It Ends With Us (15, 130 mins)
Verdict: Bland but beautiful
Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel It Ends With Us, about domestic abuse, was a monumental success. It was a New York Times number one bestseller, translated into 20 languages. So now, inevitably, it’s also been translated into the language of cinema, starring Blake Lively as the story’s heroine Lily Bloom, and featuring songs by Lana Del Rey, Lewis Capaldi and Taylor Swift.
The director is Justin Baldoni, who also plays an uncommonly handsome neurosurgeon called Ryle Kincaid. In real life, nobody called Ryle Kincaid who looks like they should be modelling Calvin Klein underwear has a day job performing brain surgery.
Nor does anyone called Lily Bloom convert a derelict retail unit into the mother of all flower shops, while also looking like Blake Lively.
In point of fact, I’m pretty sure that my Jewish grandmother had a friend called Lily Bloom, and she looked like Danny DeVito.
Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel It Ends With Us, about domestic abuse, was a monumental success. It was a New York Times number one bestseller, translated into 20 languages. So now, inevitably, it’s also been translated into the language of cinema
No one called Lily Bloom convert a derelict retail unit into the mother of all flower shops, while also looking like Blake Lively
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter that It Ends With Us is cheesier than a wheel of Camembert and shallower than a toddler’s paddling pool because, you see, there’s a twist on its way.
First, however, we have a romance to tackle. On the rooftop of a swanky Boston apartment block, Ryle meets beautiful, fragrant Lily, who is gazing pensively into the middle-distance because back in small-town Maine her father has just died, and he, though a pillar of the community, was also a wife-batterer.
Slowly but surely, Ryle woos Lily by ticking off every movie cliché: the flirtation on the roof, the blast at the bowling alley, the fun in the karaoke bar. Meanwhile, Lily’s assistant at the flower shop is Allysa (Jenny Slate), who has not only with weird speed become her very best friend but has also been revealed as… Ryle’s sister. So the die is cast.
Ryle and Lily get married, but not before Lily bumps into the first boy she had sex with, Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), once homeless and on his uppers, now one of Boston’s most promising restaurateurs.
The director is Justin Baldoni, who also plays an uncommonly handsome neurosurgeon called Ryle Kincaid. In real life, nobody called Ryle Kincaid who looks like they should be modelling Calvin Klein underwear has a day job performing brain surgery
On the rooftop of a swanky Boston apartment block, Ryle meets beautiful, fragrant Lily, who is gazing pensively into the middle-distance because back in small-town Maine her father has just died, and he, though a pillar of the community, was also a wife-batterer
Sporadic flashbacks shed more light on their teen romance, with Isabela Ferrer looking passably as if she might have turned into the older Lily, and Alex Neustaedter looking like he might have turned into the older Atlas only with the help of a complete head transplant, but let’s not split hairs.
The point is that Atlas and Lily bonded as teenagers partly because they had both watched their mothers being beaten, and now the grown-up Atlas is worried that Lily’s drop-dead-gorgeous husband Ryle might be an abuser too, though we know better. Or do we?
Either way, there are better films about domestic violence that will live much longer in the memory than this one, without being nearly as handsome on the eye.
Babes (15, 104 mins)
Verdict: Coarse but funny
Babes, too, is a love story with a difference, because the relationship is a platonic one, between female besties Eden (co-writer Ilana Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau). Actress Pamela Adlon’s mostly assured directing debut, Babes is also a comedy, occasionally genuinely uproarious and sometimes, frankly, too coarsely scatological to be even slightly amusing. A burst pipe filling a house with a pooey pong? That’s primary-school humour.Still, when Babes is funny, it’s very funny. New Yorkers Eden and Dawn have been devoted pals since childhood but now adult issues are changing the terms of their friendship — in particular, pregnancy, childbirth and the demands of motherhood.
Babes is a love story with a difference, because the relationship is a platonic one, between female besties Eden (co-writer Ilana Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau)
Dawn is in a stable marriage when she has her second child, but Eden gets pregnant after sleeping just once with a guy she likes, who then inconveniently chokes to death before they can properly get together.
How the pair navigate their journeys, and the support they offer each other, is the wellspring of the somewhat manic comedy, reminiscent of Bridesmaids (2011) except that instead of being about hen parties and wedding-planners, it’s about labour pains and lactation.
It Ends With Us and Babes are in cinemas now.
Another endlessly wise-cracking little robot? Zap me now!
Others might not share this view but from where I’m sitting, the last thing cinema needs is a whole new comedy sci-fi extravaganza based on yet another video-game series. More jauntily named planets like Pandora and Promethea to get to know, and yet another endlessly wise-cracking little robot? Zap me now.
Still, Borderlands (12A, 102 mins, HHIII) at least has a sensible running-time — and an A-list cast led by Cate Blanchett, with Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis and, voicing the ‘hilarious’ robot, Jack Black.
The director is Eli Roth, better known for slasher films such as his 2002 debut, Cabin Fever.
Here, Blanchett plays the flame-haired, alpha-female Lilith, who returns to her home planet (yes, Pandora) to find the missing daughter of the most powerful baddie in the universe, Atlas (Edgar Ramirez).
