Amazing Grace

In 1972, Aretha Franklin recorded her first gospel album, “Amazing Grace” at the New Temple Missionary church – over two nights with the backing of the Southern California Community Choir with a live audience. The album became the best selling live gospel album of all time and the biggest selling of her career. Director Sydney Pollock also filmed the recording sessions, but due to not using clapperboards, it turned out to be impossible to sync sound and vision for general release (as far as I can tell, Pollock never made another concert film). In around 2010 producer Alan Elliot managed to sync the film, and planned to release it, but Franklin sued to prevent the release and it was delayed until now, a few months after her death.

This is an uneven piece of work. The footage is pretty raw – constantly slipping out of focus, zooming around the space often distracted by anything shiny going on at the time (the second night’s footage, with Mick Jagger in the audience, is particularly prone to just occasionally showing “hey, here’s Mick Jagger” – although it is nice to see visual prove that Charlie Watts, sitting next to him, smiles sometimes). And Franklin is shown physically sweating fairly constantly, and she has virtually no banter or action between songs – she’s just there to sing the songs. But she’s still extraordinary, and this is a document of an extraordinary performance. I occasionally complain about singers who go for every note except the ones that are actually in the songs – but with Aretha, everything is forgiven when she sings. She’s got a voice and a presence that commands attention, and everything that is significant about this film is due to her. And on the plus side, there’s not a lot of faffing about getting in the way of her – it knows, most of the time, to sit the camera down and just watch the extraordinary happen. So, on that basis, recommended. Because for whatever reasons, cinema never used Aretha Franklin very much (it’s basically this and two songs in Blues Brothers movies) and any chance to encounter her has to be cherished.

The Nightingale

Jennifer Kent’s follow up to “The Babadook” is a bigger scale film set in 19^th century Tasmania, as an Irish convict, freed but still working for the officers who run the settlement, falls afoul of one of them, subsequently seeing her husband and baby killed and herself brutally raped. Seeking justice or some kind of vengeance, she chases them down as they make the trek from Hobart to Launceston, with the assistance of an Aboriginal tracker, but how far is she really willing to go?

This is, undoubtedly, a brutal film, with some grueling images (particularly in the first phase, but it never quite lets up – some mid-film incidences, in particular, are quite disturbing). But it derives its strength through the various sufferings of an Irish convict woman and the Aboriginal tracker who has his own losses, and Aisling Franciosi and Baykali Ganambarr embody these characters in great depth. Sam Clafin as the main offending officer is painted in somewhat broader strokes, but there’s a desperate self-justification in his actions that mean he’s not an uncomplicated villain – he’s a product of the environment that made him. It’s a rough experience, and no, it is not nearly as streamlined as “The Babadook” was – but it’s worth the watch if you are prepared to take the brutality.

The Farewell

Billi is a Chinese born young woman living in New York, keeping regular contact with her grandmother. But when her family return home to China (ostensibly for a cousin’s wedding, but in reality to see the grandmother, whose terminal cancer is being concealed by the rest of her family), Billi decides to come too. The tension then plays out over the next few days as Billi’s cross-cultural experience, and two very different traditions of grieving, come into play.

This has been praised a lot elsewhere, but I didn’t quite get into this as much as others. I didn’t find much here beyond the bare premise – the acting is fine (Awkwafina, in particular, shows a different, less goofy side to her performances in “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Ocean’s 8”), and there’s some nice footage of contemporary China, but I wasn’t ever particularly emotionally gripped here – it all feels just a little too mild for me. I suspect mileage will vary on this one

Dogman

This powerful drama about a gentle dog groomer who gets dragged into a criminal friend’s circle is anchored by a strong performance by Marcello Fonte as the groomer. It finds individual strength and courage in a grim seaside town in Italy, as Fonte finds himself squeezed by the expectations of his brutish friend, and eventually rebels and finds his own freedom. There’s a glorious gentility to Fonte’s role – his kindness to his daughter and the animals around him and his integrity is contrasted with the rundown town, and how little attention others pay to him.

Director Matteo Garrone shows a strong eye for the unusual beauty in a broken town, and builds tension effectively as the relationship between Marcello and his old friend Simone gradually becomes intractably dangerous. This is a thoroughly effective film (and, no, none of the dogs in the film are harmed or appear in particularly much peril).

Weathering with you

This is the followup anime from Makato Shinkai to his highly successful “Your Name” – and again, it’s a story of a boy and a girl whose lives intersect across magic and natural disasters – in this case, a seemingly set of days of rain, which the girl turns out to have secret powers that can bring sunlight, albeit briefly. Both initially try to market the ability (selling her as a “sunshine girl” online, helping out people who want to have picnics or fireworks displays) before it becomes apparent what using these powers is doing to her – and difficult decisions have to be made…

This is a sweet natured piece, albeit one with some particularly surprising swerves in the finale. There’s familiar anime tropes including the boy who gets embarrassed when he looks at cleavage, the slightly bratty but adorable little brother and the vulnerable magical girl, but there’s a heart and soul to this that makes it still quite engaging. Shinkai has a way of diving into emotional territory in a wholehearted manner that draws on the heartstrings very effectively. Okay, so there’s a little bit of “oh, so THAT’S what’s going on” towards the end, but this is pretty effective as an anime emotion splurge.

Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino is by this point something who either you like or you don’t. He’s as much a film critic as he is a film-maker, albeit one whose criticism usually takes the form of making a film of his own – and he has got somewhat more self-indulgent over the years, with his films accumulating length without necessarily always increasing in depth. Still, it’s the kind of self-indulgence I like, in this case telling a tale of Hollywood in 1969, just on the verge of the great youth-quake which would see many careers end and a whole bunch of new careers take flight. We see this through three characters, two fictional, one real – Rick Dalton, an actor in decline who’s reduced to small guest spots on TV; Cliff Booth, his old stunt-double who’s largely been cut out of the industry and is left helping out Rick by driving him around; and Sharon Tate, their neighbour, a young starlet on the rise, married to a celebrity director, who’s enjoying the heights of her fame and the benefits it brings. On the periphery are various actors and Hollywood types, and the looming threat of the Manson family, whose path, of course, notoriously crossed with Sharon in August of that year.

Much of the film is fairly leisurely, as we look at two days in January 1969 for the characters, as Rick has a guest shot on a new TV pilot, Cliff picks up a hitch-hiker and Sharon meets friends and sees herself in a new film. The third act, set on that notorious August night, is where everything is leading, but in many ways this is more a film about the way fame winds down. Tarantino’s made a very loud point that he expects his career to end after one more film, and this isn’t a film that is particularly interested in the young turks and rebels (I can imagine if Tarantino made a film like this around the time he wrote the script of “Natural Born Killers”, for example, the Manson element might be a lot more to the forefront than it is). It’s an elegiac story of heroes in retreat, men who start to fear that they’ve become passe or irrelevant. But, and perhaps this is a sign that I’m aging too, I found it pretty compelling, using the talents in particular of Pitt and DeCaprio at their peak – both are better than they’ve been onscreen in a while (pretty much since both of them appeared for Tarantino). I suppose in some ways he’s himself a bit of a remnant of another era, the 90s independent scene that he did so much to epitomise and influence – but dammit, he’s still entertaining.