BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

★★

Though it’s not actually, um, good, Bohemian Rhapsody is, at the very least, an accurate representation of a band’s own self-conception. Here, Queen are the heroes of their own story, the movie-version of their musical career wielding axes-to-grind re: ‘the critics’, old record-label execs, and Freddie Mercury’s one-time manager. Scores are settled, hits are made, and, on climax, we find the band — then as they are now — on stage in a stadium, inspiring singalongs from the merry masses.

With Brian May and Roger Taylor serving as ‘executive music producers’ — and director Bryan Singer deposed midway through — Bohemian Rhapsody plays like a warning against the committee-thinking blandeur of the Official Band Biopic. It’s self-satisfied, overly simplified, utterly sanitised. Mercury’s wild life is made mild, his Byronian debauchery not just dramatically neutered, but turned cautionary tale of what happens when you stray away from the 'Band'. Like an ad-hoc family, Queen is shown as representation of what’s right and real and true, while other endeavours — like, say, solo albums — are works of delusion and hubris and Judasry, a sure symbol of someone who’s lost their way.

It’s a film in which chronological history is rewritten, discography on anachronistic shuffle so as to make the flick a non-stop parade of Greatest Hits, each with their moments of in-studio genesis. And, hits they have: I’ve never chosen to listen to Queen a single time in my entire life, and yet I knew every single song herein. Years upon years of prime soundtrack placement in filmed entertainments has entrenched them so thoroughly in the culture that they transcend it; existing on such a large scale that, in a dispiriting way, it makes sense that the to-screen movie is basically a family-friendly cine-playlist.

Befitting a film based around a band’s self-conception, Bohemian Rhapsody is overly in thrall to the music. The drama is barely humanising, rarely interesting; instead, the whole thing feels like a jukebox musical, with story in service of familiar songs, and narrative scenes merely rickety bridges built to get from one musical performance to the next.

Only, it’s a jukebox musical in which you don’t even get to watch a musical performed; the production so deferential to the music of Queen that it just plays Queen songs throughout. As whole numbers are mimed wholesale, the weirdly-praised performance of Rami Malek is revealed to go beyond mere mimickry, closer to something resembling ventriloquy. Clad in various awful wigs and an absurdist denture, Malek is enthusiastically out to ‘channel’ the theatrical Mercury in the spoken scenes, and then, in the musical ones, mouth his voice in a grand act of on-screen lip-sync.

The result is a film that feels like it exists simply to sell Queen records. Rather than a psychological study of a singer who created musical fantasies as a form of closeted escapism, Bohemian Rhapsody is essentially just a tie-in product, a Queen movie that never even attempts to stand on its own.

BOY ERASED

★★★

Arriving in the wake of The Miseducation Of Cameron Post, Boy Erased presents a weightier take on what’s a now-familiar cinematic tale: a Christian-conversion-camp coming-of-ager. Where Desirée Akhavan’s film felt like a teen-movie, Joel Edgerton’s take plays like a prestige-picture: all dramatic weightiness, top-shelf actors, and a grave air. Based on a memoir by Garrard Conley, it’s a nightmare of the near-past, a portrait of an institutionalised system in which luckless subjects — through a rigorous process of shaming — undergo a 12-step program teaching them a love of God, but a hatred of the self. At times the film is grimly funny, but most of the time it’s just grim: a dour study of the dangers of groupthink, cod-psychology, and moralisers out to ‘solve’ problems that aren’t actually problems.

The resulting movie is duly ‘worthy’; which is, of course, a critical backhander. In the near-past, perhaps a film like this would’ve been controversial, but at this point Boy Erased feels safe, especially given how sexless the whole endeavour is. It-boy Lucas Hedges, Nicole Kidman in a bad wig and wavering Southern-Belle accent, a weight-gainin’ Russell Crowe, and double-duty Edgerton wheel out their actorly mettle; amidst a cast that includes Xavier Dolan, Troye Sivan, and Flea. At its most simplistic, the film is essentially saying ‘conversion therapy is bad’, but there’s complexity depicted in the relationships between child and parents, empathetically viewing not just the victims of conversion therapy, but those misguided Christians who thought sending a child there was doing the right thing.

