The Royal Hotel (18, 91min)
Verdict: Tense Australian thriller
Trousers (15, 91 min)
Verdict: High school satire
For all those parents who have recently waved their children off for a year of backpacking under Australia’s Work & Travel program, my strong advice is to give The Royal Hotel a tactical escape.
My own daughter did that program, working for three months on a 50,000-acre sheep farm in the boondocks of New South Wales as part of a year Down Under, and even though she has long been safely home and remembers the experience fondly ( except from the attacks by giant killer magpies), I still felt a dry-mouthed personal investment in this gripping film.
The eponymous establishment at The Royal Hotel is anything but royal. It’s a grim, run-down pub in the Outback, serving a community of hard-drinking miners, where a pair of young Canadian women, Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick), are sent by an S&T consultant in Sydney with the smooth but ominous warning: “You’ll have to be okay with a little male attention.”
We don’t learn much about the women’s backstories, other than a few vague hints that they both leave something behind in Canada that they would like to escape. Metaphorically, it turns out, they merely fled headlong from grizzly bears to the jaws of saltwater crocodiles.
For all those parents who have recently waved their children off for a year of backpacking under Australia’s Work & Travel program, my strong advice is to give The Royal Hotel a tactical escape, writes Brian Viner.
The Royal is run by a dissolute drunkard named Billy (Hugo Weaving, pictured) who gives them a few basic tips on how to serve the regulars, preferably with some cleavage. After that, they’re more or less on their own.
The Royal is run by a dissolute drunk named Billy (Hugo Weaving) who gives them a few basic tips on how to serve the regulars, preferably with some cleavage. After that, they’re more or less on their own.
When they ask about a WiFi connection, they are just laughed at. There are a few faint glimmers of kindness from Billy’s lugubrious, long-suffering companion Carol (Ursula Yovich), but that’s where the indulgent indulgence ends.
As they begin working behind the bar, their predecessors, a pair of promiscuous English girls, prepare to leave. On their last night, these two are as drunk as the roughest of the gamblers. “That will be us in a few weeks,” Liv says. It is meant as reassurance.
Chalked on a blackboard outside the hotel, above a crudely drawn pair of breasts, is a message drawing attention to their arrival: “Fresh meat.” For Hanna, this, together with the unreconstructed behavior of the customers, quickly sets off alarm bells: she wants to leave. But Liv doesn’t think there’s anything serious to worry about.
Plus you can’t go anywhere and the next bus won’t come for days. From this uncomfortable but rather prosaic situation, director and co-writer Kitty Green deftly constructs a story of increasing tension and fear. She cleverly makes us guess what the biggest threat to the women’s safety is.
Is it the owner, Billy, who doesn’t think to call them the C-word? Or Matty (Toby Wallace), who takes them to a watering hole and is in love with Hanna? Is it the creepy, hot-headed Dolly (Daniel Henshall), who obligingly retrieves a snake from their room, but then does something sinister with it?
Hanna (Julia Garner, right) and Liv (Jessica Henwick, left) are sent by an S&T consultant in Sydney with the smooth but ominous warning: “You’ll have to do well with a little male attention.”
Or the tough, simple guy nicknamed Teeth (James Frecheville), who longs for a date with Liv? As time passes, the two women become more familiar with the Royal’s customers and become more resourceful in dealing with them. But the dangers remain and are even increasing. “I’m afraid of everything and everyone here,” Hanna says, even as she gains the confidence to clear away unruly drinkers.
With a tight 91 minutes, the length of which is a reproach to all those directors who would take at least another half hour to tell the story, this is a very successful thriller. And the acting is fantastic across the board, but especially from Garner, who triumphantly teams up with Green again after their good collaboration in The Assistant (2019), another story about monstrous male behavior.
All things considered, this isn’t a good week cinematically for the male of the species (see also How To Have Sex, review at right). We boys also get a serious blow in Bottoms, a spicy, foul-mouthed, funny, sometimes violent and above all non-heterosexual subversion of all those well-known American high school comedies about naughty quarterbacks and sexy cheerleaders.
The film is directed and co-written by Emma Seligman, whose 2020 feature debut Shiva Baby I really enjoyed. Bottoms offers further evidence of her talent. The main characters of the story are lesbian best friends Josie (Ayo Edebiri, from the wonderful TV drama The Bear) and PJ (Rachel Sennott).
The pair form a fight club at Rockbridge High, ostensibly to empower their female classmates by teaching them self-defense, although really they just want to become wildly popular and seduce those sexy cheerleaders.
Bottoms is a feisty, foul-mouthed, funny, sometimes violent and above all non-heterosexual subversion of all those well-known American high school comedies about naughty quarterbacks and sexy cheerleaders. (L-R) Virginia Tucker as Stella Rebecca, Kaia Gerber as Brittany and Havana Rose Liu as Isabel
One of them is played by 22-year-old Kaia Gerber, daughter of supermodel Cindy Crawford. The boys, meanwhile, are a ridiculous bunch, stupid or conniving or both. The most ridiculous of them is the school hunk, Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine), a nurturingly mischievous parody of every school hunk you’ve ever seen in movies.
Only occasionally does the parody fall flat, turning Bottoms into a hit-or-miss comedy, but the hits more than make up for the misses, and the climactic football match between Rockbridge and their fiercest rivals is a gleefully silly mickey-take of a sacred American tradition. , which made me laugh out loud.
Also show…
In the six or so years since the #MeToo movement began in earnest, there have been countless films about predatory men and vulnerable women.
But most of them have tended to avoid the intricate complexities of human relationships, as if any nuance seems too ambiguous and could undermine the message.
How To Have Sex (15, 91 minutes, HHHHI) does not fall into that trap, to the great credit of debuting writer-director Molly Manning Walker.
Her film follows three teenage girls to a Greek seaside resort, the kind of place most of us would run screaming from, but cheerful 16-year-olds, released from their final exams, run screaming towards.
Tara (the quite brilliant Mia McKenna-Bruce, pictured above) is the least ‘worldly’ of the trio, meaning she’s never had sex. The other two encourage her to lose her virginity, and she eventually does so to one of the friendly Yorkshire boys staying at the same hotel.
How To Have Sex follows three teenage girls to a Greek seaside resort, the kind of place most of us would run screaming from, but cheerful 16-year-olds, released from their GCSEs, run screaming towards
It’s not rape, as most of us understand the word, but neither does she encourage it, much less initiate it.
What a powerful film this is about teenage behavior, especially because it doesn’t preach, just tells.
Nobody Has To Know (12A, 99 minutes, HHHII) is a relationship drama from the other end of the age spectrum, and could indeed be set on another planet. It’s set on an island in the Hebrides, where Bouli Lanners (also the film’s writer-director) plays an aging Belgian farm worker known to everyone as Phil.
After he suffers a stroke and returns from the hospital with no memory, his boss’s loose, middle-aged daughter (Michelle Fairley) deceives him into thinking they are lovers.
That could almost be the premise for a comedy. Instead, Lanners has created a soulful, poignant, tranquil film. There is a bit too much silence and staring at the middle distance for my taste, but it is sweetly acted and beautiful to watch.
The Netflix film Nyad (15, 121 min., HHHHI) tells the inspiring true story of Diana Nyad (Annette Bening, fantastic), once a celebrated marathon swimmer who turned 60 years old, more than thirty years after failing to swim the dangerous 180 kilometers from Florida. to Cuba, decides to try again.
Jodie Foster plays her best friend and coach, with Rhys Ifans as the grizzled sailor who keeps her on course from his adjacent boat. Stirring things.