Long Day's Journey Into Night review – an exhilarating slo-mo hallucination

There is such artistry and audacity in this new film by the 30-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a hallucinatory experience whose sinuous camera movements take you on a long journey into memory and fear and a night full of dreams – with influences from David Lynch, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Wong Kar-wai. It is a film about obsessive love, lost love, and that Dantesque dark wood in which, in middle-age, you can suddenly find yourself, with a longing for the past and a creeping dread of the future.

Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) is a former casino manager who has returned to the depressed home town he left 20 years before, because of the death of his father. In the family restaurant, run by his now-widowed stepmother, Luo finds a broken electric clock (one of many images indicating the treachery and unmanageability of time) and having removed the back to change the battery, he finds an old photo, apparently of a woman with whom he was passionately in love in the old days. This is Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei). She was the girlfriend of a local bully and gangster Zuo Hongyuan (Chen Yongzhong) who murdered Luo’s friend, known only by his nickname Wildcat (Lee Hong-chi), whose mother (Sylvia Chang) ran a local hairdressing salon where Luo himself once worked. Then Zuo simply disappeared – on the run, or perhaps murdered himself?

Luo and this beautiful young woman, remembered in flashback wearing a distinctive green dress, pursued a doomy affair, while she feared that this dangerous former lover would reappear. And then Qiwen herself vanished, and Luo drifted away. His return has triggered an obsessive need to find her again, and to delve into his memory for clues. Just when we have acclimatised ourselves to this remarkable and enigmatic reverie, Bi raises the stakes halfway through by taking Luo into a cinema showing a 3D film, and then gives us an entire hour-long 3D dream-fantasy sequence in one unbroken shot, in which Qiwen is to reappear as a new person – the sultry and melancholy karaoke singer Kaizhen. (The film is being screened in 3D and 2D versions, and it is impressive either way.)

The effect is a kind of slo-mo exhilaration. And the film reflects deeply on the nature of memories themselves: they can be unreliable, and illusory as dreams, but perhaps the same is true of our present experience. Luo says: “The difference between films and memory is that films are always false … but memories vanish before our eyes.” Perhaps it is only falsity, the fictional falsity of cinema, or any representative art, that gives memories their structure and substance. Novels and movies have encouraged us to think of our memories as “flashbacks”: distinct, cogent scenes that we have mentally excerpted from a lost flow of time. But perhaps they are entirely different from that, and different also from dreams. They are closer to subliminal flashes, things with no articulated substance until we create one for them. Memory becomes a creative act, a developmental fleshing-out of a fleeting glimpse or feeling.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a noir movie in its way, with moody cityscapes, pool halls and wrecked buildings – the kind of buildings that in a European film of 60 years ago would obviously denote wartime destruction. That is not quite what is being suggested here: these are buildings that are being knocked down, perhaps to create something brand new, in keeping with Chinese prosperity. There is an extraordinary moment when Luo asks someone if Kaizhen is going to be on the bill at a certain club – yes, comes the reply, and in the morning the whole building is to be torn down. And where is Luo right now? Asleep in his 3D movie, dreaming everything we see? Or is it rather that the film simply uses that moment to ascend to a higher order of mystery? It is sometimes exasperating when a film suggests that everything has been a dream anyway, but Bi has let you invest just enough in the material reality of Luo’s unhappy new obsession with lost love, and his realisation that this is the only real thing that has ever happened to him. His love affair has been a waking dream, and the nearest thing to its fulfilment is this eerie new epiphany: that she is gone, and that everything must soon be gone, but that he has been vouchsafed a final new vision of her beauty at the moment of parting.

Atlantique review – African oppression meets supernatural mystery

Some memories are omens,” says the heroine of this intriguingly ruminative and poetic movie from Mati Diop, making her feature film debut in the Cannes competition after an acting career that notably included work in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum in 2008. Atlantique is in fact developed from a documentary short Diop made 10 years ago; she directs and co-writes with Olivier Demangel.

Atlantique is a Voodoo-realist drama, or docu-supernatural mystery, whose dimension of strangeness is unself-consciously baked into the movie’s ostensible normality. But this doesn’t undermine the pertinent things it has to say about the contemporary developing world. It’s a winter’s tale of a film.

At first, it seems a familiar enough story about migrants, boat people and sexual politics. Ada (Mame Bineta Sane) is a thoughtful young woman in Dakar, Senegal, where a huge, futurist luxury tower is being constructed, looming on the beachfront skyline facing the Atlantic Ocean (it is fictional, and digitally created for these distance shots). Ada is engaged to be married to Omar (Babacar Sylla), a wealthy but faintly obnoxious guy who spends half the year in Italy tending to his business interests – and may not intend to stick personally to those laws of monogamy and chastity that apply to a demure young bride.

In any case, Ada is in love with someone else: Souleiman (Traore) who is a building-site labourer working on the tower, and like everyone else he has not got paid for weeks. The property mogul in charge, Ndiaye (Diankou Sembene), has cashflow issues for which his workers must pay the price. And so Souleiman must decide if he will join the many young men who are going to climb into a flimsy boat and make the dangerous journey across the ocean to Spain. A better life awaits, in theory, but what of Ada?

The irony is unbearable. Ada herself is on the verge of a far better life, and apparently more easily attained, than any Souleiman can dream of – that of a rich woman. Her home, with its exquisitely ghastly marital bedroom, will be a masterpiece of garish luxury, the envy of her friends. But the gulf between what she is being forced to accept, and what she wants, is wider than any ocean.

What she has in common with Souleiman is, of course, servitude. Her personal capital as a beautiful, desirable young woman is greater than anything Souleiman can offer in terms of labour. But her self-hate could well be greater than any anguish Souleiman will suffer as a poor man paying his way – though this supposes that he will survive any sea journey.

