single, to universal acclaim. The problem is that Rick originally wrote the song but has no way to prove it.

Self-deprecating, rumpled but immediately likable, Rudd is a great fit for Carney’s brand of disarming comedy. And while he’s not the greatest singer in the world, you suspect he could hold his own at karaoke. Jonas, however, acts in much the same way that he sings: his performance feels over-produced and too synthetic to convey real heart.

Fairyland

(116 mins, 15) Directed by Andrew Durham; starring Emilia Jones, Scoot McNairy, Nessa Dougherty

Alysia (Nessa Dougherty as a child, Emilia Jones as a young adult) is just five years old when she loses her mother in a car accident. She only half understands what has happened, with fragments of the grownups’ ghoulish grief cutting through her own subdued sadness. When she moves with her writer father Steve (Scoot McNairy) to San Francisco in the mid-1970s, it takes her a while to accept that her mother won’t be joining them. And there are other complicated things to grasp: her dad’s newly open, enthusiastic embrace of his identity as a gay man, for one. As Steve is finding himself, Alysia is increasingly left to fend for herself. And while Steve believes he is teaching her to be independent, she is gathering material for a simmering teenage grudge.

Based on the memoir by Alysia Abbott, Andrew Durham’s sensitive but slightly underpowered feature debut offers a child’s-eye view of a loving but flawed father-daughter relationship, and captures the changing personality of a community torn apart by Aids. Most impressive is the way Durham weaves a wealth of archive footage into the film, evoking the spirit of a lost time.

Moss & Freud

(100 mins, 15) Directed by James Lucas; starring Derek Jacobi, Ellie Bamber, Will Tudor

The friendship between the supermodel Kate Moss (Ellie Bamber) and the artist Lucian Freud (Derek Jacobi), forged during an extended period during which she sat for a raw, unvarnished portrait, is the subject of this rather thin drama. 

Moss, who serves as the executive producer on the film (sound your alarm bells), is shown as a blithe free spirit who is searching for meaning rather than mere cheap thrills. To her credit, Bamber captures something of Moss’s irreverence and mischief; she gets the laugh even if she doesn’t quite nail the look. 

The meeting with Freud, brokered by his semi-estranged daughter Bella (Jasmine Blackborow) offers her a door into a world removed from the transience of fashion. Unfortunately, the film can’t avoid depicting her as an empty vessel to be filled by the wisdom of the important man. It’s a dispiriting narrative to pursue.

Leonora in the Morning Light

(103 mins, 15) Directed by Lena Vurma, Thor Klein; starring Olivia Vinall, Alexander Scheer, Luis Gerardo Méndez

Now considered a significant figure in the surrealist movement, Leonora Carrington (played by Olivia Vinall in this non-linear biopic) spent much of her life pushing back against assumptions based on her gender. Her wealthy father punished her childhood eccentricity, attempting to mould her into an obliging debutante. 

The lover of Max Ernst, she was toasted by the surrealists as the ideal “femme-enfant” muse, rather than as an artist in her own right. It’s a pity then that this handsome but frustrating film focuses more on her trauma and rocky relationships than on her work. Still, Vinall is magnetic and some of the directorial choices – the angular, discordant score, for example – evoke her unconventional mind.

Photographs by David Cleary/Lionsgate, Sean Gleason