Blue Moon
(100 mins, 15) Directed by Richard Linklater; starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale
New York 1943. It’s the night of the Broadway premiere of Oklahoma!, the triumphant first collaboration between the composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney) – a partnership that will go on to make history. At an afterparty at a midtown bar, champagne corks fly and the air fizzes with breathless superlatives.
But for one man, Rogers’s former writing partner, the celebrated lyricist and notorious drunk Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke, shortened by camera tricks and perspective manipulation to match Hart’s diminutive stature), every word of praise for the show lands like a knife to his heart.
Directed by Richard Linklater, from a crisply bittersweet screenplay by Robert Kaplow, Blue Moon is as elegantly witty and luxuriantly melancholic as one of Rogers and Hart’s toe-tapping, heart-swelling compositions. The film unfolds almost entirely in the bar, where Lorenz – Larry, to his friends – slips off the wagon and slides towards irrelevancy.
Hawke is excellent, even if the height-reducing techniques can feel a little unconvincing at times. His Larry is drunk on a heady mixture of vitriol and need; his monologues, delivered to Bobby Cannavale’s barman Eddie veer between deliciously catty put-downs and hollow self-aggrandising. Tortured by the realisation that Oklahoma!, with its cornball sentimentality and its grotesquely obvious rhyme choices, is going to be “a 14-carat hit”, he becomes consumed by an obsession with a young Yale student, Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley).
Perhaps it’s a kind of rebound, something to fill the aching gap left by the disintegration of his professional relationship with Rogers. But inevitably Elizabeth wafts away, drawn to Rogers’s triumph, and Larry is left once again with just bourbon and disappointment for company.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
(144 mins, 12A) Directed by Rian Johnson; starring Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close
It’s the familiar Knives Out formula: a serpentine plot, a starry cast and Daniel Craig as dapper private detective Benoit Blanc, laying on a southern accent as thick as melted cheese. But the third film in the series, Wake Up Dead Man, is sharper and smarter than its predecessor, the brash, showy Glass Onion. And thanks to a terrific Josh O’Connor, a standout even in a heavy-hitting cast that also includes Glenn Close, Josh Brolin and Andrew Scott, plus a confident screenplay that dares to ask existential questions along with the usual whodunnit twists, it could be the best instalment yet.
O’Connor plays Father Jud Duplenticy, a boxer turned Catholic priest, whose journey to the church was driven by repentance after a fatal incident in the ring. He is sent to a small-town community in upstate New York, and finds a congregation that is little more than a personality cult presided over by the raging, vengeful Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Brolin).
A mysterious death seems to implicate Father Jud, but – of course – nothing in this handsome, Agatha Christie-inspired thriller is quite what it seems.
Christy
(135 mins, 15) Directed by David Michôd; starring Sydney Sweeney, Ben Foster, Merritt Wever
Sydney Sweeney gives a transformative performance as Christy Martin, the most successful female boxer of the 1990s. The picture pays dutiful tribute to Martin’s dedication and courage, both as a woman in a male-dominated world and as a closeted lesbian who finds herself in an abusive and controlling marriage to her coach Jim (Ben Foster in sneering sleazebag mode).
Christy, a coalminer’s daughter from blue-collar West Virginia, finds what seems to be an escape route from the closed minds and limited opportunities of her home town when she realises that she has a talent for punching people in the face. Jim – paunchy, with thinning hair, bullet eyes and big talk – persuades her he is crucial to her success, that she is nothing without him. It’s watchable enough, but the story is approached in such a formulaic and incurious manner that this feels like film-making by bullet points and montage sequences.
Zodiac Killer Project
(92 mins, 15) Directed by Charlie Shackleton
This playful examination of artistic frustration and deep dive into the cliches and conventions of the true crime documentary genre leans so heavily on the wry delivery and personality of film-maker Charlie Shackleton that it could work almost as well as a live stage performance. Shackleton, a voracious consumer of true crime television, had planned to make his own foray into the medium with an adaptation of a book about the Zodiac serial killer, who murdered at least five victims in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1960s.
Shackleton was deep in pre-production when the author’s estate decided not to sell him the rights after all, so he decided to make a film about the movie he wanted to make. Along the way, we learn the insider tricks of the true crime trade; “backtors”, for example, are actors who are shot from behind, walking moodily away from the camera. Witty, meta and informative.
Photograph by Sabrina Lantos