And then something strange and unexpected happens. Souleiman’s behaviour is upsetting and mysterious. A police inspector enters the picture, suffering illness and maladies that some of Ada’s more disreputable and westernised friends share, and attribute to malign djinns. Souleiman sends Ada a text asking her to meet at a certain time in the middle of the night; is it real, or a sinister trap?

Atlantique is about the return of the repressed, or the suppressed: the men who were denied their rightful pay on the building site then faced the real possibility of a watery grave. Their spirit rises up, and this becomes a ghost story or a revenge story. Atlantique may not be perfect, but I admired the way that Diop did not simply submit to the realist mode expected from this kind of material, and yet neither did she go into a cliched magic-realist mode, nor make the romantic story the film’s obvious centre. Her film has a seductive mystery.

Sorry We Missed You review – Ken Loach's superb swipe at zero-hours Britain

Director Ken Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty have come storming back to Cannes with another tactlessly passionate bulletin from the heart of modern Britain, the land of zero-hours vassalage and service-economy serfdom – a film in the tradition of Loach’s previous work and reaching back to Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. It’s fierce, open and angry, unironised and unadorned, about a vital contemporary issue whose implications you somehow don’t hear on the news.

Like their previous movie, I, Daniel Blake, it depicts the human cost of an economic development that we are encouraged to accept as a fact of life. Like I, Daniel Blake, it is substantially researched through many off-the-record interviews, and rich in detail. But I think this film is better: it is more dramatically varied and digested, with more light and shade in its narrative progress and more for the cast to do collectively. I was hit in the solar plexus by this movie, wiped out by the simple honesty and integrity of the performances. Yet my emotions were clouded by my feelings about a certain toxic political issue. Of this, more in a moment.

The drama concerns Ricky (played by Kris Hitchen) a former construction worker in Newcastle who lost both his building work and his chance of a mortgage after the economic crash of 2008. He is a hardworking, affectionate guy with a bit of a temper and a liking for drink. Now he is renting with his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood), a contract nurse and in-home carer who has to visit dozens of disabled, elderly and vulnerable people every day for their meals, baths and “tuck-ins” – jargon for an eerie formalised version of maternal intimacy. It’s a workload that over the years has left no time for her to tuck in her two kids at the end of the day. They are Seb (Rhys Stone), a stroppy teen who has artistic talent but is in trouble with the authorities, and his smart kid sister, Liza Jane (Katie Proctor).

Ricky’s mate persuades him to get on what looks like a nice little earner: van driving for a big delivery company. But the firm’s hard-faced manager Maloney (Ross Brewster) – a bullet-headed guy with a number-one cut – brusquely tells Ricky that he will be employed on a quasi-freelance basis, with none of the benefits of conventional employment. He has to buy or lease his own van, or rent one from the firm at a ruinous daily rate, and meet strict targets for deliveries. These are set by the all-important scanner, worryingly called a “gun”. Particularly important are the “precisors”, customers who have paid extra for precise delivery slots. Maloney shouts things like “Let’s get the cardboard off the concrete!” when all the packages are being loaded: a telling real-world detail. But Ricky has no time to go to the lavatory and has to carry an empty plastic bottle with him, a necessity which is not just mortifying but makes him vulnerable. And Maloney has not told him everything about the insurance situation.

So Ricky persuades Abbie to sell the car she needs for her work so he can buy the van that is going to be their route out of financial misery. He is hired – or in the firm’s sinister terminology, he is “onboarded” – and Laverty creates a subtle resonance when a caring and careworn copper tells Seb he has a great family and that he should “Take that onboard”.

Inevitably, inexorably, Ricky gets into trouble when ordinary human needs mean he has to take a little time off work, and the system of “sanctions” – another creepy bit of corporate jargon borrowed from the Department of Work and Pensions – means he gets into more and more debt with the firm, and has to work ever harder. Abbie also has a zero-hours contract and she can see how her patients are becoming neglected: there are some heartbreakingly lovely scenes for Honeywood here. Their family life and their relationship with their children becomes more and more toxic. It is gripping, even terrifying, especially when Ricky realises where the financial responsibility for his goods actually lies. The cast enact for us a tragic situation with a simple dignity and openness.

And here is where my qualm arises. Many people will see this film as a portrayal of real issues facing people – not silly old Brexit, which only worries people in the London bubble. Does the director himself feel like this? I don’t know. But I can only say that the European Union is the modern-day nursery of employment rights, and outside it is where working people will find more cynicism, more cruelty, more exploitation, more economic isolation and more poverty. This brilliant film will focus minds.

The Irishman review: Scorsese, De Niro, Pacino and Pesci are foes reunited in de-aged mob epic

For an auteur whose work has often been bridled by commercially-minded studio executives, Netflix offers something close to total creative control, a seductive if dangerous proposition. It’s how the streaming behemoth lured everyone from Alfonso Cuarón to Steven Soderbergh to the Coen brothers and it’s partly how ultimate get Martin Scorsese was gotten. Originally set at Paramount, his ambitious, decades-spanning, fact-based crime drama The Irishman was deemed too financially excessive, its budget spinning out to more than $150m. But with the ability to not only bankroll but to remove any fears of box office failure, Netflix welcomed Scorsese with open arms and a gaping chequebook.

