Clayface ★★★
(MA) 108 minutes. In cinemas
No-one told me Clayface was an actor. Granted, he hasn’t always been an actor: like other enduring DC comic-book villains, the character has been given a new origin story every few years. But reliable sources tell me that through it all, he’s retained a special ability to masquerade as other people, through some combination of advanced psionic powers and sheer showmanship.
The showbiz angle is critical to the gruesome new Clayface movie from British director James Watkins (The Woman In Black) – not a superhero adventure but a traditional exercise in grand guignol, although it takes place in Batman’s hometown of Gotham City and was overseen by the same producers as the recent screen versions of Superman and Supergirl.
The anti-hero Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is an up-and-coming movie star whose career takes a downturn when he makes the rookie mistake of sleeping with the girlfriend (Joana Ribeiro) of a mob boss (David Dencik).
The mob boss explains that he too is a star, in his own field: if anyone does him wrong, his revenge needs to be visible, though not so visible anything can be proven in a court of law. So Matt’s pretty face is slashed to ribbons, seemingly bringing an end to his screen career.
A glimmer of hope is offered by Dr Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), a bright young scientist pioneering a new approach to treatment that involves injecting her patients with artificially intelligent cells.
Dr Corr’s goal is to treat degenerative diseases rather than improving anyone’s looks – but Matt, whose thespian gifts haven’t entirely deserted him, begs her to use him as a guinea pig. After all, what do either of them have to lose?
The upshot is a little like a male equivalent to The Substance. Matt gets his original face back, but only temporarily, and at a price. The extra twist is his newfound gift for transformation, which isn’t fully under his control: as his moods shift, his appearance changes too, as if he were taking method acting to the next level.
This promisingly bizarre premise could have been a vehicle to explore many questions related to identity, performance, and the relation of both to the physical body. But, in the end, the film boils down to a fairly standard revenge saga, with a streak of conservatism evident in the initial portrayal of Matt as a hapless victim of this world’s version of cancel culture.
It’s a fair bet that more ambition was present in earlier drafts of the script, credited to Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini (curiously, the dialogue quotes both The Merchant of Venice and Raging Bull). Still, it’s a compelling story as far as it goes, and Watkins’ straightforward style has the merit of not distracting us from it.
The very crudity of the comic-book plotting gives Harries scope to create a credible character between the lines, showing us Matt’s mingled vanity, insecurity, rage and yearning – though at almost every turn, it feels as if we’re being asked to give him a notch more sympathy than he deserves.
Wildwood ★★★★
(M) 131 minutes. In cinemas.
Oregon teenager Prue McKeel is on a quest. A murder of crows has swooped out of the sky and snatched her little brother while she was taking care of him. Now she must get him back – a mission which takes her into a nearby forest of the enchanted kind we’ve come to know so well from Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm.
Nobody emerges from these without undergoing some fundamental change and this one is busier than most, heavily populated with witches, warlocks, battling armies, marauding bandits and talking animals.
That’s the premise of Wildwood, the new animated feature from Laika, the American independent studio devoted to stop-motion animation, a painstaking art relying on articulated puppets and handmade sets photographed frame by frame. Wildwood is the studio’s sixth film. Its predecessors, which include Coraline, The Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings, have all been nominated for Oscars, but only Coraline has been a hit at the box-office.
Fallen Angels by Noël Coward ★★★½
(CTC) 106 minutes
It’s hard to believe that Noël Coward’s giddy comedy, Fallen Angels, was considered scandalous by the London tabloids when it opened in the West End in 1925.
One critic sniffily conceded that audiences with a taste for the decadent might be entertained but he was not among them. Coward’s account of two happily married women who are thrown into a state of drunken confusion by the prospect of a reunion with the Frenchman who seduced each of them when they were single struck the critic as being distinctly unpleasant.
Fortunately, the decadent prevailed and the play has been done many times in London and New York. This is a screen version of the latest production, filmed live on Broadway in April with Rose Byrne and American stage star Kelli O’Hara as the nervous wives, Jane Banbury and Julia Sterroll. Both actors were nominated for Tony Awards because they infuse their performances with such an elegantly superior brand of slapstick.
Clayface ★★★
(MA) 108 minutes. In cinemas
No-one told me Clayface was an actor. Granted, he hasn’t always been an actor: like other enduring DC comic-book villains, the character has been given a new origin story every few years. But reliable sources tell me that through it all, he’s retained a special ability to masquerade as other people, through some combination of advanced psionic powers and sheer showmanship.
The showbiz angle is critical to the gruesome new Clayface movie from British director James Watkins (The Woman In Black) – not a superhero adventure but a traditional exercise in grand guignol, although it takes place in Batman’s hometown of Gotham City and was overseen by the same producers as the recent screen versions of Superman and Supergirl.
The anti-hero Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is an up-and-coming movie star whose career takes a downturn when he makes the rookie mistake of sleeping with the girlfriend (Joana Ribeiro) of a mob boss (David Dencik).
Street Fighter ★★
(M) 119 minutes
As campy video-game adaptations from the 1990s go, the original version of Street Fighter, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, sets a high bar. More specifically, the bar is set by the late Raul Julia’s performance as the levitating drug lord and would-be global dictator General Bison, strutting and glowering in his red uniform and peaked cap adorned with a winged skull, more feverishly high on his own supply than most Bond villains ever managed to be.
This new bid to launch a Street Fighter movie franchise is not a direct remake, but as a reimagined version of the character – now known as Lord Bison – David Dastmalchian seems very conscious of not wanting to mimic his predecessor. He goes for a more internalised kind of madness, speaking in uncanny hushed tones and periodically letting his big sorrowful eyes roll back in his head.
