Film reviews: Can any performance deny Jessie Buckley the Oscar for the tour de force Hamnet?
Hamnet: Jessie Buckley in Chloé Zhao’s film. Photograph: Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features
★★★★★
“To be or not to be,” Hamlet says, mired in grief and existential crisis and posing the ultimate question.
Adapted from Maggie Farrell’s novel, (12A) opens with William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) scraping a living by teaching Latin to village boys, a monotonous existence that is enlivened when he meets Agnes (Jessie Buckley), a free-spirited woman notorious as ‘the daughter of a forest witch.’
Suitably bewitched, Will marries Agnes against the wishes of his parents, and soon the pair are parents to the twins Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes).
Tragedy strikes, however, when the 11-year-old Hamnet succumbs to the plague whilst Will, now an established playwright, is absent in London.
In a desperate attempt to cope with his pain, Will seeks to transmute his grief into art, pouring himself into the writing of Hamlet and neglecting his wife’s agonies.
Adapted by Farrell and Chloé Zhao, with the latter directing, is a profound meditation on loss and the grieving process given an epic quality by its palimpsest-like association with the magisterial Hamlet.
But while we might expect the story to focus on the author of , the film is at its mostly deeply affecting in Jessie Buckley’s portrayal of Agnes.
Paul Mescal is terrific as the devastated Bard deploying his genius in the service of reconciliation and acceptance, but Agnes transcends the story’s specifics to become an Everywoman who is brutally ripped asunder by the death of her child.
Jessie Buckley seems incandescent here, delivering a performance of uncanny power as she explores Agnes’ bone-juddering grief, and it will take a singularly brilliant performance elsewhere to deny her the Oscar.
And that’s before we get to the film’s final act, which gradually builds to a moment of wholly unexpected catharsis, and one that only the cinematic art could deliver.
All told, a tour de force.
(theatrical release)
★★★★☆
Opening in the early 1980s, (15A) stars Pierce Brosnan as Brendan Ingle, a transplanted Irishman who takes kids off the Sheffield streets and teaches them ‘how to box and how to live.’
When he meets the young Naseem Hamed (Amir El-Nasry), a cocky young Muslim boy whose fancy footwork is the result of frequent escapes from the casual racism that often spirals into violence, Ingle takes the young man under his wing, setting Naseem – the future Prince Naseem – on the road to glory.
Written and directed by Rowan Athale, this sports biopic is in part a showcase for the wonderfully fluid style of Prince Naseem, who was arguably the most charismatic and naturally gifted boxer since Muhammad Ali, and who similarly thrived on hatred and naked racism.
The story, however, is centred on the fractious relationship between Ingle and Naseem, as the latter, delightfully brash as he revels in what he believes is a God-given talent, begins to chafe under Ingle’s insistence that Naseem only achieved greatness as a result of his trainer’s tutelage.
(theatrical release)
★★★★☆
(15A) stars Richard Gere as the dying documentary filmmaker Leo Fife, who agrees to tell his life story to his former student Malcolm (Michael Imperioli).
Fife is a legend, an American refugee from the Vietnam draft who came to Canada to make hard-hitting political films.
But as the camera rolls, with Leo’s wife and filmmaking partner Emma (Uma Thurman) in attendance (and Jacob Elordi playing the young Leo in flashbacks to the 1960s), the story that emerges is one that bears little resemblance to the sanctified tale of the enfant terrible.
Adapted from Russell Banks’ novel, and written and directed by Paul Schrader, is an absorbing account of how we shape and reconfigure our own narratives via refashioned memories, sly inventions and necessary lies, with a gaunted Gere in superb form as a man who, having belatedly admitted to himself that he ‘can’t exist, except as a fictional character,’ decides to confess all and damn the consequences.
(digital release)