The result, boasting a budget usually reserved for a film with a colon in its title and a staggering 209-minute runtime, is a gamble nonetheless given that unquestionable talents have unquestionably struggled with the type of indulgent free rein streaming platforms tend to offer. There’s also the small matter of why the production costs were so high, mainly down to a desire from Scorsese to digitally de-age his primary cast members, a controversial practice that has yet to be perfected. But The Irishman, serving as this year’s splashy opening night premiere of the New York film festival, is not only a successful film on its own terms but a successful example of how this brave new industry shift can benefit those who use great power with great responsibility. Because, quite simply, the film as it is would never have survived the modern studio system without streaming assistance.

Scorsese has referred to it as “a costly experiment” although at its core, it’s familiar, even safe, territory for him. It has been a passion project of his since 2007 and sees him reunited with the Goodfellas and Casino pairing of Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. De Niro is Frank Sheeran, a second world war veteran whose ensuing career as a truck driver belied his cold-blooded ability to kill with little remorse. But he soon found his way into a life of crime, first with a bit of light theft and ultimately as an efficient killer, working for mob boss Russell Bufalino (Pesci). The two became close and led Sheeran to also work alongside Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), whose corrupt tactics as a labor union leader made him a target to both the authorities and the criminal underworld.

Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zaillian decide to tell Sheeran’s story at three different ages and with the help of similar instayouth tech we have seen in everything from American Horror Story to Avengers: Endgame. But within the confines of a more naturalistic setting, there’s something undeniably jarring about its use, both in how at times it really works and how at times, it really doesn’t. The film’s biggest, creepiest problem lies behind De Niro’s fortysomething eyes – or rather the film’s biggest, creepiest problem is that nothing lies behind them. Understandably the hardest physical feature to digitise, De Niro’s gaze is stuck with this faintly nightmarish, Polar Express-esque vacancy and while it distracts at first, the surrounding film is so vastly impressive that I found myself otherwise immersed.

It’s not often that any director is afforded such a luxurious budget outside of franchise fare. This year, it has miraculously happened twice but while Quentin Tarantino’s overhyped and undercooked Once Upon a Time in Hollywood only teased at what a recreation of late 60s Los Angeles might look like with $90m to spare, Scorsese takes us far deeper. As one might expect from a director of such loving precision, The Irishman is exquisitely made, every detail carefully considered, every location perfectly picked and with such a gargantuan budget at hand, it feels utterly transporting, a film to be savoured on a big, crisp screen rather than half-watched on a smartphone. De-ageing quibbles aside, the craftsmanship contained here is flawless and my main reservation about its Netflix availability is that not enough people will get to appreciate the delicacy of Scorsese and his team’s work in theatres.

But regardless of how one chooses to consume the film, the performances will soar nonetheless. De Niro’s well-documented decline, from Oscar-winning lightning bolt to mostly hapless hired hand, has allowed many to lose sight of his abilities and to lose hope that he might reconnect with his former glorious self. It’s obviously fitting that a reunion with his longtime collaborator would do the trick and it’s a joy to see him cruising at the top of his game again, curbing his parodied excesses and effortlessly steering the film through decades. Pacino has suffered a similar crash, wasting himself in ill-fitting dirge, and while he does fall into some of his scenery-chewing old tricks here, it’s the best we have seen from him in years.

The film’s ace is a quietly electrifying Pesci, in his first role since 2010, an astounding reminder of his big screen presence with a character so dramatically distant from his previous Scorsese incarnations. He’s rational and professional, much like the film’s plot, which eschews the brash debauchery of Goodfellas or Casino for something far more grounded. There’s humour, plenty of it, but rather than watching men commit crimes to pay for extravagant luxuries, we see them do it for their family’s survival, or at least that’s how they might justify it.

And it’s in this introspection where the film gets really interesting. When a director returns to a genre they’re most associated with, it can often feel like a greatest hits montage. For much of its duration, The Irishman covers familiar ground but is slickly entertaining, if a little repetitive in the third hour. In the last 30 minutes, as the pace slows and the quips subside and the violence quells, we are suddenly made aware of the ultimate price of this lifestyle and of the crushing savagery of old age. It’s a finale of stifling bleakness, of the pathetic emptiness of crime and of men who mistake their priorities in life, the discovery arriving all too late. There’s an almost meta-maturity, as if Scorsese is also looking back on his own career, the film leaving us with a haunting reminder not to glamorise violent men and the wreckage they leave behind.

The Great British Bake Off review – sweet relief in these trying times

On your marks, get set … GET HAPPY! The Great British Bake Off – the show that brought the nation together at the exact same time everything else fell in the bin like a sabotaged baked alaska – is 10 years old. To celebrate, we get … another scrumptious series of The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4). No surprises hidden like currants in a fruit cake. No crimes or misdemeanours (not yet anyway). No boat-rocking channel switches. Just some decent folk getting in a tizzy over the height of their genoise in a Berkshire tent.

Let’s face it, reviewing Bake Off is now about as necessary as scoring your nan’s scones. Of course they’re going to be just right, you ungrateful wretch. Nevertheless, like those scones, Bake Off commands attention, praise, respect. And we show this recognition not by making ‘mmmm’ noises and saying ‘your best yet, nan’ but via the cooking up of vast amounts of column inches, manufactured scandals, and thinkpieces on what it really means when Paul Hollywood describes Michelle’s Fairy House showstopper as “faultless” yet doesn’t give her the handshake. Is it unconscious bias? Because it’s the first episode and he doesn’t want to peak too soon? Or has the handshake been overused to the point of redundancy and will now only be rolled out in the event of another bread lion?

We will never know, but I’m racing ahead when what we’re after is a low-and-slow bake. So to the opening tableau; a riff on The Wizard of Oz. Noel Fielding, droll, kind, cheeky-faced, is Dorothy. Sandy Toksvig is the scarecrow with no brain (Noel: “That’s the QI gig gone!”). Prue Leith – she of the showstopper necklaces and compassionate judging – is the lion. And Hollywood is the tin man. No heart. “Is it weird that I fancy you now?” Toksvig asks Fielding as they wander across the lawn and we wait for the theme, the aural equivalent of stepping into a warm bath, to kick in. “So do I,” mutters Hollywood. Hil. Ar. I. Ous.

