August and the height of summer is normally when crap blockbusters fill the cinemas. Not this year. The first five films on this list are all genuinely brilliant, starting with this total banger...
Film of the month: Kneecap
John, Paul, George and Ringo in A Hard Day’s Night. Prince in Purple Rain. Eminem in 8 Mile. And now, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, Naoise Ó Cairealláin and JJ Ó Dochartaigh in Kneecap.
Pronouncing those names will give you pause for thought, appropriately so as much of West Belfast rap group Kneecap’s raison d’etre is the revivification of the Irish language. Their other motivators are sticking a provocative Republican finger up to the British and giving fans a wild, reckless experience, which is amply evident in Rich Peppiatt’s fictionalised account of the trio’s formation and rise.
You know you’re in unruly territory as soon as the credits flash up in hand-scribbled caps, “EVERY F***IN’ STORY ABOUT BELFAST STARTS LIKE THIS!”, followed by archive footage of cars being blasted to pieces. But then a crunching bassline kicks in and we’re in rave-ageddon with Ó hAnnaidh and Ó Cairealláin (stage names Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap) dealing class-As by the sackload.
After Mo is arrested and refuses to speak English, enter music teacher at an Irish-language school JJ (Ó Dochartaigh) to interpret. JJ adores the lyrics he spots in Mo’s notebook and proposes the idea of a group (Kneecap being a reference to traditional paramilitary punishment).
After a properly hilarious, insanely drug-addled (half-naked men in clouds of powder) first rehearsal in JJ’s garage studio, their rapid rise is just a question of not getting battered to death by the men of the Radical Republicans Against Drugs and avoiding a brutally dogged detective (Josie Walker). Oh, and staying on the right side of Móglaí’s father Arló (Michael Fassbender), a mercurial Republican terrorist who’s been missing presumed dead for a decade.
The drug-taking scenes are laced with sharp, spiky references (ex-Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams himself stars in a ketamine-induced hallucination), while the humour is bold to say the least. When Mo is in bed with his girlfriend, some viewers might bristle as she declares, “I wanna blow you like a Brighton hotel.”
But more than an unhinged tale of a riotous band, this is a paean to the Irish language (a storyline within the film), which was officially recognised in the Identity and Language Act in 2022. And although decidedly less well-know than the Beatles, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, Naoise Ó Cairealláin and JJ Ó Dochartaigh can certainly act a lot better.
In cinemas August 23
The movies you should see this month
Tuesday
Many viewers will find it hard to clamber over the “magical realism” (a repellent coupling of words for some) barrier and enjoy this sweet, cockeyed and occasionally wonderfully witty tragi-comedy. Their loss, as the wizardry in Daina O Pusić’s debut comes in the charming and endearing imagining of the Grim Reaper as a gigantic parrot.
Heart-breakingly, the big bird has come to snatch the final breath of terminally ill 15-year-old Londoner Tuesday (Lola Petticrew). Soul-soothingly, dying has rarely been more absurdly funny, as seen early on when Tuesday has to calm Death down from a panic attack, which leads to her earning a stay of execution in the company of her feathered deliverer.
The pair form a gorgeously bizarre bond that swoops from desperately moving to ridiculously silly (Pusić has a real talent for leftfield humour). But then there’s Tuesday’s mum. When your teenage daughter is about to be taken away and you’re played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus displaying all the unpredictable wackiness of your classic Seinfeld and Veep characters… well, Death might have met its match. This isn’t for everyone, but it will leave some with devasted smiles on their faces.
August 9
Sing Sing
“The jaws of darkness do devour it up. So quick bright things come to confusion,” decries Colman Domingo, delivering a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. An apt opener as, although on stage, Domingo is in notorious US prison Sing Sing. However, 105 minutes later, that shadowy void is replaced with light, redemption and a discernible early scent of Oscars.
Greg Kwedar’s film focuses on a real-life programme at the institution, which sees inmates produce and act in stage productions. Ingeniously, and tellingly, nearly all the actors here besides Colman are former Sing Sing prisoners playing themselves. We follow a show from start to finish, as the men craft and rehearse their chosen play, a comic oddity involving cowboys, ancient Egyptians, time-travel and Freddy Krueger.
While it’s genuinely uplifting watching these men expose their vulnerabilities through performance, the deep narrative soul here is the relationship between Domingo’s wrongly convicted Divine G and the superb Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, a hardened con who finds acting way out of his comfort zone. If you enjoy heart-on-the-sleeve film-making, prepare to be moved.
August 30
Black Dog
While not totally jaw-dropping in its emotional profundity, Hu Guan’s shaggy dog tale is a gob-smacking, widescreen feast for the eyes. Under a zinc-crusted sky, an apocalyptic pack of dogs bounds across the desert of northern China, swooping into the path of a bus and sending it tumbling into the dust.
It’s quite the visual mood-setter. Out of the wreckage steps freshly released convict Lang (Eddie Peng) to walk the rest of his way back home. There, his dying alcoholic father is now living in the semi-abandoned zoo. In fact, as the Beijing Olympics are approaching, the whole town is crumbing, its citizens constantly urged over loudspeaker to “build a harmonious society” while awaiting the bulldozers of progress.
