Written by Luc Besson, and produced and fronted by Kiefer Sutherland, Father Joe is exactly the sort of nostalgic ’90s throwback you might expect it to be. It wears its daft heart on its vestment sleeve and makes no apology for being the kind of movie you might have picked up from Blockbuster in yester years. A quasi-Western via mobster movie tropes, it follows the titular Catholic priest (Sutherland) as he attempts to clean up his ’90s Manhattan neighbourhood of drug dealers and organ thieves via murder, violence and a series of one-liners. Plus, it features Al Pacino dressed in furs and sashaying through mass as a Godfather-esque score swells.
EuropaCorp
If you’re still with us after that first paragraph, the catalyst for Joe’s vigilantism goes back to his experiences as a special forces soldier and the death of his family as a consequence of illegal drugs flooding NY. Now he runs a church that is an orphanage/soup kitchen/arms den, where his faithful second-in-command is an ace with nunchucks, his orphan choirboys can service a semi automatic and Joe ventures out on an evening armed to the gills and rocking a wide-brim hat, leather waistcoat, billowing trench and massive crucifix (which doubles as a dagger). He calls victims ‘my son’ and quotes the Bible as he destroys drugs labs, maims and murders, injects goons with poison and rescues overdosed teens. His mission is to stop dealers selling to anyone under the age of 21 (‘you can’t save everyone’) and he must be ok cos the local Jewish and Muslim leaders are down with a bit of gunplay too.
Things come to a bullet-spraying head when mobster Giu Falcone (Pacino) puts down his latest book (100 Years Of Solitude, which he gives a review of to his sunglasses-wearing henchmen) and decides to stop the holy father from wreaking any more havoc. Bazookas are used on pulpits, there’s slow-mo walks from explosions and a teenage drug user (played by Milla Jovovich’s daughter, Ever Anderson) becomes a surrogate daughter to emotionally wounded Joe…
But all of this is played with such earnestness and lack of snark that the result is something nostalgically comforting. Ignore the moral seesawing and accept the creed, and Father Joe is a bombastic popcorn movie that promises tasty elevator and toy shop dust-ups, Sutherland looking undeniably cool and the possibility of a sequel teased with a nod to Pacino’s most famous movie. Go in peace – and you may have a silly time at the movies.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Images courtesy of EUROPACORP Father Joe premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival
Luke Lorentzen’s meditative year-long study of a Brooklin boat yard in Maine is nautical nirvana for any sailor, but you don’t need to know your port from starboard to appreciate the craftsmanship and community that goes into building a bespoke $4.5million 56-foot sailing yacht. Following the team of 60 builders at Brooklin Boat Yard – from felling the wood to polishing the deck, and through the New England seasons – Coretzen’s gorgeous tone poem is as much about a niche industry as it is about masculinity and the lure of salt water for sustenance and sport.
Spark Features/MetFilm
Beginning with the launch of a newly completed vessel, we’re introduced to the men who will create a made-to-measure ship of dreams for a giggly financial advisor to sail around the world in. As the team watch their work slip into the water over beers and a cookout, the graft begins anew with the hull of a new boat taking shape in the dockyard on the edge of Jericho Bay. Project managing the build is Trent, a zen new father who is told in his gentle appraisal to be more forceful with his staff. From an outsider’s POV it doesn’t seem he needs to be as the gang turns up at 7am each morning with their particular set of skills; planing, dovetailing, sanding, gluing and carving the local wood into a feat of engineering and artisan achievement. We watch as planks are pressed together like a jigsaw, the ship’s wheel is clamped incrementally into a circle, the sanding team sway in synchronised silence, a beautifully carved cabin is wheeled down the hill and lowered into precision-drilled holes… it’s hypnotic to watch, especially when given regional and cultural context.