It’s cake week, and the signature challenge is a fruit cake, which is all about batter consistency. Too thin and the fruit drops to the bottom, too thick and … whatevs. What we’re really interested in is the texture of the contestants. Will we be blessed with a Nadiya or Rahul? Who’s going to be the anal Brendan-y one? (Henry, without a doubt: just look at his royal iced house). The posh one who induces automatic fond eye-rolls whenever they mention using pullet eggs from their own chickens? (A toss-up between vet Rosie and geography teacher Alice). The clumsy one? (Michael: he keeps cutting himself but still makes a treasure chest cake with about three fingers.) As all Bake Off fans know, the ideal contestant will be the perfect cake mix of wit, compassion, baking flair, self-deprecation, team spirit, and comedy stress responses. It’s too early to say, but I’m keeping an eye on Steph and Michelle.

Much has been made of how young the group is this year, and it’s true that seven out of 13 are in their 20s. Jamie, 20, is easily the silliest. One of those inexplicable people who looks like he’s having the best time even while failing to add eggs to his caramel schnauzer. “It’s like mixing concrete,” he grins. Special mention, also, to Helena, who “lives like every day is Halloween” and makes the droopiest bat wings ever crafted out of sugar. “From one goth to another I know you’ll be fine,” Fielding reassures her. God love him, and all goths who bake. Her genoise is so rubbery, she says, that if it fell on the floor it would bounce right back. Tragically, this doesn’t happen.

But her showstopper leads to the episode’s best moment. Based on the fairy garden Helena imagined as a child, she explains that she now has an actual fairy garden at home. Hollywood looks a bit smirky. Turns out he thought she said furry garden. Oooooh, naughty! “Oh Paul,” says Helena, slightly hysterical. “I know what you’re thinking.” Cue a query about how big her furry garden is, at which point I started to miss Mary Berry, because her confused-amused face would have been priceless.

No matter. Bake Off remains a constant in this otherwise sugar-free life. A place where catastrophe is a dropped cake that can always be squashed back together. Welcome home, nan.

The Nowhere Man by Kamala Markandaya review – worryingly relevant

When the African American artist Faith Ringgold’s brilliantly provocative American People Series paintings were rediscovered a few years ago, after being hidden away in storage since the 1960s because of art world uninterest, she found herself belatedly proclaimed a major artistic figure. At 88, she had to wait 60 years for society to catch up with her radical black female genius. Zora Neale Hurston was sadly long dead when her womanist novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) was resurrected in the 70s by Alice Walker, after decades out of print. It has been considered a feminist classic ever since. One wonders how many other great works of art, especially from marginalised voices, are underrated or ignored because they were ahead of their time.

The republication of The Nowhere Man (1972) by Kamala Markandaya, who migrated to Britain from India in 1948, is a case in point. It was her seventh novel, but unlike her previous, India-based books, this one put British racism under the microscope, gained no traction with the critics and disappeared from sight until now. Set in 1968, the year of Enoch Powell’s racist rivers of blood speech, the novel centres on Srinivas, an Indian widower and spice merchant who came to England in 1919 and now lives in his own large house in a London suburb. He has experienced the loss of his country and many loved ones. When his Indian wife dies, he becomes friends, and eventually lovers, with Mrs Pickering, a kindly English divorcee.

Srinivas ruminates on his relationship to Britain in a novel that bravely unpicks the scabs of empire and racism. He experienced the oppressiveness of the British empire in India in his youth and he’s never quite sure, even after 50 years, whether he fully belongs in his adopted country. He’s generally left undisturbed, but with the arrival of black and Asian immigrants in the 50s and 60s, racist attitudes surface with dire consequences. When immigrants are accused of being the root of all the country’s problems, Srinivas, referring to the exploitative history of the empire, concludes that the reverse is true: “That this bland country owed debts it had not paid, rather than scores which it had to settle. That the past had seen his countrymen sinned against, rather than sinning.”

Markandaya’s writing initially feels ponderous, almost archaic, and the 21st-century reader probably needs to acclimatise until the book grabs hold and doesn’t let go. She weaves the reality of racial politics as a lived experience, as well as themes of community, conquest, belonging and love. Character interiority and complexity are exploited to the full, fostering empathy, even when people should be despised. She dexterously handles subtly shifting points of view so that we are exposed to multiple perspectives. Cultures clash, generations are divided by gaps, there are private and political rebellions, families are ripped apart, much goodness prevails, but when immigrants are made scapegoats, innocent people suffer.

The Nowhere Man is worryingly topical in our unsettled times with hate crimes on the rise and anti-foreign sentiment stoked by the Brexit agenda. Unfortunately, Markandaya died in 2004 and isn’t around to witness renewed interest in the book she considered her greatest. For the last 20 years of her life, she couldn’t get published and went out of print. Generations of readers lost out on reading this gem. Now I hope it will take its rightful place in literary history.

Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton) has been longlisted for the 2019 Booker prize.

Yesterday review – Richard Curtis' magical mystery tour of a world without the Beatles

Imagine no Beatles, it’s not easy even if you try. No Yesterday, no Blackbird, no Sgt Pepper ... and then … no Imagine, no all-time best Bond theme (Live and Let Die), no all-time best comedy band name (Ringo Deathstarr), no Concert for Bangladesh to inspire Live Aid, no Withnail & I, no Life of Brian – but then again, no Charles Manson. In a Beatle-less universe, Mike McGear could be Bono’s producer and best mate and Jeff Lynne is president of the world. Screenwriter Richard Curtis’s goofy, wacky, exasperatingly enjoyable fantasy-comedy riffs on ideas like these with a story co-written with Jack Barth – although it turns out TV’s Goodnight Sweetheart got to the idea first. It is directed with dash and gusto by Danny Boyle.