Only the stray dogs are thriving; hordes of them everywhere, including one thought to have rabies which Lang sets about capturing for the sizeable bounty.
Meanwhile, snake farmer Butcher Hu isn’t going to let the death of his nephew (which he blames Lang for) go unavenged. A travelling circus rolls in, too, just for good measure. This milieu forces Lang into a series of picaresque incidents which he confronts while barely opening his mouth, which is fine because every scene is a pure pleasure to watch. There is cerebral food for thought here (renewal versus decay; redemption), but at its core this is all about a man, a dog and a yearning to unleash yourself.
August 30
Paradise is Burning
Here’s a suggestion for anyone blown away by last year’s How to Have Sex but with a strong disinclination for foreign language films: get yourself over that one-inch wall of subtitles, because Mika Gustafson’s Swedish debut about troubled girlhood is just as good, if not better.
Sixteen-year-old Laura (Bianca Delbravo) and her much younger sisters, Mira (Dilvin Asaad) and Steffi (Safira Mossberg), have been left to fend for themselves by their absent mother for months. They appear to be living the feral dream, hanging out with the wilder local girls, breaking into empty homes for pool parties. But there’s also the anguish of abandonment, conveyed superbly by all three young actresses, often simply by a heart-breaking, natural gaze.
Woven through this are the peculiar relationships with adults the girls are prematurely thrown into. Laura forms a risky “wo-mance” with a woman she wants to stand in as her mother for social services, but who becomes obsessed with Laura’s house-breaking talents. Meanwhile, Mira assigns herself as “manager” for a down-on-his luck karaoke wannabe (producing one scene of pure, magical pathos). Strange and filled with the unruly bodily movement of youth, this is a joyously melancholic delight.
August 30
The films you might want to see this month
Didi
Sean Wang’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama is a tale of universal angst (we all terrifyingly almost kissed a girl) wrought with the precise specificity of the era (the puberty class of 2008 will recognise Wang’s references with deep nostalgia).
Thirteen-year-old Taiwanese-American Chris (Izaac Wang) is really quite lost. His stay-at-home mum (Joan Chen), herself relentlessly, hilariously nagged by an overbearing mother-in-law, is constantly on his back. Meanwhile, his big sister is about tospread her wings for college, inducing separation anxiety and envy — no, the answer isn’t to pee in her shampoo bottle, Chris.
Told through MySpace and early Facebook (if you were there, you know), harbingers of today’s social media anxiety, Chris’s answer is to experiment with his teenage identity. Cue awkward efforts to fit in with the older skater boys, a wonderfully sweet attempt to learn how to kiss via YouTube tutorials using a pair of French fries as the target lips, and that moment we all had when we could have got in on with that gorgeous girl (if only we weren’t so painfully shy). Beautifully observed, tenderly acted, if a touch underwhelming, this is a minor joy.
August 2
Sky Peals
Moin Hussain serves up a distinctively droll dose of the uncanny with his Midlands-set debut. And where better to amplify a story of disconnect and isolation than that exemplar of non-places, the motorway service station. Adam (Faraz Ayub) is young, has no friends, his father vanished years ago and his mother and her boyfriend are making him homeless. A job flipping burgers on the night shift at Sky Peals traffic stop guarantees there’s no escape from his permanently morose sense of alienation.
Of course, it’s not going to help if your dad dies and then starts appearing “not quite dead” on the CCTV where you work. This is a strange, visually striking, deadpan portrait of modern loneliness. Perhaps a little too dry, but not without its lip-curling moments, like when Adam introduces himself to the circle of trust at a self-help group: “I think my dad might have been an alien.” Fingers crossed for more stranger things from Hussain.
August 9
Also out this month
It might sound like a Studio Ghibli offering, but any British parent or child should know Kensuke’s Kingdom (August 2) is based on the Michael Morpurgo novel about a young boy shipwrecked on a remote island. Cillian Murphy, Sally Hawkins and Ken Watanabe provide starry voice power to this animation.
Based on the video game, bonkers day-glo action romp Borderlands (August 9) stars, of all people, Cate Blanchett along with a cast of big hitters. It looks tremendously silly and a double-barrel of fun.
No Ridley Scott behind the camera this time, which could be a good thing, Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus (August 16) with Cailee Spaeny is set to be THE BIG summer smash. So get thee to an Imax pronto.
In Blink Twice (August 23), when tech billionaire Channing Tatum invites cocktail waitress Naomi Ackie to a private island with his friends, what disturbing weirdness could possibly happen? Notable as Zoe Kravitz’s directorial debut.
Hunter Schafer on the bill will help fill cinemas. Sending her to a strange resort in the German Alps with her father in Cuckoo (August 23) for blood-spattered freak-outs should ensure the thrills.
So, if you need to cool down from the August heat, diving inside a cinema this month might well be rather rewarding.