Spark Features/MetFilm
Coretzen is as interested in the world and lives around the endeavour, the bucolic that seems to be poured into the very fabric of the boat. He charts the beauty enveloping Brooklin; a blue bay dotted with the fluttering white triangles of sails during a regatta, a duckling floating on purple water at dusk, lobster potters hauling their glistening catch, the drilling of an ice-fishing hole, the doleful clang of a red harbour bell, children shaking apples from a tree, a peachy sunset, the mowing of an emerald lawn. This little corner of Maine is painted as hardy, idyllic – the only sour notes coming when management very reluctantly dismisses a worker for repeatedly not taking direction or when Trent complains about the cost of his car payments. There is little exploration of hard-scrabble lives or the fragility of this livelihood – and on that level, the film may be considered slight for some. But if you’re looking for a contemplative 90 minute foray into a quiet world where you can practically smell the wood and taste the sea spray, Boatbuilders provides a shipshape escape.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Images courtesy of SPARK FEATURES/METFILM Boatbuilders premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival
For someone who admits he talks a lot of crap, Liam Gallagher, lairy frontman of Oasis, makes a lot of sense. Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s documentary charts the 2025 reformation world tour of warring brothers, Liam and Noel, might as well be called The Gospel According To Saint Liam such is the almost religious experience captured on film, the message of forgiveness, and redemption that runs throughout it – and the unwittingly profound nature of Liam’s typically blunt life advice. As music docs go it’s a proper supernova – frequently moving, uplifting and promising to send fans and non-acolytes alike out of cinemas on a post-gig high.
Harriet Bols/Disney
For those not up to speed on the Oasis story, Southern and Lovelace (along with creator Steven Knight) whip through the rise and fall of ‘Britain’s biggest band since the Beatles’ via grainy archive footage of the Gallaghers tearing up the music scene before tearing strips from each other. A quick skim through to 2009’s implosion in Paris leaves us 15 years later when the brothers are planning their global reunion tour and Noel is rehearsing the band alone with no sign of his singer. Liam is a spectre in this initial grounding back into the Gallagher world. Noel calls him a ‘fucking pain in the arse’ and waits for him to turn up, a drum thuds a steady beat and a door flies open. Liam struts in with barely a nod, puts his hands behind his back and begins to sing in a manner he describes as exorcism. Swearing off the cigarette and alcohol for the tour, he sucks on a straw and performs ‘like he did years ago’ according to his impressed brother. When he’s done singing, Liam stalks back out.
Noel admits to having a newfound respect for his younger sibling and it’s this new humility, nostalgia for the past and the mileage between them that shapes the rest of the documentary as we watch the band make their nervous debut in Cardiff to an audience of multigeneration fans, before tracking their greatest hits via gigs around the globe. Though the trick is repeated at every new stop, the cultural, sociological, political and socio-economic impact of Oasis is explored via the booming tunes and the emotive reactions of the fans to their resurrection. One man kneels as though in prayer, a young boy weeps in ecstasy, a local vicar uses his sermon to describe the thronging of people to the stadium as pilgrimage and a shared longing for healing. One doesn’t have to be an Oasis fan to understand the feeling of community and communion felt during an electrifying gig with fellow fans, and Southern and Lovelace capture that magic via fond concert camerawork and by building individual portraits that humanise the sea of faces.
The Gallaghers get some scrutiny as people rather than artists, with Noel chatting for most of the first half before spiky Liam comes around. By the time the tour is in full flow and the film has crescendoed in its set list to the biggies, the brothers are bantering together, calling themselves a ‘shower of cunts’ and admitting to being delighted by each other, their once-strangers children now boozy besties who get ‘spangled’ while their Dad’s go to bed. If the Gallaghers have mellowed their music hasn’t, with rhythm guitarist Bonehead back in the fold and the anthemic bangers now firmly part of the cultural landscape. That makes hearing ‘Wonderwall’ or close-out tune ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ feel resonant to any cinemagoer and might bring a nostalgic tear to the eye whether you own a bucket hat or not.
Disney
As a document of a band accepting love from each other as well as their audience (and actually rehearsing), Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger showcases a group at the top of their technical game. But where it really wins is in the optimistic and brotherly message it emits to a polarised, angry world. ‘Do your thing, do it well and try to move people, man’ is what Liam says his new vibe is. Mission accomplished, ‘our kid’. (Though the mercurial brothers did skip the press conference in Venice so, you know, it’s still some business as usual.)
Words by JANE CROWTHER Images courtesy of DISNEY Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival
Like Danny Boyle’s opener at this year’s Venice film festival, Ink, Lance Oppenheim’s cautionary tale entrenches with tabloid fodder and the consequences of audience blood-lust for it. Sleazy, lurid and uncomfortable, Primetime asks us what sensation we feel when unfettered sensationalism featuring real people reaches its inevitable, sad and avoidable conclusion. And it’s another gonzo baddie performance from Robert Pattinson, who is cornering the market in bug-eyed damaged goods with flamboyant personas.
