Movie Reviews: Excellent performances in Uncle Frank
Paul Bettany as Uncle Frank. Picture: Brownie Harris/Amazon Studios
Affable, erudite and thoughtful, Frank (Paul Bettany) is the perfect (12A) for 14-year-old Betty (Sophia Lillis), who yearns to escape the stultifying South Carolina backwater of Creekville. Five years later, now a freshman in New York, Betty – now Beth – discovers that Frank is gay, and has lived for many years with his partner Wally (Peter Macidssi). But what is acceptable in 1970s New York doesn’t fly in South Carolina, where the 1960s have yet to arrive; and when Frank’s homophobic father Daddy Mac (Stephen Root) dies, Frank’s return home for the funeral is fraught with fear and loathing. Written and directed by Alan Ball, Uncle Frank is a Southern gothic tale of sexual oppression that flirts with cliché but is ultimately redeemed by excellent performances. The cliché is that the American South was a hotbed of prejudice, in which any difference – that of race, or sexuality – is despised and ostracised; what gives the story its emotional heft is the way in which Frank appears to have internalised the disgust and hate, and his subsequent, flailing attempts to disentangle himself from the hard lessons learned during his formative years. It’s a pity that some terrific actors – Margo Martindale, Judy Greer and Steve Zahn, especially – hover around the margins of the story with very little to do, and there are occasions when Alan Ball confuses dialogue with exposition and conversations for homilies. That said, Sophia Lillis is striking in the coming-of-age role of Beth, while Peter Macidssi is utterly charming in his poignant turn as Wally, who supports Frank in his time of need but refuses to countenance or enable his self-loathing. (Amazon Prime)
Sci-fi thriller (15A) stars Andrea Riseborough as Tasya Vos, a ‘star performer’ assassin who can inhabit other people’s bodies by way of a brain implant, thus gaining access to high-profile targets.
Commissioned to ‘possess’ the body of Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott) in order to murder the father of his fiancée Ava (Tuppence Middleton), Tasya discovers that repeated missions are causing her to lose her grasp on reality, and that her consciousness is beginning to overlap with Colin’s. Written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, Possessor touches on some of the themes previously explored by his father, David: technology and bodily transformation, and the blending of physical and psychological horror. The result is superb science-fiction that is challenging not only in its depiction of brutal violence — there are times when Cronenberg appears to be daring the viewer to look away from the inevitable consequences of his story’s embrace of violence — but also in its investigation of the mind’s seemingly limitless capacity for self-deception. Andrea Riseborough is brilliantly chilling as the assassin Vos, and particularly when, having inhabited Colin’s body, she unexpectedly finds herself having to negotiate a path through his complex emotional life. At this point, of course, it’s not Riseborough we’re looking at, but Christopher Abbott, who is required to embody Colin Tate whilst also embracing the character of Vos, whereupon things get very tangled indeed. Riseborough and Abbott are terrific in their roles, and they get very strong support from Jennifer Jason Leigh (who starred in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ) as the dead-eyed manager Girder, who remotely controls her assassins as they go about their deadly work. Powerful and punchy, provocative and disturbing, Possessor is the most ambitious sci-fi movie of the year. (Amazon Prime)
The latest remake of (G) opens in the wilds of the American northwest, where the young mustang Beauty (voiced by Kate Winslet) roams free on the high prairie.
When her entire herd is captured due to her curiosity about the world beyond her plains, Beauty is transported to upstate New York by John Manly (Iain Glen), where her unbreakable spirit finds its human equivalent in Jo (Mackenzie Foy), John’s recently orphaned teenage niece. Adapted and directed by Ashley Avis, this contemporary American take on Anna Sewell’s classic doesn’t stray too far from its source material. It’s at its most engaging in the early stages, and particularly in the sequences when Jo and Beauty bond: the tone may be sentimental to a fault, but it would require a heart of stone to resist the way Beauty inspires the orphaned Jo to pick up the pieces of her shattered life. The second half of the film, which is mostly given over to Beauty’s heroism and her feats of endurance, is less persuasive, and not least because it’s heavily dependent on coincidence. Indeed, the arc of the film might be equated with Beauty’s gait throughout: from the intoxicating elegance of her running wild to the mannered gallop of a disciplined horse, and eventually the measured plod of an older, wiser but considerably less exciting creature. (Disney +)
