Doubt is a superbly acted, intelligent, grown-up drama

Popping up on Netflix as I looked for something to watch this afternoon, Doubt is a 2008 film that was written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, adapted from his 2004 Pulitzer and Tony-winning play, Doubt: A Parable.

Set in 1964, a year after the assassination of JFK and not long after Vatican II pledged that it would drag the church into the 20^th century, it takes place in a predominantly Irish-American parish in the Bronx, where cheerful Father Flynn is the priest of St Nicholas’s Church.

As he preaches about a community of doubt – particularly in light of the previous year’s assassination – Sister Aloysius, the principal of the connected school, prowls the aisles, admonishing children who aren’t paying enough attention.

This sets up the central confrontation in the piece – that of the modernising priest who wants to be friends with the children and their families, and the nun who entered the convent after being widowed in WWII and is very much of the old order.

But after witnessing a fleeting encounter between Flynn and one of her pupils, Aloysius tells her fellow nuns to be on the watch for anything suspicious and report it to her. Some days later, naïve Sister James eventually tells her that a week earlier, Flynn had called her in class to ask for one of the boys – Donald Miller, the school’s sole black pupil – to be sent to see him at the rectory.

When he returns to class, he is acting strangely and has alcohol on his breath. Aloysius has no doubts about what is happening. James is full of them.

The film’s is quietly paced and gives great time to flesh out the characters. It ultimately leaves the audience to decide whether Aloysius is correct. Do we have doubts too or her certainty?

The central cast is superb. Meryl Streep is a fierce Aloysius, Philip Seymour Hoffman a charming Flynn who can be threatening too, and Amy Adams takes the naïve James and gives her some real complexity. With only a single scene, Viola Davis is outstanding as Mrs Miller, Donald’s mother.

All four gained Oscar nominations: Streep for best actress and the others in the best supporting categories.

A seriously intelligent, grown-up drama, it’s well worth 104 minutes of your time.

The Great Escaper – gentle and powerful

Back in 2014, the year of the 70^th anniversary of the D-Day landings, Royal Navy veteran and care home resident Bernard Jordan hit the headlines because he had left it too late to get included on an official trip to the commemorations in Normandy. So he decided to make his own way there – encouraged by his wife Rene.

This is the film of his ‘great escape’, written by William Ivory and directed by Oliver Parker.

Without the knowledge of anyone – except Rene – he left the care home they lived in together and made his way to France on his own. On the way, he was ‘adopted’ by Arthur, an upper-class RAF veteran with his own bucketload of personal demons from the war.

Initially reported missing, with police and others alerted, Bernard’s story caused a media hoo-ha and saw him dubbed a ‘hero’, with newspaper headlines across Europe.

‘The great escapee’ was how the mainstream news media dubbed him – but it is not indicative of what this film version of the story reveals.

There are arguably issues about how well all the flashback sequences of Brendan and Rene’s relationship work, but there can be no complaints about how the contemporary relationships are portrayed.

Though personally, I think that Will Fletcher and Laura Marcus, as the WWII versions of Bernard and Rene do really good jobs.\This is a really sweet film – not least because Michael Caine as Bernard and Glenda Jackson (in her final role) as Rene – are simply fabulous, but because it really catches at the sense of grief and PTSD suffered by veterans of all generations.

Shout outs also to John Standing as Arthur and Danielle Vitalis as a care home worker.

It is, in the second half, a blubathon. But not in an exploitive way. Just so moving – not least in a scene where Bernard, who wouldn’t buy German produce at the beginning of the film, encounters a German veteran from the D-Day landings.

When I say it’s a “blubathon”, it’s not mawkish. It addresses, in a nuanced way, the trauma that those young men suffered then – and in the years after.

This is a gentle, yet very powerful film. Streaming now on Sky.

Going on a bear hunt with Paddington in Peru

The Paddington ‘threequel’ sees the Browns and Paddington travel to Peru to visit Aunt Lucy at the Home for Retired Bears, after the Reverend Mother in charge there writes to Paddington to tell him that Aunt Lucy is seriously missing him.

