Daily Mail, Friday, September 6, 2019 Page 49

Rojo (15)

Verdict: Quietly compelling thriller

   ★★★★✩

GRIPPEDBYATALEOFARGYBARGY

some of the initial scenes are sat-

isfyingly repulsive and terrifying.

The mass hallucinations of the

characters result in some of

the creepiest haunted fortune

cookies you will ever see, and the

leper in the basement is always

a winner.

When Beverly goes back to the

house she lived in with her

abusive father, she finds it owned

by a dear little old lady, Mrs

Kersch, who invites her in for tea,

and says helpfully: ‘you know

what they say about Derry? no

one who dies here really dies.’

Then it all kicks off when Mrs K

gets naked.

Pennywise himself is at his

scariest when being seductive,

particularly to small children.

His unsettling, petulant voice is

full of repressed laughter and his

cheesy smile erupts into a huge

red maw of needle-sharp teeth,

before he indulges in heart-and-

face-munching cannibalism. But

as the movie jump-scares along,

tension is lost as Pennywise

morphs into increasingly ridicu-

lous forms, teasing, attacking

and retreating, because the show

must go on.

Rather than lurking evilly in

the shadows, he comes out into

the light in a superhero-style

final battle that lasts for about

half an hour.

The cast desperately put on

their scared faces again and

again, as they are challenged by

a killer cute puppy and gallons of

gloopy fake blood.

Fans of the first film will enjoy

going down the sewer of memory

lane with the adult losers’ Club,

but this is definitely not a cinema

outing for anyone suffering from

coulrophobia, ‘a persistent and

irrational fear of clowns’.

And as the master of suspense

Alfred Hitchcock once said: ‘The

length of a film should be directly

related to endurance of the

human bladder’ — and it: Chap-

ter Two just goes too far.

VINER’SVENICEROUND-UP

and Essie Davis, both superb)

have to deal with her growing love

for a 23-year-old drug addict and

dropout, Moses (Toby Wallace).

it’s quirky, with a whip-smart

script, and pulled off the double-

whammy of making me, and

everyone around me, laugh and

then cry. (★★★★✩).

noah Baumbach’s Marriage

Story, with Scarlett Johansson

and Adam Driver, is another funny,

beautifully-observed film about

family relationships, focusing on a

couple trying to get divorced. i

reviewed it briefly last week, so

here i’ll just say: see it

(★★★★✩/netflix).

For me, the disappoint-

ment of the festival was

The laundromat, Ste-

ven Soderbergh’s

comedic take on the

2016 Panama Papers

scandal, which uncov-

ered massive interna-

tional tax evasion and

fraud. The story is

intriguing, with Meryl

Streep playing

an ordinary

widow whose

insurance

PREDiCTinG awards at film

festivals is notoriously tricky;

juries move in mysterious ways.

All i can say is if it were down to

me to dish out the prestigious

Golden lion at the conclusion of

the 76th Venice Film Festival

this weekend, Joker would prob-

ably get the nod, with Babyteeth

and Marriage Story also firmly in

the frame.

Joker, which i reviewed in

Monday’s paper, is a provocative,

witty, troubling, compelling inter-

pretation of how Gotham City

resident Arthur Fleck (Joaquin

Phoenix) began his evolution into

Batman’s arch-enemy.

Director Todd Phillips and his

co-writer Scott Silver have made

Arthur a mentally-ill man, more

sinned against than sinning — at

least to start with.

They do not disguise their debt

to Martin Scorsese in a film that

has clear echoes of The King

of Comedy and Taxi Driver,

yet Joker is also thrillingly origi-

nal, with an extraordinary

performance by Phoenix at its

dark heart. (★★★★★)

i loved Babyteeth, a remarkably

accomplished debut by Austral-

ian director Shannon Murphy.

An adaptation of a play, it tells

the deeply moving, at times hilari-

ous, story of a cancer-stricken

schoolgirl, Milla (Eliza Scanlen),

whose parents (Ben Mendelsohn

claim against a U.S. leisure-boat

company starts the ball rolling

towards the expose.

But Soderbergh divides his film

into chapters, explaining financial

shenanigans in a variety of self-

consciously jaunty ways.

Also, the scenery-chewing

performance by Gary oldman as a

German conman, yelling in a cod-

Teutonic accent at the camera,

might be the most annoying turn

i’ve seen in the cinema all year.

(★★✩✩✩ /netflix)

of the foreign-language films i

saw in Venice, i greatly admired

An officer And A Spy, Roman

Polanski’s grippingly faithful

adaptation of Robert Harris’s

excellent novel about the Dreyfus

affair, which unfolded in late 19th-

century France in a murky swirl of

anti-Semitism.

it’s tempting to wonder if Polan-

ski, effectively exiled from the

U.S. for the statutory rape of a

13-year-old girl, sees a

parallel between himself

and Alfred Dreyfus, the

upright army officer

wrongly accused of trea-

son. one hopes not.

But that aside, Polanski

has made, at the age of

86, an absolutely terrific

picture (★★★★✩).

SET before the 1976 military coup in Argentina,

which overthrew President isabel Peron, Rojo

immerses itself in the lives of the butter-wouldn’t-

melt middle classes, quietly profiting from

corruption and staying safely silent as their left-

ist-leaning neighbours mysteriously disappear.

The real-life ‘Dirty War’ of state-backed

terrorism targeted political dissidents and

anyone associated with socialism. The film

centres on lawyer Claudio (Dario Grandinetti),

his wife and daughter, who increasingly find

themselves sullied by their complicity.

And when a man comes into a restaurant, takes

Claudio’s table, and later breaks down screaming

‘nazis!’, the netherworld cracks open.

There is a quiet, thrilling tension to this film by

Benjamin naishtat. Every polite sentence is a

metaphor for something worse, and the

magnificent plains of Argentina make the human

action seem disturbingly small.

n PERHAPS this is a whole new sports genre —

the gay water polo comedy, filled with hot bodies,

lip-synching divas and happy, snappy humour.

The stars of the show, in budgie-smuggler

Speedos, are The Shiny Shrimps, an amateur

water polo team from Paris with ambitions to

compete in the upcoming Gay Games.

But they find it difficult to take pool training

seriously, and in this French film, olympic

swimmer Matthias le Goff (nicolas Gob) has to

atone for making a homophobic remark on

television by being sent to coach the Shrimps.

The usual personal hurdles are overcome in

mini-dramas for each member of the team, and

they set off for the games in Croatia, which natu-

rally requires a trip on a Priscilla, Queen of The

Desert-style double-decker with rainbow flag.

it’s a fun outing, but no old-fashioned queer

cliché is left unturned, and despite the fact the

story is based on the real-life Shiny Shrimps, it

often feels like this film is years behind the times.

KM

by Brian Viner

AT THE VENICE

FILM FESTIVAL

The Shiny Shrimps (15)

Verdict: No cliche left unturned ★★✩✩✩

Pictures: ALLSTAR PICTURE LIBRARY/NEW LINE CINEMA

NG

He’s back: Bill

Skarsgard as

evil clown

Pennywise

In the running:

Scarlett Johansson