ozjosh03

This is an interesting, if not quite worthy successor to the infinitely superior A Very English Scandal. The problem here is that the writers clearly decided to make Margaret, the Duchess, the more sympathetic character - one supposes so the audience would have someone to root for, but also clearly in order to create a narrative around the way women were demonised for their sexuality in more repressive times. While this is certainly a valid perspective, it has the effect of short-changing us on the scandal front. In truth, the Duchess was a nasty piece of work, and every bit as bad, if not worse, than the loathsome Duke. But this TV version of events only touches lightly on some of the more appalling things she did, like trying to have her step-sons disinherited, and faking a pregnancy (while attempting to buy a baby) to establish a rival claim to the estate and title. The real Margaret was thoroughly spoilt, vacuous and self-absorbed, and Claire Foy's generous portrayal of her really doesn't do justice to the woman's monstrosity. And if the object here is to dissect a celebrated scandal, why not go all the way? The series is worth watching for the performances, and as a potted history to the Argyll affair, but if you want the full story you'll need to do some further reading.

A documentary about Martin Shkreli? Sure, why not? The guy briefly became "the most hated guy in America". He drew attention to pharmaceutical price gouging with his own cack-handed attempt at the rort. He was convicted of securities fraud. And his weirdness alone should almost guarantee a watchable film. Unfortunately, Pharma Bro manages to take everything interesting about Shkreli and squander it in a muddle-headed exercise in something that veers wildly between trolling and hero-worship. Director Brent Hodge does himself no favours in putting himself front and centre in this half-arsed search for answers about Shkreli. In fact, he starts to seem like a mini-me Martin, as needy, as self-absorbed, as irrational and as amoral as Shkreli himself. For commentary on he relies heavily on the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos (someone as widely loathed as Shkreli), a rapper friend of Shkreli's who turns out not to be that much of a friend, an ex-girlfriend who wasn't even that much of a girlfriend and a WuTang Clan rapper so incoherent that he should have been subtitled. None of it is very revealing. Hodge actually seems to have a secret crush on Shkreli, which is the only way to interpret his efforts to paint Shkreli as a colourful cartoon super-villain - a kind of cross between Lex Luthor and The Joker. It's a cute conceit, but it does little to illuminate the seriously awful things Shkreli did, much less shed any light on Shkreli's motivations or personality flaws. Pharma Bro feels a bit like documentary-making for the TikTok generation. But even that makes it sound more interesting than it is. Don't waste your time.

Oh dear. This shockingly fourth-rate production aspires to be an outback thriller with a comic bent. But before the humour even has a chance to fall flat - which it soon does - the plot collapses under the combined weight of rolling implausibility and cliches by the bucket load. In the opening sequence a car is pursued along a highway, then off-road across the desert by a massive road train, which somehow both out-runs and outmanoeuvres the car. It defies all automotive logic. The police subsequently find a camera near the scene of the crash, yet no sign of how the crash occurred. Really?! No sign of the road train's tyre tracks metres from the over-turned car? No sign of the several kilometres of tyre tracks from the high-speed pursuit?! Amazing. The investigating cop later declares he's from the "Burnt Ridge Police Force", which tells us only that the writers did zero research into how police forces in Australia are organised. Meanwhile, a funny-fat probationary cop tosses off northern-english colloquialisms like "any road...", an expression that no Australian-born person has ever used. Later, it transpires that the local police have heard nothing about the bomb explosion at the cafe in a nearby town - an event that, if it occurred anywhere in outback Australia, would be about as momentous as 9/11. And all of this in the first episode. Suffice to say, I will not be bothering with the second. It's hard to believe this tosh is actually a BBC/HBO co-production. Or that either company feels okay about producing a series in which almost every Australian character is there to be the butt of various dimwitted local yokel jokes. The three stars are for Jamie Dornan, who clearly needs to get a better agent.

I don't care that Ben Platt is ten years too old to play Evan Hansen. It's a musical; it doesn't need to be realistic. And I know many a teenage boy who looks ten years older as soon as puberty kicks in. I do care that the film is a lumbering, overlong and more than somewhat pretentious. I do care that most of the musical numbers are dull. But what bothered me more than anything was the fact that the grandiose claim of the musical's one big showstopper - You Will Be Found - is thoroughly negated by the actual plot. Which makes Dear Evan Hansen one of the dopiest musicals of all time.

