These uneasy riders are like Goodfellas on Harleys: BRIAN VINER reviews Bikeriders
Cyclists (116 minutes)
UK release date: 1st December
The 67th London Film Festival ends this weekend not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a whimper.
Among the final treats is tomorrow’s world premiere of the Chicken Run sequel, famously titled Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget.
My review will have to wait until next week, but I’ve already seen it and can report that the clever folks at stop-motion studio Aardman have struck golden corn yet again. That’s wonderful.
Of the films already featured, I loved Bikeriders, an absorbing drama with echoes of great mob pictures like Martin Scorsese’s Good Guys, except the mob depicted here is a Chicago motorcycle club in the late 1960s. They call themselves Vandals.
Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy and Austin Butler lead a terrific cast, but most of the praise goes to writer-director Jeff Nichols, whose last picture, 2016’s Love, also delved into 1960s America, telling the true story of a couple whose interracial marriage fell down. a violation of Virginia’s grotesque anti-miscegenation laws.
Austin Butler as Benny at The Bikeriders Studios 20th Century
Damon Herriman as Brucie and Tom Hardy as the biker gang’s founder and leader Danny in The Bikeriders directed by Jeff Nichols
Butler’s character Benny alongside Jodie Comer who plays his wife Cathy
Yet race barely figures in this film, a fictional (and, beware, often violent) story that Nichols concocted after becoming fascinated by the striking black-and-white images of bikers and their girlfriends in a 1968 book by photojournalist Danny Lyon. With Mike Faist playing Lyon, the story emerges episodically from his interviews with biker ‘moll’ Cathy (Jodie Comer, the brilliant Liverpool actress speaking here with an accent that might have been plucked from the depths of Lake Michigan).
She recalls how the Vandals started, how they spread to other American cities, and how their founder and leader Johnny (Tom Hardy) maintained his supremacy. “Fists or knives,” he says almost tiredly, whenever someone challenges him.
Cathy’s memories are strongly reminiscent of the voice listening device provided by Ray Liotta as Henry Hill in The Good Guys. Indeed, I was reminded again and again not only of that masterpiece, but also of the Godfather trilogy and the TV hit The Sopranos, because this is a story about tough people who function outside of normal society in their own subculture, governed by their own laws.
As crooks and scoundrels as they are in those mob narratives, we still find ourselves rooting for them, especially in the case of Cathy’s unspeakably cool, incomparably relaxed, infuriatingly laconic husband Benny (Austin Butler), whom Johnny, who regards him as a son, wants to hand over his crown.
By the way, you don’t have to like motorcycles to like this movie, which is just as well, because I, for one, hardly know Harley-Davidson from Jim Davidson. But it helps to love 1960s music. The soundtrack, featuring Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and The Shangri-Las, is magnificent.
Saltburn (127 minutes)
Release date: November 17
I liked the Saltburn Festival opening film, but not as much as I had hoped. The second film from writer-director Emerald Fennell (following 2020’s well-received A Young Woman of Promise), it stars Barry Keoghan as first-year Oxford student Oliver Quick, whose own seemingly deprived background on Merseyside helps fuel his infatuation with wealthy colleague Felix. Catton (Jacob Elordi).
Fennell has a lot of fun satirizing his own extremely privileged upbringing, and there are some priceless moments when Oliver is invited back into the fold of the Catton family, with Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike as Felix’s parents, Sir James and Lady Elspeth (“Darling, Where’s Liverpool?”), and Carey Mulligan as family friend “poor dear” Pamela, are all thoroughly enjoyable.
But what starts out as a fun tragicomedy of manners veers a little uneasily into something much darker: a psychosexual thriller that flaunts its inspirations rather shamelessly — among them Brideshead Revisited, The Talented Mr Ripley and Kind Hearts And Coronets.
Saltburn stars Barry Keoghan as first-year Oxford student Oliver Quick (pictured)
Shot from Saltburn is the second feature film from writer and director Emerald Fennell
Holdovers (133 minutes)
Release date: January 19
Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers is another story about privilege. The action takes place in 1970 in a boarding school for boys in New England, where, during the Christmas holidays, the classics teacher Mr. Hunham (the brilliant Paul Giamatti) gets the unenviable job of overseeing the ‘holdovers’, the guys who for whatever reason can’t go home.
In the end, he’s left with just one holdover, the smart but grumpy Angus (newcomer Dominic Sesa, also excellent), who develops into a curious ménage-a-trois: a jaded teacher, an unruly student, and the school’s African-American cook, Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), trying to contain his grief after the death of his only son in Vietnam.
This might not sound like a recipe for comedy, but then Payne could find humor in a damp flannel.
The laughs, however, are carried by a strong undercurrent of sadness as this trio of misfits try to find their way. It’s an extremely poignant story, beautifully presented with muted colors and grainy texture, as if to give the impression that it was made at the time it was set.
Dominic Sessa stars as Angus Tully, Paul Giamatti as Paul Hunnam and Da’Wine Joy Randolph as Mary Lamb in a scene from The Holdovers
Dame Maggie, 88…Singing with The Chiffons? She is good!
The Miracle Club (12A, 90 min)
Verdict: Marvel at Dame Maggie
Sumotherhood (15, 97 min)
Verdict: Rescued cameras
Dame Maggie Smith can still deliver the odd surprise. I never expected to find her, aged 88, as a lively backing singer belting out a version of The Chiffons’ He’s So Fine, but here she is, on stage at The Miracle Club, doing just that. It might be worth watching the movie just for that scene.
Otherwise, the uneven comedy from veteran director Thaddeus O’Sullivan is a predictable bag of Irish Catholic clichés and sentimentality, albeit greatly enhanced by a huge cast.
Kathy Bates, Laura Linney and Agnes O’Casey star alongside Smith in the story of four working-class women who travel by bus from Dublin all the way to Lourdes in 1967, three of whom win tickets to a church talent contest.
The strangest of all is Linney’s character Chrissy, who immigrated to America in disgrace decades earlier and has still not been forgiven.
Returning to Dublin for the funeral of his estranged mother, who was great friends with Eileen (Bates) and Lily (Smith), he has work to do to redeem himself in their eyes.
Some of the accents go back and forth across the Atlantic and the Irish Sea (I imagine there are a few aging Irish actresses who raised eyebrows when the cast was announced), but it’s a gentle enough film and we should all enjoy the great Dame Maggie while we can.
I didn’t enjoy Sumotherhood one bit. Adam Deacon’s cheeky comedy, set in East London, tells the story of several misadventures (one of them played by Deacon himself) who turn to crime.
It’s not very funny, although there are some notable cameos, from Jennifer Saunders, Ed Sheeran (playing a homeless drug addict who takes great offense to being called a “ginger”) and Jeremy, wearing his Bolshevik cap and ranting about the Corbyn Tories.
Even when he’s playing himself, I can tell that Corbyn’s acting is about as strong as his credentials to be prime minister. Let’s leave it at that.