Parallel Mothers (15, 123 mins)
Verdict: Cruz control
Rating: 
Flag Day (15, 108 mins)
Verdict: A full set of Penns
Rating:
The titles of foreign-language films often sound better in the original, so don’t be put off by Parallel Mothers, which is not a feeble new Channel 5 game show hosted by Matt Lucas and Liza Tarbuck — at least, not yet.
Madres Paralelas was the classier Spanish title conferred on the film by its writer-director, the great Pedro Almodovar, and it stars Penelope Cruz, who is often described as Almodovar’s muse — even by people who aren’t entirely sure what an artist’s muse is.
‘Someone who can be the subject of the romantic ideals of what made him an artist in the first place,’ is one dictionary’s waffly definition.
The titles of foreign-language films often sound better in the original, so don’t be put off by Parallel Mothers
Madres Paralelas was the classier Spanish title conferred on the film by its writer-director, the great Pedro Almodovar, and it stars Penelope Cruz
Whatever, this is Cruz’s eighth collaboration with Almodovar and a long way from their best, though when I saw it a few months ago at the Venice Film Festival, where it was granted the status of opening film, it received a rapturous five-minute standing ovation.
That’s Venice, and indeed Almodovar, for you. The ovation could just as easily have come at the start, not the end.
Cruz plays Janis, a glamorous photographer who tumbles into an affair with the subject of her latest shoot, an urbane ‘forensic anthropologist’ whose job is to exhume and identify the remains of those murdered and buried in mass graves during the Spanish Civil War.
She wants him to help her find her great-grandfather, who was one of those rounded up and killed.
For Janis it is a passion project, but there is a mighty distraction: an unexpected pregnancy.
Her anthropologist lover is married and she resolves to bring up the child, her first, on her own.
In the maternity ward she befriends another single mother, a teenager called Ana (Milena Smit).
Cruz plays Janis, a glamorous photographer who tumbles into an affair with the subject of her latest shoot, an urbane ‘forensic anthropologist’
But there is a mighty distraction: an unexpected pregnancy. Her anthropologist lover is married and she resolves to bring up the child, her first, on her own
Soon, their two lives are running less in parallel than headlong into a hopelessly inextricable tangle.
To service this narrative, Almodovar plots a series of frankly unbelievable contrivances, including a lesbian relationship that feels about as authentic as boil-in-the-bag paella.
But inevitably, with him at the helm and Cruz giving her all, there is plenty to admire.
I am also aware, through Spanish friends, that the country’s civil war more than 80 years ago has cast a long, dark shadow well into the 21st century, and hats off to Almodovar for tackling it.
However, weaving it into a contemporary story of motherhood, love and loss feels heavy-handed. The celebrated auteur’s usual adroit touch is missing here.
Flag Day, too, could do with a lighter touch, though at least it can’t be called implausible or manufactured, because it’s true.
The director is Sean Penn, and the story is that of John Vogel, a charismatic conman, bank robber and counterfeiter who single-handedly forged dollar bills on an industrial scale, for which, after managing to elude the FBI for years, he was eventually caught and sent to prison.
Penn casts himself as Vogel, with his daughter Dylan as Vogel’s daughter Jennifer (and his son Hopper as her brother Nick).
Jennifer wrote the 2004 memoir on which this film is based, Flim-Flam Man, which might have been a better title, but there was already a 1967 picture of that name starring George C. Scott.
Flag Day, too, could do with a lighter touch, though at least it can’t be called implausible or manufactured, because it’s true
The director is Sean Penn, and the story is of John Vogel, a charismatic conman who forged dollar bills on an industrial scale, for which he was eventually caught and sent to prison
Penn casts himself as Vogel, with his daughter Dylan as Vogel’s daughter Jennifer (and his son Hopper as her brother Nick)
So Flag Day it is, after a day in the U.S. calendar, June 14, chosen to honour the Stars and Stripes. It also happened to be Vogel’s birthday, and growing up he always thought the hoopla was for him.
That self-absorption does not recede in adulthood and Penn, in a swaggering, rather show-offy performance, makes the utmost of his own craggily dissolute features to play Vogel as a feckless fantasist, irredeemably dishonest, yet also an irresistible charmer.
The story’s core character is actually Jennifer, who gets wincingly over-lyrical in narrating the account of her blighted childhood: ‘My father’s misplaced sense of pride seemed so endlessly wed to his shame and embarrassment.’
In fact, she shares some of his personality flaws but, while he is serving a 15-year sentence, she becomes a journalist seemingly destined for greatness for breaking a story about a corporate giant poisoning the water supply.
It is a flimsily constructed sub-plot, but at least offers an opportunity for Eddie Marsan to look shifty, which he takes.
The screenplay is by the British Butterworth brothers, Jez and John-Henry, who are normally so reliable.
Flag Day doesn’t represent their best day at the office but it’s not a bad film, with faint echoes of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1973 classic Paper Moon and a soundtrack of plaintive road songs that will either get your feet tapping or set your teeth on edge.
ALSO SHOWING: CRAZY CRITTERS AND LAUGHS APLENTY IN STAR-STUDDED SING SEQUEL
Sing 2 (U, 110 mins)
Rating: 
Amulet (15, 99 mins)
Rating:
There may be only so many computer-animated singing animals you can take, but you won’t find a more appealing collection of them than in Sing 2, Garth Jennings’s exuberant, and at times genuinely funny, sequel to the 2016 hit Sing.
He could have shaved 20 minutes from the running time, especially bearing in mind junior attention spans, but it’s an appealingly colourful story again featuring theatre owner (and koala) Buster Moon (voiced by Matthew McConaughey), who this time covets the support of ruthlessly powerful producer (and arctic wolf) Jimmy Crystal (Bobby Cannavale).
There may be only so many computer-animated singing animals you can take, but you won’t find a more appealing collection of them than in Sing 2
Garth Jennings’s exuberan sequel to the 2016 hit Sing is an appealingly colourful story again featuring theatre owner (and koala) Buster Moon (voiced by Matthew McConaughey)
It’s all delightfully done, and I laughed out loud at a series of auditions over which Crystal (Hasley) sits in judgment rejecting act after act, like a lupine Simon Cowell
There is plenty of talent in Buster’s company, which includes a porcupine guitarist (Scarlett Johansson), a singing pig (Reese Witherspoon) and a dancing English gorilla (Taron Egerton), although Crystal offers to back them only when Buster promises to tempt the tycoon’s favourite rock star, a reclusive lion called Clay Calloway (Bono), out of gloomy retirement.
But Buster is lying. He doesn’t even know Clay. Can his iguana assistant (Jennings himself) find Clay and persuade him back into showbiz?
It’s all delightfully done, and I laughed out loud at a series of auditions over which Crystal sits in judgment rejecting act after act, even the roller-skating flamingos, like a lupine Simon Cowell.
Amulet is a very different kettle of fish, an arty horror film and a directorial debut for actress Romola Garai.
It starts in the woods in a war zone somewhere in Europe (my wife and I thought we recognised Mortimer Forest on the Shropshire border, but I’m sure we weren’t meant to) where a soldier, Tomaz (Alec Secareanu) almost shoots a scared female refugee and later gives her an old amulet he has dug up, as a form of protection.
Amulet is a very different kettle of fish, an arty horror film and a directorial debut for actress Romola Garai
Inevitably, it’s in a creaky, spooky old house with strange inhabitants, cue plenty of horror tropes, but Garai cleverly uses flashbacks to connect his past with his present
The story then shifts to London, where Tomaz is working as a builder until a seemingly sweet, old nun (Imelda Staunton) finds him a job as a caretaker.
Inevitably, it’s in a creaky, spooky old house with strange inhabitants, cue plenty of horror tropes, but Garai cleverly uses flashbacks to connect his past with his present.
As so often happens in horror films, it all begins to get more than a bit silly. But for Garai’s future ambitions as a filmmaker, this is still a bold statement of intent.
CLASSIC FILM ON TV: IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967)
The late Sidney Poitier’s annus mirabilis, 1967, also yielded Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner and To Sir, With Love.
He is brilliant in all three but unforgettable alongside Rod Steiger in this superb, racially charged thriller.
Sunday, BBC2, 10pm