Spencer is a ludicrously over-the-top, wilfully camp piece of myth-making, destined to stand alongside Mommie Dearest as one of the most bonkers biopics of all time. The script is, by turns, both intentionally and unintentionally bad. The direction is madly flamboyant. And the central performance is every bit as outrageous as Faye Dunaway's Joan Crawford. Kristen Stewart is wildly mannered, lavishly self-indulgent and joyously chews through the scenery. The script calls for her to converse with scarecrows, pheasants and the ghost of Anne Boleyn. She performs a dance routine through the halls of Sandringham. And she devours and regurgitates her way through a number of banquets and cold storage rooms. But, as with Faye in Mommie Dearest, there's never any subtlety or nuance. Stewart's Diana remains a stubborn caricature. Watch her in the scene with the reporters outside the Church on Sunday as she emotes maniacally, giving an unhinged drag queen's version of a mental breakdown. And just when you think Spencer can't get any sillier it takes a left turn into Mrs Danvers territory. Seriously. This is a film that really does deserve midnight screenings with cult followers dressed in their favourite Diana costumes shouting the best of the worst lines along with Stewart. But that might rather depend on there being enough Diana fans with a sense of humour. Which I seriously doubt.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye attempts to re-cast tele-evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker as, among other things, the naive victim of her avaricious husband, a champion of the underdog and a gutsy, heroic survivor. But to achieve this the movie script performs all kinds of magic tricks with the facts. It ignores how Tammy Faye knowingly colluded with Jim Bakker for decades, defrauding their hapless followers of millions and living in the lap of luxury at others' expense. It largely overlooks how she stood doggedly by Jim's side, often crying for the cameras, through a litany of allegations of financial impropriety and sexual misconduct (including rape), abandoning him only when the money dried up and he was no longer going to be a viable meal ticket. It ignores how she then married another criminal, Roe Messner, who was was subsequently convicted and jailed for massive bankruptcy fraud. The woman was a grifter all her life. She was nobody's victim. She didn't "survive" Jim; she simply moved on to her next scam. I get why Jessica Chastain saw Tammy Faye as the role of lifetime: a larger than life character, outlandish costumes and make-up, the drug addiction, the scandal, the fall from grace and the public attempt at redemption. But if you're going to play a clownish villain, then why not go all the way and tell the truth, rather than withhold key facts, soften the edges and pretend Tammy Faye hurt nobody but herself? All of which pretty much makes Jessica Chastain as shameless a huckster as Tammy Faye herself.

Free Fall is an angst-ridden German melodrama that seems to have found an appreciative gay audience, despite some disturbingly retro sexual politics. The romance - if it really amounts to a romance - between Mark and Kay reminded me of a lot of films from long, long ago. One is Sunday, Bloody Sunday, John Schlesinger's 1971 film about a tortured triangle between two men and woman. Except that Schlesinger's film has subtleties and and an intellectual aspect that Free Fall entirely avoids. I was also reminded of 1982's Making Love, another film that offers up a lot of sexual heat between two guys, but generates way more emotion and sympathy for the wronged woman caught in the middle. But even Making Love had more going on between its two male star-crossed lovers. The biggest problem with Free Fall is there's nothing real about the relationship between Marc and Kay. There's some steamy sex. And bucket loads of angst and repressed emotion. But at no point are we witness to anything you could actually call a conversation. So it's hard to say why they're attracted to each other, or whether their romance really is meaningful. Ultimately, it's frustrating and seriously unsatisfying if you're looking for something more than the gay equivalent of a Barbara Cartland novel.

This is a fairly straightforward record of the events of January 6, pieced together from a variety of sources and narrated by interviews with those who were there - rioters, police, reporters, politicians. The film doesn't really reveal anything new or surprising about January 6, but it does serve as a revealing record of possibly the dumbest insurrection in history. They stormed the Capitol with no real plan - just because Trump told them to. Some believed the election had been rigged or stolen, but they had zero evidence, and had ignored all the evidence that there was no irregularity, no "steal". Some spout dopey beliefs about children being kidnaped and tortured, again with no evidence. Once inside the Capitol, they take selfies, smoke weed, wander aimlessly and are led away from the Senate chamber by one wily security officer - because they were too dumb to even check the layout of the building before storming it. Ultimately, they achieved nothing, other than shaming themselves and their nation. All in all, it's a wonder these yokels managed to catch the right bus or train, or take the right freeway to get to Washington in the first place. Yes, the US is deeply divided, and those divisions led to the insurrection, riot, attempted coup, or whatever you want to call it. But the US needs to face the fact that - besides being a nation divided - this was an insurrection born of rank stupidity.

