Dream Horse Cert: PG, 1hr 53mins
A Quiet Place Part II Cert: 12, 1hr 37mins
Rating: 
Land Cert: 12A, 1hr 29mins
Rating:
Remember Pride, the heart-warming, Bafta-winning drama about London’s gay and lesbian community coming to the aid of striking Welsh miners in the early 1980s? Well, Dream Horse is a lot like that, only with racehorses instead of miners and no sweet Welsh grannies bustling outside to greet visitors with the words: ‘Now, where are my lesbians?’
The new film, although firmly rooted in the same South Wales valleys as Pride and similarly based on a true story, is set some 20 years later in a community still bearing the economic scars of the loss of King Coal.
Now women like Jan Vokes (Toni Collette) scrape a living from a variety of minimum-wage jobs – bit of cleaning here, some bar work there, some time behind a till in between.
How fortunate that a garrulous accountant with first-hand experience (Damian Lewis, above with Toni Collette) drinks in her bar and can help her assemble a chaotic syndicate
Her husband (Owen Teale) may be content to stay at home watching TV but Jan still has some get-up-and-go, still has her dreams, and this is a film all about dreams. Having successfully bred whippets and racing pigeons in her youth, she tries her luck with racehorses.
She’s done her research and knows it’s just about affordable, but with only £318 in her savings account she’s definitely going to need some help. So how fortunate that a garrulous accountant with first-hand experience (Damian Lewis) drinks in her bar and can help her assemble a chaotic syndicate of assorted locals to chip in £10 a week each – from the teacake-addicted Maureen (Siân Phillips, no less) to the force of drunken nature that is Kerby (Karl Johnson).
Suddenly Jan’s little horse, born in an allotment stable, is carrying an awful lot of dreams…
There’s no doubt Dream Horse gets off to a sticky start, as director Euros Lyn struggles to balance drama and comedy and we get used to the idea that the stars of this very Welsh film (and, yes, Land Of My Fathers, Bread Of Heaven and Delilah all feature) are an Australian (Collette) and an old Etonian (Lewis).
But fair’s fair – they’re both pretty good, Lewis is half-Welsh anyway and they get energetic help from a fine supporting cast of authentically Welsh-born actors familiar from the likes of TV’s Stella, Gavin & Stacey and Keeping Faith.
This is lightweight, crowd-pleasing stuff but the final few furlongs are a rousing delight as the finish line at the Welsh Grand National approaches. The vital race scenes are well staged, Lyn ratchets up both tension and Welshness to good effect and if you don’t come out singing ‘Why, why, why…?’ I’ll be very surprised.
After a brief, and alarming, flashback to ‘Day One’, A Quiet Place Part II picks up where the first film left off – there’s still a rusty nail on the stairs and Evelyn (Emily Blunt) is still trying to keep her family – new baby and all – out of the jaws of those pesky aliens that hunt by sound.
There’s still a rusty nail on the stairs and Evelyn (Emily Blunt, above) is still trying to keep her family – new baby and all – out of the jaws of those pesky aliens that hunt by sound
The only bit of good news is that her deaf teenage daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) might just have found a way to stop them. If only she can reach the one radio station still broadcasting.
Director and co-writer John Krasinski certainly keeps tension levels and visual-effects standards high, but one plot revelation is borderline laughable.
Fourteen years ago, Sean Penn made Into The Wild, about an idealistic young man escaping into the Alaskan wilderness. And for a good half-hour it looks as if his ex-wife, Robin Wright, has done something similar with her feature film debut, Land, as we watch Edee (Wright herself), a city woman clearly dealing with some sort of emotional crisis, head for the Wyoming hills, buy a remote farm and embark on a new life of self-sufficiency.
The problem is she’s hopeless at it and disaster looms but, just when all seems lost, nice Miguel (Demián Bichir) happens to pass by. This isn’t heading where you are thinking but it’s well acted, features stunning landscapes and has a powerful last lap.