8 1GT Friday September 11 2020 | the times
film reviews
The Broken
Hearts Gallery
12A, 109min
{{{{(Real
15, 76min
{{{((The actor and novice writer-director
Aki Omoshaybi delivers a promising
feature debut, set in Portsmouth and
charting a tentative relationship
between the sensitive Kyle (also
Omoshaybi), newly released from
prison, and the hard-working single
mum Jamie (Pippa Bennett-Warner).
The pair meet over a declined debit
card in Jamie’s local newsagent, and
their unfolding relationship is
permeated with economic hardship
masked by romantic swagger. Jamie,
who works in a supermarket, pretends
to be a white-collar manager, while
Kyle claims to be a lawyer. In the
strongest and most excruciatingly
tense scene Kyle invites Jamie for
dinner in a restaurant that he clearly
can’t afford. When she suggests
ordering champagne his reaction
shot is one of pure terror.
The movie slips slightly off the rails
near the end. Omoshaybi shoots for
a heavyweight payoff involving a
past tragedy, which requires dramatic
complexity and a performance range
that he, unfortunately, cannot yet
muster. KM
On selected release in cinemasT
his is such a strange
and sneaky little
movie, one that creeps
up and grabs you by
the heartstrings even
as you’re trying,
hopelessly, to pick
apart its flaws. It’s a
rom-com, first of all, formulaic to the
core. And yet in a year of uninspired
genre duds, including The High Note,
The Wrong Missy and Love Wedding
Repeat, this low-key charmer rises far
above the pack thanks to a wickedly
funny screenplay from the writer-
director Natalie Krinsky (Gossip Girl)GEORGE KRAYCHYKAt last, a rom-com to fall in love with
This gem from a
Gossip Girl writer
has added laughs
and avoided cliché,
says Kevin Maher
and an indecently charismatic turn
from the rising Australian star
Geraldine Viswanathan.
She plays Lucy, a harried assistant
at a New York gallery who lives in a
spacious Brooklyn apartment with two
wisecracking flatmates and is fired
from her job after a drunken launch
party disaster heavily reminiscent of
Bridget Jones and the Kafka’s
Motorcycle debacle.
Lucy, who has been dumped by her
boyfriend, leaps into the back of a
Prius — assuming it to be an Uber —
belonging to Nick (Dacre
Montgomery), a sensitive wannabe
hotelier. Before long Nick and Lucy
decide to establish, in the shell of
Nick’s incomplete hotel, a museum
space for the memorabilia of failed
relationships (see title).
Naturally, they fall for each other,
but then her ex appears, and then his
ex appears, and before you can say
“Trainwreck meets Working Girl”
something remarkable happens — the
film breaks free from its own clichés
and becomes very special indeed.Krinsky explores Lucy’s obsession with
romantic memorabilia as an act of
desperation, in honour of an ailing
family member. Her friends and
flatmates spring to life with
unexpected poignancy and a battery of
memorable one-liners. The pregnant
and irritable Randy (Megan Ferguson)
rants at her husband, Marcos (Arturo
Castro): “Men! You run the planet, you
start the wars, you killed the bees!” His
meek, quietly defensive reply? “I feel
I had nothing to do with that.”
Montgomery, meanwhile, is the
antithesis of the traditional rom-com
hero — he’s short, not especially
witty and soft around the edges.
Viswanathan, last seen in Blockers, is
the magnetic focus of every scene,
ingenuous and beaming, even when
Lucy is broken inside. By the time the
“enormous game-changing declaration
of love in a public place” scene comes
along, you won’t be hissing with
cynicism, you’ll be punching the air in
triumph. The rom-com is dead. Long
live the rom-com.
On general release in cinemasGeraldine Viswanathan
and Dacre MontgomerySavage
18, 99min
{{{((The masculinity is not just toxic, but
radioactive in this brutalising account
of New Zealand gang life. The
Australian actor Jake Ryan — his face
covered in tattoos, the most prominent
of which reads “Poneke”, Maori for
Wellington — plays Damage, a
ruthless enforcer whose weapon of
choice is a hammer and whose motto
is “Be a fackin savage!”
Damage frequents a bar in a barbed-
wire compound where the burly,
sweaty, leather-clad regulars punch
each other into booze-sodden stupors,
swearing together like a strange
species of aggressive sea bird,
The film flashes back through
Damage’s hard-knock childhood —
physical abuse from his father, sexual
abuse in a borstal, teenage criminality
and his emergence as a psychopath.
The debutant director Sam Kelly
creates a hard-hitting if depressingly
repetitive milieu, with shades of Lee
Tamahori’s classic New Zealand drama
Once Were Warriors. KM
On selected release in cinemasThe Painted Bird
18, 169min
{{{{(If you thought your
lockdown was tough,
spare a thought for the
young boy here, played
with superb restraint by
Petr Kotlar, right, who is
beaten, abused, thrown into a cesspit,
and buried up to his neck and left for
the crows as he makes his way home
through the Balkan badlands during
the Second World War.
The Czech director Vaclav
Marhoul’s film is shot largely in
Interslavic, a constructed Slavic
language, to avoid particular nations
identifying with it. You can see why ithas been greeted with
walkouts at festivals.
The bit with a spoon is
especially horrific, and
Julian Sands plays the
kind of man whom no
child wants to run into.
The sequence of events
is so relentlessly brutal
as to become numbing,
almost comical.
That’s the point, though: Marhoul
is describing a world in which cruelty
has become the norm. The black-and-
white cinematography is rarely less
than exquisite, though, while Harvey
Keitel’s priest and Stellan Skarsgard’s
kindly Nazi offer some respite from
the grimness. Ed Potton
On selected cinema release and Amazon,
BFI Player and Curzon Home CinemaHard Kill
15, 98min
{((((exists on a hard drive, is desired by
a sinister international terrorist called
the Pardoner (Sergio Rizzuto) and
a billionaire former soldier called
Donovan Chalmers (Willis, openly
uninterested).
The plot, it transpires, is merely
an excuse to fill an empty
warehouse with commando-clad
extras and watch them shoot
each other in a series of poorly
executed action sequences.
“If you want to torture
someone, torture me!” the selfless
Chalmers shouts to the Pardoner
near the flaccid climax. “Don’t
worry,” the Pardoner does not
reply. “We’re already torturing
the audience!” KM
Available to stream from Monday on
Apple, Amazon, Google and SkyWhen he was challenged about his
reasons for starring in the truly
execrable Jaws: The Revenge,
Michael Caine famously
replied: “I have never seen it,
but by all accounts it is terrible.
However, I have seen the
house that it built, and it is
terrific.”
I can only hope that Bruce
Willis managed to squeeze a house
out of the producers of this
breathtakingly poor mess about a,
ahem, “quantum” military computer
program that can either destroy the
world or save it. The program, which Hard-boiled: Bruce Willis