There’s nothing wrong with a children’s film striving for cross-generational appeal. A hit on target can be pure magic. Pixar nailed just that with every film in their heyday and it’s a sweet spot the first two Paddington films exemplified. Miss, however, and you might wind up with a film like IF. That’s to say, a middling effort, neither fun enough for kids nor interesting enough for mum and dad. This is the new feature from John Krasinski, skewing young for the first time after horror dabbles in A Quiet Place. Krasinski has a natural flare for concept cinema but here his efforts feel strained, the push for pathos too obvious and contrived. It’s like watching an adult’s distant memory of childhood, repurposed through the weary lens of parental experience. The imagination is there, it’s just not the wild and boundless sort of children really enjoy.
Three hundred years have passed since our last visit to the Planet of the Apes. It’s felt like it. In real world terms, that’s seven years since Andy Serkis’ Caesar expired his mortal coil, mere moments after his band of superior simians finally reached the paradisal Oasis. The legacy of Serkis – and, indeed, his chimpanzee counterpart – weigh heavily on Kingdom, film four in the reboot era. Coming from an already high bar, the advancement is astonishing and the apes have never looked, nor swung, better. Humanity, meanwhile, has regressed. You decide on which side of the screen.
Sweaty, muscular and desperately horny, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers lusts in the fashion of an old courtly romance. The emphasis is on the court – it’s a tennis film – but the romance is as pervasive as it is dripping in the erotic energy of unquenched climax. Every game is intercourse. As befitting the Chaucerian tradition, there are knights, jousts and a fair maiden worth fighting for. More modern is the youthful vibrance of the piece. Guadagnino’s cast are electric but it’s his own reinvention of point of view filmmaking that drives forth the avant-garde vigour.
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