Review: THE FLORIDA PROJECT

Two kids against a purple wall. A scream off. They respond. This keeps up until the third gets there and tells them to follow him. They do, running past huge cartoon heads, balloons, fruit and great splats of colour, all shops, to a landing of the purple place they live in, the project of the title, where they spit on the car below. The owner comes out and yells at them and they return fire with adult turns of phrase that aren't so much cute as worrying. They disperse. The girl runs back to her motel room where her mother Halley, almost entirely tattooed and green haired, is on the bed gazing at the tv. When the manager knocks because of the spitting a few minutes later, Halley shouts at her daughter to get the door. She has reasons for not answering it herself.

Halley manages the day to day hanging by a thread as she scams, does tricks or just begs her way through the days. The rent is always due and it's always too much. Meanwhile her daughter Moonee runs amok, leading any other kid she can find to cause mischief. But this film makes it clear that children with their nuclear level energy are pushing their own knowledge with each new experience more potent a lesson than anything in the classrooms they will soon be entering. They hangout at the swamps or the abandoned housing projects, all with names of dashed hopes like Magic Castle or Future World. It's Orlando, Florida, home of Disney World. But Disney World is over the road which is lethally busy, the cars speed thickly, their roofs like the fins of sharks. From a pad nearby a helicopter seems constantly taking off, carrying those who can afford it into the sky like a rapture for the one percent. Halley and Moonee give it the finger at one point. The July 4th fireworks from Disney World are spectacular, even seen from the damp grass of the swamp.

This day to day plotlessness is made compulsive movie going through the sheer boldness of its presentation. We don't have to work too hard to know the irony of all the candy coloured poverty but neither are we beaten about the head by it, that's simply what life looks like here. The persistent aural reminders are the same with kiddy pop and cartoon soundtracks on televisions that stay on when everyone's asleep. And the tension between the ugly acts of grown-ups and the gormless disasters of the children's play commands us: it's a system but it's always on the edge of snapping.

And it's the performers. Bria Vinaite as Halley goes from sweetness to cozening to outright horrifying as she swings between survival and an unrestrained sense of injustice that hasn't developed past her childhood. Brooklyn Prince as Moonee is only anything but natural when she's trying to be a grown up and then she seems heart-rendingly aware of its futility. Her dialogue and that of the other kids, especially when together never drops from natural, never sounds scripted. The film's thread of the elastic boundary between life and its violations is dependent on the direct identification we are forced to make between the wildness of the children and the only partially guarded chaos of their parents. Each moment feels precarious, each happy laugh a second away from a scream.

Presiding over this or what little he can control is Bobby the manager. Willem Dafoe whose intensity has taken him from roles as Jesus, to the chaotically violent Bobby Peru, to a recreation of Max Schreck as Nosferatu and beyond, seems to bring all that experience and the rest of the hemisphere on his shoulders as he keeps as much of the chaos on his watch from exploding beyond its bounds. Is he a little too good? Maybe, but if so it's the character rather than the performance which fills the gaps of any under-drafting with what feels like a very muscular concern for those around him. His scene with a freezingly banal paedophile demonstrates this: he knows he can't stop the man from invading anywhere else but uses a telltale detail found on the predator's driver's licence to buy a little time because that's really all that can be believably done about anything on that side of the road.

Taking in the sustained power of this film I was reminded as I might have been of John Cassavetes' often brutal naturalistic style, adopted from Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave. The unflinching and knowing eye coupled with the confident direction of the actors to keep themselves grounded in documentary realism is there for anyone to compare. But I was also taken by the direction of the children and the realisation of their secret world and how it reminded me of a favourite from years ago, Beasts of the Southern Wild. While never attempting the magical realism of that piece, The Florida Project's joy in examining the seriousness of children's play is as rich as it is in Beasts which is a tribute I'll happily part with.

