Bill and Bening’s haunting portrait of love on the rock: KATE MUIR reviews Hope Gap

Hope Gap (cinemas, Curzon, 12A)

Verdict: A marriage cliffhanger

Rating:

Matthias And Maxime (MUBI)

Verdict: A friendship overheats 

Rating:

She Dies Tomorrow (cinemas, Curzon, 15)

Verdict: As tedious as it sounds

Rating:

Bill Nighy and Annette Bening messily uncouple three decades of middle-class marriage in Hope Gap. 

The problem is that Edward (Nighy) knows the break-up is coming, while Grace (Bening) has no idea. We do, though. 

Their conversation is like a ping-pong game of passive aggression and unspoken resentment played out over the kitchen table. Something has to give.

Bill Nighy and Annette Bening (pictured) messily uncouple three decades of middle-class marriage in Hope Gap

Bill Nighy and Annette Bening (pictured) messily uncouple three decades of middle-class marriage in Hope Gap

The problem is that Edward (Nighy), who is a semi-retired history teacher, knows the break-up is coming, Grace (Bening) has no idea

The problem is that Edward (Nighy), who is a semi-retired history teacher, knows the break-up is coming, Grace (Bening) has no idea

Edward is a semi-retired history teacher who favours dowdy cashmere pullovers and avoiding conflict. 

Grace potters about reading poetry on her computer, but also has a demanding side, bolstered by her unswerving Catholic faith.

When the couple’s twentysomething son Jamie (The Crown’s Prince Charles, Josh O’Connor) arrives for the weekend, Edward confides in him… a burden no child should bear. Soon the kitchen table goes flying — with all the crockery — and battle begins.

Grace is terrifying in her anger, green eyes piercing with holier-than-thou moral superiority.

This is followed by near-suicidal depression — their house is conveniently located near the Hope Gap beach and white cliffs in Seaford, East Sussex, and the script indulges in several cliffhangers.

The film was adapted by director William Nicholson from his 1999 play The Retreat From Moscow, but never quite expands to fit the big screen. 

While the cast cannot be faulted, the stagey back-and-forth domestic dialogue runs at full pelt when it might be better to show and not tell. Classical Muzak coupled with shots of white cliffs do not a movie make.

Their house is conveniently located near the Hope Gap beach and white cliffs in Seaford, East Sussex, and the script indulges in several cliffhangers

Their house is conveniently located near the Hope Gap beach and white cliffs in Seaford, East Sussex, and the script indulges in several cliffhangers

Nor does panning round discarded household objects as reminders of the past.

Perhaps the play did this better, too, but Edward’s references to Napoleonic soldiers left to die by their comrades on the retreat from Moscow are blindingly obvious. 

‘In extremis men can be cruel,’ he tells his history class — but not his wife.

What’s somehow radical here, however, is the way the film mostly follows Grace’s point of view, and she is a difficult creature, hard to empathise with. But she is both magnificent and awful in a scene in a solicitor’s office. 

The most amusing moment of  revenge occurs when Grace gets a labrador puppy and names him Edward. At least the dog is willing to have his tummy tickled.

Hope Gap reminded me of another intelligent dissection of the unspoken tensions of a long marriage — 2015’s 45 Years, starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay. 

Brilliant, devastating and definitely worth streaming, too.

Sometimes tender, sometimes unexpectedly brutal, Matthias And Maxime questions the lifelong friendship of two men, after they end up kissing in a friend’s film.

Sometimes tender, sometimes unexpectedly brutal, Matthias And Maxime questions the lifelong friendship of two men, after they end up kissing in a friend's film

Sometimes tender, sometimes unexpectedly brutal, Matthias And Maxime questions the lifelong friendship of two men, after they end up kissing in a friend’s film 

The talented 31-year-old French-Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan directs, writes and plays Maxime in the drama, which opens with a reunion at a lakeside house.

Maxime is gay. His friend Matt is a straight, sharp-suited lawyer with a steady girlfriend.

When someone’s annoying little sister, a film student, persuades them to kiss on the sofa for a video, convention falls apart and causes them to question their lives. 

They end up sharing a waterbed, platonically. Arty swimming scenes also ensue.

Time ticks by as Maxime plans to move to Australia, but Dolan’s film refuses to take the obvious route, and immerses the viewer in the men’s separate lives.

Maxime’s relationship with his ex-alcoholic mother (Anne Dorval) is brilliantly realised, the anger bursting like a boil.

The meandering film often shows  a seedy side of Canada, which upends the usual cliches.

She Dies Tomorrow is a woozy, pretentious drama about a young woman who suddenly becomes convinced her end is nigh. 

