Every year, audiences flock to the cinema on Boxing Day for a well-earned break from talking to friends and relatives (and if you talk during the movie, shame on you). As usual, this year’s lineup caters for all tastes – delivering arty dramas, foreign films, spectacles for kids and splashy mainstream fare.
Urchin
★★★★
The directorial debut of Babygirl and Triangle of Sadness actor Harris Dickinson is a warts-and-all character study and portrait of homelessness – a fact established in the opening scene when protagonist Mike (Frank Dillane) wakes by the side of the road to the sound of a ranting street preacher. The film immediately feels like a genuine, lived-in portrait of an undercurrent of British society Ralph McTell memorably evoked in his great song Streets of London.
For a while I wondered: will this be a rise-from-the-gutter story? A tale of redemption, or starting again? As it turns out, Urchin isn’t easy to pigeonhole, though it’s certainly an empathetic and finely calibrated drama: social realist in spirit but never oppressively heavy. You want the best for Mike, despite his moments of cruelty and self-sabotage, yet neither the film nor Dillane’s excellent performance play the pity card. The point is made that starting again is always possible but rarely a linear, entirely upwards trajectory.
My Brother’s Band
★★★★
Fingers crossed that Hollywood never gets its mitts on this moving and easy-to-watch French film (titled The Marching Band overseas) about a conductor with leukemia who discovers he’s adopted and tracks down his biological brother, learning that he too is passionate about music. Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe) is the conductor, famous and at the top of his game; Jimmy (Pierre Lottin) is his brother, who plays trombone in a community marching band. The potential for this generally feelgood but bittersweet film to devolve into Mr Holland’s Opus-esque mawkishness is present throughout but, in the hands of director Emmanuel Courcol, it remains very well balanced and never remotely cloying.
More could have been made of the high/low art divide implicit in the premise but I’m glad Courcol leaves it largely untouched, letting the beauty of both forms of musical performance speak for themselves without sermonising about how All Art Matters. The story is smartly and accessibly staged, with well-drawn characters and appealing performances.
Read more: The Marching Band review – tender French concert bromance gets out the trombones
The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants
★★★
SpongeBob SquarePants is a good egg: annoyingly high energy and bug-eyed, sure, but a fundamentally decent sponge bobbing his way through a wet and wild universe. The latest in an expanding canon of movies (with four to date, and three spin-offs in the works) continues the franchise’s brisk pace, poppin’ fresh colour palettes and daffy mashup of live action and animation. The story is essentially an underwater road trip, whereby the blockish yellow hero ventures into a dark, Halloweenish part of the ocean, determined to become a “big guy” and channel his “intestinal fortitude”.
Read more: SpongeBob at 20: how the pineapple-dwelling fry cook endured
Sentimental Value
★★★
There are some interesting, left-of-centre ideas floating around in this father-daughter relationship drama between two creative and complicated people: dancer Nora (Renate Reinsve) and her film-maker father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), who has written a new script just for her. In an introductory scene the family home is described by a narrator as a human-like entity, as if it can think and feel: “What the house disliked more than noise was silence.”
The house in question was clearly meant to carry metaphorical weight, but much of it doesn’t quite land in this well-acted but drifty and amorphous film, lacking shape and momentum. Joachim Trier, director of The Worst Person in the World, focuses on gradually teasing out the fractures in the relationship between his two leads but seems to get distracted along the way, the back half in particular feeling quite shaggy and unfocused.
Read more: Sentimental Value review – Stellan Skarsgård is an egomaniac director in act of ancestor worship
Rental Family
★★
At first I was touched by the look on Brendan Fraser’s face in Rental Family. It’s soft, kind, a little happy, a little unsure; the look of a compassionate person trying to make sense of a difficult world. But after a while it became clear he had no other modes or layers; a shallow performance in a film that starts off relatively strongly but devolves into cheesiness and tissue box sentiment. Which is a shame, given it has a great premise: Fraser plays Phillip Vanderploeg, an American actor living in Japan, who takes a job as the “token white guy” for a company that provides actors to pose as family members and friends for strangers.
There was so much potential here for funny, profound, poignant commentaries on social isolation, sense of belonging and human connection but they’re almost completely squandered by director and co-writer Hikari. I concur with this review from the Guardian’s Radheyan Simonpillai.
Read more: Rental Family review – Brendan Fraser is stranded in mawkish misfire
Anaconda
There’s always at least one big silly Hollywood blockbuster included in the Boxing Day lineup. This year’s (which I’m yet to see) is a bit of an oddity: a meta action-comedy connected to the pulpy 1997 creature feature of the same name. THR reported that this film, which stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd as indie film-makers who head to the Amazon to make a dodgy remake of Anaconda, exists “somewhere between a reboot, reimaging and spiritual sequel”.
The Housemaid
Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried headline this Paul Feig-directed adaptation of the bestselling novel of the same name, which has been compared to lurid female-led 90s thrillers. Sweeney plays the titular character, Millie, who has a troubled past but accepts a job with the well-to-do Winchester family, soon discovering all sorts of juicy secrets – or, as Variety’s critic puts it, “diabolical developments.” I haven’t seen it yet, but my interest is certainly piqued; the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gave it four stars and called it “an outrageously enjoyable – or at any rate enjoyably outrageous – psycho-suspense thriller”.
Read more: The Housemaid review – Sydney Sweeney takes the job from hell in outrageous suspense thriller