A24
Opening with Pattinson’s Chris Hansen repeating a mantra of ‘I will undress you, you will undress me’ with red-flag intensity as he preps to trap another potential paedophile on in 2006 Dateline NBC reality show, To Catch A Predator. While his team lures online creeps to an unassuming house before having them interact with a child decoy (Phoebe Bridger) to seal their fate, Hansen preps his big entrance. As the perps nibble at cookies in the kitchen, carrying their molestation paraphernalia, Hansen emerges like a sideshow magician, reading their grooming messages back to them. This is the gotcha moment, when power transfers – both to Hansen and his TV viewers – as the would-be molesters crumble in wailing shame. It’s exactly what the network wants and in Hansen’s fervor. As he towers over them asking ‘you see how this looks?’ in his idiosyncratic, practiced cadence, it’s clear it’s what he also lives for. He understands its potency, telling a fan on a plane that what he does is ‘a little bit worse’ than killing. Hansen is driven by jealousy for serious journalists at NBC, the chase for ratings and his need to preen. He demands numerous takes to find just the right superiority in his voiceovers and wakes his small children to make them watch his latest edit.
Arriving in this world with all the naivete of a child is Dan Plum (Skylar Gisondo), a fresh-faced struggling actor who is thrilled to get a gig, less so when his first day has him playing a teen boy honeytrap and confronting a man with whipped cream on his penis. Plum’s arc in getting over the shock of the depravity, his subsequent lean-in to the entrapment and, ultimately, the disillusionment is what drives the narrative. His experience of this particular section of TV is perhaps a wider comment on the craveness of the entertainment industry, as well an audiences invitation to check their own complicity. Through Dan’s eyes we watch as Hansen goes down the rabbit hole, his softly spoken, gum-chewing producer Andie (Merrit Weaver, excellent) manages up, and the biggest catchfish the show can land, their so-called ‘whale’, turns out to be newsworthy in all the worst ways.
Oppenheim isn’t subtle in his delivery, bathing everything in neon hues, holding unflattering close-ups and filming in Academy ratio to mimic the era’s TV screen dimensions. His casting is similarly on-the-nose with former child stars such as Jonathan Lipnicki and Alex Winter playing predators, recalling the way Patrick Swayze tapped into his cultural currency in Donnie Darko. And a flashback revealing Hansen’s Indian origin story as a media vigilante doesn’t quite work, but nevertheless adds layers of ick to the endeavour.
‘There used to be a pillory in every civilized town,’ Hansen prognosticates. ‘Now there’s a TV in every home’ and later he asks, ‘what would’ve happened if I wasn’t here?’ Yes, we get it. Reality TV without guardrails and an audiences’ inability to turn it off is a recipe for harm. So in that respect, Primetime has little new to say about our greed for ‘if-it-bleeds-it-leads’ journalism. But like Hansen’s hypnotic show, it’s almost impossible to turn away from. Especially when Pattinson is theatrically spitting out mouthwash and curling his tongue round the word ‘cock’ in a manner that feels destined for more memes. Dirty, undeniable entertainment.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Images courtesy of A24 Primetime premiered at the 83rd Venice film festival
Paul Schrader continues his ‘Man in a Room’ treatise with this examination of guilt, repression, legacy and the big questions of life: why do we exist? Is change possible? They are themes that have dominated his work for decades and so his latest, following a college professor (Jack Huston) who is hiding a past indiscretion, labouring under the pressure of a controlling father and punishing himself for his proclivities, stays reassuringly in his tried-and-tested lane for fans of his monastic oeuvre. Those looking for the much mused over change might find that the philosophical answer in Schrader’s case is a resounding no.
Noora Films
Dr. John Jorrison (Jack Huston) is writing a book on philosopher Spinoza, keeping his romance with colleague Becca (Sofia Boutella) at arms length and dodging the overtures of students who insist that ‘everyone is guilty of something’. When his ailing dad dies (Bill Pullman) the wake sets off a chain of events that uncover an incident of child molestation from John’s past, the pressure from his father to conform to a particular idea of a good and noble life, and sends the prof down a rabbithole of suicide ideation, gay cruising and what forgiveness might look like.
