sffbiopics

REAL ESTATE MOGUL CREATED OUT OF HUMBLE BEGINNINGS IN NEW YORK CITY RECESSION

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

In the backdrop of the Nixon Presidency a young real estate entrepreneur starts to create a bit of space away from his father’s autocratic reach in The Apprentice (2024).

Sebastian Stan plays Donald Trump with all the facial nuances and personal vanity projects involved in an ambitious plan to rejuvenate New York City, which has been hit with a recession and a crimewave as well as disco.

Stan is interesting to watch as he creates the character incrementally.

Director Ali Abbasi keeps the camera on the rising real estate mogul as he reaches out to Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong, at an exclusive high end New York City club.

Cohn is a ruthless lawyer who knows or has access to all the big deal makers in the city, such as the mayor. 

Trump’s big start up idea is to refit the historic Commodore Hotel, near Grand Central Station, into a swanky 1500 room hotel with a glass façade that will reflect the iconic buildings in the area. The whole city block needs a bump, and Trump is okay with taking on that project next.

In the club, the inexperienced Trump moves slowly, but he learns quickly from the connections he is making as Cohn introduces him around to his inner circle.  Trump’s first big ask of the political fixer is to make a Federal lawsuit, for discriminatory rental practices at their New York City housing project, go away.

Stan deadpans Trump’s lack of other worldly knowledge when he has a little chat with artist Andy Warhol, but Trump does not know who Warhol is.

Stan shows how Trump gets mentored by Cohn as Trump leaves his father’s charge and seeks to make his own name with the real estate project.

Cohn teaches Trump three rules of business: attack, deny and claim victory.

The close cropped camera follows Trump around from room to room inside New York City, as he learns the nuances of these three basic rules.

Abassi shows how Trump gradually develops confidence as he builds up business successes with the assistance of Cohn. The narrative goes from Trump’s involvement in a business controlled by Trump’s father, Fred, to Trump as a real estate mogul with the construction of Trump Tower.

The starting point is a young entrepreneur personally collecting rents and a budding deal maker with personalized license plates ‘DJT’. Collecting rents from low income people is not all that straight forward, though. And million dollar deals require a lot of insider knowledge that Trump does not have yet.

Trump and Cohn eventually come to a meeting of the minds which is basically that Cohn is ‘brutal” but ‘whatever he does he does for America.’ 

Strong creates a dark stealthy character in Cohn, who is shown to have the laconic approach of legal professionals who see the world through the singular lens of winning at all costs.

Cohn was involved in the McCarthy hearings that sought out communists in America. Cohn was also the prosecutor who had Ethel and Julius Rosenberg convicted for espionage in 1951.

The Rosenbergs were executed for leaking American nuclear secrets from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. 

The camera also creates a certain take on the Trump family, with the hardliner patriarch, Fred, basically destroying his son, Freddie, who is made to feel shame for choosing to work as an airplane pilot.

The Trumps are able to just barely sit together for dinner, while Fred simultaneously dishes out personal criticism and business advice.

The camera also captures the moment Trump meets his first wife, Ivanka. Maria Bakalova plays the independent woman who becomes a dedicated wife until reason proves otherwise.

Abassi is not necessarily critical in his portrait of the young Trump, but he is not entirely flattering, either.

The camera attempts to create an objective distillation of Trump’s early real estate career, while showing the various ways that deals get made in the high stakes real estate game.

INTERNALIZED TRAUMA COMES FLASHING FORWARD ON SCREEN IN BLACK IRISH

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Director Tim Mielants strips away all the fancy ornamentalism to illustrate the hard life of a coal merchant in a small Irish town.

The Magdalene Laundries wait in the backstory, as if for everyone else, except for the young fallen women, life goes on despite the town’s dirty little secrets.

Cillian Murphy creates a character study of a poor, but hard working father of six young girls who desperately hangs on to what he’s got as news of other people’s financial misfortune reaches the family.

