To weep or not to weep? It’s not so much a question as it is an inevitability in Chloé Zhao’s profoundly moving adaptation of Hamnet. Drawn from the equally affecting novel by Maggie O’Farrell, who takes joint credit for the film’s screenplay with Zhao herself, Hamnet draws woozily on the tragic 1596 death of the only son of William Shakespeare and Anne – here referred to as Agnes – Hathaway. In the sixteenth century, an opening epitaph advises, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable. Hamnet’s supposition has Hamlet a tragedie born of truth. There’s no doubting, at least, the film’s emotional honesty in its exploration of the loss.
A year on, it feels legitimate to consider Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: Part One a barnstorming success. Not content with defying gravity at the box office, the film proved popular through the awards season and spawned the cultural moment that was Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande’s space-held press tour. Part two, subtitled For Good, dances through on a slightly tougher sell. It’s the stage musical’s less beloved second half, complete with notoriously weaker songs and haphazard attempt to crowbar the original Baum circle into Macguire’s square.
Was it the story that drew punters en masse to last year’s It Ends With Us or that story? Justin Baldoni’s emotional excoriation of abuse on screen or Blake Lively’s allegations of the same off it. One suspects the latter, Either way, the serviceable Colleen Hoover adaptation proved so barnstorming a success that more could not help but follow. What it is to have a sizeable back catalogue. Stephen King for a BookTok fandom. Regretting You lands first out of the blocks, from The Fault in Our Stars’ Josh Boone. Lacking the gravitational pull of star feuds, Regretting You must earn its chips entirely on merit. A pity, then, that it is little more than a tepid soap opera unto which soup is ladled from a shallow emotional pool into chasms of implausibility.
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