CINEMA
Those Who Wish Me Dead Cert: 15, 1hr 40mins
Nomadland Cert: 12A, 1hr 47mins
Rating: 
Sound Of Metal Cert: 15, 2hrs
Rating:
Many people will not have been to the cinema for more than a year but, after months of closures, Britain’s cinemas will begin reopening from tomorrow and I, for one, cannot wait.
It goes almost without saying that cinemas offer bigger screens, fabulous sound and the deepest, darkest of blackouts, but what I’ve really missed is the concentration. At the cinema there’s no sudden need to boil a kettle, repel marauding teenagers or pause the latest Netflix offering while you answer the door.
Instead, when the lights go down there’s just you and your chosen film for the next couple of hours. Perhaps to be discussed over a glass of wine afterwards. Bliss!
Cinema-owners, however, know it may take a while to lure us back into the habit of regular film-going, so they’re not offering us all their goodies at once. Instead, we can expect a carefully curated mix of the new, old and recently Oscar-worthy.
Leading the way is Those Who Wish Me Dead, which stars Angelina Jolie (normally a good thing) but is set – superficially at least – amid the macho world of American wildland firefighters (not always a good thing for UK audiences).
Leading the way is Those Who Wish Me Dead , which stars Angelina Jolie (above, normally a good thing) but is set amid the macho world of American wildland firefighters
Yes, Hannah (Jolie) is a ‘smokejumper’, the sort of woman who parachutes into a blazing forest and heroically puts it out before brushing up very nicely afterwards.
She’s also haunted by a mistake from the past, but what you need to know is that Those Who Wish Me Dead is actually a violent gangland pursuit movie… only with more trees and, obviously, wildfires than you would normally expect.
A forensic accountant has unearthed financial corruption at the highest level, putting his life – and that of his 12-year-old son – in danger. So he heads for the forest-clad hills and the sanctuary offered by an old friend who just happens to be deputy sheriff and his wife who runs, er… a survival school.
Good choice, because what the accountant doesn’t know is that he’s being pursued by two very nasty hitmen, played – a touch improbably but perfectly well – by Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult.
What ensues is a formulaic but above-average thriller, with a decent performance from Jolie, a particularly good one from Finn Little as the boy and with enough action, spectacle and tension to make it worth catching on the big screen.
Two recent multiple Oscar-winners are among this week’s early releases, including Nomadland, which won three of the big Academy awards: Best Picture, Best Director for Chloé Zhao and Best Actress for its popular star, Frances McDormand.
But you’ll want to see it for one of the categories it didn’t win: the stunning cinematography of Joshua James Richards.
For while, essentially, this is the bleak story of Fern (McDormand), a sixtysomething woman who, through force of circumstance, now travels America in a van, it is Richards’s horizon-spanning photography that reminds us that what we’re actually watching is a modern-day western.
Riz Ahmed was Oscar-nominated but failed to win for his fine performance as a heavy-metal drummer whose life is plunged into crisis when he starts losing his hearing in Sound Of Metal.
But what makes the film worth catching in the cinema is the Oscar-winning sound – both its presence and absence. It’s a tour-de-force that requires real concentration to appreciate, the sort of concentration you’ll find only in the cinema.
Time to book my tickets.
FILM ON DEMAND TV
The Woman In The Window
Cert: 15, 1hr 40mins Netflix, now
Rating:
The Artist’s Wife
1hr 34mins Most platforms, now
Rating:
Apples
Cert: 12A, 1hr 31 mins Curzon Home Cinema, now
Rating: 
The Woman In The Window has had a troubled genesis, what with rumoured reshoots, Disney’s takeover of 20th Century Fox and then, of course, Covid-19. But here it finally is on Netflix, and pretty decent it is too, which is surely what you’d expect given that it is directed by Joe Wright – maker of Atonement and Darkest Hour – and stars Amy Adams, Julianne Moore and Gary Oldman.
Feeling very much like a homage to the great Alfred Hitchcock but based on A. J. Finn’s bestseller, it’s set almost entirely within the dark, chaotic rooms of a New York brownstone, home to Anna Fox (Amy Adams, right), a child psychologist now confined to the house by agoraphobia and mental illnesses.
So she takes her medication, washes it down with wine she shouldn’t be drinking and, when she’s not watching old films, voyeuristically watches the neighbours instead, Rear Window-style.
It’s set almost entirely within the dark, chaotic rooms of a New York brownstone, home to Anna Fox (Amy Adams, above), a child psychologist now confined to the house by agoraphobia
Initially, she’s just twitching behind the curtains but then, just like James Stewart, the camera and the telephoto lens come out.
But it’s when she witnesses a violent attack that her problems start. The police don’t believe her and her furious neighbour (Oldman) believes she’s either drunk, mad or seeing things. Crucially, we’re not sure either.
Adams is excellent as the increasingly dishevelled Anna and Wright ratchets up the old-school thriller atmosphere to such a level you half-expect Bette Davis to suddenly come lurching from the shadows.
But we have all been down this mis-directed path many times and while tension levels are generally well maintained, the last lap is underwhelming.
In The Artist’s Wife, Bruce Dern is Richard Smythson, a world-famous abstract artist but now in his eighties and showing the first signs of dementia. Which prompts a crisis of her own in his younger, still beautiful wife, Claire (Lena Olin), who gave up her own artistic career to support the husband she clearly still adores.
But suddenly she’s behaving almost as unpredictably as he is, a fact that confuses the narrative arc of Tom Dolby’s drama but doesn’t totally spoil it. Nice to see Olin in a rare leading role.
Christos Nikou’s deadpan comedy-drama, Apples, is set in a Greece in the grip of a pandemic, with sufferers hit by total amnesia for which there is no cure. So when middle-aged Aris succumbs, all doctors can do is place him on a programme that provides a place to live and instructions to build new memories.
The influence of Yorgos Lanthimos’s surreal The Lobster is clear, until Aris greets a dog in a park… by name. Unexpectedly touching.