My Policeman: Quietly arresting

My Policeman (2022) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated R, for sexual candor and nudity

Available via: Movie theaters and (starting November 4) Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang

Celebrated British theatrical director Michael Grandage’s roots show in this adaptation of Bethan Roberts’ 2012 novel, which frequently feels more like an intimate stage production than a film.

 

And two become three: Museum curator Patrick (David Dawson, left) is delighted to
discover that visiting couple Marion (Emma Corrin) and Tom (Harry Styles) have a
genuine interest in art.

The melancholy, regret-laden character study centers on three people who — out of desire, desperation and love — have caused each other a great deal of pain.

The kicker, in Ron Nyswaner’s script, is the jolt upon realizing that what seemed like happenstance actually was premeditation.

 

The story opens in the 1990s, in the East Sussex seaside resort of Brighton. Tom (Linus Roache) and his wife Marion (Gina McKee) argue over her decision to allow Patrick (Rupert Everett), an ailing, long-estranged friend, to live with them while he recuperates from a stroke.

 

We’ve no clue what prompts the hostility, which Tom refuses to discuss, preferring to retreat to long walks along the massive sea walls that protect the cliffs above (an impressively dramatic image given imposing ferocity by the way cinematographer Ben Davis frames the crashing waves).

 

Grandage and Nyswaner then slide back to the 1950s. Newly minted schoolteacher Marion (Emma Corrin), enjoying a day at the beach with friends, is taken with Tom (Harry Styles), a handsome young policeman. Sympathetic to her fear of the water, he offers to teach her to swim in the local lido (public outdoor pool), if she’ll broaden his horizons by recommending some good books and classic artists.

 

She’s charmed by this. A copper, wanting to better himself?

 

The days pass idly and happily. They visit a gallery, where Tom is drawn to a painting of storm-tossed seas. Patrick (David Dawson), the curator, offers some learned observations; then, sensing kindred spirits, he impulsively offers them tickets to a classical music concert. Tom falls asleep. (So would I.)

 

They become inseparable, a larkish three musketeers enjoying life to the fullest whenever possible. Patrick’s cultured sensibilities are more perfectly aligned with Marion’s, and his solicitous attention to her begins to feel like something more than friendship, which Tom can’t help noticing (prompting Constant Companion to mutter, “Threesomes never work out”).

 

But is Patrick actually interested in Marion? Or is she merely an excuse for his close proximity to Tom?

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children: Enchanting fantasy

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and quite scary fantasy violence
By Derrick Bang

It would be difficult to imagine a more perfect marriage of imaginative picto-fiction and eccentric filmmaking sensibilities.

All dressed up and ready for ... we know not what: from left, Olive (Lauren McCrostie),
Claire (Raffiella Chapman), the invisible Millard (Cameron King), the Twins (Thomas and
Joseph Odwell) and Emma (Ella Purnell).

Author Ransom Riggs’ neo-gothic Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was released to acclaim in the summer of 2011, spending well over a year on The New York Times’ Children’s Best Sellers list. It occupies a niche that blossomed with the 2007 arrival of Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, brought to the big screen with panache by director Martin Scorsese.

Tim Burton has just done the same with Miss Peregrine, and if the results aren’t quite as impressive, it’s a beguiling near-miss. This new film also plays to one of Burton’s career themes: the importance of responding with kindness and grace to the misfits in our world, as opposed to shunning or fearing them.

Scripter Jane Goldman — boasting oodles of fan cred for her handling of Kingsman, Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and two of the X-Men films — has faithfully retained both the core plot of Riggs’ unusual narrative, as well as its mythical, off-kilter and slightly morbid atmosphere.

That’s no small feat: As with The Invention of Hugo Cabret, much of Miss Peregrine’s appeal lies in the manner in which the story unfolds, and how Riggs chooses to tell it.

Both books also cleverly exploit actual world history, transporting readers to pivotal eras that are both simpler and more dangerous.

And, perhaps best of all, both books evoke the imaginative blend of words and images that was much more common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, led by fantasists such as Lewis Carroll, H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. It would be nice if modern readers — of all ages — grew more tolerant of books with pictures.

Rather drolly, both film adaptations share the same young star.

Miss Peregrine begins in present-day Tampa, Florida, as teenage Jake (Asa Butterfield) discovers that his beloved grandfather, Abraham (Terence Stamp), has died — or been killed — under sinister circumstances. Jake finds the body in the woods near Abraham’s house, and is horrified to discover that his grandfather’s eyes are missing. Worse yet, Jake briefly glimpses a huge something lurking nearby, in the mist.