Pan (PG)
Pan is a richly colourful adventure story that continues the cinema’s obsession with all things J.M. Barrie and the “the boy who wouldn’t grow up.”
It begins at the Blitz-battered London orphanage where Peter was left as an infant and where he is now in the care of Kathy Burke’s gargoyle-ish Irish nun, Mother Barnabas. Every morning when he wakes up, another few beds in the dormitory are empty and Peter is convinced that something strange is going on.
The boys assume that evacuation is to blame until it transpires that Mother Barnabas is selling them to a crew of Neverland pirates who need cheap labour for their mining operations. They swoop by every night in their flying galleon, drop through the skylight on ropes and pull the children from their beds.
This set a sequence of panting set pieces in motion that involve the opened-faced, blue-eyed Pan (Levi Miller), Hook, the pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman) and Tiger Lily (Rooney Mara).
The movie is fairly traditional in its narrative approach but despite the way it has been received in the US, I found it entertaining and constantly lively.
Recently on The Picture Show, Philip spoke to Pan director Joe Wright. You can listen back to the podcast below:
The Lobster (15A)
Made by the Irish production company Elements Pictures and directed – and shot in Kerry – by award-winning Greek filmmaker, Yorgos Lanthimos, The Lobster is a droll black comedy about the nature of human relationships.
Colin Farrell is a shy architect who is despatched to an expansive hotel in the countryside when his wife leaves him. He is one of a group of people who is given 45 days to find an alternative partner or be turned into an animal and he goes about his task with surprising consideration for the people around him.
It is when he finds a new relationship that his circumstances change and he has to face a sometimes bizarre and hilariously funny set of alternatives.
The Lobster probably won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but if you are into it, you will find it funny, insightful, and exquisitely performed by a cast that also includes Rachel Weisz, Olivia Coleman and John C Reilly.
Philip also spoke to Dublin actor Colin Farrell, and you can hear the podcast here:
Also showing this week...
Also out this week is Crimson Peak from Guillermo Del Toro – a horror film with Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain that plays like one of those Edgar Allen Poe stories which Vincent Price and Roger Corman made in the early 1960s; in the animation sequel, Hotel Transylvania 2, Dracula puts his diffident grandson through a monster-in-training bootcamp programme to develop his vampire side and the poetic Talking to my Father, Sé Merry Doyle’s documentary in which the architect and lecturer Simon Walker addresses his late father’s legacy on modern architecture from the 1960s.
Every Wednesday on The Right Hook, Philip joins George to talk movies and TV. Listen back to the podcast below:
