Men

 Year:  2022

Director:  Alex Garland

Screenplay:  Alex Garland

Starring:  Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu, Gayle Rankin

Running Time:  100 minutes

Genre:  Horror

Following the apparent suicide of her abusive husband (Essiedu), Harper Marlowe (Buckley) takes a two week break from her home in London, renting a holiday home in the isolated village of Cotson.  During a long walk in the country, Harper is horrified by a vision of a naked hairless man, who appears to follow her home.  Walking around the village, Harper is deeply disturbed by the creepy, toxic men that she encounters (all of whom are played by Kinnear).

This is a deeply strange, but oddly effective slice of folk horror, a subgenre of horror films which use folklore and tradition, particularly in a rural, isolated landscape.  Jessie Buckley, who is one of the best actors working at the moment, gives a fantastic performance as the tormented Harper, and Rory Kinnear is fantastic as multiple men, all of whom display various types of toxic masculinity, and the truly disturbing image of Kinnear's face superimposed on a schoolboy, who frequently wears a Marilyn Monroe mask.  The death of Harper's husband, and the events leading up to it, are shown piece by piece in flashback, lit in a warm, orange, late-evening light, while the scenes in the country are all bright greens and grey stones.  the film uses a lot of religious and pagan imagery, particular the Green Man (a face surrounded by leaves and vegetation).  For the most part, this is a strange, effective slow-burner, however in the last act, the film seems to go in for more conventional horror movie territory, before ending in genuinely nightmarish, surreal imagery.  I enjoyed the film, even though I am not sure I really understood everything that was happening in it.  This is a film that is worth your time, a powerful and pertinent look at disturbing and problematic male behaviour, particularly against women, and some of the most memorable, bizarre imagery to be seen in a long time.  

 Jessie Buckley in Men

The Imitation Game

Year:  2014
Director:  Morten Tyldum
Screenplay:  Graham Moore, based on the book Alan Turing:  The Enigma by Andrew Hodges
Starring:  Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Rory Kinnear, Mark Strong, Charles Dance
Running Time:  114 minutes
Genre:  Period drama, thriller, war

This film is a historical drama based on the life of mathematician Alan Turing (Cumberbatch), who was the head of the team of code-breakers at Bletchley Park who worked to decrypt the German Enigma codes for the British Government during the Second World War.  The movie moves back and forth between three key periods in Turing's life: His time at boarding school in the 1920s, where the teenage Turing (Alex Lawther) first develops an interest in codes and finds respite from frequent bullying in his close friendship with a fellow pupil (Jack Bannon); his downfall in 1951 where he is arrested for "gross indecency" due to his homosexuality (which was a criminal offence at the time); and, by far the most extensive section of the film, his wartime experience trying to decode the Enigma codes.

I don't know much at all about the life of Alan Turing or how historically accurate the film is, so I'm going to be talking about the film as a drama.  However I have heard that it is not particularly true to the facts of the story.  However it works as a drama.  It is well made, well acted  particularly by Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing, and Keira Knightley as fellow code-breaker Joan Clarke.  It also does well at making Turing's work as accessible and possible for the general audience.  The recreation of the 1940s is fascinating.  The difficulty with a lot of biopics is that they can tend towards shapelessness, but this film structures it as a compelling thriller.  There could have been more about the tragedy of Turing's later life, however, if it encourages people to learn more about a man who has pretty much shaped our lives today with his contributions to computer science, and a shameful period in the history of LGBT rights, than it is a success.

 Keira Knightley and Benedict Cumberbatch  in The Imitation Game