Study buddies: Spike Fearn and Angourie Rice in ‘Finding Emily’.
FINDING EMILY ***1/2 (111 minutes) M
In this winning, warm, smart YA rom-com a young lad’s noble quest to find his potential soulmate on the Manchester university campus results in a serendipitous meeting with another potential soulmate and an eruption of online opinionistas.
Blessed with a great, fully developed premise, the story kicks off with audio engineer Owen (Spike Fearn) making a dance-floor connection with a sprightly lass called Emily who, in her rush to get to another party, gives him a phone number with a missing digit.
Thus begins the poor sod’s desperate attempt to locate his Emily from the 300+ Emilys attending the uni, bringing him into the orbit of an American Emily (wonderfully played by Melbourne-born Angourie Rice), a witty psych student.
She volunteers to assist him in his search, her motives far from altruistic as she secretly pegs his plight as a perfect case study for her academic credit.
Breezily directed by Alicia MacDonald from writer Rachel Hirons, the film dives deeply into the travails of online culture, including data breaches, memes and keyboard warriors with no sense of fair play or common sense. In particular, Nadia Parkes does a super job as a podcast diva.
Yet for all its Gen Z touchstone tapping, the film assiduously follows the dictates of the sturdy rom-com formula, cutting through the comic clutter to deliver an eternally useful and relevant message – that love makes perfect sense when you’re on the inside looking out, and makes no sense when you’re on the outside looking in.
Finding Emily clocks in as a spirited, refreshing, well-rounded and satisfying jaunt skillfully blending themes of online mania with a solid romantic story about deception and honesty.
The leads put in engaging, character-funny performances, with an exceptional turn from Angourie Rice who shows natural comic flair without ever pushing it. She gets some big laughs. And try poking holes in her accent. It’s flawless.
Having starred in The Nice Guys, three Spider-Man films, The Beguiled, Ladies in Black, Mean Girls and one of the best episodes of Black Mirror, she’s now a leading screen presence who effortlessly owns the frame. And at the risk of committing a capital crime, her visage is rather pleasant to behold. Is it still legal to say that?
THE MANDALORIAN & GROGU ***1/2 (132 minutes) M
Given that Star Wars devotees will flock to and fawn over Disney’s latest serving of franchise extender it need be said that even the uninitiated will find this rollicking, old-school space adventure easy to love.
We offer thanks to whatever higher power is watching over the George Lucas legacy for the deep love of Star Wars lore coursing through the pop-cultural soul of director Jon Favreau, who created the smash-hit TV series, still the best of all the Star Wars spinoffs.
Energetically directed, the film boasts the look and visual texture of the original movies, right down to the use of live puppetry and stop motion, a lovely analog touch amidst the usual wash of impressive and expensive digital wizardry.
There are even salutes to the old-fashioned scene wipes George Lucas used in the first Star Wars (1977 – and shame on you if you didn’t know) as a respctful nod to the Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon movie cliffhangers of the 1930s that Lucas loved.
Crammed with action and some lovely alien vistas, the action-stuffed space adventure sees the titular bounty hunter (who we met in The Empire Strikes Back) and Baby Yoda go in hunt of one of the high-ranking bad guys determined to get the vanquished Evil Empire back on its feet.
Amidst all the fast-paced fighting and fireworks – most of which, it need be said, occurs on the ground rather than in space, which is slightly disappointing – Favreau bravely includes a lenghty, hushed interlude in a forest where very few words are uttered and the story gains some gravitas.
It’s actually quite beautiful and a clear tribute to the Dagobah chapter in Empire. Proof, again, that good directors know how and when to downshift from all the explosions and laser blasting to give the audiences some respite and some solid character bonding.
All up, very well done and deeply satisfying. The thing looked great at the Imax preview on Tuesday night, that giant screen accentuating all of that magnificent design work.
Especially appreciated by original Star Wars fans who saw the first film as wagging high schoolers is the effort that has gone into the film’s hovercraft transports. They look as though they were made by the same firm that knocked out Luke’s landspeeder on Tatooine.
And if you don’t know what that is…
FRANZ *** (127 minutes) MA
Definitely one for fans of Franz Kafka, this ambitious and unusual biopic by esteemed veteran Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa; In Darkness) charts the life and legacy of the Czech writer through an appropriately rigid performance by Idan Weiss, a dead ringer right down to the ears.
Bravely, the film pits a linear narrative with touches of time travel, taking us from Kafka’s detested work in an insurance firm to a contemporary Kafka museum celebrating the author through exhibits and merch. A very novel touch.
It’s a fine work designed for a discerning, niche audience familiar with Kafka’s work, most notably In the Penal Colony which is vividly recreated here in all its gory detail.
In what was probably his bleakest work, the story told of a machine that executed prisoners by inscribing the name of their crimes into their backs with an inverted bed of pins.
It engaged the signature Kafka theme of bureaucracy and its indifference to humanity, a concept that got its most famous exploration in The Trial (a TV version of which Holland made in 1981).
Its depiction here largely accounts for the film’s MA rating.
THE RICHEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD *** (121 minutes) M
It takes too long to get into gear, but once it does The Richest Woman in the World shapes up into a pretty solid high-life drama about wealth, greed and manipulation, with the inestimable Isabelle Huppert leading a fine cast.
Inspired by a real story, the yarn sees the super-rich Marianne Farrère (Huppert) forming a friendship with a noted magazine photographer Pierre-Alain Fantin (Laurent Lafitte).
He subtly ensconces himself into her daily life, ringing alarm bells among her friends and family who can see the relationship is too close for comfort, suspecting an ulterior agenda mostly to do with access to an endless stream of free cash.
There is some choppiness early on with director Thierry Klifa not being overly concerned with the plausibility of someone getting so close so quickly to somebody so rich.
Once the film gets over that speed bump, however, it settles into a very engaging tale, with Lafitte doing a good job at making the interloper so obnoxious you want to reach into the screen and give his nose a good pinch.
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