The coal merchant, Bill Furlong, comes home tired from hauling coal all day, but he cleans up in the mudroom before joining his family for dinner. Everyday is the same, a bit of time in the coal yard filling the bags and checking the invoices, before driving to the little coal sheds around town.

The character is one of great strength and compassion, with Catholic values of family and of gentle moments during which exhibitions of kindness toward his neighbours seem ordinary. Murphy shows though, that as Christmas nears, Bill cannot think but of childhood traumas and other lesser disappointments.

A series of flashbacks to Bill’s childhood incrementally explain the protagonist’s mysterious demeanour.

Mielants’ camera also paints a world around Murphy in which the actor can convey emotive responses to his environment. There is a wondering scene shot through a framed window. Then there is the day ahead unravelling through the coal truck window. And there is also someone else’s life continuing on at a distance.

The camera finds poetry in the descent of the dark, rain swept cobbled streets with a shiny band of water heading back to the ocean.

Everything just repeats, over and over again, like being back in the mudroom again, then sharing a bit of chit chat with the wife and kids. Eileen Walsh plays Eileen Furlong, a loving Catholic woman who has found contentment in her home with Bill and their children – and the life they have built together.

This life in a small Irish town would have a bit of charm to it if life was not so hard and desperate, and the convent didn’t keep secrets in the coal shed.

Bill has an invoice that needs to get paid, and meets a young distraught woman inside the convent, on his way to collect what he is owed. 

The director has painted the town with his camera. And Murphy has shaped the character with a kind of internalized projection while obviously searching for meaning in his day, but who and why this young woman has reached out to the protagonist is yet to be explained.

The 1 h and 38 minute runtime is enough for the character portrait, and to reveal that there is more to the town than pretty little picture frames, but the town’s secret stays a secret just the way it was.

CATHOLIC MISSIONARY SENT ON IMPOSSIBLE JOURNEY OF HOPE

Everyone knows about the glory stories of how America welcomed immigrants from the old world at Elise Island in New York City.

Director Alejandro Monteverde tells the darker version of that story by shining God’s light on the lives of the children living in the streets after losing their parents to the hard life of places like the Five Points.

Cabrini (2024) stars Cristiana Dell’Anna as Catholic missionary Francesca Cabrini who set out from Rome to establish an orphanage for the lost boys and girls of Italy in 1889. 

Cabrini is a bit stunned at first by the impoverished conditions that festered disease and crime which she discovered during the first hours in the New World.

The lights are dull and dark like the light from the candles and lanterns people had to use to find their way at the time.

The characters move from the light into the darkness and then back into the light as a metaphor of the life God made for people, giving them free will and equal portions of chaos and goodness to find.

The answer seems so obvious now that Cabrini showed the church how.

Giancarlo Giannini plays Pope Leo XII who must consent to the first woman foreign mission, before Cabrini can embark on the journey and build an empire of hope around the world.

The idea is inspirational enough, but Dell’Anna shows how Cabrini mustered the motivation to make it happen.

John Lithgow has a few moments on camera as Mayor Gould, while David Morse plays New York Archbishop Corrigan. The Archbishop is in charge of the church in New York, but the Pope in Rome has the final say. Cabrini would have to go to the Pope on occasion to overrule the Archbishop.

The camera eventually captures the Mayor in a scene or two, because in the back story Italians are not appreciated in New York City yet, particularly high minded Italian women. And Lithgow must portray the Mayor as barely being able to contain the bubbling rage occurring within him. The Mayor, though, is sophisticated enough to begrudgingly embrace the inevitable change.

Federico Ielapi plays the orphan boy, Paolo. And Romana Maggiora Verganno plays the prostitute, Vittoria. 

Everyone must take care of the pimp in Five Points before real progress can be made on the New York City mission.

Not soon after Cabrini arrives, she finds an underground shelter of orphaned children living in the sewers below the streets. But the task of helping the poor is not as easy as one might expect, because of the sexism and bigotry among the establishment.