While Schrader may specialise in ‘God’s lonely men’ it seems his expertise does not extend to recognisable gay bars and interactions, or convincing flashback scenes – and his decision to have Spinoza himself (Karl Glusman) visit his protagonist seems hokey and cheap. Fortunately, he has Bill Pullman onboard to deliver authenticity as a prescriptive father who values ‘correctness’, Richard Gere popping up in a cameo to remind us of the genius of American Gigolo and Jack Huston bringing the weight of his own family legacy to the idea of living up to one’s forebears.
Schrader constantly threatens that each picture he creates is his last, but one has to hope that this is not the one the scribe of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and First Reformed bows out on. While it fits neatly into his canon it might be more engaging to see the filmmaker adhere to Heraclitus’ theory of everything being in constant flux and toy with some change himself.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Images courtesy of NOORA FILMS The Basics of Philosophy premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival
Writer-director Martin McDonagh’s ability to give celebrated actors amusingly potty-mouthed and insulting things to spew in specific places has previously paid awards dividends. After sweeping up the gongs with Three Billboards and The Banshees of Inisherin his latest exploration of friendship via comedic violence and swears is sure to secure a place in the awards season stable – especially for John Malkovich, channelling Dangerous Liaisons waspish disdain and the befuddlement of his alt-persona in Being John Malkovich to delicious effect.
Diego Araya Corvalán
He plays a grizzled CIA agent, Chris, who is stationed in Chile in 1973 and a pain in the ass of bureau chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi). His longtime partner, Lee (Sam Rockwell) is used to his no-filter outbursts – with the duo constantly bickering like an old marriage couple – but as a coup looms the two are sent to Rapa Nui on a break. Chris has always wanted to see ‘the big heads’ and Lee is happy to get his loose-lipped friend away from the exasperated MJ. Looking like two CIA agents trying to blend in (Hawaiian shirts, quirky hats), the duo set off, with Lee cautioning his friend to keep a low profile. That proves difficult for Chris as he tells a pair of students (Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas) on the same flight that they are spooks and when they arrive at their hotel, shouts insults at a pair of British holidaymakers. Though they are ostensibly on vacation, it becomes apparent that both have secret, personal missions to complete…
Perhaps McDonagh’s fondest look at male relationships, Wild Horse Nine is not only the sort of buddy comedy with a screwball edge that provokes guffaws, it’s loaded with pathos and a reverence for the kind of brutal kindness only a true friend can serve. While it’s an absolute hoot to watch Malkovich go gonzo on anyone and everything – and Rockwell to masticate and placate his way through it – there’s also a genuine thriller at work here (who works for who?) as well as a treatise on euthenasia and what makes a person who they are. Kudos too to Parker Posey, stealing focus over the phone as Marge, Lee’s kaftan-wearing wife, who understands more than he knows; and Tom Waits as a gruff cameo with heart.
Diego Araya Corvalán
It’s probably McDonagh’s most accomplished work and it features a cast at the top of their game. Load onto that the stunning vistas of Rapa Nui – with this production being only the second film to ever film on the island – and Wild Horse Nine (yes, wild stallions do gallop beautifully across the landscape) is a retro, moving and funny piece of perfection. It recalls Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in both the tangible sense of a friendship and the sorrow for a moment passing, while also being a specifically McDonagh film. It’s entirely worthy of the awards buzz on the Venice Lido…
Words by JANE CROWTHER Images courtesy of SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES Wild Horse Nine premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival
Werner Herzog begins his whimsical, empathic and quirky tale of two sisters living in enmeshment by dedicating it to the memory of David Lynch. Lynch would no doubt dig a film that is proudly unconventional and opaque to a degree that will likely be marmite to viewers. It opens with an Irish court hearing to bring a restraining order against Jean and Joan Holbrooke (Rooney and Kate Mara) for harassing a man they love (Orlando Bloom), before following the duo through their synchonised sibling existence as they seek romance and a sense of belonging by digging a tunnel through a mountain, adopting a fox and interacting with a wide range of men who want to protect/exploit them. The title of the piece is the accidental Spoonerism the sisters blurt out during their court proceedings, the real-life response of British twin sisters, Freda and Greta Chaplin, who Herzog met during the 1980s.
