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A film by the always interesting Italian director Paolo Sorrentino with his favourite lead actor Tony Servillo in the lead role, as the fictional President of Italy who is in the final six months of his official appointment.As the opening titles explain, presidential powers allow them to make the final decisions on several matters including whether to approve new laws. In the film, a bill to legalise euthanasia is on his desk for approval and petitions to grant pardons to two convicted persons (a husband who killed his wife with long term Alzheimer’s and a long-suffering wife who murdered her abusive husband). Will he approve the three items which his lawyer daughter who assists him plus family and political colleagues are pushing hard for, is the film’s key theme. The President being a devout catholic still grieving for his dead wife and who meets regularly with the current black pope with dreadlocked hair (!), has misgivings on all three matters. Compared with prior Sorrentino films, this is a much slower moving film and all the better for it, though the usual colourful cinematic flourishes (an amazing scene of an Italian astronaut shedding a tear in his space capsule, being one of them) and a soundscape that cannot be ignored, as the director’s hallmarks are still there. I personally found it fascinating given how the story unfolds and examines how decisions get made slowly in a bureaucracy, but must admit I enjoy most of the films that Sorrentino makes.

Joe Conneely ● 174d

Looks like May is Anne Hathaway month, with this film being followed shortly by the new “Devil Wears Prada” update, which based on the trailer shown with this film, looks like being a repeat of the original.Described as a “psychosexual pop thriller” by its director who also wrote the script, "Mother Mary" skirts horror elements with images of spirits, a seance and body horror but wears its queer element prominently. Anne Hathaway as the Mary of the title, is a global pop star on the eve of a major comeback. She arrives in ragged condition at the European country home and fashion design atelier of Sam Anselm (played by a very icy and incisive Michaela Coel), who pretty much steals the film. The barbed exchanges between the two that takes up over the first 20 minutes of the film, reveals the two had an intense personal and artistically productive relationship but Mary in success broke away. Now she needs an amazing new dress costume for her show which she believes only Sam can design.From there on the film goes all over the place with many extravagantly staged pop concert flashback scenes. When the story moves beyond the scathing argument between the two leads, it only encompasses their respective close female entourages.At two hours its way too long and confused plus as indicated poorly scripted. One is left feeling the attraction of using the soundtrack of new songs written by FKA Twigs, Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX for the concert scenes took priority over any dramatic storyline development.

Joe Conneely ● 165d

This is the second of two very long French films about De Gaulle and WW2. I have not seen the first part but after seeing the second, doubt I will bother. Covering the later years of WW2, from 1943 through to post the liberation of France, at nearly 3 hours it is a long slog. I did not recognise too many of the French actors though the De Gaulle and General Leclerc characters look like the characters they are portraying. Simon Russell Beale certainly captures a very curmudgeonly Churchill who treads the middle ground between trying to control De Gaulle and the USA, who do not trust De Gaulle and have designs on putting parts of Northern France under US administration after liberation.The story of how de Gaulle as leader of the Free French had to battle endlessly for France's corner from a position of weakness while the USA leaned towards Petainist supporters who in De Gaulle's eyes were traitors, is the main theme of the film. Sadly the producers also want a WW2 action film, so the film flits endlessly between war action sequences in North Africa and depicting the French underground resistance who report to De Gaulle, trying to negotiate unity between the communists and political parties. The De Gaulle scenes that fill up the rest of the film end up being repetitious as his stubbornness to comprise is tested yet again.Given the central themes of the film I found it ironic that the most famous images of De Gaulle as liberator arriving and walking through a newly freed Paris in 1944 are finally not shown in the movie.

Joe Conneely ● 25d