Monteverde paints the story with his camera, creating several picture perfect low light portraits. The director even has a flourishing when compressing time and space, such as when a horse drawn carriage turns into the scene, and when the construction of a hospital just gets underway.

Overall, the camera moves through the light and shadows, and frequently shifts through the spirit world, with psychotropic flashbacks to emphasis just how fragile the task has become.

The narrative is not all about the time and space continuum. The film’s direction detours into more than a few moments of hard work, like the bucket brigade of children passing water up from the Hudson River to a dry well near the orphanage that had previously been occupied by Jesuit Priests.

Cabrini also encounters bigotry and sabotage. But everyone becomes a bit inspiring to watch as the uplifting stories of hope become realized.

MCQUEEN RAISES CINEMA ART FROM FIRES OF LONDON BLITZ

The world has heard the horrific war story before, but like Londoners, who felt the bombs drop night after night for eight months, the story of the Blitz gets told over and over again.

Director Steve McQueen introduces the chaos of the fire storms before the camera finds the leading characters and the narrative tract.

This historical drama dramatizes the true stories of the Blitz during World War II when Adolf Hitler’s Germany attempted to conquer the Island of Great Britain just as they had swept through Europe with lightening aerial bombardment.

McQueen develops the mother and son relationship just before George is sent, for his own safety, into the countryside with the other children of London.

Saoirise Ronan reinvents herself again, this time as George’s mother, Rita, deeply connected with him, so much so she only sends him away at the last minute, on the last train from London into the countryside.

The narrative has this Disneyesque quality as George, played by Elliott Hefferman, does not want to leave his mother in London, and instead escapes the very first chance he gets.

George is a mature 9 year old, but his part in the film has this enigmatic charm that resembles one part coming of age film and one part Peter Pan adventure fantasy.

McQueen splits the narrative in two, with one part continuing on in London, as Rita finds her role in the war effort, first as a machinist in a bomb factory and then in a bomb shelter as a first aid attendant.

The story initially seems to be about Rita and Saoirise Ronan’s performance in a leading role – like just how good of an actor has the four time Academy Award nominee become. Rita is distraught but finds valuable things to do with her time.

McQueen highlights Ronan with a bit of extra light as she mingles in dark sets with blonde hair and a light complexion.

The camera follows George for a bit on the train and then goes back to Rita in London. But then George decides to turn around and go back to the love of his mother’s arms. And the camera begins to mainly follow George on that journey, with Rita becoming more and more the backstory, but ever in the young boy’s thoughts.

The narrative recurringly returns to London to remind everyone of the horrors of the Blitz and how the community was so desperate to survive. But George also has one frightful experience after another on his return journey in a parallel narrative.

McQueen seems to have seamlessly compiled together a series of psychotropic experiences for the narrative, like recurring childhood nightmares telling different parts of a horrific true story learnt in bits and pieces from neighbourhood friends and during very serious debriefings around the family dinner table.

Several of the adventures George finds himself on are independent truths of the Blitz, like the looting of shops and macabre robbing of the dead, and the flooding of the Balham subway station. And London Authorities did reluctantly open up the underground subway system for people to use as bomb shelters.

Everything else has this surreal anonymity like in childhood nightmares in which people and events seem familiar, but not likely, and the young mind is thankfully woken up, although by something more horrific than being trapped in a dreamscape.

And a dull camera lens often provides that aesthetic of seeing, while asleep, through the fantastical childhood imagination.

McQueen uses the Jungian archetypes for mother to drive the subplot, while the Jungian trickster is used as the main narrative device.

While many anonymous Londoners fearing imminent death are driven by instinctual survival impulses, George has an all-knowing omniscience that only children and filmmakers have (after having finished all the story boards) of being convinced of him returning to be with his mother as being the correct choice.

Elliot Heffernan, as the trickster, knows he should be with his mother and he also knows that he should not be discriminated against.