HanWay Films
Though the Chaplins are the inspiration for the film (and the Maras are dressed in their idiosyncratic head scarfs and coats) Herzog uses the idea of them as a jumping-off point to explore identity, co-dependency, infatuation and the noble art of a quest. Jeanie and Joanie are so entwined that they speak and dress in unison, perform acts as a single person and view the world entirely through a lens only they share. That lack of outside context means they love fiercely and inappropriately when they fall for their neighbour who relishes a ‘cowgirl’ threesome but gets married to another woman. The impotence the women feel from his ghosting leads to criminal behaviour and the beginning of a court-ordered banishment which takes them to a city apartment where men spy on them, want selfies with them and, in the case of Domhnall Gleeson’s sweet social worker Timothy, try to integrate them into modern life. In a couple of the film’s more amusing moments Timothy stops them scrapping as they duo hoover and get wedged between chairs, and tries to get them to act independently while opening a sardine can. But ultimately, the sisters do not wish to change (‘we are we’ they say plaintively) and their hope for love that matches their own unique viewpoint takes them to the countryside of Sligo and a cave where they single-mindedly chip away at the rock and their life purpose to find some sort of epiphany.
Unspooling in a timeless, reality-adjacent bubble where the Holbrookes are inexplicably American in an Irish world, the Internet exists but people who come in contact with them are unphased by their otherness and foxes are gassed as rabies carriers, Bucking Fastards is a series of vignettes that meaning may be read into. The sisters are fastidious about the type of buttons they put on their coats and interact with a patient haberdasher, a sheep farmer takes them to some local caves and gets them obsessed with the isle of Orkney, they bury all their clothes in the garden because…well, because. That might intrigue or frustrate depending on a tolerance for the willfully oblique.
But what is mesmerising by any measure is the performance of the Maras as a fused child-like persona, their thoughts tumbling from their mouths in harmony like a wide-eyed Greek chorus and the secret looks between them given extra resonance by their off-screen relationship. Herzog’s fable is meandering and provides no easy answers, but it does give great fox (a non-CG critter called Cupid) and enough quirks to be engaging without ostensibly having very much to say.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Images courtesy of HANWAY FILMS Bucking Fastard premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival
James Graham’s award-winning West End and Broadway hit charting the birth of Britain’s The Sun newspaper and tabloid culture served the drama without op-ed – leaving the audience to decide on the morals and ethics at play, and the Pandora’s box such practice opened. Danny Boyle (with Graham adapting his work for screen) makes no apology for drawing a direct line between the ‘move-fast-break-things’ MO of newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch and his editor, Larry Lamb, and the latter-day rule-breaking narrators shaping our world. The epoch of The Sun, he posits, is the hellmouth for our problematic 21st century media landscape – that Murdoch and Lamb have blood, as well as ink, on their hands. And that we, as consumers, are as voracious as any hack hounding a story. But there’s also admiration for the underdog ambition and anti-establishment disruption of the endeavour, told with antsy Trainspotting verve and a nostalgic respect for the craft of physical media.
Anthony Dickenson/StudioCanal
Bookended by two meetings at Rules restaurant in London, Ink begins in 1969 with Aussie businessman Murdoch (Guy Pearce) making Northern journalist Lamb (Jack O’Connell) an offer he can’t refuse over a lobster dinner; editorship of an ailing broadsheet, with no guard rails and the opportunity to stick one in the eye of Fleet Street’s old boy’s network. Wily Lamb immediately tells Murdoch the principles of a good story – the 5 W’s: who, what, where, when and why. The ‘why’ he says, is the least important but it’s an element that drives the tale here with both men’s motivation explored. Ambitious Lamb is hellbent on besting his former employers at The Mirror as well as rattling a London-centric, middle-class and public school establishment that hazed him as a newbie. Murdoch’s desire to screw colonialism comes into focus as he amasses media companies with gimlet-eyed precision while being named ‘the dirty digger’ by Private Eye.
