THE GREAT ESCAPER TBC

Runaway Caine…

‘Has anybody seen where I left my glasses? Have a good look, won’t you?’

★★★★★ OUT 6 OCTOBER CINEMAS

Ninety-year-old coffin-dodger honours the glorious dead!’ Scoffing at the media furore over his audacious 48-hour care home breakout to attend the 2014 70th anniversary D-Day commemorations in France, Michael Caine’s determined Bernie is having none of it. Inspired by a true story, director Oliver Parker’s big-hearted film dodges geriatric comic capers in favour of quietly unpacking a tough old veteran’s survivor’s guilt.

As Bernie wangles his way across the Channel, he teams up with John Standing’s alcoholic Arthur to seek overdue closure for long-hidden wartime traumas. A small, heartfelt story about the tenacity of love and loss, the result is given heft by Caine’s canny, subtly troubled performance. Crisply unsentimental, apart from an encounter with a PTSD-racked young Helmand veteran, the film is also surprisingly moving about remembrance and reconciliation (Bernie won’t even eat Black Forest gâteau, because it’s German).

Shot in unfussy style, the film is marbled with Bernie’s mounting flashbacks to one fatal D-Day landing encounter, neatly matched by wife Rene’s snapshot memories of their whirlwind wartime courtship. Glenda Jackson, superb to the last in her final role as the frail, flinty Rene, embodies the couple’s resilient love story as she waits, one more time, for Bernie’s return from France. ‘He has done it before,’ she says. ‘Then, of course, they were shooting at him.’

THE VERDICT Caine and Jackson’s chemistry lights up this tale of a runaway veteran battling war trauma.

CASSANDRO 15

All the fight moves…

★★★★★ OUT 15 SEPTEMBER CINEMAS

22 SEPTEMBER PRIME VIDEO

Gael García Bernal is the kind of actor who elevates his material. Yet even by his standards, Bernal’s performance as Saúl Armendáriz is phenomenal. A gay amateur wrestler from El Paso who became a star in the late 80s, Armendáriz broke down barriers around queerness in the sport as his wrestling character Cassandro, aka ‘the Liberace of Lucha Libre’.

Having explored gender and sexual fluidity before, in films such as Almodóvar’s Bad Education, Bernal conveys that spirit of mischievous defiance and convinces as a bad-ass fighter. The result is a layered character study, ensuring Cassandro fascinates equally whether he’s hamming it up for the audience or – in the quieter moments – just living his life as Saúl.

Director Roger Ross Williams brings an impressive elegance to the film, framing wrestling scenes and conversations between lovers alike with care and flourish. Refreshingly, too, he steers away from a focus on misery and trauma. Even when Saúl struggles with addiction, injury and rejection, his suffering doesn’t define him or the film, both maintaining a sense of playfulness and a belief in Cassandro’s ability to overcome the toxic masculinity of the world around him. While the biopic is determinedly feel-good, and sometimes a little over the top, Williams holds true to the spirit of a born entertainer.

THE VERDICT This lovely tribute to a groundbreaking queer hero should earn Bernal plenty of Oscar buzz.