The Balham subway station flooding becomes the deluge myth. And George survives as the hero, waking up in the comfort of a volunteer’s home, like Peter Pan finding himself safe back in Kensington Gardens after escaping the pirates in Neverland.

McQueen weaves London’s racial politics into the script, with several scenes involving discussions about equality and racial harmony, usually after the camera confronts racial bigotry in some form. George is mixed race after his mother Rita had a relationship with a black man she met at a London Jazz club.

The script constantly dances back and forth from tranquil moments to traumatically interrupting frightful events. This contrast of scene sequences inevitable becomes an emotive device that is driven even deeper by an original music score.

Composer Hanz Zimmer compels the narrative beyond what words can accomplish, further than anything that can be rationalized, and into scenes that emote pure emotional responses.

Stephen Graham has a role in the film’s reversal scenes as a Dickensian leader of a group of looters and corpse robbers that enlist George to squeeze in between burnt timbers of bombed out jewelry stores and nightclubs in search of preowned treasure. The macabre scene sequences show just how fragile humanity can become under the pressure of the life and death struggles that the Blitz brought to London.

The childhood influences of fantastical stories and nightmarish dreamscapes edits well together because of a heavy layer of camera angles and film aesthetics. McQueen has spent a lot of creative energy seamlessly advancing the scenes underneath the telling of a deeply disturbing human tragedy.

One scene advance takes the interpretation of the true events from abstract dots to the moonlit waves of the English Channel as seen below from the perspective of the German bomber pilots.

Blitz is an aesthetically pleasing and emotionally compelling film perfected within a 2 hr runtime by stylizing every scene within a brief storyline that occurs over perhaps 48 frightful hours of a young boy’s life.

CHALAMET RECREATES SPACE GIVEN IN FOLK MUSIC CULTURE

The title character reference could not be further from the truth since folk singer and poet Bob Dylan has been for a quite a long time now the most celebrated and most respected singer songwriter of a generation – a generation that quickly became a generation or two.

Director James Mangold makes the reference to anonymity because the film’s narrative begins with Dylan as a complete unknown, meeting celebrated Wood Guthrie for the first time in the opening scenes. Dylan, though, is far from that sort of introduction by the end of the narrative, in A Complete Unknown (2024).

The story ends just when Dylan begins to experience freedom as a musician by incorporating elements of rock and roll, which has become all the rage to the point of influencing across music genres and other creative enterprises, including Dylan picking up an electrical guitar instead of an acoustic guitar at the Newport Folk Music Festival in 1965.

Timothee Chalamet recreates Dylan on screen picture perfect, including the singing style and cool, irreverent, anti-authoritarian attitude towards love interests and fellow musicians. The hair department also gives an accent to Chalamet’s physical presence on screen and in front of music audiences.

Chalamet has a flash of artistic creativity in the role, not only providing compelling acting through subtle emotional shifts in the character that merge with the well-known public image of Dylan, but Chalamet also performs the songs and plays the guitar and harmonica in what may very well be a film in the musical genre.

Mangold uses the Dylan lyrics to augment the script, and the script and lyrics seamlessly sync together with several scene sequences becoming occupied by a Dylan song.

The film has a lot more going on though, like the Dylan lyrics. The narrative is rather linear but at the same time contains interesting subplots and didactic themes.

Dylan has two main love interests during this time at the start of his career as his star skyrockets a bit. 

A relationship with Sylvie Russo, played by Elle Fanning, keeps the film going forward as Dylan slowly finds his way to writing and composing and producing songs. Fanning has the face of unconditional love and shows how Russo supported Dylan while remaining somewhat independent. The happy couple are not exactly ever in conflict, but rather, unhappily decide to go their own separate ways.

A second subplot explores how Dylan is gradually accepted into the folk music culture by established folk icons such as Pete Seeger, played by Edward Norton, and Johnny Cash, played by Boyd Holbrook.

