Before Paddington (Studiocanal, PG) arrived, eager and sticky-pawed, on our screens, industry analysts wondered how the polite Peruvian bear would be received by a generation of children who hadn’t grown up on his adventures. Four months and £165m later, maybe no such generation exists: thanks to Paul King’s spiritually faithful but cunningly modernised reworking of Michael Bond’s ursine adventures, a potentially long-running family franchise has been minted. From its improbable welding of a kidnap plot to everyday London escapades to its visual fusion of handmade production design and state-of-the-art CGI, everything about Paddington succeeds in the ramshackle, roundabout way of its hero – bears always fall on their feet, remember. King imports from his work on The Mighty Boosh a specifically British sense of deadpan irony, yet never lowers things to the level of snark. It’s always been the duffel-coated furball’s guileless generosity that has charmed most, and such is the case here – as the update even works a cheerily liberal pro-immigration agenda into proceedings. Meet your match, Farage.
Nearing the bear in the lovability stakes is Tom Hardy in The Drop (Fox, 15), who tempers Brando-esque swagger with puppy-cuddling softness in a casually loose, flavourful take on a Dennis Lehane story (adapted by the author himself, it may be the best Lehane yet put to screen). Punchy Belgian director Michael Roskam (Bullhead) brings shadowed elegance to this New York heist picture, the pleasant surprises of which begin with Hardy’s perfectly mush-mouthed Brooklyn accent. As a doleful bartender slowly catching wise to murky goings-on around him, the always-fascinating actor has never been so unaffectedly magnetic as a movie star; the film would be worth watching for him alone, though the same claim could be made for James Gandolfini’s wily, piercing final performance as Hardy’s grizzled boss.
Rather rashly, I’ve used up the adjective “grizzled” before getting to Tommy Lee Jones’s reluctantly redemption-chasing claim jumper in The Homesman (Entertainment One, 15), an unexpectedly quasi-feminist prairie drama that marks Jones’s first directorial effort since 2005’s excellent The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. If he ever decides to make more than one a decade, the crotchety star could be the chief architect of the 21st-century western. The acting laurels, however, go to Hilary Swank, as fierce and vulnerably purposeful here as she’s been since Boys Don’t Cry: as the gender-defying “homesman” of the title, shepherding three deranged women to safety while battling her own demons, she could prove a rare female icon in this boy-ruled genre. The film’s odd structural jolts, meanwhile, are rewarded by repeat viewing; its Cannes reception was too muted by half.
I’d certainly rather have seen Jones raise the Palme d’Or than Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose much-celebrated Winter Sleep (New Wave, 15) is a turgid lull in a hitherto remarkable filmography. From its very title to its 200-minute running time, padded with circuitous yet bluntly literal conversation on weighty matters of class and charity, the film is practically defying critics to call it anything so obvious as dull. Dare I call its bluff? Every salient concern here is one Ceylan has previously addressed in more narratively embedded form, with greater cinematic acumen; the Chekhov comparisons for which Ceylan begs in the closing credits aren’t borne out by his uncharacteristically indelicate writing. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” a character banally observes. Twice.
If you prefer your communal morality studies modest, witty and just 70 minutes long, head on over to Curzon Home Cinema, where Miloš Forman’s delicious The Fireman’s Ball has recently been made available for streaming. Forman’s last film made in his native Czechoslovakia, this droll dissection of small-town foibles – via deadpan scrutiny of a volunteer fire department’s disastrous fundraising party – still bristles with pertinent political ire 48 years after its release, with enough incidental life at the edges of every frame to keep it from feeling essayistic. It’s at once a historical snapshot of a fractious place and time and a mirror for any other country in political transition.
