Summer is a notoriously dry time for top-quality film releases. But fear not: for you viewing pleasure, there’s a mega-violent Indian fist fight on a train, delicate foreign musings on life, beavers going slapstick bonkers and… the simply astounding Mia Goth in MaXXXine.
Film of the month: MaXXXine
Sleazily stupendous Mia Goth is back in the finale of Ti West’s horror trilogy as sleazily stupendously named Maxine Minx. And if you grimaced and winced while adoring the previous, ever-so-slightly-underwhelming instalments (X and Pearl), this blows the bloody doors off.
It’s 1985, ZZ Top’s Gimme All Your Lovin’ is blasting out of Maxine’s open-top Mercedes, and West is cranking up the sordid neon underbelly of Hollywood to 11.
A porn star with a sinister past, Maxine is trying to make it straight in the movie biz. Meanwhile, there’s an occultist serial killer laying waste to Tinseltown’s supposedly fallen women, and who has a particular curiosity in Maxine. The only clue to their identity is the gorgeously gut-churning creak of their stiff, slimy, black leather gloves.
There’s also the never-less-than-awesome Kevin Bacon as a gold-toothed private eye whose morals appear to have been thrown into the gutter at birth. He is very, very insistent Maxine meets his client. She, of course, doesn’t give a flying f*** what he wants.
Elizabeth Debicki also pops as the Svengali director of Maxine’s new film (the ironically titled The Puritan II). As the blood flows as freely as Maxine’s perverse ascent to the summit of the red carpet, West excels with some eye-poppingly exquisite moments of cinematic gore that were notedly absent in X and Pearl. You’ll have never witnessed body parts tumble from a suitcase with such gleeful elan.
But this glorious low-life orgy of trash would be nothing without Goth, who is a total phenomenon – even ever-reliable deliverers of brilliance such as Bacon and Debicki start to look like bit-part actors in comparison.
In cinemas July 5
The movies you should see this month
Crossing
It must be no mistake that Swedish-Georgian director Levan Akin chose Istanbul, that great cultural crossroads, as the setting for this tender, freewheeling mosaic of lives, sexuality and convictions in transition. Elderly teacher Lia (Mzia Arabuli) rolls up to a desolate fringe of Georgian city Batumi in search of her estranged trans niece, Tekla.
There, she learns from Achi (Lucas Kankava), a young man she once taught, that Tekla is in Istanbul. Together, Achi insists as he is desperate for a new beginning, they set off on an odd-couple road trip to the Turkish megalopolis. The faint trail leads to scuzzy sex worker districts, hustling street kids and trans activist and lawyer Evrim (Deniz Dumanl).
As stoic Lia battles to reconcile her old-fashioned values with the choices Tekla has made (all the while secretly swigging away at the potent bottle of Georgian booze she’s sneaked along with her), this is a “crossing” on multiple metaphorical levels: of Tekla’s identity; Achi’s economic future; Lia’s morals. Beautifully acted, it’s a tale of good people driven to precarious moments.
July 19
About Dry Grasses
A lone figure pushes its way through a widescreen wasteland of snow, and if you’re familiar with Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the winter of discontent that follows will be no surprise. It’s bleak and sorrowful, but like Ceylan’s previous masterpieces, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Winter Sleep, this journey into the aching human soul is as engrossing as it gets.
That figure is teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), returning to a remote village school for a fourth compulsory year. Samet’s contempt for what he sees as the backwardness and hopelessness of life there (and his conflictingly destructive views of his own superiority and inner wretchedness) plays out across two storylines.
One is a relationship with fellow teacher Nuray (Merve Dizdar, a deserved best actress winner at Cannes), including a devastatingly unforgettable dinner debate over society versus self-worship. The second is when Samet is accused of crossing the line of friendship with a young female pupil.
Both threads excavate profound insights about how life sucks and throw up some simply ravishing lines (“Everything beautiful in this world gets stuck in the webs we weave before it ever reaches us”). If you like this kind of thing, you won’t even notice the three hours and 17 minutes go by.
July 26
The films you might want to see this month
Kill
You really, really have to love punching and kicking, and blood and guts, and knives being thrust into eyeballs to enjoy this Indian festival of violence. Because it’s basically one very, very long fight sequence.