Mangold had previously written and directed a biopic about Johnny Cash and June Carter, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, in Walk the Line (2005). The film received five Oscar nominations, with Witherspoon winning for best performance in a leading role.

Mangold is also known for Ford v. Ferrari (2019) and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023).

A second love interest develops with Dylan meeting folk singer, songwriter Joan Baez, played by Monica Barbaro. Baez had already established herself in the industry, but like Russo, Baez is instantly mesmerized by Dylan’s talented performances.

Baez’s infatuation with Dylan proves to create irreparable damage to Dylan’s relationship with Russo, and in the end, Dylan loses both loves to the winds of time.

Despite the 2 hr 21 m runtime, the exploration of relationships lacks a bit of depth, with Mangold choosing instead to film Chalamet performing entire songs. 

And yet, the film does not have that music video atmosphere about it, although all the elements are there, such as scenes when Dylan discovers famous lyrics and scenes depicting the atmosphere inside the recording studio. And Dan Fogler plays the often frustrated music manager, Albert Grossman. Fogler also plays Francis Ford Coppola in The Offer (Series 2022).

The historically endearing connection to Dylan is underscored with several poignant moments created on screen that seem to accentuate the connection of the public with the folk singer.

And the rest is history, or so they say, as the film ends with Dylan as a recognized talent but also one who then begins to experiment in a way that would ultimately solidify his popularity for the next generation already growing up on rock and roll.

STORY OF FINAL DAYS BECOMES PERFORMANCE OF A LIFETIME

Director Pablo Lorrain spins out a psychological drama about famous 20^th century opera singer Maria Callas.

The camera finds Callas dead on the floor of her Paris apartment in the opening scenes. The narrative then gives way to a wraparound and bends time backwards, but just for a week prior to the protagonist’s death in Maria (2024).

The story then begins moving forward to answer the question about what happened.

Lorrain turns these 7 days into the lifetime of the leading character by spinning in dramatized news reels and flash backs to an earlier time, such as when entertaining Nazi officers, while also getting closer to the estimated time of death.

A light aesthetic masquerades the film as a home movie and suspends disbelief so as to suggest the film may actually be occurring in realtime, like watching a film being made within a film that only dreams are made of.

Writer Stephen Knight collaborates with Lorrain again, after writing the script for Spencer (2016), which is a psychodrama biopic about just how unhappy and confused the life of Princess Diana may have been.

Lorrain is also known for Jackie (2016), in which the director uses the interview as a narrative device to tell the story of a still grieving First Lady, just weeks after the assassination of her husband, John F. Kennedy.

Maria is interviewed as well, except by her Quaalude fueled imagination.

A FILM BEING MADE WITHIN A FILM THAT ONLY DREAMS ARE MADE OF

Angelina Jolie creates a beautiful performance as the title character, compelling scenes in real movie time as well as in flashbacks to her more famous operatic performances. And then there are the impromptu meetings with Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

Overall, the film unfolds a bit like an opera with the camera lens often fitting a room into the view finder like looking at the stage from the orchestra row seats of an opera house.

Jolie sings in several scene sequences, sometime in movie realtime in her kitchen and sometimes in movie flashbacks to performances at the opera house.

Maria is presented as being in control of her last days and directing the action of others just as she might in an opera with everyone being there and playing a role to facilitate her singing. The 2 h 4 m runtime of the film may or may not be the length of a real life opera performance.

Everything involved and all, Jolie creates a certain beauty in the character study and compels the scenes forward with this unpredictable uncertainty about what is real and what is imagined, and what parts of each form the diva’s final self penned opera.

The film quickly becomes intertextual and self referential – with the latest assumption being that this particular flashback will be a new narrative moving forward at least for a few more scenes.

But Lorrain brings Maria back to the Paris apartment, and then from there, everyone may go to a famous Parisian sidewalk café.

Jolie is more often than not centered on stage, but she shares several scenes with Maria’s butler and housemaid, Ferruccia and Bruna, played by Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher, respectively.

errucia spends a lot of time complaining about his back pain while moving the piano around in the apartment at Maria’s direction. This not so gentle play soon becomes a domino for a bit of humour found elsewhere, whenever Maria is not brooding.

