Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: The President’s Cake, Crime 101, Looney Tunes and more

The President’s Cake

(105 mins, 12A) Directed by Hasan Hadi; starring Baneen Ahmad Nayyef, Waheed Thabet Khreibat, Sajad Mohamad Qasem 

Iraq 1990. A combination of international sanctions and internal corruption has stymied the economy and caused widespread shortages. Just putting food on the table day-to-day is a challenge for the average Iraqi. But for nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) and her frail and ancient grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) in their riverside shack, survival is balanced on a knife-edge. One piece of bad luck, and destitution looms. Autocratic and oblivious in his presidential palace, Saddam Hussein demands showy displays of devotion from his people.

Every Iraqi, he declares, must mark his birthday with cake. A classroom lottery at Lamia’s school assigns extracurricular jobs in preparation for the state-mandated celebration. Lamia draws the short straw: she has the “honour” of making the cake for her class. With her pet cockerel Hindi carried in a sling, she heads for the city, first with Bibi and later her streetwise classmate Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), to source ingredients.

This is an impressive first feature from the writer-director Hasan Hadi, a sharply observed, bittersweet, child’s-eye odyssey that avoids cute-kid cliches and has a kinship with 1990s Iranian classics such as Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven or Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon. An urban fable that plays out under the gaze of the president – huge, crudely painted portraits of Saddam are displayed on billboards around the city – the film follows Lamia and Saeed as they negotiate a world that seems hostile and, at times, alarmingly dangerous for a youngster. The president shall have his cake. But the cost of those hard-won ingredients is unimaginably high.

Crime 101

(140 mins, 15) Directed by Bart Layton; starring Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Halle Berry 

The documentarian Bart Layton (The Imposter) made his fiction film debut in 2018 with the terrific American Animals, a heist movie featuring some of the most clueless criminals ever to cobble together a get-rich scheme. With his second, Layton revisits the genre, but this time the perpetrator is a savvy Los Angeles career thief with a code of honour and a fail-safe checklist to avoid getting nabbed.

“Mike” (Chris Hemsworth) is a ghost; he leaves no DNA traces and never hurts the people he robs. This is a more conventional picture than American Animals, which was notable for its deft blend of fact and fiction. And if we know one thing from the great heist movies, it’s that luck always runs out. Layton elegantly weaves together the parallel lives of Mike, paunchy, rumpled cop Lou (Mark Ruffalo), insurance saleswoman Sharon (Halle Berry), and motorbike-riding psychopath Ormon (Barry Keoghan). It’s pacy and slick. And as you would hope from a film that makes a point of namechecking the Steve McQueen car chase classic Bullitt, the asphalt of LA’s downtown highways takes some serious punishment.

Looney Tunes: The Day the Earth Blew Up 

(91 mins, PG) Directed by Pete Browngardt; voiced by Eric Bauza, Candi Milo, Peter MacNicol 

The future of Earth hangs in the balance: a despotic alien overlord is bent on enslaving humanity using luminous brain-controlling goo. Plus there’s a giant comet on a collision course with the planet. Our only hope for survival rests on a stuttering, socially anxious pig and a deranged duck whose preferred course of action is to hit things with a giant mallet.

I’m not sure what’s more terrifying: the idea of Looney Tunes stalwarts Porky Pig and Daffy Duck (both voiced by Eric Bauza) as the saviours of the human race or the fact that this gloriously demented animation came worryingly close to getting binned as a studio tax write-off. Fortunately, the first wholly animated Looney Tunes feature film finally makes it to UK cinemas. Porky and Daffy get a backstory – they were adopted as young tykes by the kindly Farmer Jim – and jobs in a bubblegum factory. It’s a riot.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley

(106 mins, 15) Directed by Amy Berg; featuring Jeff Buckley, Mary Guibert, Ben Harper 

It would need to be a rare and unusual film to fully do justice to the talent of Jeff Buckley. But while Amy Berg’s documentary is perhaps a little too conventional in its choices to capture a life lived so impulsively and intensely, it does offer a fascinating insight into the soul of the man and the forces that shaped him.

Berg draws on a wealth of archive material – aching live performances, intimate scribbled notes, answerphone messages to friends – plus interviews, candid and heartfelt, with his collaborators and loved ones.

The shadow of his absent father, the troubadour Tim Buckley, looms, with Jeff understandably chary of comparisons between them. Berg’s deftly edited picture strikes a balance, acknowledging the impact of a largely fatherless childhood without labouring the tragic parallels between the son and the man who came before him.

Little Amélie

(78 mins, PG) Directed by Maïlys Vallade, Liane-Cho Han; voiced by Loïse Charpentier, Victoria Grosbois, Yumi Fujimori 

Born in 1960s Japan to Belgian parents (her father is a diplomat, her mother a performer), the young heroine of the title is a child caught between cultures. Adapted from Amélie Nothomb’s 2000 novella The Character of Rain, Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Ha’s exquisite 2D animation captures the sensory thrills that awaken a little girl’s appetite for discovery: the taste of Belgian chocolate – a gift from her grandmother – and a lesson in calligraphy from her Japanes  nanny.

Oscar-nominated in this year’s animated feature category, this is a poetic and strikingly beautiful work: it looks like a shimmering watercolour painting. It combines moments of playful, droll humour with darker themes, such as bereavement, grief and the still-fresh scars of the second world war.

Photographs by Curzon/Merrick Morton/Vertigo Releasing