Off-duty special forces officer Amrit (played by the mono-named Lakshya) hops aboard a train to try and derail his secret love Tulika’s (Tanya Maniktala) arranged marriage. Only so does a 40-strong gang of machete-wielding bandits. Unlucky for them, one-man death machine Amrit is rather protective of his beloved.
It’s relentlessly brutal, but much of it entertainingly cartoonish (such as sweet, middle-aged women caving in a baddie’s skull with hockey sticks). Each over-the-top crunch of fists will have blood-thirsty audiences “oohing” and gasping out loud (like they were when I watched this).
July 5
The Nature of Love
Ah, amour, the one thing cinema will never tire of (well, there’s sex and violence too). Québécois director Monia Chokri’s old-fashioned romantic comedy is an erudite addition to the genre and blessedly more interested in intelligent insight than rom-com chuckles.
That said, there’s nothing new here. Philosophy lecturer Sophia (Magalie Lépine-Blondeau) is living in a cerebral Eden with her bookish husband and high-art friends, but it’s a desert of physical passion. Until she meets ruggedly devastating handyman Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal).
Who in her position wouldn’t fall head over heels for a man who can bang a nail in, owns a snowmobile and ravishes her like never before? But will he leave her hungry intellect begging for sustenance? And will she be able to stop herself correcting his uneducated, “hick” language? You get the idea: groin vs brain; snob vs commoner, etc. The themes are laid on a little too thickly, but this is pleasant enough soul food for thought.
July 5
Hundreds of Beavers
Comic tour de force or simply cinematic oddity destined for extinction, Mike Cheslik’s whirlwind of slapstick is quite unlike anything else. Shot in a black-and-white collage of scratchy live action and expressionistic animation (as if MC Escher were directing Buster Keaton), it tells the tale of Jean Kayak, a 19th-century applejack booze salesman in the snowy north. Beavers wreck Jean’s livelihood, so he must become a legendary animal trapper to survive (and win the hand in marriage of a young woman).
I say beavers; they are just people dressed in fancy dress shop onesies, who take great thuggish pleasure in kicking the shit out of Jean. It’s a silly load of nonsense, with a visual gag roughly every millisecond. If you can endure the lame humour and plodding non-story of the first 45 minutes, the second half supercharges into a genuinely inventive, mad, mad, mad masterpiece.
July 9
Top of the docs
July's best documentaries
Agent of Happiness
It’s difficult to imagine anything bone-shakingly hard-hitting coming out of the pretty little Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, which is probably best known for its guiding concept of Gross National Happiness. So no major shocks here as we follow Amber and Guna, a pair of tranquil agents travelling the country surveying the nation’s happiness.
It’s a sweet snapshot of individual lives and also peculiarly revealing in what questions are posed to gauge the cheerfulness of the population. No surprise that the man with three wives scores a big, smug 10 on the happiness scale, whereas a trans drag performer rates painfully lower, partly on account of them owning zero tractors or buffalo.
Ironically underpinning everything is Amber himself, unhappily single and desperately searching for a wife. As we see him progress from awkward first date to romantic mountain motorcycle rides, things start looking up, so hopefully he won’t always feel the need to resort to filming his strange TikTok-style dance routines… A gentle, undemanding treat.
July 12
Also out this month
South Korean black comedy, body horror, marriage drama mash-up Sleep (July 12) looks irresistible. What could possibly go wrong with a weirdly sleepwalking husband (Parasite’s Lee Sun-kyun) and a newborn baby?
You’ve seen The Zone of Interest. Essential viewing now is documentary The Commandant’s Shadow (July 12), which follows the son and grandson of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss.
In Fly Me to the Moon (July 12) Scarlett Johansson plays a Mad Men-style marketing genius sent to Nasa produce a back-up fake moon landing in 1969. Rumour is that this screwball-ish comedy is a real blast.
Remember Twister from 1996? Well, it was massive, and now Twisters (July 17) is set to be massiver (at least in the size of the tornados). Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones play the storm-chasers.
Justice will be served hilariously, and on a mobility scooter, in Thelma (July 19), as 93-year-old Thelma (June Squibb) sets off across town to reclaim the money that was scammed off her.
Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds team up Deadpool & Wolverine (July 25), and it could well be the movie that saves Marvel’s year. In the meantime, enjoy your month...
