One can only imagine the gallows humour that was banded around the set of Allelujah. The film adapts Alan Bennett’s eponymous play and comes directed by Notes on a Scandal’s Richard Eyre. It creams the upper crop of Britain’s most beloved veteran thespians and devotes just shy of a hundred minutes to reminding each that they’re nearer death than birth. Charming. A good job all involved boast a well honed sense of humour. Certainly, a cast so glittering can’t help but warm the cockles. And yet, an excess of worthy point-making can’t help but weigh down the film’s featherlight flurries.
It’s been well over a decade since Shekhar Kapur last featured on the British cinema scene. That was 2007’s risible Elizabeth sequel: The Golden Age. The less said the better. And yet, feels is fitting that Kapur’s return to the main stage plays rather like a callback to a bygone era. What’s Love Got to do With It? revives not Britain’s love affair with lavish period drama but the lush rom coms Richard Curtis made profitable in the nineties. Curtis hasn’t a hand in this one but with the leafy London setting, middle class sensibilities and über-familiar narrative, he’s the only plummy cliché missing.
It’s with a weary competency that the latest entry in Marvel’s difficult second era fuels one more trudge through the studio’s now gluttonous cinematic universe. Apologies: multiverse. This is Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. An exposition dump of a film as visually ugly as it is a waste of its A-list talents, who do, at least, bring fine and dandy performances. In further balance, theree is some very funny material to be found within the drudge. After all, Ant-Man always meant breezier fare than the likes of Doctor Strange and the Cap’ in the pre-Endgame days. Those Halcyon days.
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