And then, as the worst of the threads wind tight and the inevitable teeters to its crash in these lives we find a moment of magnanimity and even love that lifts us like children to its warmth. It's the sole moment with scored music and feels as manipulative as you might imagine but it is so perfect for what you need after the rest of the film that you simply don't care about that. Strong candidate for best of the year.

Review: THE DISASTER ARTIST

Tommy and Greg meet at a theatrical audition in San Fransisco. Greg fenceposts his way through a scene from Beckett. Tommy storms through the iconic "Stella!" moment from Streetcar. They pair up as potential acting buddies. Moving to L.A. they fail steadily until the inspiration strikes and Tommy decides that the only way out of the vicious circle is for them to make their own movie. Using Tommy's apparently bottomless pit of money they buy equipment, hire crew and cast actors and off they go to make a film that has become the world's current champion of cinematic rubbish. Through this we get Tommy's erratic mood swings and exhausting delusional behaviour and a premier that would crush the thickest-boned film director in history. This is a true story. Or is it?

Writer/director/star James Franco doesn't seem to mind. He fashions a polished account of the psychological maelstrom that created a film as a vanity project, beginning with a series of recognisable Hollywood figures attesting to the phenomenon of the film, The Room, before plunging into an imagined origins issue. Sometimes going for the laugh, sometimes starkly mocking, sometimes appreciative of the effort, Franco never gets close enough to his subject to find any single anchor point from which to float any comedy, drama or any substantial development. What we get is very little more than the late night screening audience's responses of the original film.

This is the problem. My reservations about the film were from a worry that the young and confident Franco, a contemporary Hollywood winner, would spend his screen time punching down. But who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? Well, he does. Beyond the merest smudge of recognition that Wiseau might have serious problems Franco goes for the jugular in the hope that it's close enough to the funny bone to grab some collateral laughs so this can be both a pisstake and an earnest tribute to force of personality.

Comparison's with Tim Burton's Ed Wood are impossible to ignore. Burton took pains to tell us how, for all his risible missteps and gormless optimism, Ed Wood at least wanted to make good films and had ideas about how to do that. Cast above reality as a kind of bright lesser god we had no problem seeing the admiration at the heart of the laughter. If you watch Plan 9 or Glen or Glenda without expecting a laugh fest you will see real movies in there, ineptly executed but made for real. Burton also gives as perspective with a fictitious meeting between Wood and the genuine film god Orson Welles who, drinking in defeat, lets Ed know that the problems in cinema Olympus can be as niggling and infuriating as they are down there on Skid Row. James Franco gives as a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched wincingly over an hour and three quarters, ignoring the opportunities already in the screenplay (e.g. that Tommy would make a better villain than romantic lead) that might have led him to create something more powerful and profound with the forces of avowed fiction.

I went to a screening of The Room with a friend who had been to several. It began at midnight and we took our seats after arming ourselves with a bag of plastic spoons handed to us by the ushers. Lights down and the session started, the titters starting with the name of Tommy Wiseau on almost every credit. And then from the first scene on the heckles stormed from the audience. Every time a set of decorative spoons appeared on screen there was a rain of plastic spoons aimed at it. At first resistant I joined in, really finding it funny, throwing spoons, the lot. I laughed till it hurt.

But what did I find funny? The Room is a poorly made movie with a serious error in judgement every few minutes. Poor acting, bizarre action blocking, a narrative that lifts and falls like an autumn leaf in winter and an overall dreariness that saps the lifeforce of any of its audience members. In the crowd I succumbed willingly, joining the tidal response the way that Winston Smith is caught up in the shouting during a Hate Week screening in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Everyone would. If you didn't you would suffer the worst spite alienation since that time at primary school. If you watched it alone you wouldn't laugh; you would turn it off after a few scenes from annoyance or boredom something similarly oppressive. The midnight screenings of The Room are neither film appreciation nor interactive like Rocky Horror sessions, they are the Bear Pit and the Orwell Hate Week of today. To be in that crowd is to join the purgative good taste that Picasso correctly warned us was the chief enemy of creativity, a philistinism that shouts as deafeningly and laughs as woodenly as only norm-seeking cutlural explosions can: it brings us back the great middling void and from there we get to guffaw openly at this lame little misstep. When I checked Youtube for phonecam clips of midnight screenings I heard every single taunt I'd heard at the screening, each last one learned by rote and uttered as though fresh, night after night.