Cate Blanchett plays the flame-haired, alpha-female Lilith, who returns to her home planet (yes, Pandora) to find the missing daughter of the most powerful baddie in the universe
Borderlands has a sensible running-time — and an A-list cast led by Cate Blanchett, with Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis and, voicing the ‘hilarious’ robot, Jack Black
Pandora’s a lawless junkyard of a place, but happiness and calm can be restored to the benighted planet… if only someone can open a mysterious elusive vault. But who has the key, and more importantly, do we care?I didn’t, I confess; but then I’m not the target audience. I suppose it’s even possible that some folk might look beyond the shamelessly derivative nods to other sci-fi films (Star Wars, Mad Max, Guardians Of The Galaxy, even Time Bandits) and find some originality in this movie. That’s the really challenging quest.
There’s a fine cast, too, in The Instigators (15, 101 mins, HHIII), a comedy heist thriller set in Boston that doesn’t thrill, isn’t especially funny, and come to think of it, doesn’t contain much of a heist, although I think the Boston locations are real.Most of what’s good about the film comes from Matt Damon, convincingly tortured as Rory, an estranged husband and father who agrees to steal money from the city’s corrupt mayor (Ron Perlman) on election night, to raise exactly the funds he needs for alimony and child support.
His unlikely partner in this enterprise is a miserable ex-con Cobby (Casey Affleck), while the gangland boss who recruits them is played by Michael Stuhlbarg, a fine actor but woefully miscast as a sweary tattooed villain.Hong Chau fares a little better. She plays Rory’s therapist who gets dragged into the enterprise after the heist goes badly wrong. But the film, directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) and co-written by Affleck, is broadly speaking just as misconceived as the robbery.
Borderlands is in cinemas now. The Instigators is on Apple TV+.
Best of the Friday Games
By Peter Hoskins
Shiver me timbers! It’s pirate cats (and rats) of the Caribbean…
Cat Quest III (PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, £15.99)
Verdict: Feline good
Yo ho ho and a bottle of… milk?! Yes, milk is right. Because the pirates in the third Cat Quest game are — as the title suggests — of a feline persuasion. After earlier quests in fantasy kingdoms, our whiskered buddies are now setting sail on the high seas to discover the fabled North Star treasure ahead of a bunch of nefarious rodents.
Like the previous Cat Quests, the gameplay in this one is simplicity itself. Almost too simple. Your cat goes from island to island, solving straightforward puzzles and defeating ’roided-out rats by cutlass, flintlock and cannon.
As you progress, you gain better and better equipment, readying you for tougher challenges. There’s nothing revolutionary here.
Like the previous Cat Quests, the gameplay in this one is simplicity itself. Almost too simple. Your cat goes from island to island, solving straightforward puzzles and defeating ’roided-out rats by cutlass, flintlock and cannon
What is here, though, is a whole load of polish. The cartoon-Caribbean world of Cat Quest III looks and feels tremendous. The gameplay is so smooth that you just want to keep on questin’ on.
Oh, and there’s plenty of charm too. There’s barely a cat- or pirate-related pun that the game doesn’t mine. Fur real. And that childish exuberance stretches to its characters and missions; you can’t help but smile at a dog asking you to exchange letters between two lovelorn starfish.
What makes it even better is the ease with which you can switch between one-player and two-player adventuring. I played alongside my three-year-old — one of his first proper gaming experiences — and now he can’t stop talking about pirate cats and baddie mice.
I’m sure that, when he goes asleep, he dreams, too, of one day finding the North Star treasure.
Cygni: All Guns Blazing (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £24.99)
Verdict: Blast off!
Hoo boy, this isn’t your grandfather’s game of Space Invaders. Certainly, it shares some of the constituent parts: a top-down view of a spaceship taking on wave after wave of alien invader. But where the retro-classic was simple in look and design, Cygni: All Guns Blazing is a riot of colour and complexity. Explosions! Speed! Literally thousands of belligerent ETs!
It’s also amazingly cinematic, and not just because there are beautifully animated interstitial sequences telling the story of the main character, a fleet pilot called Ava, as she battles determinedly against seemingly insurmountable odds.
All Guns Blazing is a riot of colour and complexity. Explosions! Speed! Literally thousands of belligerent ETs!
Cygni’s beautiful cosmic warzones are enough by themselves to pull you back in, but battling through to the end of them is even more satisfying. It’s one ship against thousands. ET, go home
The levels themselves are full of detail and invention, with soldiers advancing across the ground beneath you, and terrifying, megalithic monsters rising to block your way.
If this makes Cygni sound like a game of style over substance… well, yes and no. It certainly is extremely stylish, but its gameplay is also enjoyably tactical. While whizzing around the screen, you’ll be making a dozen micro-decisions a second — about whether to power up your weapons or your shields; about whether to shoot at the ground or into the sky; and so on.
And you’ll need to make those decisions correctly. While Cygni is easy enough to get into — with a limited set of moves, all neatly explained in a Space Invaders-referencing tutorial section — it does get pretty difficult when the laser blasts start flying. These are levels that you’ll have to try, try and try again.
Thankfully, though, you’ll want to. Cygni’s beautiful cosmic warzones are enough by themselves to pull you back in, but battling through to the end of them is even more satisfying. It’s one ship against thousands. ET, go home.