The uncertainty created by the imaginary narrative of Maria being interviewed by her Quaalude induced imagination is a kind of running joke among the servantry, who take their part in ‘the play within a play’ very seriously.

The film in the end draws an analogy between Maria losing her voice and Maria dying of a broken heart because she had lost her voice.

The film is kept a bit gritty with a documentary tone and a light treatment of aesthetics that keeps everything grounded inside the Paris apartment – like a family secret.

At times, everyone seems to be looking through the eyes of the hallucinating title character, which eventually brings everyone around to thinking about how tragic the opera singer’s last days were.

The famous life can be glamourous and engaging, but may often be, particularly at the end of the day, plain and ordinary.

TIME SPLIT LIKE THE MIND BREAKING INTO FRAGMENTS

The truth about fascism was difficult to tell in public even for the Christians protected by the church in Germany.

Director Todd Kormarnicki tells the story of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the direction he took the Lutheran church before he was hung for treason in Bonhoeffer (2024).

The fragmented narrative follows the psychological chaos of the mind of the neo-orthodox theologian as he prepares to accept his own death on April 9, 1945.

Kormarnicki begins with Dietrich’s childhood in Germany, just before his brother gets sent off to fight in World War I. Walter is meant to return the hero, but in the next scene sequence, which follows with a sense of immediacy as if Walter had never left, he is shown in an open coffin being buried in his uniform.

Jonas Dassler creates a complicated character performance in Bonhoeffer as the Dietrich’s real world learning quickly accelerates from a few moments at peace during his childhood to an educated theologian living and studying with Christians in New York City.

Bonhoeffer learns from a black Christian fellowship in Harlem about a deeper love for Jesus as well as about racial hatred living day to day on the streets of New York City.

The narrative takes a long time, bringing everybody to all the places that shaped Bonhoeffer into the hero he became known as, and how the church, that initially was swayed into silence by Nazism, gradually bends back toward a more honest criticism of Germany under the fascist leadership of Adolf Hitler.

Cinematographer John Mathieson creates a tone and atmosphere that suggests more sinister matters are unfolding. Several scenes are brilliantly dipped in shadow as the protagonists discuss darker subject matters.

marnicki also uses a score, composed by Gabriel Ferreira and Antonio Pinto, that runs in the background behind dialogue scenes, which creates a lot of tension because of the substantive subject matter of the discussions between characters that syncs with the musical composition.

A lot of suspense is developed to get to the point where one of the assassination attempts fails, but the scene sequences disclosing the details about Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the assignation plot never seem to happen in any great substance.

FRAGMENTATION OF A MIND REFLECTING ON LIFE JUST BEFORE DEATH

The film is more about the challenges facing heroism in circumstances of great social uncertainty and personal danger. Dassler shows that the good character of the Lutheran pastor is the foundation of his heroism.

Essentially, the Nazis went too far by overwriting the Bible to infuse Arianism and the cult of the personality. This fascist revisionism and anti-Christian teaching about Jesus created a sense of outrage among the Church leaders and congregation, so much so that they began to put their own lives at risk to be able to speak the truth.

The Chistian church also became outraged at the treatment of the Jewish population, eventually gaining the knowledge about the Nazi’s killing the Jews in the concentration camps. At one point, Bonhoeffer is involved in a betrayal of Nazi authority by setting 7 Jews free at the border with Switzerland so that they could tell the world about the unfolding genocide.

A layer of aesthetics also moves scenes put together with various artful compositions, while several camera shots have clearly been inspired by creative forces.

Although there is a need to keep the truth alive, the movie avoids telling another story of Jews being hidden from the Nazis and saved from the gas chambers of the concentration camp system by focussing on the character of the hero that risked his own life to liberate the Jews.

