Movie Reviews: Brooklyn, He Named Me Malala, Kill Your Friends

Adapted from Colm Tóibín’s best-selling novel, Brooklyn (12A) stars Saoirse Ronan as Eilis, a young woman chafing at the lack of opportunities available to her in 1950s Enniscorthy. 

Emigration to America and a new life in Brooklyn offers employment, a sense of self-worth and even the promise of romance when she meets Italian-American Tony (Emory Cohen).

Home is where the heart is, however, and Eilis finds herself horribly torn between her old and new lives. Directed by John Crowley, Brooklyn is a beautifully elegant tale, a tragedy in a minor key.

The period detail is superb, not just in the physical detail but in the way the moral mores of the time become intrinsic to Eilis’s plight, and Eilis’s rather genteel (albeit emotionally exhausting) emigrant journey offers a fascinating contrast with the hardship experienced by those who have sailed north across the Mediterranean in recent times.

For the most part, though, Brooklyn offers a range of excellent performances, from Julie Walters as the irascible landlady to Emory Cohen (channelling the young Paul Newman) as the love-struck Tony, and Domhnall Gleeson as the buttoned-down but charming Jim Farrell. As strong as the supporting cast is, however, Brooklyn is Saoirse Ronan’s film, and Eilis the part that sees her flower into an actor of remarkable maturity.

Dowdy, plain and meek as the story opens, Eilis develops into a self-aware and sophisticated young woman, and Ronan’s transformation is all the more impressive given the subtlety she brings to role – indeed, her finest moments are those in which she conveys Eilis’s inner turmoil with the barest minimum of expression. It’s a stunning performance, and one that gilds this elegiac tale with genuine gold.

Malala Yousafzai was 15 years old when she was shot by the Taliban for daring to go to school.

Davis Guggenheim’s documentary He Called Me Malala (PG) tells Malala’s story, which even in terms of its more newsworthy items – Malala meeting Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth, winning the Nobel Peace Prize and addressing the United Nations – is impressive enough to warrant telling.

Such moments, however, tend to be glossed over by Guggenheim, as he tries to get beyond the headlines and discover who Malala really is. Named by her father, Ziauddin, after Malalai of Maiwand, an Afghan warrior-poetess, Malala grew up in the Swat Valley in a progressive household, attending the school established by Ziauddin, who was himself an orator, a teacher and an outspoken opponent of religious extremism.

The film blends existing footage of the equally outspoken teenage Malala as she defied Taliban edicts with straight-to-camera interviews of Malala at home in Birmingham (including some of Malala’s younger brothers’ rather spiky opinions of their famous sister), where a portrait of a complex but in many ways typically shy and insecure young woman begins to emerge.

Guggenheim appears to be attempting to graft an unnecessary narrative onto Malala’s story, subtly suggesting that she was somehow destined to become the Voice of a Generation, but the film is at its most affecting when it captures the intimate moments, and particularly the incredibly strong bond between daughter and father.

The medieval barbarities of the Taliban may make your blood boil at times, but He Called Me Malala is an inspiring film that everyone should see.

Kill Your Friends (18s) stars Nicholas Hoult as Stelfox, an A&R man working in the music industry at the height of the ‘Britpop’ craze. It’s a cut-throat world at the top end of the music biz, but Stelfox, determined to maintain his privileged lifestyle of coke, booze and VIP parties, takes the notion of throat-cutting a little too literally, and sets about murdering anyone who gets in the way of his ravening ambition.

Adapted from a novel by John Niven and directed by Owen Harris, Kill Your Friends is a blacker-than-black comedy about exactly how desperate and scuzzy music industry executives really are.

Nicholas Hoult brings a vapid charm to his role as Stelfox as he manically butchers and bludgeons his colleagues (among them James Corden, playing a delightfully slovenly and ignorant exec with an impressively straight face), although it’s something of a one-note performance – Stelfox snarls his demented profanities right from the off, and appears homicidally deranged from before the movie begins, which means we’re given no good reason other than frustrated ambition for why Stelfox might have turned psychotic.

There are some good supporting performances from Edward Hogg as a suspicious policeman and Georgia King as a receptionist on the make, but overall the joke has grown stale long before Stelfox has run out of friends to kill.

Brooklyn 5/5

He Named Me Malala 4/5

Kill Your Friends 3/5