On one level this is a superior rogue cop thriller, very much in the film noir tradition. The direction is taut. The performances are strong. And it's intriguing from start to finish. But Operation Hyacinth is also a tense and nuanced study of homophobia and the inevitable hypocrisy that goes with it. It is specifically about Poland in the 1980s, but there are almost identical stories of police persecution and conspiracy in many other places - the US and Australia to name just two, around the same time. (The recent Australian TV series, Deep Water, covers much the same territory.). What elevates Hyacinth is the way it explores the twin moral dilemmas of Robert, an aspiring secret service officer who is challenged by corruption and by his own sexuality. It's several cuts above most gay-themed movies. Recommended.

Let's be honest: if a straight director delivered this movie the vast majority of gay men would be rightly incensed at the dismal parade of two-dimensional stereotypes. Every gay character in Swan Song is cut from the same polyester cloth - the swishy-bitchy central character, Pat... the swishy-bitchy hairdresser... the swishy bartender... the swishy drag queen... etc. There's a couple of gay dads who appear briefly, but they don't get to talk, so we never get to know how swishy they are. I started to wonder: could there even be this many screaming queens in Sandusky, Ohio (with a population of 25,000)? The 10 star reviews here might suggest there is still an audience for this kind of gay flick, but to me Swan Song is even more desperately dated and wrist-slashingly grim than the original Boys in the Band or La Cage aux Folles. The movie is supposedly a heartfelt tribute to a much-loved Sandusky hairdresser, but a quick google search leaves me wondering just how heartfelt and how much of a tribute it really is. For one thing, the real Mr Pat was not German, which makes the casting of Udo Kier a dubious move. More crucially, despite an end credit thanking people for their stories about Mr Pat, the film character is entirely superficial. He wears a lot of rings, smokes a particular brand of cigarettes, etc. But if there were fascinating anecdotes that reveal his character and illuminate his life and struggles, then they haven't made the movie since both the narrative and the back story is entirely unsurprising.

Everything about The Guilty is so implausible that I just couldn't summon the necessary suspension of disbelief to even just go along for the ride. I don't specifically know how emergency calls are handled in LA, but I do know that in most places the responders who take those calls are carefully screened and extensively trained. They are expected to remain calm and unflappable. They are trained to counsel distressed callers in a wide range of situations. They are there to be reassuring and comforting to victims of violence and to talk reasonably and responsibly to people who may be unhinged, hysterical and a risk to themselves and others. Also, ALL of their calls are recorded. Sometimes they are also monitored by supervisors. So everything they do is subject to minute analysis and review, and any deviation from protocols and procedures are quickly corrected. Serious violations would cost them their jobs. And rudeness and abuse of callers would simply not be tolerated. The character played by Gyllenhaal in The Guilty would quite simply never be allowed through the door of real emergency call centre, and the kind of ranting and reckless behaviour he indulges in would have him quickly escorted from the building by security. But, hey, if you'd rather live in a world where police responders are allowed to behave like Gyllenhaal's character, go right ahead and "enjoy" The Guilty.

The catastrophic bushfires of 2019/2020 have already acquired mythic status in Australia, with almost unbelievable stories of monster conflagrations, epic devastation and awe-inspiring heroism. So there was every reason to expect the ABC's Fires to be an appropriately epic and inspiring dramatic interpretation of those events. Unfortunately, the first episode doesn't rise much above Home and Away-level soap. The first fifteen minutes is nothing but mundane teen romance. The two lead characters are somewhat dull star-crossed teens, and hardly the best representation of Australia's brave and fearless volunteer firefighters. And nothing of any great interest happens until about 35 minutes into the 45minute running time. Maybe future episodes will do a better job of conveying the terrifying scale of those fires and the hardship and heroism that came with them. But this opening episode doesn't come close to doing justice to the real life events still seared in the nation's collective memory.