WILDLIFE

★★★★

Where coming-of-age stories are usually studies in the sexual awakening of the individual, Wildlife checks in at an earlier loss-of-innocence landmark: that moment when a child discovers that their parents are sexual beings; individuals capable of irrational passions, bad decisions, and both fucking-people-over and, y’know, fucking. It’s the directorial debut of Paul Dano, the 34-year-old who was but 22 when he commanded the screen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterwork There Will Be Blood. Dano’s adapting a novel by Richard Ford, in which the dark underbelly of Small-Town Americana is sliced open with sharp, spare, unsparing text.

Here — in a 1960 Montana that’s more dirty and dressed-down than Atomic Age kitsch — teenaged Ed Oxenbould watches the painful disintegration of his parents’ marriage from the close, claustrophobic quarters of their suburban bungalow. His father, Jake Gyllenhaal, is a study in male pride, who, after losing his job as a golf-pro, turns first to the bottle, then to a heroic stint as volunteer fire-fighter confronting a dangerous blaze. His mother, Carey Mulligan, is a still-young beauty queen who feels stultified by small-town life, motherhood, domesticity. When she begins an affair with Bill Camp’s older, wealthier gent, she not only doesn’t bother to conceal it, but wields it like a weapon: out to both hurt her husband, and to awaken her hangdog son from the slumber of childhood innocence.

FAHRENHEIT 11/9

★★★1/2

After the unexpected positivity of his last film, 2015’s Where To Invade Next, Fahrenheit 11/9 finds Michael Moore angry. This isn’t surprising, given the great rabblerouser is taking the temperature of a nation that’s coursing with anger. And there’s plenty, herein, to be angry about, even if you’re not American. Not just Trump or Trumpism, but the degradation of democracy, the terrifying fallout from late-period capitalism, unchecked corporate power and greed, the militarisation of police, wilfully poisoned populations, economic inequality, institutionalised prejudice, the opioid epidemic, school shootings, and unvarnished citizen-video of racially-motivated attacks in public spaces. These themes are sliced up into seething montages, Moore hoping to stoke the fires of democratic dissent and righteous protest.

Trump is the film’s obvious villain, but he’s more a symptom of a greater problem than the problem itself; a grotesque clown who somehow bumbled his way upwards due to a clamouring, complicit media who, in pursuit of ratings, gave a platform for him to broadcast base sentiments, appealing to people who were, of course, angry. Whilst Trump makes for a magnetic target, he’s hardly the sole one; Moore turning his ire on politicians from both sides of the political divide, and American democracy itself. It’s a broken system breaking other systems; Fahreinheit 11/9 chronicling the chaos of the contemporary nightmare.

JOURNEY’S END

★★★

War, what is it good for? Well, um, noble period dramas in which the horrors of life in the WWI trenches are turned into study of the psychology of fighting — and dying — for king and country.

Released on the centennial anniversary of the German Spring Offensive in 1918, Saul Dibb’s film is a to-screen adaptation of a play, by R C Sherriff, first staged merely ten years later. It’s a well-mounted, ‘classy’ portrait of the grimy reality and dark psychology of trench warfare; of men living out lives held so tenuously in the balance. The production finds handsome leading men in moustaches (Paul Bettany, Sam Claflin, Tom Sturridge), choice character actors (Toby Jones, Stephen Graham, Robert Glenister), and fresh-faced Asa Butterfield as the innocent youngster thrown amongst the battle-hardened men.

It begins with Bettany reading from Alice In Wonderland, and soon disappears down its own dark hole, entering a world terrifying and unfamiliar: muddy, disease-riddled, horrifying; a nightmare of ongoing suffering so hellish that a heroic death can seem like blessed escape.

PENGUIN HIGHWAY

★★★

What starts out seeming impossibly-twee — an animé tale of a grade-four nerd who investigates the sudden, inexplicable appearance of penguins in otherwise-generic Japanese suburbia — takes a turn towards the fantastical and psychedelic in Penguin Highway. It’s a coming-of-age tale about a bookish boy whose bookishness becomes the ultimate virtue, his fondness for investigative research, problem-solving, and endless note-taking leading him into a rollicking adventure of revenge against bullies, buxom dental assistants, and the collision between recognisable reality and another metaphysical realm.

And also penguins! Though the penguins, herein, aren’t really penguins, but avatars of some kind of inexplicable energy force. The mythology of it all is left a little fuzzy, but, in short, Hiroyasu Ishida’s film is allowed to throw itself into the wilder, visually-resplendent reaches of its central concept, lovingly drawing both quotidian banality and flights of wild fantasy.