She Dies Tomorrow is a woozy, pretentious drama about a young woman who suddenly becomes convinced her end is nigh. Pictured, Kate Shell and Kentucker Audley

She Dies Tomorrow is a woozy, pretentious drama about a young woman who suddenly becomes convinced her end is nigh. Pictured, Kate Shell and Kentucker Audley

Soon Amy's death paranoia (above) infects everyone she meets, including her scientist friend Jane (Jane Adams), who studies mysterious microscopic viruses

Soon Amy’s death paranoia (above) infects everyone she meets, including her scientist friend Jane (Jane Adams), who studies mysterious microscopic viruses

Kate Lyn Sheil plays Amy, who has a freakout which involves wandering around drunk in a silver evening dress, armed with a leafblower. 

She scopes out cremation urns online and considers having herself made into a leather jacket for posterity.

Soon Amy’s death paranoia infects everyone she meets, including her scientist friend Jane (Jane Adams), who studies mysterious microscopic viruses that loom luridly on the screen.

The American film was written and directed by Amy Seimetz long before coronavirus, and could do with a new ending.

Whole dinner parties of middleclass folk hallucinate that they’re doomed. All very self-indulgent.    

Spy-fi thriller’s mind-bogglingly good

Tenet (cinemas, 12A)

Verdict: Get back, back to the movies

Rating:

The blockbuster that’s supposed to bring light to thousands of darkened cinemas around Britain is out now — and worth the wait. 

Christopher Nolan’s spy thriller is a mind-boggling and timebending spectacle which will leave audiences high on kinetic energy.

The no-expense-spared action includes a bullet-pumping bunker bust, a crash staged using a real Boeing 747, and astonishing car chases that literally enter another dimension.

Christopher Nolan's spy thriller Tenet, starring Elizabeth Debicki and John David Washington (above), is a mind-boggling spectacle which will leave audiences high on kinetic energy

Christopher Nolan’s spy thriller Tenet, starring Elizabeth Debicki and John David Washington (above), is a mind-boggling spectacle which will leave audiences high on kinetic energy

It stars John David Washington, pictured, as a U.S. secret agent called The Protagonist, and Robert Pattinson as his deceptively languid British counterpart Neil.

They try to foil Andrei, a psychotic ex-Soviet arms dealer (Kenneth Branagh with a hokey accent) who has dastardly plans. So far, so Bond.

But Nolan takes the spy game to chess grandmaster level, as time inverts in a parallel universe. 

The British director has played similar tricks in previous films Interstellar and Memento, but there is surprising pleasure here in seeing events reel crazily backwards. Even the film’s title is a palindrome.

Washington (BlacKkKlansman) is a smart, muscular hero, as comfy dispatching foes in SWAT team gear as he is in a Savile Row suit. 

John David Washington is a smart, muscular hero, as comfy dispatching foes in SWAT team gear as he is in a Savile Row suit

John David Washington is a smart, muscular hero, as comfy dispatching foes in SWAT team gear as he is in a Savile Row suit

Pattinson leaves Twilight behind as a too-cool-for-public- school chap with a steely interior.

Elizabeth Debicki plays Andrei’s wife Kat, an elegant English rose gone rampant, trapped in a marriage which takes coercive control to new heights.

But there’s barely time to catch your breath as Tenet bounces from India to Estonia, Norway to London, with a stopoff on a superyacht moored off Italy.

The clever, exhilarating comeback that cinemas have been hoping for.

Get Duked (Amazon)

Verdict: Horror-comic Highland fling 

Rating:

This is a teen comedy pitched somewhere between The Inbetweeners and Trainspotting as four 16-year-old misfits are sent on a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award expedition into the Scottish Highlands.

It has lots of up-your-kilt attitude and was made for peanuts by music video director Ninian Doff. 

Get Duked is a teen comedy pitched somewhere between The Inbetweeners and Trainspotting, starring Eddie Izzard as a local duke and Georgie Glen (above) in its adult cast

Get Duked is a teen comedy pitched somewhere between The Inbetweeners and Trainspotting, starring Eddie Izzard as a local duke and Georgie Glen (above) in its adult cast

Four 16-year-old misfits are sent on a Duke of Edinburgh's Award expedition into the Scottish Highlands, but the trip becomes more a psychedelic, rap-fuelled rampage

Four 16-year-old misfits are sent on a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award expedition into the Scottish Highlands, but the trip becomes more a psychedelic, rap-fuelled rampage

The adult cast includes Eddie Izzard as a local duke, plus Kate Dickie and Kevin Guthrie as bumbling, Hot Fuzz-style police.

Facing expulsion from school, Duncan (Lewis Gribben), Dean (Rian Gordon) and DJ Beetroot (Viraj Juneja) are sent to man up in the mountains, along with the irritatingly enthusiastic, homeschooled Ian (Samuel Bottomley).

The trip becomes less educational, and more a psychedelic, rap-fuelled rampage, as the posh huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’ fraternity take exception to the councilestate ‘vermin’ roaming their land, culminating in a battle fought with rifles, swords and cup-a-soup.