It seems we're still at the point where any old gay-themed movie can get an endless string of 10/10 reviews, even if it's very ordinary or downright bad. Firebird is somewhere between ordinary and bad, depending on how critical you want to be. While it's apparently based on a true story, it plays awfully like a very standard, very cliched boy-meets-closet-case tale. Anyone who has seen more than a handful of gay movies has seen it all before. The leads are visually appealing, but not good enough actors to rise above the soap. And for the second half of the film Tom Prior (as Sergey) is saddled with one of the most obvious wigs you'll ever see in a film. It pulls focus so much it should probably have had its own separate character name. Sadly, it's not the only unintentionally hilarious thing in Firebird. There's some visual imagery involving jet fighters that will leave any seasoned film buff rolling their eyes. And Sergey becoming wide-eyed with awe and emotion at his first visit to the ballet is pretty funny, given that what's on display is comically garish and amateurish. Check it out if you must, but don't expect 10/10.

This is a fascinating documentary, particularly for anyone who knows Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice and is therefore already acquainted with the haunting beauty of the young Bjorn Andresen, who played Tadzio. The Most Beautiful Boy in the World is sumptuously photographed and deftly edited to create a legend around Andresen's main claim to fame - and therein lies the problem. It gradually becomes apparent that the producer-directors of this doco are hellbent on the main narrative being that of a beautiful innocent corrupted and all but destroyed by his youthful brush with movie fame. While nobody ever explicitly speaks in terms of a Death in Venice curse, it's very much implied in the shots of an aged and frail Andresen gazing along the same beach where his younger, more carefree self frolicked while making the film; and in the all-to-clear parallels between the lost, lonely old Andresen and Dirk Bogarde's pathetic, crumbling Aschenbach. What's troubling is that the documentary makers are quite clearly determined not to allow too many facts to get in the way of their myth-making. The emphasis is all on instant fame and the pressures of being labelled "The Most Beautiful Boy in the World" leading to Andresen having a deeply troubled life. In fact, this is 90% of the film, with stern fingers pointed at Andresen's fame-obsessed grandmother and some sly, not-entirely-justified jabs at Visconti for their parts in exploiting the boy. There's much less examination of Andresen dealing with a mentally unstable mother, his mother's grisly death when he was still a child, his loss of his own child to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or his struggles as a husband and father. All of these likely had a bigger impact on Andresen's life than briefly being a poster boy for youthful beauty, and they can't all be conveniently traced directly to his Death in Venice experience. The filmmakers also curiously omit any mention of Andresen actually having a fairly extensive film and TV career after Death in Venice, leaving the false impression that playing Tadzio not only led nowhere, but more or less destroyed him. Frankly, by the end of this weirdly deceitful exercise I formed the impression that Bjorn Andresen has been more egregiously wronged by The Most Beautiful Boy in the World than he ever was by Death in Venice.

There must be something about the story of the real Joe Bell that somehow didn't make the final cut. Because on the strength of the movie alone, Joe is a pretty poor excuse for a hero. And why anyone thought his story added up to an important and uplifting parable about bullying remains a mystery. Sure, the guy is understandably grief-stricken about his gay son's suicide, and he goes to somewhat extraordinary lengths to atone for his own guilt. That said, his insensitivity and disregard of the boy's feelings seems to have contributed to if not actually triggered the suicide. Then he takes off on his walk of atonement, leaving a grief-stricken (and apparently alcoholic) wife and a surviving son also in need of a father. It's selfish, to say the least, And nothing about any of the speeches Joe makes or the encounters he has along the way suggest he's much of an inspiration to anyone. All in all, I was increasingly annoyed by Mark Wahlberg's scenery-chewing, look-at-me-playing-a-hick, where's-my-award? Performance. And, it has to be said, the Sixth-Sense twist just further cheapened the story. For me, the only real compensation was Reid Miller's charismatic performance as Jadin, Joe's son. He's one to watch.