Anthony Dickenson/StudioCanal
While the ‘why’ percolates, the who, what, where and when is provided as Lamb corrals a scrappy editorial team together like Danny Ocean recruiting his heist gang, enticing specialist journos onboard from Fleet Street bars, bathhouses and in the case of new women’s editor, Jules (a composite character and played by Claire Foy), his extra-marital bed. Moving as fast as the printing presses that are constantly heard as a low thrum throughout the action, Lamb’s initial building of a tabloid is a thrilling and amusing spectacle. In a smoke-filled newsroom of clattering typewriters and stories being slapped on spikes, Lamb demands his team make their work ‘louder’, conducting a brainstorming session to identify the real interests of the working man. TV, sport, personalities, weather and sex are top of the agenda, with the words ‘win’, ‘free’ or ‘love’ on the cover nabbing his staff a bonus. As the circulation figures creep up, the giveaways get sillier (knickers in a tin) and the presses roar, with Boyle leaning into framing and lighting that evokes Citizen Kane and a fondness for a lost world soundtracked by IDLES’ TheNew Sensation. Lamb swaggers through his domain demanding more WOBs (white on black text), italics, dog’s dicks (exclamation points), bangers (design roundels) as the typesetters sweat over the galley and chase… the sort of Fleet Street nerdism that demands a linotype advisor on the film’s credits.
It’s exhilarating stuff loaded with archival footage and AI-animated Getty images which showcase Murdoch and Lamb’s particular brand of fearless entrepreneurship, and leads them to the Press Council Awards where the elitism and bullying of the industry is laid bare. ‘The Aussie sheep farmer – a seat at the table’ Murdoch glowers of his personal oneupmanship. There is, of course, a price… rats are scuttling around the newsroom, there’s hypocrisy in exposing the failings of public figures and, when a Sun exec’s wife is kidnapped, real consequences in the way Lamb chooses to package the news. Shuttling through the arrival of page three girls, Thatcher, Murdoch’s empire expansion and Lamb’s successor, Kelvin MacKenzie, Boyle speeds up the flickering images to bring us to the sobering present via Princess Diana, Caroline Flack, Zuckerberg, Musk and Trump.
Anthony Dickenson/StudioCanal
Considering the TS Eliot quote that closes this story, it would be easy to simply despise the players but in the hands of Pearce and O’Connell, Murdoch and Lamb remain complex human figures. Pearce’s clenched Murdoch, not yet a media baron, is a fascinating work in progress, while O’Connell gives Lamb a drive and charm that carries some of his more morally dubious choices into pathos. And Boyle’s ability to eddy audiences along with propulsive music, editing and strong period detail is like being sat on one of the tube trains that constantly hurtle through the piece. Entertainment is what Murdoch wanted from his newspaper and it’s what Boyle delivers here.
Words by JANE CROWTHER Images courtesy of STUDIOCANAL/NETFLIX Ink premiered at the 83rd Venice Film Festival and will be in cinemas 11 December
In an alt-theonomic USA premarital sex has been outlawed and singletons are only allowed to copulate (with a mandated condom) for one night a year – their identifying bio tattoo turning green to allow for 12 hours of horndogging. So, The Purge for sex. Those that have sex without authority are imprisoned and well, give this too much thought and it’s a deeply unsettling premise on which to set a rom-com – one which presents more questions than answers. But director Will Gluck (working from a script by Travis Braun) presses on with all the staples of the romantic genre (meet-cute, dash across town, reference to An Affair to Remember etc), two winning leads, numerous cameos and a Haim soundtrack to create a raunchy-com that just about works as long as audiences don’t look under the hood too much.
Nicole Rivelli/Universal Pictures
We arrive in New York as time ticks down to 12 hours of banging just as Owen (Callum Turner) is about to propose to his girlfriend (Maya Hawke) and Allie (Monica Barbaro) finishes work singing Psoriasis jingles. Owen’s first cockblock of the night happens when his girlfriend decides to have sex with their neighbour (Glen Powell) sending him into the street to look for a hook-up. He crosses paths with Allie as she prowls for a partner having been left solo by her wingwoman. Might these two good-looking people be the perfect bedfellows? Not when he barfs his proposal dinner on her shoes and she’s looking for real connection…
Nicole Rivelli/Universal Pictures
As they drift through the city, possible partners (portrayed by a string of cameos) and reasons not to get lucky (lack of condoms, criminal tendencies, Molly Ringwald’s embarrassing Mom), Allie and Owen find themselves repeatedly meeting and learning more about each other. He knows how she takes her coffee, she knows about his pizza parlour, he understands the red lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge that she loves, she gets his need for delayed gratification… all of which become signposted narrative callbacks by the end of the sex countdown, easily anticipated by any viewer with a passing knowledge of rom-coms. But better to lean into that than unpick the gender politics of why everyone constantly tells Owen he is hot (even a NYPD officer), why this is a world where no one protests the mandate or finds a workaround (couldn’t people just screw abroad?) or why there’s a pervading sense of promoting current moral pugnaciousness, heteronormativity and state-controlled reproduction. It’s almost like the film is asking us to consider what it might be like if The Handmaid’s Tale was about Offred just chilling out a bit, putting up with it and having some fun within her sexual suppression.