The less obvious overall vision of the film seems to be scenes put together from gentle fragments of memory in which a person being executed the next day might be expected to become consumed.

The narrative is also presented as a metaphor for a Bible Dietrich’s brother gave him, with underlined passages, that mirror the unfolding of Dietrich’s life one select page at a time, as he nears the point that he will join his brother in Heaven.

RONAN CREATES GRITTY PORTRAIT OF SOBRIETY

The gritty reality of a sober alcoholic comes to life on screen with the picture perfect performance of Saoirse Ronan in the film, The Outrun (2024).

Director Nora Fingscheidt creates short scenes that shift frequently in tone, atmosphere and content to make for a compelling narrative along a 1 hr 58 m runtime.

Two narratives in the backstory merge with the main narrative counting the days forward of sobriety.

Ronan becomes the roaring uncontrollable binge alcoholic in one backstory narrative and the highly focused task oriented research biologist in another backstory narrative. The scenes shift back and forth from the days of sobriety on the Scottish Orkney Island Coast to the too much to drink days in London Town.

The film score is merged with the natural sound of the stormy ocean coast where the film’s protagonist, Rona, retreats to after a successfully completing a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program.

Fingscheidt at times creates visual chaos to depict the long hard road to recovery on which Rona has embarked. The plot reversal scenes are shown as a visual montage just when Rona appears to have broken through the most difficult days and begun to turn her world around.

Ronan creates a varied, gritty performance as the character shows the many faces of a sober alcoholic, from the black out drunk to the hours and hours of delirium tremens.

When Rona is all clear, the biologist falls in love with the seaweed she has been living with along the sea shoreline of the remote island.

The Outrun lacks a bit of the grand cinematic sweep of a feature film, and instead, resembles more the lonely internal struggle Rona must go through before returning to her life in London.

The detailed creativity of the storyboards does transfer well on film with scene sequences being individualized under an interesting intellectual aesthetic that surfaces now and then, such as a synchronicity with the character and the approaching storm.

The script every now and then becomes didactic, showing the boredom the protagonist experiences that drives her to drink and/or urges her from the inside to drink.

Paapa Essiedu provides a supporting character as the live-in boyfriend that can no longer tolerate the drunken rages of Rona that occur too frequently pub hopping in London.

Daynin is not the only part in Rona’s life that becomes dissatisfied. Rona always seems to have a reason to be displeased with other significant people in her emotional support system.

Saskia Reeves plays Annie, Rona’s mum, who Rona resents because she spends too much happy time pleasing Jesus Christ, instead of taking care of her daughter’s needs.

And Rona’s father, is an eccentric bipolar sheep farmer who is less nurturing than his daughter would like.

Ronan does a good job creating distinct parts of her character interacting differently with each of the supporting characters in a kind of Bakhtinian dialogue with the fragmented parts of a dysfunctional life.

The film is based on the memoir by Army Liptrot.

The Outrun is currently streaming on Apple.

CLASSIC BOXING FILM GENRE BENDS FOR REAL LIFE STORY

The streets of Michigan are bare and cold and hard except for a lone female runner heading to the neighbourhood boxing gym.

The film starts out at the gym for a compulsory introduction to the trainer who does not want to train a girl, and a gym full of boys and young men who believe in themselves to be the next world champions.

Director Rachel Morrison uses a gritty documentary tone while filming on location in the poor neighbourhoods of car town in Flint where no dramatization is required to show the poor black families struggling next to the middle class neighbourhoods built by the automotive giants. 

Morrison brings her experience with camera angles and set lighting as a cinematographer on Mudbound (2017), for which she received an Oscar nomination, and Black Panther (2018).

Initially the sense is that a fan is following Claressa Shields around with a camcorder, but then, as the extended family is introduced, and the relationships become understood, the audience is left with that thought that boxing is all she has in this rundown desperate town – and that presenting anything more will create surreal expectations.