Heavily promoted as a landmark Aussie series and (amazingly) well-reviewed by critics, The Newsreader proves to be as dispiriting and preposterous as almost every other ABC drama of recent years. In order to fashion a story about how appallingly mistreated women working in 1980s TV newsrooms were - something that may or may not be true - The Newsreader finds it necessary to create an entirely false and revisionist picture of TV news of the time. For example, up-and-coming newsreader Helen Norville (played by Anna Torv) is threatening the popularity and career of older, established male newsreader Geoff Walters, a seasoned journo who we're told made his name covering Vietnam. The inference is that "glamour" and Helen's brand of more "emotional" news coverage is replacing a more staid kind of impartial journalism. In reality, the older established male newsreaders of the 80s were not crusty old journos like Geoff; they were almost unanimously "broadcasters" or "announcers" like the esteemed Brian Henderson. They were almost never journalists; they were there to project the right aura of authority and deliver the news in well-modulated voices. What actually happened through the 80s is that female newsreaders (generally with minimal experience, sometimes journalists, sometimes not) were grafted on to these men to inject glamour and a sense of gender balance. They occasionally continued to work as reporters, but mostly they didn't. The idea that any of them had enormous clout - and, as Helen does, could dictate that news coverage be extended instantly or demand to be given additional on-air bulletins - is just ludicrous. In short, The Newsreader makes the 80s an era in which women had to fight to survive, when in fact the 80s was the era in which women were promoted to news desks and as on-air journalists in ever greater numbers. If anyone was fighting to keep their jobs, it was the men they were replacing. It doesn't help that in Torv's hands Helen Norville is a truly lousy newsreader who wouldn't keep her job on a weekend rural news bulletin. That this somehow escapes the notice of the series' producers and directors isn't surprising given the general cluelessness of the entire enterprise. In short, The Newsreader is yet another example of "woke" drama that plays fast and loose with history and reality, which seems to be the specialty of ABC dramas of late. Total Control was similarly daft. It's looking a lot like the era of the ABC as the last bastion of quality Australian drama might pretty much be over.

Eddie Izzard should probably have made Six Minutes to Midnight a comedy. As it is, pretty much every aspect of the film is completely risible. While there is an element of truth to the setting - a German finishing school for girls in pre-WW2 Britain - the premise for the film is preposterous. We're supposed to believe that the Nazis have hatched a top secret plan to evacuate these daughters of the Reich before war is declared, and that British intelligence is prepared to do anything necessary to stop them. As if there was nothing more pressing to be getting on with in August 1939. Izzard's limp and exceedingly dull script never comes even vaguely close to making this concept fly. In fact, it is a lazy assemblage of clumsily executed spy movie cliches, with precious little in the way of logic or character motivation to hold them together. It's certainly more Carry On Spying than Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - though the Carry On crew's efforts were, it has to be said, infinitely more entertaining. Izzard also fails to bring much in the way of charisma or character depth to his part as the undercover spy/teacher. Given his famed gender fluidity, I can't help wondering if he might not have fared better playing Miss rather than Mr Miller. In drag he might have at least added a much-needed dose of Joyce Grenfell or Beryl Reid. And he does increasingly resemble Beryl, either in or out of drag. Better still, he could have played Miss Jean Brodie, since she already comes with genuine fascist credentials. I struggled to take the whole enterprise seriously from the start, but finally collapsed into gales of laughter as the demented Nazi teacher Ilsa leads the girls up some very steep cliffs, hopefully to freedom, in a sort of twisted reversal of the von Trapps fleeing over the alps in The Sound of Music. Alas, their escape is predictably thwarted in a special effects aerial dogfight that must have cost all of £85. Six Minutes to Midnight also confirms that Dame Judi will, as we have long suspected, lend her national treasure status to any old codswallop. She really needs to exercise a little more caution. Another outing with Izzard and she's likely to have her damehood revoked.

Lady Day deserves much better than this muddled, often tedious and substantially apocryphal "biopic" from Lee Daniels. In this telling of Billie Holiday's life the song Strange Fruit becomes central to the narrative, with government forces determined to stop her singing the mournful lament, afraid that it will ignite a civil rights movement. At one point she's even dragged from the stage after singing just the first few lines. The problem with all of this is it never happened. Federal Narcotics chief Harry Anslinger apparently claimed in letters that he "asked" holiday not to sing the song, but - even if that's true - that's about as far as it went. Holiday was never dragged off stage for singing the song; in fact, she sang the song in the very concert in which the film depicts this as happening. In any case, the civil rights movement was already a growing force long before Strange Fruit became a popular protest song. As for Billie, she was never especially political and was initially ambivalent about performing Strange Fruit. She was convinced more by the way it would be dramatically staged as a final number than by any notions about the political clout of the lyrics. So to make the song central to her life and have Billie so passionate about performing it any cost is in itself dishonest. But then so much of Daniels' film, from the weird Quentin Crisp-like Reginald Lord Divine character who interviews Billie (he never existed) to the romantic affair with FBI agent Jimmy Fletcher, for which there is zero evidence. At best the film offers brief glimpses into the reality of Billie's life, but they're so swamped with apocrypha that you'll have trouble identifying them. Which makes this a pretty messed up biopic, and an extremely half-assed tribute to the great singer. The only saving grace in all of this is Andra Day, who manages to look and sound like Billie for the most part. But even here there are caveats. Day's performances of Holiday's songs are more impressive as vocal impressions than they are for evoking the emotion and pathos that made Billie legendary. And, sad to say, her rendition of Strange Fruit is oddly stilted, almost bland. Not to mention severely truncated. Never mind that this is the song the entire film revolves around. Strange, indeed.

