Holmes doco’s hall of mirrors and Depp’s curious comeback, plus other new movies to watch this week

(M) 174 minutes

I spent the first third of Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder’s documentary about convicted con woman Elizabeth Holmes consumed with boredom and frustration, knowing I still had almost two hours to go.

I must admit that Nathan Fielder’s chat show appearances have never inspired me to watch The Rehearsal, his satirical analysis of reality TV. Nor have I seen much of his other forays into the off-kilter art of awkward comedy and I quickly tired of watching him stare searchingly into Holmes’ glazed blue eyes in a wordless effort to guess what she was thinking.

It was all starting to look like a battle of the brands – his desire to embarrass her into slipping up, versus her determination to ward him off by maintaining her innocence no matter what. Despite her conviction for fraud, she is still claiming that she did not lie about the capacities of her company, Theranos’ blood testing device, even though its flaws cost its shareholders millions of dollars as well as endangering the health of patients given false results.

(M) 115 minutes

Of all the characters created by the once universally beloved Charles Dickens, none has endured more successfully than Ebenezer Scrooge. In part, this must be because there’s no shortage of similar penny-pinching bastards with us today (though Scrooge is witty, which his real-life equivalents never are). But while the plot of A Christmas Carol offers the satisfaction of seeing a tyrant get his comeuppance, it also proposes that even the worst among us can be redeemed.

Some people would reject that proposal, and even dispute whether offering a villain a path to redemption is a good idea. In all likelihood, these are among the people who will choose to steer clear of Ebenezer, starring Johnny Depp, whose career ran aground a few years ago following a tidal wave of bad publicity in the wake of an extremely public and messy divorce.

Here is not the place to relitigate that backstory, which nonetheless hangs like a fog over Ebenezer, one of the oddest screen Christmas Carols yet, and a wholly unexpected project for its director Ti West (Pearl), an accomplished horror filmmaker venturing for the first time into the realm of what might loosely be called “family entertainment”.

(MA) 114 minutes

It’s no surprise that I Love Boosters’ writer-director Boots Riley is a hip-hop artist. With a rainbow palette of saturated colours, an exuberant cast and torrents of rapid-fire dialogue, the film looks and sounds as if it’s come straight off the street. And in a way, it has, having been inspired by the lyrics of a song by Riley’s group, The Coup.

It also has a message – aimed squarely at the sins of the fashion industry. Boosters are shoplifters who lift as much as they can and re-sell it at prices that they and their friends can afford. Their reasoning is simple. Arguing that the styles came out of their own neighbourhoods in the first place, they believe that they’re reclaiming what was theirs.

Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), who call themselves The Velvet Gang, are veterans at the game – although there is nothing subtle about their technique. Banking on the incompetence of bored and apathetic shop assistants, they make off with entire racks of clothes and emerge from changing rooms padded with so much loot that they outdo the Michelin Man.

(MA15+) 106 minutes

Wicker is an ingenious oddity. It’s a fairytale but there’s nothing remotely ethereal about it.

The earthiness of its humour is a large part of its charm. The residents of the medieval village where it’s set have a keen regard for the expressiveness of the “f” word in all its conjugations. They also revere the institution of marriage, which means that unmarried women occupy the lowest position in the village pecking order.

The Fisherwoman knows all about that. As a single woman noted for the briny odour she trails in her wake, she’s long been the butt of the villagers’ jokes and she’s learnt to ignore them. Olivia Colman, a popular choice for any director out to explore the comedy of embarrassment, gives her a guilelessness which conceals her irritation. But one day, she becomes so frustrated with the condescension she’s forced to endure that she decides to act.

FILM
Wild Horse Nine ★★½
(MA15+) 117 minutes

As a writer of comic dialogue, Martin McDonagh relies heavily on one simple technique: if a word or phrase sounds vaguely amusing the first time round, repeat it as often as you can.

His new film, Wild Horse Nine, is set on Easter Island – primarily, it would seem, so the dialogue can include a maximum of references to “the big heads”.

The film relies on repetition in another sense as well: its plot is a retread of McDonagh’s first feature, In Bruges, released in 2008 when he was already one of the UK’s most successful playwrights. That involved Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as bumbling Irish hitmen marking time in the Belgian city of the title, awaiting orders from their short-tempered boss (Ralph Fiennes).

(PG) 122 minutes

So many movies are made by people who appear to believe in nothing, the idea of “faith-based cinema” has an appeal, even for those of us far from sharing the faith in question. Still, the kindest thing I can say about Drummer Boy is that it more or less means well.

What we’re dealing with is an earnestly sentimental musical in which brother is pitted against brother in the American Revolutionary War, a conscious metaphor for the divided America of today.

Reportedly, the storyline also mirrors past tensions in the relationship between directors Joel and Ben Smallbone, members of an Australian family who moved to Tennessee in the 1990s and grew up to become major players in the realm of contemporary Christian entertainment.