Nicole Rivelli/Universal Pictures
Turner and Barbaro are charming and effortless, selling the wacky scenarios their characters get into with the charisma of throwback stars of the genre. While their chemistry together may not entirely sizzle, they have more than enough a twinkle in their eyes to carry the picture and make audiences care if they each get their ahem, happy ending. And New York looks dazzling with its postcard views and food stops. You may want pizza by the end credits if not sex…
Nicole Rivelli/Universal Pictures
Words by JANE CROWTHER Images courtesy of UNIVERSAL PICTURES One Night Onlyis in cinemas now
The so-called ‘playground of the rich and famous’ just 26 miles from LA, Catalina has long had Hollywood links as a movie location and star vacation destination. Hollywood Authentic visits the jewel in the crown of this bountiful channel island, the Catalina Casino.
Chewing gum magnate and Chicago millionaire William Wrigley Jr wasn’t the first person to transform the island of Catalina. Native Americans had long lived on the mountainous land before Europeans discovered it in 1542 when Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed past. Mexico had owned it before it became American in a land grant deal in 1846, the Banning brothers bought it in 1891 hoping to make a resort, while silent movies such as DW Griffith’s 1912 Man’s Genesis had used it as an exotic background. But Wrigley had the vision and the investment nous to make the balmy spot SSW of LA as whimsical and compelling as any of the numerous movies that had already begun to use its tropical aesthetic as a film location.
In 1919 he bought controlling shares in the island and declared that the spot would be ‘an island utopia in a modern, busy, everyday world. A land where there are neither rich nor poor. A heaven on Earth – without a fence around it’. Wrigley built better infrastructure including the casino (meaning ‘gathering place’ rather than gambling den) at the mouth of the Avalon bay on Sugarloaf Point, a 1920-built octagonal white building that would greet all visitors who arrived by steamer boat across the San Pedro channel. By 1921 his baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, were making the island their spring training ground and in 1929, the casino was replaced by a new structure replete with a circular, cantilevered ballroom and a purpose-built cinema for ‘talkies’. This fairytale tower became a symbol of the island’s lure: a transportive world away from LA where entertainment was still key.
Wrigley Jr had his own private screening room built high above the auditorium so he could entertain in style on movie nights, but sitting in the ‘cheap seats’ is no less of a treat. It’s said that Norma Jean Baker often spent her evenings here watching the silver screen – and likely dreaming of playing her own part in Hollywood across the water
Wrigley enticed Hollywood across the sea for filming (one production, thought to be the 1925 silent The Thundering Herd, introduced a herd of bison to the island and the animals’ descendants now roam the land) and into his casino. Famed movie production designer John Gabriel Beckman created the stunning murals that still decorate the movie theatre – as he had previously done at Mann’s Chinese Theatre – and Hollywood stars contracted to studios began to visit along with studio heads, such as Louis B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn, wanting to screen their unfinished movies out of town. Designed with nods to the Moorish Alhambra and Mediterranean Revival style by architects Sumner Spaulding and Walter Webber, the casino opened in May 1929 with interior ramps said to be inspired by Wrigley Field (the Cubs’ ballpark), a seven-layered (including one of cork) ballroom dance floor, a cinema curtain in 14-carat gold thread and a Prohibition-era soda fountain. Upstairs, the Maurice Menge band opened the ballroom, downstairs Douglas Fairbanks Jr’s The Iron Mask was the inaugural film in the movie theatre, accompanied by the largest Page organ in the world.