Still, he has some welcome moments of flamboyance, including a version of the most famous scene from the original, where Bison confronts Chun-Li (played here by Callina Liang), an Interpol agent who has infiltrated his criminal organisation in order to avenge her father’s death.
Whalefall ★★★
(M) 106 minutes
Whalefall comes to you from inside the belly of a whale. By the time it’s over, you’ve been treated to a comprehensive tour of a sperm whale’s digestive system. I now know that its stomach is split into four separate compartments.
Set on the craggy Californian coast near Monterey, the film is adapted from a bestselling novel by American writer Daniel Kraus, who was inspired by true stories of swimmers being swept into the mouths of whales and spat out again. Kraus’s teenage hero, Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) is not so lucky. His scuba gear becomes entangled in the tentacles of a giant squid chosen by a sperm whale as its next meal and in the confusion, which is terrifying, he’s swallowed whole.
This puts him in select company. I count Jonah, Pinocchio and his father, Geppetto, as those who have had firsthand experience of life inside a whale. Then my list cuts out. Jay does have a slight advantage. His scuba tank is still functioning, giving him an hour to make his way to the exit.
La Bola Negra ★★½
(MA) 159 minutes
Homophobia is hardly extinct in Spain, any more than elsewhere. Still, it says something that one of the biggest locally made hits at the Spanish box office this year is La Bola Negra, a crowd-pleasing, century-spanning epic that is thoroughly conventional in nearly all respects aside from its emphasis on same-sex desire.
Directed by the team of Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, known in Spain as Los Javis, the film shares its title with an unfinished work by the celebrated Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca – a gay man who was murdered by a fascist death squad in 1936, soon after the start of the Spanish Civil War.
The few pages of Lorca’s play that survive tell the story of a young man blackballed from a casino (“black ball” is the literal meaning of the title). Much the same happens to Carlos (Milo Quifes), a well-off young man rejected as a member of a prestigious social club in Granada.
Sense and Sensibility ★★★½
(PG) 132 minutes
I was astonished to realise that Ang Lee’s film of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is now more than 30 years old.
It is so fresh in my memory and the performances still seem so perfectly pitched that I approached Georgia Oakley’s new version, with its screenplay by Australian novelist Diana Reid, expecting to find it redundant. But Austen is infinitely adaptable. Like all classic works, her novels offer something new to every generation so they go on re-appearing in film and television, having undergone slight changes of shape each time.
Oakley and Reid’s take on Austen produces an up-market bodice ripper, loosening the novel’s constraints, punching up the emotional temperature and taking the story out of the drawing room whenever it can to roam Devonshire’s forests, fields and beaches.
NAZA ★★★★½
(M) 77 minutes
In a famous scene from Carol Reed’s moody 1949 thriller The Third Man, shot in Allied-occupied Vienna, a war profiteer played by Orson Welles looks down from a ferris wheel at the tiny figures on the ground. “Would you really feel any pity,” he asks rhetorically, “if one of those dots stopped moving forever?”
It’s a chilling speech, but not as chilling as any sequence in NAZA, the forceful new documentary from the Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (both members of the Palestinian-Israeli collective responsible for No Other Land, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2025).
NAZA consists primarily of one-on-one interviews with two dozen Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, shot at night on rooftops in central Tel Aviv. The anonymous subjects are reduced on screen to silhouettes, freeing them to speak with unusual frankness about their involvement – mainly from afar – in the killing of Palestinian civilians during the ongoing Gaza war (in response to Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, in which 1200 people were killed).
Other Mommy ★★
(MA) 94 minutes
The outline of a strong idea is visible in Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, enough so to indicate why the star Jessica Chastain wanted to do it. But not enough to make this more than the usual kind of toothless Hollywood horror movie, which backs away from anything too genuinely horrific, and frantically over-explains itself without becoming any less disjointed.
One aspect of the idea strongly recalls Coraline – both the 2002 children’s book by Neil Gaiman, and Henry Selick’s 2009 stop-motion adaptation – and can be traced back further to The New Mother, a genuinely terrifying short story by the 19th-century British writer Lucy Clifford, which Gaiman admitted to plundering freely.
Clifford’s story concerns two misbehaving children who are punished when their affectionate mother is replaced by a horrible substitute with “glass eyes and a wooden tail”. Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), the eight-year-old heroine of Other Mommy, is more fortunate in a way, having two mothers who take turns looking after her.
The Social Reckoning ★★★½
(M) 112 minutes
The Social Reckoning’s writer-director Aaron Sorkin says the film presents Meta’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, as an anti-hero rather than a villain. If so, the actor, Jeremy Strong, didn’t get the message.
As Zuckerberg, he delivers a poker-faced portrait in implacability. Gone is the nervy awkwardness exhibited by Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network (2010), Sorkin’s first foray into the life of Facebook’s founder. Strong’s Zuckerberg is bombastic, dictatorial and maniacally convinced of his own infallibility.
His lapses into robotic caricature throw the film off kilter at times. Nonetheless, you can’t look away. Sorkin’s longstanding fascination with the nature of power and those who find its charms irresistible is functioning as effectively as ever, as is his flair for dialogue. He doesn’t completely ignore the screenwriter’s mantra, “show, don’t tell” but his is the kind of skill which allows him to get away with great chunks of uninterrupted conversation. He can translate words into weapons and inject several suspense points into a single sentence while maintaining his sense of humour. Even so, picking your way through the tech jargon which clogs up many scenes is hard work.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
