8 1GT Friday November 13 2020 | the times
film reviews
Two biopics for the price of one
is the essential pitch of this densely
involving documentary, which tells
Billie Holiday’s story via the previously
unheard interview tapes of her fearless
biographer, Linda Lipnack Kuehl.
After eight years of meticulous
research, including audio interviews
with everyone from Harlem pimps to
former drummers to Tony Bennett, in
1978 Lipnack Kuehl fell to her death
from a hotel balcony in WashingtonDC. Police called it suicide, but
her family suspected foul play.
An eerie pall is deliberately
cast over James Erskine’s gripping
portrait of Holiday, left. There’s
a suggestion that the singer’s
hard-knock life — her battles with
racism and drug addiction and her
voracious and self-destructive
appetites (she was, one band
member says matter-of-factly, “a
sex machine”) — spilt over into the
world of the biographer and sealed
her fate. It’s a richly rewarding film,
and the best music doc since Amy.
Barbican Cinema on Demand
now; Amazon and Apple
from MondayD h c p a h r v a m s w h a B n
fr
The shadow of Tarantino looms large
over this B-grade heist movie. From
the self-conscious dialogue of the bank
robbers, who discuss their favourite
TV stars on the way to the crime, to
the non-chronological narrative leaps
and the repurposing of Hans Zimmer’s
True Romance soundtrack, everything
exists in adolescent homage to the
Pulp Fiction director. There’s a smart
story, nonetheless, at the centre, aboutBillie
15, 98min
{{{{(Finding Steve
McQueen
15, 91min
{{(((an infamous bank robbery in 1972
from President Nixon’s slush fund —
hidden, the film claims, in the bank’s
safety deposit boxes.
That narrative kernel, however, is
beaten into tedium by an enormously
bland central performance from
Travis Fimmel, as the robber and
McQueen enthusiast Harry Barber,
and a dopey screenplay that mistakes
flashbacks and time-jumps for actual
dramatic tension. Forest Whitaker,
the star of this week’s Jingle Jangle,
pops up as a sensitive FBI agent.
He is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the
best thing in the film.
Amazon, Apple, Google, Sky from
MondayF
or every diatribe about the
nefarious reach of Netflix and
its capacity to precipitate the
death of “real” cinema there
comes a movie like this. It’s a
modestly budgeted whisper of a film,
backed by Netflix, and featuring
Sophia Loren as Madame Rosa,
an octogenarian ex-prostitute and
Auschwitz survivor who fosters a
12-year-old Senegalese street urchin
and wannabe drug dealer called
Momo (Ibrahima Gueye). It is, in
short, precisely the type of movie
(measured, thoughtful, elegant, andSophia Loren, still a force at 86
The Italian star
shines in this tale
of an unlikely
friendship, says
Kevin Maher
The Life Ahead
15, 94min
{{{{(not in the English language — it’s
Italian) that mainstream cinema has
long since abandoned.
Screen legend Loren, who has not
taken a starring role in 16 years (she
had a couple of desultory moments
in the musical dirge Nine), grabs the
formidable part of Madame Rosa with
both hands (and teeth and claws).
Rosa’s initial relationship with the
sullen Momo, deposited in her care
after some petty thievery, is typically
hostile. They live on the Adriatic coast,
in the Italian port city of Bari, and
they clash over every subject, from
table manners to Momo’s desire to
work for the local mafia boss Ruspa
(Massimiliano Rossi). It’s a testament
to the talents of the director and
co-writer Edoardo Ponti (Loren’s son)
that this tension is not easily resolved,
and as late as an hour into the film
Rosa is still appalled by Momo, and
complains: “There is a hooligan in my
house. He’s rotten to the core.”
Loren’s performance is instinctual,
commanding and entirely vanity free.There is a tendency with ageing
Tinseltown legends to primp them
and prune them and plop them in
lightweight froth such as Book Club or
Our Souls at Night.
But no such rules apply here, as
Loren reveals the downward trajectory
of Rosa (there is an illness) in a series
of devastating close-ups. In one she
stares into space, soaked by the rain,
mouth hanging vacantly open and
eyes frozen in a catatonic stupor.
It’s a poignant and tragic bookend
shot to the vivacious Loren captured
in the close-ups of her breakthrough
movie, Vittorio De Sica’s The Gold of
Naples (1954). There she played a pizza
seller who bamboozles a plethora of
drooling male customers — a Rosa in
the making.
Loren is nicely complemented by
the powerful new find Gueye, who
matches her scene for scene. Their
relationship, like the film surrounding
them, is tender without ever being
saccharine.
On NetflixFireball: Visitors from
Darker Worlds
97min
{{{((Everyone’s favourite husky-voiced
Bavarian, Werner Herzog, returns with
this diligent, informative documentary
about asteroids and their impact —
literally, metaphorically and culturally
— on Earth. Visiting space-rock
hotspots in the Australian outback,
Rajasthan and Antarctica, Herzog is
joined by Clive Oppenheimer, his co-
director and a Cambridge professor.
The result is more straight-faced
science doc and less Herzogian
jeremiad. Occasionally he springs to
life, injecting the commentary with
mordant humour. In Chicxulub,
Mexico, site of the strike that killed
the dinosaurs, he says in his delightful
deadpan: “The dogs here, like all dogs
on the planet, are too dimwitted to
understand that three quarters of all
species were extinguished by the event
that took place right here.” The rest of
the film is compelling, yet it pales in
comparison with Herzog’s Grizzly Man.
On AppleTV+Lennox: The
Untold Story
15, 96min
{{(((Blank,
incurious
hagiography
defines this
“documentary”
about the
three-times
world heavyweight
champion and — by all
accounts here — bloody good
bloke Lennox Lewis, above. Cut
together with all the pizzazz of a robot
mainlining YouTube clips, it opens
with his grudge match against Mike
Tyson in 2002. We then reverse to
Lewis’s childhood in London, his early
bouts in Canada and his rise to the top
until — whaddya know — we’re back
to the Tyson fight.
Is there an app for this? Famous
clips + circular structure = sports
documentary? The talking heads skip
the juicy stuff, such as his legal battles
with the promoter Don King.
Fight fans will enjoy the access
to Lewis’s mother, coaches and “the
Lion”, his nickname for himself. The
relentlessness of the messaging,
though, is quite a slog.
Amazon, Apple, Google and Sky
from MondayGARETH GATRELL/NETFLIXory
ight
— by all
bl d dSophia Loren
and Iosif
Diego Pirvu