Maybe it shouldn’t be any sort of evaluative factor, but the simple fact of hearing Beatles songs, the simple thought experiment of pretending to hear them for the first time, does carry a charge. And, although this film can be a bit hokey and uncertain on narrative development, the puppyish zest and fun summoned up by Curtis and Boyle carry it along. It’s ridiculous and indulgent at all times, like Russell Crowe shouting his “Are you not entertained” line from Gladiator wearing a Beatles wig. Yet there is a weird and heavy backwash of sadness at the end, a kind of melancholy comedown, and I can’t quite decide if that was intentional or not.

Himesh Patel (from EastEnders and Channel 4’s Damned) steps up amiably and confidently to his starring role as the classic Richard Curtis lovably-hopeless-and-rubbish character with a supportive gallery of friends; he gets a wild stroke of fortune that could never ever happen in real life. But that’s enough about the fact that his best mate is Lily James who is probably in love with him.

Patel plays Jack, a useless bloke from Lowestoft who works in a retail warehouse and has big dreams of making it as a singer-songwriter. On evenings and weekends, he and his guitar show up at awful pubs, gigs secured by his superfan, de facto manager and miraculous quasi-Platonic-but-not-really friend Ellie (James) who has believed in him ever since school when she saw him playing Wonderwall, of all the hilariously quasi-Beatle standards.

But then one night, at the exact moment that Jack loses consciousness due to a non-serious road accident, a gigantic electrical storm lashes across our solar system, frying planet Earth’s space-time-reality-consciousness continuum, and, after a brief power-out, existence has been changed: the Beatles never existed. (This is incidentally every bit as scientifically accurate as anything in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.) Jack realises that he is the only person unaffected. He is the only human being who remembers the Beatles songs and can pass them off as his. And so his climb to super-mega-greatness begins.

There are lots of laughs and goosebump moments, especially when Jack plays his new song Yesterday to his saucer-eyed mates, and later realises he has to frantically piece together the lyrics for Eleanor Rigby from memory because Google can’t help. Ed Sheeran has a nice good-sport cameo as himself, as the big star who discovers Jack and then has to come to terms with the fact that he is Salieri to Jack’s Mozart; and, in all his mediocrity, he winds up attempting to sabotage Hey Jude.

Arguably, the story as it pans out is a bit straightforward: there is no question of, say, some Beatles songs going down better than others in the present day. Moreover, Curtis scholars will see how Yesterday is a gender-switch version of Notting Hill, featuring an ordinary guy getting a brush with uber-glamour, with Joel Fry in the Rhys Ifans role of stupid best mate. There wasn’t much for Kate McKinnon to get hold of in the role of the nasty LA manager, but the onward rush of silliness compensates.
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Of course, we’re heading for a colossal final cameo(s), and I was reasonably sure I knew what form this was going to take – but I was wrong. This big walk-on moment is every bit as sentimental and extravagantly sugary as everything else. For the first millisecond, though, it really will take you aback. As fab as it could reasonably be expected to be.

Apocalyptic visions from a shunned giant of British art – Frank Bowling review

Why hasn’t 85-year-old Frank Bowling been honoured with lots of big museum shows before now? Born in 1934, in what was then British Guiana, he studied at the Royal College of Art alongside David Hockney and Patrick Caulfield. Yet many of his 1960s paintings were so undervalued they have long since vanished, including a self-portrait as Othello. Bowling’s neglect, however, is not just because he is black. It also has to do with the deeply unfashionable character of his painting for much of his career. His sin was to be an abstract expressionist in the wrong time and place.

In Britain, abstract art is rarely the public’s cup of tea. In 1966 Bowling moved to New York and his great paintings of the early 70s are completely American in vision: you’d think he went to college with Mark Rothko, not Hockney. But he took up abstract expressionism just as it was being repudiated by postmodernists who dismissed it as pompous, macho or even American imperialist. Bowling saw something else: its moral and intellectual strength, its potential for history painting.

Bowling’s work Penumbra is a fine example. It is nearly seven metres wide and more than half of it has been swallowed by night. Out the velvety darkness the continent of Europe materialises, as if seen from space. Bowling painted this epic in 1970 when the Apollo moon landings were in full swing and images of the earth from space were becoming familiar. Yet the satellite of his mind’s eye sees time as well as place. The yawning shadow that swallows up Africa and the Atlantic Ocean is the melancholy echo of slavery still scarring the modern world.

Middle Passage is the title of a similarly grand canvas, this one nearly three metres square. It makes that tragic theme explicit, referring to the journey across the Atlantic endured by Africans crammed in mostly English slaving ships in the 18th and early 19th centuries. How do you represent such suffering in art? Bowling does it with colour. Yellow, orange and red blaze over misty green. If these colours don’t immediately conjure up the horrors of the slave trade, just compare it to JMW Turner’s 1840 masterpiece Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying. Turner too shows a fiery red and gold sky over a sickly sea. Bowling has removed the sharks and corpses to tell history with colour alone.

These are great works of abstract art. Artists have been painting abstractions for a long time now - the first to do so was, arguably, Turner himself in late works that he exhibited without even trying to make their suggestive clouds of light look “like” anything. Yet abstract art comes in many varieties. It can be decorative and silly, like a Damien Hirst dot painting. Or it can be overwhelming in its seriousness, like Rothko’s Seagram murals at Tate Modern. Bowling has pursued his own idea over a long and still creative life – the last room reveals exuberant works done in the last few years – and it is up there with the giants.

