BACK TO BLACK 15

Fame is alosing game…

Marisa Abela is captivating as late singer Amy Winehouse

★★★★★ OUT NOW CINEMAS

Iwant to be remembered for being a singer,’ intones Amy Winehouse (Industry’s Marisa Abela) in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic of the iconic London musician. It’s a noble sentiment, especially given Winehouse’s tabloid-created infamy: her struggles with drink and drugs were splashed across the headlines in the lead-up to her death aged 27 in 2011.

Marking scriptwriter Matt Greenhalgh’s reunion with the director 15 years after John Lennon film Nowhere Boy, Taylor-Johnson’s take on Winehouse’s story holds back the muckraking and attempts to celebrate her work. We get a glimpse of the Back to Black singer’s family life as she moves up the music industry food chain. But the film only truly hits its stride when she meets Blake Fielder-Civil (a cocksure Jack O’Connell), who she then marries and joins in a haze of substance abuse as her fame hits levels of near-hysteria.

Holding back on the grimier aspects of her decline, the film doesn’t land the same emotional impact as Asif Kapadia’s Oscarwinning doc Amy. It works best as a tumultuous love story, knitted together by a terrific Abela, who looks the part (tattoos, beehive) and gives a remarkable vocal performance. While the film doesn’t exactly get under its subject’s ink-covered skin, it serves a sobering – if rather strait-laced – look at the perils of fame.

THE VERDICT A competent if occasionally clunky biopic is enlivened by a superb Marisa Abela, who truly inhabits Winehouse.

CIVIL WAR 15

American horror story…

★★★★★ OUT NOW CINEMAS

You never know what’s coming around the next corner!’ veteran newsman Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) cautions novice photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) in writer-director Alex Garland’s Civil War. It’s advice worth heeding as they – with photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and reporter Joel (Wagner Moura) – take a perilous journey through a future America in brutal conflict with itself.

Yet Sammy’s words also serve as an admonition from Garland to today’s disunited States, whose partisan politics and ideological positions might indeed spawn a nightmare scenario akin to the one envisioned. What Lee and Joel are after is one final interview with the despotic president (Nick Offerman) before his imminent overthrow. Standing in their way are 800 miles of treacherous terrain, ruled by militias.

A palpable sense of dread pervades as the quartet plot a course through an apocalyptic landscape. Yet Garland also conveys the giddy rush they get from the visceral warfare – a guilty exhilaration we share.

The reasons behind the titular war are left intentionally, and rather frustratingly, vague. Taken as speculative fantasy, however, Civil War is never less than chillingly authentic. The maternal feelings Lee reluctantly develops for Spaeny’s greenhorn allow shafts of humanity to emerge from behind the bleakness. For the most part, though, this is a gritty, gruelling thriller you endure as much as enjoy.

THE VERDICT There’s no shortage of horrors in Garland’s drama, whose thrills come steeped in moral complexity.