When writer Barry Jenkins misses a few boxing movie tropes, like having a famous celebrity from the real life boxing world playing a character in the film, The Fire Inside seems like more of a sports movie about poor black athletes such as Venus and Serena Williams in King Richard (2021).

That struggle of poor black children to find their way out of the Inner City ghettos through sports is there. And so is a love interest.

Claressa and her male training partner begin to spend time together outside the ring just as Claressa’s championship hopes begin to become real. Ryan Destiny, as Claressa Shields, shows though, that eventhough love is inevitable, everything else must be set aside to focus on the ultimate goal in sports of being champion of the world.  

The camera follows the soon to be champion around into the private lives of her relationships with her mother and her sisters. Olunike Adeliyi plays Jackie Shields, a poor single mother enjoying a few moments on the upside with her friends instead of making sure there is food in the fridge for the children.

Jackie seems unreasonably harsh at times, or harsh and neglectful often, until she does kick the rising boxing star out of her home. 

By this time though, Shields has sorted out the otherside of her life, and correctly relies on her good friendships with her trainer and his family. Jason takes Claressa in as a border to ensure she continues on down the championship road, but also out of compassion for another human being whom he has come to respect. 

Morrison does a good job in creating poignant moments and then taking them apart later as an emotive device. As in boxing as in life, the film explores the physical conditioning and training of skills into a young athlete as a metaphor for the struggle young black people face in rising out of poverty in America.

Jenkins, better known for Moonlight (2016) and The Underground Railroad (2021), uses the 2012 Olympics not as a finale but as a plot reversal. When Claressa gets back to Flint, Michigan with her Olympic gold medal, people are proud of her, but there are few opportunities for the poor black girl, and what opportunities exist are meagre and come with strings attached.

Destiny puts Claressa’s boxing gloves down at this point in the narrative and really begins to act through an emotional rollercoaster that has Claressa giving up on boxing and then thinking better of that decision.

The film relies on the boxing narrative that leads from a lonesome 11 year old jogger to a 16 year old Olympic champion.

In parallel, though, another narrative runs forward about individual survival within community dysfunction by taking as much as is positive as you can from the fragmentation without falling back into the trap.

QUEEN SURVIVES DARK HEART OF ENGLAND’S HENRY VIII

When the King of England was away on the continent fighting the armies of France, Queen Catherine was granted charge of the Royal business.

Alicia Vikander plays Queen to King Henry VIII as the struggle for a proper reading of the Bible occurs in the background. Vikander shows how Queen Catherine, as the sixth wife of Henry VIII, could be a loyal wife but also a devout Christian, determined to do right by God.

Queen Catherine’s support of the Protestants must become invisible when the King returns from France, but the Queen has not been discreet enough and is eventually found out to have supported the religious reformers.

Vikander performs the strong woman confined to the customs of the court role – and shows Catherine adjusting ever so delicately so as not to attract the wrath of a King who has executed his five previous wives.

Jude Law plays the overweight King suffering with ulcerous legs – as the infection spreads to the rest of his body. Law portrays Henry VIII as having a short fuse with a dark heart that often tempts him to burn his Queens as heretics.

Henry VIII shows the height of paranoia when he causes Catherine to have a miscarriage after physically assaulting her during questioning as to the legitimacy of the child inside her.

Director Karim Ainouz pans the camera around the court to show the full extent of the costume drama being produced. Close ups are used to engage the camera with the characters of King and Queen developed by Jude Law and Alicia Vikander and those around the court.

The religious reformers have made their way inside the court of King Henry VIII. Eddie Marsan plays Edward Seymour, who is a close confident to both the King and the Queen, but who in the end, plays both sides of the struggle while the King is dying of the infection to his legs.

Suspense is maintained along the narrative, despite history having revealed the truth of what is occurring on screen.

In the end, the story is told through character studies and the beautiful costumes, as well as the loyalty of the people all around. The little details in front of the camera give it all away, like the way Catherine looks at Henry VIII, and the way the King looks back at his Queen.

Firebrand is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.