How incredible that in 1988 – when history books tell us the only important thing happening in British art was Hirst’s Young British Art exhibition Freeze – Bowling, back in London, was painting a series of tremendous abstract canvases inspired by the Thames. In Great Thames IV (1988-9) the river is transfigured into a glorious dapple of silvery blue. But if this seems an optimistic vision of the urban Thames, step closer. The congealed surface is infested with the kinds of stuff you can pick up by the Thames: I swear I saw a used condom. Other objects include bracelets that might be 3,000 years old, or from Accessorize.

The glimmering surface of this riverine work is created, like many of Bowling’s later paintings, using not just paint but acrylic gel and foam. Turner’s ghost is still in the building: he was accused of throwing mustard and curry powder at his canvases. Maybe he too would have squeezed gel and foam everywhere if he’d had the chance. Bowling can be tremendously grave. But he is joyous, too. So many paintings here share the sheer fun and freedom of being in a studio with a big canvas and as many squeezable sloppy substances as you need, and no rules. Bowling is a true heir of Pollock’s drip method. In a wondrous group of 1970s paintings that seem to subvert the political sobriety of his global maps, he cascades acrylic paint in gooey towers of melting colours that run lusciously into each other. They look like apocalyptic ice cream cones.

Bowling uses colours that Rothko would never have dared to because they don’t seem serious. Lurid violet and lime slide about in his 1974 painting Ziff. In later works, the plasticky addition of those gels heightens the disco glamour, yet meaning clogs the surfaces. Philoctetes Bow is a fire of rust in ocean depths. Go up close and you find real rope embedded in the matted colours. If colour is feeling, texture is truth. In the legend of the Trojan War, the Greek heroes abandoned Philoctetes because he had a rotten foot then tricked him out of his bow. This is an abstract history painting about war, theft and betrayal.

There is not a dull painting in this exhibition. Nor is there a stupid one. Bowling’s art is sensual yet hefted with truth. It is a sea you can swim in with pure pleasure, until you see the shadow in the water.

Seahorse review – moving study of man who gave birth

Across the breadth of fiction, the notion of male pregnancy has historically been played for laughs, terror or, most often, a combination of the two. The theatrical poster for the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Junior says a thousand words: doctor Danny DeVito stares through the fourth wall with a get-a-load-of-this-guy grin while Schwarzenegger looks to us, stunned, as if to ask how he could have landed himself in such a predicament. Even if these jokes ultimately make male frailty their butt, suggesting that a milestone of womanhood would be a man’s worst nightmare, they’re still jokes.

The new documentary Seahorse (which was produced in association with the Guardian) dares to take seriously a scenario heretofore portrayed as absurd. Back in our nonfictional world, there’s nothing particularly amusing about the heartfelt, draining struggle of trans man Freddy McConnell to conceive and deliver his own infant. Director Jeanie Finlay extends sincere empathy towards someone who won’t let gender get in the way of heeding the basic human impulse to create and nurture new life. That’s how Finlay wants us to see McConnell’s journey to fatherhood – a phenomenon as natural as the reproduction of the seahorse, in which male specimens carry and spawn their own young.

The friction in McConnell’s day-to-day comes from the disparity between his biologically hardwired drive to multiply, and the extraordinary medical measures that must be taken to make that dream real. He has had surgeries above the waist but not below it, enabling him to undergo an intense water-birthing procedure captured with frankness a couple notches short of Window Water Baby Moving. Before that, however, he will need to get off the testosterone treatments that have brought him closer to reconciling his body with his identity. By the end of the film, McConnell chastises himself for his naivety at the outset of this journey, failing to realize that listening to his internal clock would ultimately lead him to “feel like a fucking alien”.

The question of what is or is not “normal” hangs over nearly every scene, heaviest in those showing McConnell explaining himself to his family and loved ones. He has trouble conveying that what might be uncommon doesn’t have to be abnormal, compounded by the fact that many people just don’t want to hear it. A contentious conversation with a conservative family member crystallizes an inward pain that films from cisgender directors and actors can only approximate. For Finlay, however, allowing McConnell to use his own words makes sense of a complicated process fraught with contradictions and paradoxes even for those not contending with a total destabilization of their personhood.

“This is a film about me having a baby, but what I feel like I’m going through isn’t me having a baby, or pregnancy,” McConnell explains. “It’s a much more fundamental sort of total loss of myself. I just want to close my eyes and be on the other side of this.” While feeling a twinge of regret and powering through it is a vital part of anybody’s pregnancy, the unique opposition McConnell faces amplifies these anxieties threefold. Even with unsureness being par for the course, it doesn’t help that he must constantly edit official forms by pen to read “all pregnant people” instead of “all pregnant women”.

Whatever misgivings McConnell may have harbored, they crumble as soon as he’s able to hold his child in his arms for the first time. New parents describe this moment with reverence bordering on the religious, an instant bond of the souls absent from any other component of human experience. Only then does it click that McConnell is exercising his right as a carbon-based organism by creating that connection. Finlay arranges a moving juxtaposition of her own footage with home videos from McConnell’s childhood, illustrating how he fits into a tradition that has cycled on and on since the dawn of time.