But when they arrive, it’s to the news that Aunt Lucy has disappeared. Paddington persuades the family to mount a search for her, which they do by hiring a riverboat owned and skippered by one Hunter Cabot, along with his daughter Gina, and head into the jungle.

Of course, this being Paddington, this bear hunt doesn’t go smoothly.

With Paul King once again at the helm, having also co-written the screenplay – along with Mark Burton and Jon Foster for this outing – it is a charming watch, though feels a little flatter and shorter on the gags than for Paddington 2. That said, the second film set an incredibly high bar.

There is fun to be had spotting nods to other films – not least The Sound of Music and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Where it is significantly helped is in the involvement of Olivia Colman as the Reverend Mother and Antonio Banderas as Cabot, both of whom turn in delightfully arch performances.

I was surprised that I didn’t feel it ‘wrong’ seeing Emily Mortimer as Mary Brown, with Sally Hawkins not wanting to reprise the role again. Otherwise, Hugh Bonneville is back as the risk-averse Henry Brown, along with Madeleine Harris and Samuel Joslin as Judy and Jonathan Brown, and Julie Walters as Mrs Bird. Carla Tous catches the eye as Gina.

A very pleasant way to spend a gloomy Saturday afternoon – and make sure you watch ALL the way to the very end.

Philomena – Dench and Coogan in heart-rending, heart-warming drama

Time for more catch-up cinema – this time, Philomena, the 2013 adaptation of Martin Sixsmith’s book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee from director Stephen Frears, which by and large sticks to the true story that Sixsmith wrote about.

In 1951, after becoming pregnant, Irish teenager Philomena Lee (Sophie Kennedy Clarke) is sent by her father to Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, where she gives birth to a baby boy, Anthony. Forced to work in the abbey laundry, she has limited contact with her son, before the nuns give him up to a wealthy American couple for adoption.

Fifty years later, Jane, the daughter of the now retired nurse Philomena, spots journalist and former Blair government advisor Martin Sixsmith at a party and suggests to him that he investigate. Initially put off because it’s a “human interest story”, he changes his mind after meeting Philomena.

With a screenplay by Jeff Pope and Steve Coogan (who also co-produced), and coming in at a tight 98 minutes, Philomena is an examination of a multitude of themes: grief and loss, sin and guilt, anger and forgiveness, faith and hypocrisy, and snobbery.

The central characters are nuanced and the film rests squarely on the shoulders of its two stars – Coogan himself is excellent as Sixsmith, while Judi Dench is simply outstanding as the elderly Philomena, in a performance that understandably earned her a seventh Academy Award nomination.

It is a deeply moving film, but never mawkish, includes moments of humour, plenty of good for thought and is ultimately heart-warming.

Very much worth watching and available to stream in the UK on various platforms.

A Man Called Otto is beautiful

So, another little revisit – but of a film I didn’t review at the time. A Man Called Ott0 is a 2022 Hollywood remake of a Norwegian film of a Norwegian novel – A Man Called Ove, which was originally penned by Fredrick Backman.

It transposes the story to the US, to a small community, where 63-year-old widower Otto is in deep distress after the death of his wife six months before, and has become a total curmudgeon in the time since.

 

However, his plans to join her are disrupted by the arrival of new neighbours – the joyful and heavily pregnant Marisol, her inept husband Tommy and their two small children.

 

And slowly but sutely but surely, he is drawn back to life.

 

Sometimes I need a life-affirming, sweet (not cloying) film, and I want a great big mug of hot chocolate of a movie to comfort me.

 

This is far from flawless – and some of it feels a bit contrived – but it is also a joy in terms of how humane and emotionally intelligent it is, not least in terms of the impact of trying to deal with grief. It’s also very funny in places.

 

So, while neither Marc Foster’s direction nor David Magee’s screenplay are perfect, Tom Hanks turns in a lovely performance as Otto, and is supported not least by Mariana Treviño as the absolute force of nature that is Marisol.

It’s absolutely up there with my Mrs Harris Goes to Paris comfort movies.

