Songs My Brothers Taught Me
Mubi
98 mins
★★★
With Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland performing well in this year’s awards season, here’s a chance to catch up with the director’s first feature (from 2015), a sombre tale of Native Americans living on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Made with non-professional actors recruited locally, it’s quite baggy — unlike Zhao’s superb second feature, The Rider, a similar look at reservation life — but there’s plenty going on. The main characters, a conflicted teenager (John Reddy) and his younger sister (Jashaun St John), are worth knowing, and Terrence Malick fans will feel at home in the film’s well-shot landscapes.
A Common Crime
Amazon, Apple TV, Chili, Google Play, Microsoft, Vimeo On Demand
12, 96 mins
★★★
The protagonist in this Argentinian thriller is a sociology professor, and it might seem we’re at risk of being lectured in some way or other when the film takes a look at corruption and class divisions: the plot turns on the professor’s unintended but guilt-inducing involvement in the death of her housekeeper’s teenage son. In the event though, Francisco Márquez’s film is rather too brisk on the social themes it addresses. It’s more a psychodrama than anything else, and Elisa Carricajo’s performance as the increasingly tormented academic turns out to be its main strength.
Wilderness
Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, Sky Store and others
15, 84 mins
★★★
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“I’ve talked so much and said nothing,” says one of the two central characters in this British drama, as it nears its end. He’s being a bit hard on himself, but there is certainly a fair amount of overblown chat in the film’s tale of new lovers (James Barnes and Katharine Davenport) who begin to question their passion during a weekend break in Cornwall. Set in the 1960s and influenced by that era’s French New Wave, Justin John Doherty’s low-budget film is impressive in its feel for atmosphere and its nimble moves from scene to scene, helped along by a jazz score. Its dialogue though, is not just stilted but lacking in Sixties’ flavour.
Sequin in a Blue Room
Amazon, Apple TV, BFI Player, Sky Store and others
18, 80 mins
★★★
With the help of a Grindr-like app and permissive parenting, this Australian film’s 16-year-old gay hero, known as Sequin (and played by Conor Leach), enjoys a busy, addictive sex life consisting entirely of one-night stands. This may or may not be bad for his psychological health, but Samuel Van Grinsven’s movie sidelines that question by introducing a clear danger: a middle-aged man who becomes aggressive in his pursuit of Sequin. This thriller aspect cheapens the film a little, but it’s executed with flair. Whether he is describing pleasure or pain, Van Grinsven (a first-time feature director) is a heady stylist.
Thunder Force
Netflix
12, 105 mins
★
Melissa McCarthy plays another of her rough-diamond types in this comedy, but the twist here is that a high-tech experiment turns the slacker into a superhero, allowing her to fight crime alongside a more competent superhuman (Octavia Spencer). It would seem however, that no amount of power-boosting fantasy can change the usual weak standard of the films McCarthy makes with her husband, Ben Falcone, as her director. Thunder Force’s cartoonish action scenes and general silliness make it a bit more fun than such clunkers as The Boss and Life of the Party, but it still has no good jokes.