As Donald Trump continues to chip away at the protections for trans people, Finlay and McConnell jointly re-establish their paramount importance. McConnell’s entitled to the sum total of what life has to offer even if it’s expensive or overwhelming, simply because life offers it. Finlay includes multiple passages in which McConnell does nothing special – drawing a bath, having lunch, stressing– to situate his pregnancy within the quotidian and familiar. She’s trying to show how McConnell is both like anyone else and unlike most people, the core challenge of trans art that also seeks to address a non-trans audience. She doesn’t always know which side of that divide to come down on, but she recognizes that it’s there, which is more than can be said for most. We all share universals like hurt and hope, it’s just that their expression differs for McConnell. Like the act of childbirth itself, something that has happened trillions of times and yet always feels intimately personal, he’s one of us and one of a kind.

Pet Sematary review – lairy, hairy new version of Stephen King's undead animal shocker

“There’s more than one way to bury a cat,” mutters one of the very many traumatised characters in this movie: an uproariously lairy, nasty new version of Stephen King’s uncanny horror masterpiece of 1983, last adapted for the cinema by King himself in the version directed by Mary Lambert in 1989 and now disinterred once again, written for the screen by Jeff Buhler and directed by scare-specialists Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer.

It’s a supernatural chiller about our fear of death - and our longing for death as an end to this fear. This brutally effective and convulsively disturbing story is something to compare with WW Jacobs’s classic Edwardian ghost story The Monkey’s Paw or maybe even Franz Kafka’s stage-play The Guardian of the Tomb, in which the guardian realises his job is not to keep the trespassers out, but the inhabitants in.

Pet Sematary has all the time-honoured and perhaps even cliched tropes of King’s golden age: the creepy kid’s drawings, the sacred burial grounds, the happy family car-journey through deceptive rural loveliness at the very beginning, the habit of stepping outside your house when you hear a strange noise and looking around while incautiously going out far enough to allow some demonic figure to nip into your house unseen behind you. This version of Pet Sematary has iPhones and plasma TVs and Google searches but it could as well be happeningduring the Carter or Reagan presidencies.

Crucially, it is about the vulnerability of animals, whose short lifespan is an instructive lesson in death and grief for so many of us growing up. Louis Creed (Jason Clarke) is a hardworking hospital doctor who is disenchanted with big-city life in Boston and has taken his wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz) and two young children Ellie (Jeté Laurence) and Gage (Hugo Lavoie) to live in rural Maine where he has a new emergency room job.

They have found a lovely tumbledown old house to live in, with what appears to be a huge forest forming their very own backyard. But the family is disconcerted to discover that by long-standing convention, local children are allowed to bury their dead pets in a special clearing there, an eerie space marked by a misspelled sign “Pet Sematary” - funerals distinguished by weird quasi-pagan ceremonials. And the subject of death is difficult for Rachel, haunted by a bereavement in her own childhood. A kindly old neighbour tells them all about this: Jud Crandall, played by John Lithgow, about whose past acting career there is a cheeky in-joke.

Young Ellie is devoted to the family cat, Church, and twinkly-eyed old Jud can’t bear it when Church is killed on the highway by a truck and he wishes to shield Ellie from the grim fact of the pet’s death. So he persuades Louis to help him sneak Church’s dead body to Pet Sematary and bury it there, and Louis plans to tell Ellie some story about the cat having just run away. But this place has a sinister effect on the pets buried there. Church returns – as a malign, dishevelled, violent cat. And the awful question is: might this place work on dead humans

Kölsch and Widmyer contrive some high-voltage jumps: it’s very disturbing when Louis is awoken one night by weird noises from his backyard forest, then opens the door to see the moonlit trees are uncannily much closer to the property than originally appeared to be the case, crowding right up to the porch. And it’s a jolt when Louis has to tend to a young student, horribly killed in a car wreck, who becomes an undead warming of Louis’s own terrible future.

As often with King stories, I find something a bit counterproductive in the sheer plethora of scary things and frightening plots and subplots – and I couldn’t help thinking that the flashback memories of Rachel’s tormented sister were a bit broad in horror terms, and superfluous dramatically. But this story keeps efficiently turning the screw, and famous misspelling itself has a power of its own. It conveys an oppressive state of wrongness: it is the non-cemetery where dishonest Louis once tried to deny death, to conceal death, and where the dead also refuse to accept their status. The final image of family togetherness is an exhilaratingly nauseous lurch.

2019 Oscars: the complete list of winners

The Oscars ceremony got off to a mildly awkward start this year, as Maya Rudolph, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler, presenting the Best Supporting Actress award, did a little comedy routine acknowledging that this year’s presentation had no host, no Most Popular Film award, and no awards given out during commercials. (“And Mexico is not paying for the wall.”) It was a wry little dig at the many embarrassing controversies the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences faced this year as it attempted to retool the ceremony. The attempts to shorten the show by cutting some awards, while simultaneously adding more crowd-pleasing elements, led to a lot of online backlash.

But the results spoke for themselves. In a comparatively brief show that ran just over three hours (as opposed to the four-hours-plus shows that have become standard over the past few decades), the producers didn’t often linger over speeches from the presenters or winners. The show moved along briskly, with the early winners’ mics being rapidly cut off if they weren’t brief and to the point in their acknowledgment speeches. Even the more elaborate presenter setups — like the visual gag involving Melissa McCarthy and Brian Tyree Henry, dressed in elaborate costumes referencing the Best Costuming nominees, and particularly the pet rabbits in The Favourite — went by quickly.

But the ceremony did give a little more time to the winners of some of the bigger awards. It was a night of firsts: Spike Lee won his first non-honorary Oscar, for co-scripting BlacKkKlansman, and delivered a shaky, emotional speech that was one of the evening’s few nods toward current politics. Black Panther, which picked up three wins out of its seven nominations, became the first Marvel Studios movie to win an Academy Award.