I Care A Lot is easily one of the best films of the year. A dark, hilarious, disconcerting satire, so fiendishly clever that it has gone right over the heads of at least 80% of IMDB reviewers. Scan the reviews for this movie and you'll find apoplectic rants about how "disgusting" the movie is, as though it's actually advocating elder abuse on a corporate scale. Or lamenting how appalling and unlikeable the characters are, as though we're supposed to like them. In fact, I Care A Lot is based directly on a number of disturbing trends in the aged care sector around the globe, in particular the increasingly corporate face of "care", which is increasingly a code word for exploitation and callousness. The movie viciously satirises both corporate aged care in particular, and unbridled capitalism in general. With Marla Grayson, Rosamund Pike creates a character as chilling and monstrous - and as timely - as Faye Dunaway's Diana Christenson in Network or Louise Fletcher's Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Dianne Wiest is, as ever, excellent as the client who becomes Grayson's worst nightmare, while Peter Dinklage adds an absurd edge to the crime boss determined to take Grayson down. The barrage of one star reviews for a film that may well be a timeless masterpiece and is certainly one of the best scripted and most intelligently executed films in ages is, to put it mildly, disconcerting. But then it also explains how so many could have voted for Trump.

As fascinating as this documentary is, one is left feeling that it barely skims the surface of the madness that prevailed during the production of The Island of Doctor Moreau. Yes, there are great anecdotes about Brando being crazy or mischievous or, as one more acute observer puts it, displaying utter contempt for his own profession. You get to hear how vile Val Kilmer was. And there's John Frankenheimer stomping around like a parody of an egomaniacal old-school director. And yet you just know that there are worse stories to be told, and that there was seemingly no end to the cluelessness of almost everyone involved in this benighted shoot. So while Lost Soul is one of the better documentaries about a disastrous film shoot, I was left wanting more and wishing they'd dug a bit deeper and provided a more thorough account of the shenanigans, the treachery, the foolishness and the folly of the nightmarish six-month jungle shoot. Even so, Lost Soul is infinitely more entertaining than the movie it documents.

The Dig will probably be dismissed by some as old-fashioned and middlebrow. But this film lifted my spirits just by being an elegantly-crafted, intelligent and engaging story. It's skilfully directed, with outstanding performances by Fiennes and Mulligan, and the cinematography is exceptional. The film also shines a light on the overlooked heroes behind a significant archeological find. In a year where the likely Oscar contenders include the insufferably pretentious and pointless Mank and a slew of poor adaptations of stage plays (The Prom, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom), a film like The Dig restores your faith in real moviemaking.

Not too far into Breaking Fast I wondered if the film was created and funded by some Gays For Mohammed lobby group I somehow hadn't heard about. The narrative certainly seems determined to put a positive spin on the Muslim faith and on Muslim attitudes to gays, despite all the real world evidence that the Muslim religion is deeply - indeed, murderously - homophobic, and not much interested in changing. Nevertheless, we're treated to a story about the unfeasibly Pollyanna-ish Mo, his impossibly down-with-it gay-friendly family, and his ludicrously chaste budding romance with the conveniently Muslim-savvy Kal through the holy days of Ramadan. And since Mo's not allowed any impure thoughts through Ramadan the romance must be more chaste than a Disney musical. Indeed, Mo is a musicals enthusiast - I'm guessing with tastes than run more Rodgers and Hammerstein than Sondheim. (The Sound of Music is mentioned A LOT). As with much about Breaking Fast, this feels like a clumsy construct to make Muslim Mo as sweet and wholesome and non-confronting as possible. To be honest, the effort to make Mo likeable mostly backfire, and the character quickly becomes a sanctimonious, insensitive prig, and deeply annoying with it. And Kal comes off as a complete doormat for putting up with him. There's one commendably feisty scene towards the end in which some of the characters actually confront Mo with the realities of Muslim homophobia, but most of this just bounces off Mo. Seconds later he's serenading Kal in a gay bar with a particularly awful rendition of Climb Ev'ry Mountain. Any politically aware homo who doesn't regurgitate his popcorn at this point is beyond help. Who knows, maybe there will be those (gay, straight or whatever) who will watch Breaking Fast and go away thinking "Hey, those Muslims are not so bad, after all". In which case I suppose Breaking Fast will have done its job. But we live in a world where people genuinely believe vaccines cause autism and Donald Trump is the greatest president ever, so what can you do?

Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit is widely regarded as a fairly indestructible warhorse of a play. It has continued to amuse through countless wonky amateur dramatic society productions and through more film and TV adaptations than generally accorded to theatre classics. So it's surprising that this latest adaptation is so consistently dull, and really never attains the kind of whirlwind hilarity that Coward intended. The problems starts with the script, which jettisons almost everything of Coward's wit and sensibility, as though it's the plot that matters above all else, not what Coward did with it. This might be more understandable if the story was to be given a contemporary makeover, but it's not; the film is set in 1937, where Coward's original dialogue would still resonate. Director Edward Hall fails to generate much in the way of pace, fails to make the most of a string of comic set pieces and, most shamefully of all, fails to get the best out of a great cast. Dan Stevens comes off the worst as the befuddled Charles Condomine, giving a performance that is so artificial and forced that it precludes any possibility of empathising with his character. Isla Fisher is merely dull as his wife, Ruth, while Leslie Mann misses the deliciously playful side of his former wife, Elvira. Most disappointing of all though is Judi Dench, who renders the traditionally dotty Madame Arcarti as a rather ordinary old woman with a perfectly understandable interest in the supernatural - as though sympathy is more important than comedy. Ultimately, the best that can be said of this Blithe Spirit is that it will only enhance the reputation of the 1945 version with Rex Harrison as Condomine and the wondrous Margaret Rutherford as Arcarti.

On the plus side: a romantic setting, some nice cinematography and two attractive leads, commendably played by out gay actors. And about two-thirds of the way into the running time this lumbering movie almost threatens to take off and deliver some genuine emotion. But, sadly, it never really recovers from an extremely creaky start and a set-up so obvious that the ending can be seen a-coming from ten-minutes in. We're supposed to believe that Wyatt is a crash-hot business negotiator who really knows how to close a deal. Odd then that he pitches his plan to sell the family ranch to his mother in front of two employees, and with all the finesse of an elephant on ice skates. It doesn't help that he's suggesting the time is coming when Mom won't be able to manage the ranch, despite Mom being played by Andie MacDowell, looking much as she did in Four Weddings (with a few wisps of grey) and good for at least another forty years. Or that Wyatt has seemingly made no attempt to come up with any kind of business plan for the property when that's supposedly what he's good at - and what he does so effortlessly at the end of the film. We get that he needs to be a touch arrogant and selfish at the start in order to have some kind of character arc. But it's done in such a ham-fisted way that it's all but impossible to invest in him as a character. Dashing also suffers from a few of the usual problems with these wholesome Hallmark/Lifestyle gay rom-coms. Thirtysomething gay guys behave like blushing adolescents at their first dance, not like real men with attractions for other real men. It's all so chaste and twee that you wonder why the hell whoever is writing, producing and directing bothered to venture into the tricky waters of gay rom-com in the first place. Clearly, these movies are aimed at female romance fans more than at a gay audience, but you'd think they'd try for at least minimal respect for the gay men they're happily exploiting. Oh, well. Baby steps, I guess.

Another superior gay-themed movie from Eytan Fox, the Israeli director of Cupcakes and Yossi and Jagger, among others. It's a simple, but well-observed story about a moment between two gay men from different cultures and different generations. Best of all, it's a showcase for the talents of John Benjamin Hickey, excellent in so many US TV series, from The Big C to Manhattan. It's nice to see him as the leading man. And he's well-matched by Niv Nissem, a young actor with the looks and charisma to make his character, who pretty much embodies the arrogance of youth, attractive. Sublet is also a pretty good snapshot of Tel Aviv, and of Israeli youth. I particularly liked Daria, the would- be dancer who decides she's going to rebel by being completely selfish. Worth the effort if you're in the mood for an intelligent, gentle, quietly moving movie.