Thursday, May 1, 2025

A Simple Favour, released back in 2018, turned out to be the ideal lockdown film come 2020. It summoned high glamour and high drama in the same domestic settings everyone found themselves stuck in, as mommy vlogger Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) became embroiled in the Gone Girl-esque faked death of Emily Nelson (Blake Lively), with one martini consumed for every ludicrous plot twist.

While it did well during its theatrical release, it became a downright sensation on Prime Video during the pandemic, leading Amazon to the natural conclusion that it needed a sequel tout de suite, despite its director Paul Feig (of Bridesmaids and Spy fame) having never indulged in one before. And, really, a film about two women – one the perky naïf and the other the elusive seductress – revealing so many secrets that they become borderline unrecognisable to each other doesn’t naturally lend itself to more plot. There’s also the small matter of Emily being in jail.

Read the full review here. 

Out this week: 

Marvel gets back on track with Thunderbolts* (****), while director Paul Feig goes bigger, camper, and more international for his first sequel, Another Simple Favour (***), and Paolo Sorrentino slips into self-parody with Parthenope (**). 

Written by Clarisse Loughrey

It’s hard not to be cynical about Marvel’s Thunderbolts*. The franchise, having muscled countless independent films out of cinema screens to make more room for its behemoths, now has the audacity to sell their latest instalment as a big-budgeted film with the “feel” of a low-budgeted one, releasing a trailer boasting about how many of its cast and crew have worked on projects released by the average cinephile’s favourite production company, A24. Even its official synopsis declares, with a wink and a nudge, that it’s come courtesy of “a crew of indie veterans who sold out”.

Then again, if you do hire the team behind Netflix’s razor-sharp comedy series Beef (director Jake Schreier, its creator Lee Sung Jin, and one of its writers, The Bear’s co-showrunner Joanna Calo), and actually allow them the space and tools to work – well, logically, you should end up with something fairly decent.

And, so, Thunderbolts* is good. Not “single-handedly save the Marvel cinematic universe” good, but enough to make those self-declared victims of “superhero fatigue” reconsider that it might not be the genre itself that’s tapped out, but merely the focus on telling stories versus marketing future sequels and the sickly shimmer of nostalgia.

For those unacquainted with the comics, Thunderbolts*, at first, bears the distinctive afterscent of James Gunn, who closed out his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy two years ago and then switched teams to head up the rival DC universe. It assembles an ill-matched squad of antiheroes, here all selected from previous Marvel films: Black Widow’s Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), and Red Guardian (David Harbour); franchise mainstay Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan); The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s John Walker (Wyatt Russell); and Ant-Man and the Wasp’s Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen).

Read the full review here. 

A document of where I've gone and the things I've seen 

Sunday, 27 April
No Marvel movie could compare to the wave of squeals and gasps that spread through my anniversary screening of Pride & Prejudice during that infamous "hand flex" scene. Cinema lives! 

Tuesday, 29 April

It was a pleasure to sit down with Tom Beasley to chat interview techniques for Voice Magazine, which works to empower young people interested in arts and culture. 

Wednesday, 30 April  

I was honoured to be given the chance to take the stage at the Rio cinema and chat to Gia Coppola (via Zoom) about her wonderful film, The Last Showgirl. 

A still from 'Pride & Prejudice' 

Richard Ayoade’s brief, two-feature dive into direction is mostly remembered as one of Britain’s populist comedian-intellectual’s expulsion of cinephilic references. His debut, Submarine (2010), was a charming, if sickly sweet, homage to the Nouvelle Vague. His second, The Double (2013), collided together Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, Orson Welles, and Jacques Tati, in a (very) loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novella, set in a sunless, bureaucratic dystopia. But I was extremely fond of The Double when it was first released, and would argue it’s only grown increasingly relevant, as Dostoyevsky’s anxiety nightmare of individual identity obliterated by society could never conceive of the advance of social media profiles and, later, ChatGPT.

It’s a film that functions as a kind of psychic attack, a complete submergence into a state of hypervigilance. It confirms the worrier’s worst fears – yes, everyone does hate Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) or, worse, they don’t remember him even when he’s been in the office for nearly a decade. And, yes, it’s entirely his fault, because when his doppelgänger James Simon (Eisenberg, obviously) rocks up, he wins everyone over with easy confidence.

But that’s the nasty trick of capitalism, right? Individual labour is so devalued that no-one cares that Simon’s doing all the work, they care that James can perform the appearance of work. It’s how the AI grifters get away with it. And it’s hard not to empathise with Simon’s descent into madness when he’s staring at the objective truth – that James has his face, but none of his talent – and no one else in the room is acknowledging it.

'The Double' is now available to stream on STUDIOCANAL Presents. 

Gwyneth Paltrow, Kirsten Dunst & Glenn Close attending the 6th Annual Women in Hollywood Luncheon in which they received the Premiere Magazine's Icon Award.

(Photo by Brenda Chase Online USA Inc)

With Andrew Ahn's The Wedding Banquet headed into cinemas next week, I'll be revisiting its star Lily Gladstone's breakout role in Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women. 

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