Movie Reviews: Black Widow has two terrific leads and a barrel of laughs
Black Widow is less a superhero than it is a spy flick.
The Marvel universe grows ever more complicated and self-referential with each passing film, but your correspondent is reliably informed that (12A) is not an origins tale detailing how Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) received her superpowers, but an account of how she spent her time between the Avengers movies Civil War (2016) and Infinity War (2018).
Not one to rest on her laurels, Natasha takes on the evil Dreykov (Ray Winstone), who has marshalled an army of zombified young women, one of whom is Natasha’s long-lost sister Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), in his bid for world domination. It’s less a superhero movie than it is a spy flick – a nod to Roger Moore-era Bond tells us we’re at the cheesier end of the spy movie spectrum – but there’s also plenty of time for an extended flashback to Natasha’s early childhood, when we discover that her ostensibly All-American parents Melina (Rachel Weisz) and Alexei (David Harbour) were Russian sleeper agents during the last knockings of the Cold War.
Written by Eric Pearson and directed by Cate Shortland, Black Widow is the latest in a string of Marvel movies – Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel – to prove that the female is not only deadlier, but more interesting, than the male.
It helps, of course, that Black Widow features two terrific leads in Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh, with the latter in particularly good form as the warring sisters take sibling rivalry to a whole new level, and there’s plenty of humour too, especially from David Harbour in the role of the vainglorious Red Guardian, aka Communist Russia’s answer to Captain America.
Ray Winstone is spectacularly miscast as a kind of Bermondsey Blofeld, but otherwise Black Widow offers an irreverent sense of humour about the superhero movie even as it pounds along courtesy of relentlessly inventive action sequences. (cinema release)
Fear Street: 1978 ****
The Fear Street trilogy opened last week on Netflix with Fear Street Part One: 1994, and introduced us to a group of high school teens in the town of Shadyside who find themselves being pursued by series of masked serial killers who seem to have risen from the dead. What Deena (Kiana Madeira), Sam (Olivia Scott Welch) and Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr) discover is that the various killers were driven insane by Sarah Fier (Elizabeth Scopel), who was hanged as a witch in Shadyside in 1666 and has tormented the town’s citizens ever since.
The trilogy continues this week with (16s), which revolves around a massacre at the nearby Camp Nightwing. Just as Part One was a full-blooded homage to Scream (1996) in the way it knowingly plays with the horror tropes, Part Two is a tribute to the classic slasher flicks such as Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980), with some of the first movie’s elder relatives caught up in the slaughter at Camp Nightwing (Sadie Sink leads the charge away from the latest axe-wielding madman).
Adapted from R.L. Stine’s series of novels by Leigh Janiak and Zak Olkewikz, with Janiak directing, the Fear Street movies are considerably gorier than their source material, delivering plenty of hardcore horror moments along with their dollops of black humour. The third film, which is set in 1666, drops next week, with Janiak insisting that 1978 and 1666 aren’t conventional sequels to 1994, but that all three movies are a single entity that offered her the opportunity to reinvent the horror flick over an unusually long narrative arc.
Funny, dark and fully immersed in the genre, and featuring marvellously eclectic soundtrack (Pixies, Bowie, Cowboy Junkies, Radiohead, the Prodigy) the Fear Street trilogy is well worth your time. (Netflix)
(PG) is the film you had no idea you needed to see. Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s film follows the truffle hunters of rural Italy as they hike through all manner of inhospitable terrain rooting out the rare fungi courtesy of the uncannily sensitive noses of their beloved dogs (no truffle-hunting pigs here, sadly).
The film features real-life truffle hunters, most of them elderly eccentrics who seem to be the last of a dying breed, and all of whom are obsessively jealous of protecting their methods and their secret truffle-rich deposits. The pace is gentle, the camera-work observational, with Dweck and Kershaw keen to situate the men in the landscape that is their natural home.
It’s not an idyllic tale, however: the film is shot through with intrigue, dog-poisoning and theft, while the truffle broker and the truffle ‘sommelier’ who thrive on the hunters’ hard work cheat the old men blind.
Overall, however, it’s a charming account of a singular way of life that features a superb score from Ed Côrtes. (cinema release)
