Film reviews: Tender and lyrical Rebuilding is one of the best films of the year to date
Josh O'Connor as Thomas "Dusty" Fraser Jr. in Rebuilding Picture: Jesse Hope
★★★★★
Like most of us these days, Dusty Frazier (Josh O’Connor) is ‘going through a bit of a hard time’ as Rebuilding (PG) opens in the wake of a forest fire that has devasted his small Colorado ranch. Separated from his wife Ruby (Meghann Fahy), estranged from his young daughter Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre), Dusty is moved into a temporary settlement of FEMA trailer homes out on the prairie. With his life reduced to ash and rubble — even his land, the bank tells him when he applies for a loan, is worthless — Dusty has lost everything, even his sense of who he is. “Can you be a cowboy without cows?” Callie-Rose asks her father, and he has no answer.
A bleak scenario, but as its title suggests, Max Walker-Silverman’s film is a paean to hope, empathy, and community. As the monosyllabic Dusty gradually starts to trust his new neighbours, and especially the recently widowed Mila (Kali Reis), the agonisingly slow process of putting his life back together begins. Central to the healing is Dusty’s tentative relationship with Callie-Rose; O’Connor, who is at this point reliably superb, invests Dusty with a whisper-dry sense of weary despair as the ostensibly virile cowboy of Western lore is hollowed out by circumstance; meanwhile, Lily LaTorre is wonderfully spiky and cynical as the daughter who desperately wants to believe that her father is a man she can trust (Amy Madigan, playing Dusty’s former mother-in-law Bess, is also excellent).
Beyond the personal relationships, Max Walker-Silverman offers us a vision of Midwest America in microcosm, a rural community that is not only impoverished but functionally broken, where the only thing that keeps the lights on is the kindness of strangers willing to lend a hand. Tender and lyrical, unsentimental but uplifting, Rebuilding is one of the best films of the year to date.
★★★★☆
Set in Argentina in 1983, Kiss of the Spider Woman (15A) stars Diego Luna as Valentín, a political prisoner incarcerated by the military junta. Forced to share a cell with the flamboyant Luis (Tonatiuh), Valentín is initially horrified by Luis’s insistence that s/he wants to be a woman; but as Luis begins to tell Valentín about his favourite film musical, the movie-within-a-movie that is Kiss of the Spider Woman, the pair slowly start to bond. Adapted from the award-winning stage musical by writer-director Bill Condon, this is an unusual but effective blend of fantasy and gritty reality.
As Luis’s storytelling distracts Valentín from the sights and sounds of torture in the drab prison surroundings, we find ourselves in a colour-saturated world of Hollywood musical excess, as fashion icon Aurora (Jennifer Lopez) falls in love with photographer Armando (Diego Luna), much to the fury of Aurora’s gay confidante (Tonatiuh). A meta narrative of magical realism in which the reality feeds the fantasy and vice versa, and featuring strong performances from all three leads in multiple roles, Kiss of the Spider Woman is a deliciously fabulous political polemic.
★★★☆☆
The Three Urns (12A) stars Ciarán Hinds as The Man, a recently bereaved widower travelling from France to Donegal to receive important documents from a solicitor. Unaware that he is being pursued by The Woman in Black (Olga Kurylenko), The Man wends his way through the idyllic Irish countryside via a series of encounters with unexpected characters, including an Irish rap group shooting a video on the roadside, a hermit-like seer (Sinéad Cusack), a cheery bookseller (Stephen Fry), an itinerant priest (Lalor Roddy) and a Native American who reminds The Man of the bond formed between the Irish and Choctaw nations during the Famine.
Co-written and directed by John-Paul Davidson and Stephen Warbeck, this is a picaresque yarn that leans into clichés about Ireland for comic effect.
Ciarán Hinds makes for a delightfully stoical lead, but the whimsy is frequently stretched far too thin.
- All theatrical releases
