The metaphor levels are set to maximum on Grand Central, an overwrought, overthought tale of leaking passions inside a nuclear power plant. Here come the hard-hat romantics, tramping up the gangway to circle the core. Radiation sickness, they tell themselves, is a little like being kissed in a bar by a beautiful woman.
Rebecca Zlotowski’s picture works best when it’s at its most stark and unadorned. Along the way, Grand Central lifts the lid on a high-stakes Catch-22 system in which employees have to keep their radiation levels down for fear of being laid off - which effectively makes the subcontractors responsible for their own safety.
Arnaud Desplechin’s latest begins with our demobbed hero being examined by mental health consultants suffering war trauma. A later, slightly anticlimatic scene shows how he sustained that scar to his head: by falling, a bit pissed, off the back of a lorry. A lorry that was going quite slowly. Luckily, Jim has wound up at the Winter hospital in Topeka, Kansas. “The best place in the country for brain trauma,” chirps a nurse. By night he’s allowed out to go boozing and seducing; by day there’s arts and crafts (at one point a suicide interrupts some potato stenciling), as well as his own dedicated doc. “May I introduce myself?” says Dr George Devereux, in one of the film’s many exposition-tastic lines. “I am the hospital anthropologist and I am interested in Indians.”
For what it’s worth, Del Toro emerges with a few shreds of dignity (despite looking inescapably Hispanic). But perhaps that’s simply the sympathy talking: that brow-clutching, groaning and desperate sweating does mirror audience experience. “How much longer do I have to stay here?” he enquires of a nurse at one point. Quite. Catherine Shoard For Those in Peril Dir: Paul Wright. With: George Mackay, Kate Dickie, Nichola Burley. 94min.
This debut feature from British director Paul Wright concerns a disturbed young man in a remote Scottish fishing village. Aaron was the only person rescued from a craft wrecked by a storm; the other five crew members, including his adored elder brother Michael, were drowned. It is a study in grief, pain and survivor guilt - that is, the guilt felt by the survivor, and also that imposed on him by a community who will not forgive him for being alive while their loved ones are dead. His anguish gradually metamorphoses into irrational suspicion and rage.
In his misery, Aaron becomes close to Michael’s fiancee, which intensifies the village’s anger. The movie has a sense of interior longing possibly inspired by Terrence Malick, but is also sometimes contrived and straining self-consciously for dramatic mood. Wright creates a showy visual texture, a collage of film and video and glimpses of TV reports - although the use of Super 8mm for childhood is close to cliche.There is a superabundance of ideas: Wright maybe just has the first-timer’s reluctance to leave anything out. Nevertheless, this is a bold and confident film from a valuable new talent. Peter Bradshaw Like Father, Like Son Dir: Hirokazu Kore-eda. With: Lily Franky, Machiko Ono, Masaharu Fukuyama Hirokazu Kore-eda has returned with another gentle and warm-hearted family drama in that classic Japanese manner he has been gravitating towards in recent movies Still Walking (2008) and I Wish (2011). The new film is a “baby-swap” drama.Go-getting salaryman Ryota and his sleek wife, Midori, have a six-year-old boy - their only child - whom they push hard. Then the hospital sends devastating news: their baby was mixed up with a child now being raised by another family.
The slow, agonising process of meetings between the families begins, and Ryota hires a lawyer, ostensibly so all four can unite to sue the hospital. But he has a secret plan: snobbishly aghast at where his biological boy is being raised, and unwilling to relinquish the one he has naturally come to love, he is scheming to prove legally that Yudai and Yukari are unfit parents - or to make them a cash offer - so that he can take charge of both boys.
Like Father, Like Son is not as distinctive as Still Walking and I Wish, not as finely observed and, frankly, a little formulaic, with life lessons being learned by the obvious people. It does, however, have charm. PB
The Dance of Reality
Dir: Alejandro Jodorowsky. With: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky, Pamela Flores. 130min The volcano of underground cinema has burst into life again, with a bizarre, chaotic and startling film. At 84, more than 20 years since his last movie, Alejandro Jodorowsky has returned to his home town of Tocopilla, Chile, to create a magic-realist memoir of his father, Jaime, a fierce communist whose anger was redoubled by the antisemitism the family faced.
As a child, young Alejandro is played by Jeremias Herskowits, and as an old man by the director himself. The film is oddly moving for what it conceals, or accidentally reveals: the director’s very real, understandable emotions of pain and regret on the subject of his father. In this movie, the director is bidding farewell to his past, to his childhood, and perhaps to the world. It is an arresting spectacle. PB
By arrangement with the Guardian