Kneecap: A craicing political movie about Ireland

Saturday evening – and what better than catching up with another film? In this case, writer and director Rich Peppiatt’s 2024 Kneecap, about the real-life rise of Belfast’s Irish-language hip-hop trio of that name and starring them as themselves.

It starts in the late 2010s in Northern Ireland/the north of the island of Ireland, where there’s an ongoing political issue of having the Irish language being accorded the same rights as the Scottish and Welsh languages in their respective parts of the UK.

Post-Good Friday, working-class lads Liam and Naoise are essentially estranged from society and living in a world of drugs and raves. As children, they had learned to speak Irish Gaelic from Naoise’s father Arlo, a Republican who then went on the run to avoid arrest, thereby refusing to accept his own parental responsibility.

Liam has been keeping a diary, in Irish, which amounts to a sort of poetry. When he’s arrested by the NI police, having been at a rave, and refuses to answer any questions in English, Irish speaker and music teacher JJ O Dochartaighn is called to translate.

Ó Dochartaighn realises that Liam has real talent and, as a musician himself, invites the lads to his own improvised studio in a garage, where they record a track.

However, even as the trio gains in popularity, it faces real threats from Republican factions, the Northern Irish police and assorted others.

Perhaps surprisingly, the central trio – Naoise Ó Cairealláin, Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh and JJ Ó Dochartaigh, as themselves, are really excellent, with nice turns from Simone Kirby as Naoise's mother, Dolores, Michael Fassbender as Arlo and Josie Walker as a detective.

Shot in an anarchic fashion, with no shortage of swearing, lots of drug use, plus nudity and sex, it's very good and very funny indeed. Not really my kind of music, but very enjoyable.

If you only see Heretic for Hugh Grant, that's more than good enough

I don’t mind a spot of on-screen horror – just not the slasher variety. Give me the likes of Peter Medak’s 1980 The Changeling, Jonathan Demme’s 1991 Silence of the Lambs, Mike Flanagan’s 2019 Doctor Sleep, Jordan Peele’s 2019 Us or last year’s Parallel from Kourosh Ahari.

To clarify further – I don’t mind a bit of violence on screen, but in-your-face gore and slasher stuff is a no-no for me, whether it’s horror or not. It’s not limited to that genre either. I entirely understand that the likes of Deadwood and The Sopranos are top-notch, serious TV dramas, but I could only ever watch them in small amounts because the violence (both spoken and enacted) was too much for me – and that was before I’d even heard the word ‘triggered’!

The trailer for Heretic, from joint directors and writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, had intrigued me, but I wasn’t sure enough that it wouldn’t descend to a degree of slasher mode, so didn’t catch it at my local cinema, where it only seemed to have a quite limited run.

Last weekend, I decided to give it a go via streaming. I’m very glad I did, because it absolutely fits into what I can enjoy.

Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes – confident in her faith and her evangelisation – and Sister Paxton (rather less so) are following up leads on potential converts and, as a winter storm breaks, visit the home of one Mr Reed, who has expressed an interest.

A middle-aged Brit living in a slightly remote – and very weird house that appears to combine both an Escher reality and a 1940s (or earlier) aesthetic – he assures them that (vital for female Mormons) his wife is baking blueberry pie in the kitchen so they won't be alone with a man, which covers the church’s rules of what company a female is allowed to be in.

When he goes to the kitchen, the women find that the front door is locked and that they have no phone signal.

Reed slowly ensnares them into a discussion of religion in general, within which he becomes increasingly aggressive. He then offers to show them a ‘real resurrection’.

Heretic is good because it takes its subject – religion – reasonably seriously in a philosophical sense. It doesn’t belittle the missionaries or their religion (or religion as a whole) and it allows them to stand up for it. Now I’m not religious, but I appreciate that.

The script allows for some really interesting looks at how you stay true to a belief – days later, I am still analysing the ending.

Sophie Thatcher as Sister Barnes and Sophie East as Sister Paxton are excellently played, nuanced characters, but Hugh Grant is sublime as the demonic, yet-suave, Mr Reed.

Really worth watching this, in my view.