And in part thanks to Black Panther, it was a significant night for black filmmakers. Black Panther production designer Hannah Beachler and costume designer Ruth E. Carter each became the first black women to win in their respective categories. (Beachler was the first black production designer to win, period.) Peter Ramsey, one of the co-directors of the Best Animated Feature winner Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, was the first black director to win in the category. Mahershala Ali, who won Best Supporting Actor for Green Book, became the first black actor to win in that category twice. (And only the fifth black actor to win in the category over the course of the Academy Awards’ 91-year history.)

And while Netflix’s film Roma lost the Best Picture award to Green Book, in a surprise upset, it made history in other ways. It’s the first Mexican submission for Best Foreign Language Feature to win in the category. And its Best Cinematography win for director Alfonso Cuarón (who also took Best Director) marked the first time in history that a director simultaneously won the Oscar in the cinematography category.

Here is the full list of 2019’s Academy Award winners:

Documentary (Feature) — Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Free Solo

Actress in a Supporting Role — Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk

Makeup and Hairstyling — Greg Cannom, Kate Biscoe, and Patricia Dehaney, Vice

Costume Design — Ruth E. Carter, Black Panther

Production Design — Hannah Beachler and Jay Hart, Black Panther

Cinematography — Alfonso Cuarón, Roma

Sound Editing — John Warhurst, Bohemian Rhapsody

Sound Mixing — Paul Massey, Tim Cavagin, and John Casali, Bohemian Rhapsody

Foreign Language Film — Alfonso Cuarón, Roma

Film Editing — John Ottman, Bohemian Rhapsody

Actor in a Supporting Role — Mahershala Ali, Green Book

Animated Feature Film — Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

Animated Short Film — Domee Shi, Bao

Documentary Short Subject — Rayka Zehtabchi and Melissa Berton, Period. End of Sentence.

Visual Effects — Paul Lambert, Ian Hunter, Tristan Myles and J.D. Schwalm, First Man

Live Action Short Film — Guy Nattiv and Jamie Ray Newman, Skin

Best Original Screenplay — Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie, Peter Farrelly, Green Book

Best Adapted Screenplay — Spike Lee, Sean McKittrick, Jason Blum, Raymond Mansfield, Jordan Peele, BlacKkKlansman

Original Score — Ludwig Goransson, Black Panther

Original Song — Lady Gaga, Mark Ronson, Anthony Rossomando, and Andrew Wyatt, “Shallow,” A Star Is Born

Best Actor in a Leading Role — Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody

Best Actress in a Leading Role — Olivia Colman, The Favourite

Best Director — Alfonso Cuarón, Roma

Best Picture — Green Book

This Is Personal review – can women's activism survive the Trump era?

One consequence of the Trump-era outrage onslaught – and the current morass of government shutdown and malaise – is that footage from his 2016 campaign already feels dated. The transgressions, both terrifying and ridiculous, and reactions that pile up in the clips opening this documentary from Amy Berg feel mild in retrospect. But anti-Trump momentum was clear when millions of women took to the streets for the first Women’s March in January 2017. This is Personal is about what happens to the movement afterwards.

It documents the continued activism of some of the march’s leaders, particularly women of colour. It’s the “my” in “not my president” – the personal in the political – that interests Berg; her film is less about the organisation of the largest mass political demonstration in American history than about how a personal moment of protest ricocheted through the lives of two activists in the years since pink “pussy hats” stormed Washington.

This Is Personal opens with Tamika Mallory, one of the Women’s March’s four national co-chairs, on her way to Washington that January. Mallory, who has a history of gun reform and Black Lives Matter activism, was instrumental in ensuring the march was more than just a parade of suburban white women. Berg intertwines scenes from Mallory’s career as an activist with footage of Erika Andiola, an immigrant-rights activist. Andiola, a resident of Arizona since she arrived from Mexico at age 11, is a so-called “Dreamer”, one of the nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to America as children and protected under Obama’s Daca act, which Trump rescinded in 2017.

We follow Andiola and Mallory – down a street in Virginia, into the Senate building, to Andiola’s mother’s asylum interview, to Mallory’s parents’ balcony – as they react and respond to the litany of affronts by the Trump administration. The shots, stitched together with footage of phone calls and time with family members, illustrates the effort and personal costs of their activism. Mallory changes from heels to sneakers as she leaves a gala for the Women’s March in New York to lead a sit-in near Trump Tower; she is detained, but gets in a phone call to tell her teenage son she won’t be home for a while. Andiola’s mother, with her in the back of a car, says she’s proud but worried; to spell out why, Berg accrues a series of truly disturbing smartphone videos of Ice arrests and racist chants.

But despite its clear illustration of the stakes of the Trump presidency, the film is most concerned with practicalities of intersectional feminism. Since the first Women’s March, the organisation has fractured, most notably around Mallory’s association with Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam who has a long history of antisemitic rhetoric. Mallory has refused, under increasing pressure, to denounce Farrakhan, citing his positive influence in the black communities where she works. The Democratic National Committee ended its partnership with the event this year amid concerns of antisemitism within the march’s leadership. To its credit, This Is Personal provides ample space to consider this criticism of one of its central stars. It is telling, and central to the film’s message, that one of its most poignant scenes simply dwells for several minutes on a conversation between Mallory and a Brooklyn rabbi as the two seek mutual understanding.

The two discuss the dispute – the pain of Farrakhan’s words for Jews, the pain of the black community, what is fair and unfair to ask in response – with a raw honesty and good faith that is rarely allowed to bloom on camera. Berg wisely leaves out the question of whether or not Mallory’s response to the criticism proves sufficient. Instead, viewers ponder Mallory and Timoner’s larger question: can we find a way to work together? This Is Personal does not provide definitive answers, but offers a template for how to listen better – and where to start.