FOOL’S PARADISE 15

★★★✩✩

OUT 28 AUGUST DIGITAL

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Charlie Day ditches his raspy voice for some expressive silent clowning in a satire that also marks his writing/directing debut. Day plays a nameless, nonspeaking man who, after being released from a mental-health facility, is hired as an acting stand-in and accidentally rises up the celebrity ranks. There’s plenty of charm and heart alongside the cutting barbs about the Hollywood artifice and absurdity, not to mention a fine cast full of familiar faces (Kate Beckinsale, Ray Liotta, Adrien Brody). It’s ultimately unsatisfying, though, to watch a protagonist being passive in their own story.

KLOKKENLUIDER TBC

★★★✩✩

OUT 1 SEPTEMBER CINEMAS

Marking the feature writing/ directing debut of Brit actor Neil Maskell (Kill List, Apple TV+ series Hijack), this darkly funny drama is part Ben Wheatley, part Harold Pinter. Couple-on-the-run Ewan (Amit Shah) and Silke (Sura Dohnke) are holed up in a remote Belgian cottage, waiting to reveal an Edward Snowden-style secret to a newspaper (the title is Dutch for ‘whistleblower’); Chris (Tom Burke) and Glynn (Roger Evans) are the muscle sent to protect them. With some droll lines and a dissonant score, it’s an anxiously enjoyable watch; there’s no doubting Shah when he says, ‘I’m fucked; we all are.’

MAIGRET TBC

★★✩✩✩

OUT 1 SEPTEMBER CINEMAS

With his deflated demeanour, tendency to shuffle and seen-itall ruefulness, Gérard Depardieu undoubtedly makes a more convincing iteration of Georges Simenon’s legendary detective than Rowan Atkinson did in ITV’s 2010s miniseries. Yet as appealing as it is to watch him wheeze and heave his way around 1950s Paris, the mystery in Patrice Leconte’s (Girl on the Bridge) film – apedestrian whodunnit involving a society engagement, an unidentified dead girl and a Vertigo-style lookalike whom Maigret recruits to flush out her killers – hardly seems worthy of his time, let alone ours.

AND THEN COME THE NIGHTJARS 15

★★★✩✩

OUT 1 SEPTEMBER CINEMAS

Adapted from Bea Roberts’ stage play of the same name, this touching debut feature from director Paul Robinson (who helmed the original) tells the story of the unlikely friendship between Devon farmer Michael and vet Jeff (respectively David Fielder and Nigel Hastings, reprising their stage roles) during the foot-andmouth outbreak of the early noughties. While the film still has vital things to say about modern rural life, the intimacy of the original two-hander has been diluted. The bucolic landscapes are a bonus, but peripheral characters feel needless.

PASSAGES 18

Sachs and the city…

★★★★✩

OUT 1 SEPTEMBER CINEMAS

Three is most definitely a crowd in Ira Sachs’ drama, a lustful tale set in contemporary Paris in which a narcissistic auteur (Germany’s Franz Rogowski) finds it impossible to choose between the man he married (Britain’s Ben Whishaw) and the schoolteacher he seduces (France’s Adèle Exarchopoulos) after completing his latest project.

Emotionally raw and sexually fearless, it’s a marked change of pace for an American writer/director whose films to date (Married Life, Love is Strange) have tended to focus on the comfortably bourgeois. Its effectiveness, however, rests totally on Rogowski’s Tomas, a creature of impulse who most viewers will either accept as a Fassbinderish prodigy or dismiss out of hand as an insufferable arse.

The latter seems more fitting during an early scene in which Tomas returns home to his graphic-designer hubby and proudly confesses to a wrap-party infidelity. But when Whishaw’s Martin takes a lover of his own, Tomas sets out to woo him back, entirely heedless of where this will leave Exarchopoulos’ Agathe. As love triangles go, this one is more sharp-edged than most. Yield to its permutations, however, and you’ll be rewarded with an unflinching exploration of a toxic ménage à trois, anchored throughout by a riveting turn from Rogowski that embraces all of his character’s prickliness, selfishness and questionable sartorial choices.

THE VERDICT A racy, bracing adult drama that’s not afraid to put a potentially divisive protagonist front and centre.