I Am Love (15)
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
★★★★

THIS film, first released in 2009, is getting another chance and frankly, it deserves it.

Rather like Ibsen’s A Doll’s House or DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, it tells the story of a bourgeois wife and her sexual awakening. In what is perhaps the role best suited to her air of uncomfortable otherness Tilda Swinton plays the trophy wife of an Italian capitalist who falls for a younger man.

The genius of the film is to allow the subjectivity of her characters — be it formal, disorientated or sensuous — to pervade the camerawork and editing, making this an emotional odyssey that is entirely convincing.

In its observation of high bourgeois manners the shots are careful to foreground the servants and maids, and to provide a plausible picture of the perversions of capitalist thinking that are the not so hidden structure of the world she leaves.

Exquisite, and recommended.

AR
Available on digital platforms
 

The Penguin Lessons (PG-13)
Directed by Peter Cattaneo
★★★

THE film has Tom Michell (a nuanced Steve Coogan) arrive in Buenos Aires to teach English at a posh private school right at the time of the military coup in 1976.

Based on Michell’s memoir, the narrative gets its leitmotif when Coogan, on an escapade to Uruguay, saves a Magellan penguin drenched in oil and is forced to take him back to the school.

An endearing comedy of errors ensues interrupted when Coogan witnesses the brutal snatching of the school cleaner’s granddaughter by a death squad. Despite her calling out to him he dithers and looks the other way.

The remoteness of the school means the daily horror remains in the background and the focus is firmly on the penguin, now named Juan Salvador/John Saviour whose presence in classes humanises the school ambience.

The English class dissects The Masque of Anarchy. The cleaner joins the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. Improbably, the feel-good factor prevails.

MB
In cinemas from today.
 

Freaky Tales (15)
Directed by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck
★★

FRANTICALLY paced and fizzing with energy, this blood-soaked comedy-thriller is less compelling and enjoyable than it ought to have been.

There are four narrative strands, all set in Oakland, California in 1987. We begin with teenagers defending their punk nightclub from neonazi skinheads and end with a basketball star’s battle with an organised crime gang. There are echoes of Quentin Tarantino in the film’s neatly choreographed brutality but the hacking, burning, and evisceration is handled with a troubling lack of irony.

The middle segments work better. In one, two young women resist predatory behaviour at work – in an ice cream parlour – and challenge a male rapper’s sexist performance at an open mic event. Sadly, Boden and Fleck seem reluctant to trust their audience: the film’s progressive values – anti-fascism, feminism and inclusivity – are asserted without subtlety or wit. The other story, focusing on an ageing hitman’s efforts to escape his role, is the most intriguing, despite a curiously irrelevant cameo by Tom Hanks.

There’s a further “nod” to Tarantino in the melding of storylines. Key characters in one “chapter” have a walk-on part in another but there’s none of the visual flair, fizzing dialogue and revelatory twists of Pulp Fiction. In fact, the hitman story is retrospectively weakened by an attempt to tie every loose thread in the closing sequence.

The quasi-supernatural aspect of the story – signalled by a mysterious green light – serves little purpose and is never properly explored. Freaky Tales is derailed by clunky storytelling, weak characterisation and cliche.

AH
In cinemas from today.

The Thicket (R)
Directed by Elliott Lester
★★

IN THIS snow-clad quasi-western, set c1904, an on-the-run, psychopathic outlaw Wilhelmina Muller aka “Cutthroat Bill” with a price on her head (a convincing Juliette Lewis) kidnaps a young woman Lula (Esme Creed-Miles) after murdering her grandfather.

Lula’s greenhorn brother Jack sets out, somewhat desperately, to free her. What follows is a melee of changing alliances, posses within posses, much “who blinks first” stand-offs, often comical, amid repetitious quoting from the Bible and Shakespeare.

The only characters you might care about, apart from sad Lula, are the acerbic posse leader and reluctant bounty hunter Reginald Jones (a measured Peter Dinklage) and his sidekick Eustace (an endearing Gbenga Akinnagbe).  

In the inevitable final mayhem only Lula and Jones are spared. They collect the $10,000 reward money — a pretty penny in those days — and relocate to Montana proper where her grandad’s 700 acres await and a promising whiff of romance is in the air.

MB
In cinemas from today.