James Franco does not convince me that he's doing anything more than repackaging the mediocrity of these screenings, getting a chance to double the fun by playing the delusional narcissist at the phenomenon's centre with an accent as perfect as the wig. He can find none of the meaning Tim Burton found in Ed Wood and is left with another syllable correct heckle refined from a Youtube moment. And, really, when the warmest and most satisfying moment of your feature length film happens after the credit sequence it's time to reassess the expense of your time and effort.

Review: THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER

Stephen is a middle aged surgeon who meets teenaged Martin in secret. Their relationship feels parent and child and extends to Stephen giving Martin an expensive watch as a present. Their conversation is stilted, as though they've only recently met, but also hints at a deeper intimacy. Martin begins to encroach on Stephen's work and then home life, drawing invitations from Stephen that have the ring of extortion.

Home life feels bourgeois, the couple, both doctors keep their tobacco habits from each other while the teenage daughter and tween boy appear to behave as we might expect, with both age appropriate sensitivity and difference clearly on show. Not an idyll by any means but vulnerable. This is where Martin enters as plot driver as he reveals the plan we have been waiting for from the first scene.

I won't spoil this but will say that this is the point where the film shifts from a kind of stylised realism to a gritty kind of magical realism. Whatever we are to make of Martin's power we can clearly see the effects and are compelled to follow the desperation of the characters to its ghastly end.

Lanthimos builds his world carefully, allowing us only enough empathy with the central characters to keep up but releasing enough when it matters to have us on the edge of our seats. The sense of threat and potentially explosive violence is constant. But the sinews of seduction within this horrifying tale serve to inject a vein of nauseous upset. The perfectly cast Barry Keoghan has a Max Cady's expertise with a smooth turn from gormless simpleton to unsettling manipulator. His steel blue calculation forces the conversations his own way. Sometimes that's the conquest of the daughter of the house and sometimes that's a perfectly turned threat to the parents.

Colin Farrell has a difficult task under a massive bush of beard and his deadpan Dublin lilt. His personal fortress is only that deeply walled and his surprise at Martin's success results in a palpable struggle with his own ethical sense. Nicole Kidman plays an older version of her role in Eyes Wide Shut, an American royal with a keen eye on the preservation of her realm. Sunny Suljic plays the kind of boy on the verge of bursting adolescence that we saw in Todd Solondz's best early efforts and Raffey Cassidy brings a hear rending vulnerability to her teenage girl longing for life beyond the home beautiful. However, the one I'll mention in dispatches here is the one I took a few ticks to identify. Martin's mother, in an excruciating scene of arranged seduction, pushes herself toward Stephen with the wiles of a mature woman but the compulsion of a teenager. I couldn't work out hwo it was until she grinned. It was a nervous grin but it flashed like a photo ID. Alicia Silverstone, still golden and energetic has reached from Clueless to this grinding horror with a commitment that leaves her pathetic as a character but brave and prepared as an actor.

This film is oddly more difficult than it's more fanciful predecessors as it keeps the alien force at its heart pumping solidly, making the already strained realism of the first act unnerving. That is why I will keep buying a ticket with his byline and it was the same in the eighties and nineties with David Lynch: I just had no control over what I might see and it scared me and I would much rather be scared by a risk taker than watch a logically perfect genre piece. I like popcorn movies but I love ones that make me think about what I'm buying a ticket to. The weird and the wonderful, the terrifying and the bleak, at their best lure me with the same kind of heart we see naked and pulsing in the opening shot of this film.