Hollywood came to call. Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard vacationed here, as did Errol Flynn, Bogie and Bacall, Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher, a teenage Norma Jean Baker before she became Monroe, Marlon Brando, Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood (who notoriously drowned after falling from her boat at Two Harbors). Films such as ’30s classics Captain Blood, Mutiny on the Bounty and Captains Courageous lensed on the island, followed by Jaws, Around the World in 80 Days, The Glass Bottom Boat and Chinatown (Jake steps off the boat in front of the Catalina Island Yacht Club with the casino looming behind him). During the studio system, stars contracted to stay within the Thirty-Mile Zone of their studio could still get a taste of far-flung travel with a jaunt to Catalina (comfortably within the allowed radius). And more recently, Step Brothers created the spoof ‘Catalina Wine Mixer’, but demand from movie fans was so great that the island now hosts a real annual event that regularly sells out.
While many grand palaces built during Wrigley Jr’s era succumbed to modernisation, wrecking ball or changing hands, the Catalina Casino has stayed in the family (now via the Catalina Island Company) – protected and gently restored throughout its existence. An instantly recognisable building that is often the first sight visitors riding the Catalina Express get of an island that has no chain outlets and golf buggies instead of cars, Wrigley’s grand entertainment hub and community centre remains a place that moves with the times while telling a stunning story of the glamour and magic of classic Hollywood.
Famed movie production designer John Gabriel Beckman created the stunning murals that still decorate the movie theatre – as he had previously done at Mann’s Chinese Theatre
Today the casino still dominates the shoreline as one approaches the island, its halo of flags fluttering in the sea breeze, its high-ceiling entrance loggia enticing with Beckman’s glittering oceanic murals, which were revitalised in 1986 using local Catalina Island Pottery methods. That ’20s tiling company originally supplied the russet spired roof that looks like a tower out of a Disney fairytale, and the 1994 renovation also ensured the Art Deco interiors continued to shine. The movie theatre ceased showing first-run films in 2019 due to the lack of footfall (the islanders number around 4,000, the cinema seats, 1,154) and it’s now a repertory theatre allowing for themed nights, film festivals and weekend re-runs of classics (many of which feature Catalina as a backdrop). Wrigley Jr had his own private screening room built high above the auditorium so he could entertain in style on movie nights, but sitting in the ‘cheap seats’ is no less of a treat. It’s said that Norma Jean Baker often spent her evenings here watching the silver screen – and likely dreaming of playing her own part in Hollywood across the water. When that gilt fire curtain is down it shows a god riding waves westward (said to represent Wrigley’s travel to California), and the magnificent 4-manual, 16-rank Page organ is still played before shows. Beckman’s gorgeous murals dance around the walls and the acoustics are exemplary, whether performing on the stage, playing a movie on the upgraded digital projectors and sound system, or just not hearing the noise from hoofers above in the ballroom.
And that ballroom… a stunning 20,000-square-foot circular space surrounded by French doors and an outdoor terrace known as the ‘Romance Promenade’, it was the place that Benny Goodman introduced swing to the West Coast. During the ’30s, he would entertain boatloads of couples who headed out of LA by steamer, where an onboard band allowed them to dance across the sea before swinging through the night (and then dancing home again). Visitors in 2026 can climb the ramps to the ballroom to drink in the views (and a cocktail from the bar) or rent a pair of rollerskates to glide around the room as Wrigley intended for his first casino back in 1926.
The promenade is where a marching band habitually plays in the venue’s famous Fourth of July celebrations and has a romantic tragedy attached to it. Legend speaks of a young man who caught his lover in the arms of another in the ballroom, so threw himself from the terrace to his death. It’s a story picked up in the ghost tour offered by the casino, where spook hunters hear about all the supernatural tales linked to the building and listen out for spectral entities via an EMT reader.
The VIP backstage tour, meanwhile, takes visitors into the projection room, the green rooms where the likes of Errol Flynn and Cary Grant lounged, Wrigley’s private viewing room, as well as the ballroom and theatre. General admission means that locals and mainlanders alike can access the gathering place year round to drink in the historical vibes. And on the weekend, hunker down in the theatre like Norma Jean to dream of the stars that glitter as brightly as those twinkling on the ceiling above. It may not hold a blackjack table, but the Catalina Casino is a sure bet for a step back in time. Truly a landmark that is an ‘island utopia in a modern, busy, everyday world’.
