The Magic Faraway Tree (U, 110mins)
Verdict: Oak-solid family treat
Splitsville (15, 104 mins)
Verdict: Hit-and-miss comedy
My children are all grown up now but my wife and I still vividly remember the exquisite pleasure of introducing them, when they were little, to the same stories that had enthralled us 30-odd years earlier. Not, I might add, that I got anywhere with my beloved Jennings books. Linbury Court preparatory school, it turned out, was no match for Hogwarts.
Enid Blyton, however, made a more successful leap between generations. Not so much her Malory Towers novels, which fared no better than Jennings, hufflepuffed into irrelevance. But our kids were captivated (and at times scared) by the glorious oddities of The Faraway Tree series, just as we had been. So, to put it in Blyton-ese, how completely ripping it is, all these years later, to welcome those characters to the big screen.
The director of The Magic Faraway Tree is Ben Gregor, whose credits are mostly in television. The writer is Simon Farnaby, whose impressive feature-film pedigree includes the joyous Paddington 2 (2017), and who has mastered the tricky art of delighting children and adults at the same time. They have both – more Blyton-ese – done a really smashing job. Not least by finding a modern, relatable context for stories published in the 1940s.
A tip-top cast, led by Claire Foy and Andrew Garfield, is the icing on the cake. At the start of the film, Polly Thompson (Foy) has, on a point of principle, just quit her well-paid job as an appliances inventor (listen out for her talking fridge). She and her affable if hapless husband Tim (Garfield) are forced to give up their comfortable urban lifestyle and decide to make a virtue of it, moving to a remote, ramshackle barn in the hope of immersing their three children in nature.
It's a challenge. The oldest, Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy), is a sullen, obstreperous adolescent who talks about 'the oppression of the patriarchy', while her younger brother Joe (Phoenix Laroche) is in thrall to his gaming devices. Blyton will be not so much turning in her grave as scratching her head.
A tip-top cast, led by Claire Foy and Andrew Garfield, is the icing on the cake of The Magic Faraway Tree
As lovers of the books will recall, this magical tree is inhabited by a raft of fantastical characters
However, she would have recognised the youngest, Fran (even though she named her Fanny). Fran (Billie Gadsdon) is an elective mute whose powers of imagination are recognised by Silky the fairy (Nicola Coughlan), and although Tim and Polly are thrilled when their daughter starts talking again, they have no idea what has jolted her out of silence. Soon she is introduced by Silky to a huge tree in the nearby wood, said to be dangerously enchanted by the otherwise mostly unintelligible farmer (a hilarious cameo by Farnaby, who keeps for himself one of the film's best gags, a doozy about the Wi-Fi).
As lovers of the books will recall, this magical tree is inhabited by a raft of fantastical characters, such as Moonface (Nonso Anozie), Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns), Mr Watzisname (Oliver Chris) and Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning). It also carries Fran, and in due course her siblings, to a rotating series of lands. These include the land of spells, of goodies, of back-to-front and, facilitating further lovely cameos from Lenny Henry, Michael Palin and Simon Russell Beale, of know-alls.
Meanwhile, way down below, Tim is growing tomatoes, intending to commercialise his home-made pasta sauce. It's an enterprise that is imperilled by events at the top of the faraway tree, but you'll find no spoilers here, just a whopping endorsement for a picture of enormous charm, that, singular though it is, carries distinct echoes of other great children's films such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971).
Just like those two classics, the wholesomeness is tempered by genuine darkness, with Rebecca Ferguson as villainous headmistress Dame Snap and Jennifer Saunders as the children's forbidding, Teutonic tycoon of a grandmother. But there's nothing likely to give your cherubs nightmares, like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's terrifying Childcatcher. Timed perfectly for the Easter holidays, The Magic Faraway Tree is an oak-solid family treat.
In a determinedly jaunty way, with one-liners and moments of pure slapstick that are somewhat hit and miss, Splitsville explores the phenomenon of 'open' marital relationships
Splitsville too whisks us back to the films of 50 or 60 years ago, although in this case I'm thinking of all those sex and relationship comedies, such as Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969). It is written by Kyle Marvin and Michael Angelo Covino, and directed by the latter. They also star, as best friends Carey (Marvin) and Paul (Covino), respectively married to Ashley (Adria Arjona) and Julie (Dakota Johnson).
In a determinedly jaunty way, with one-liners and moments of pure slapstick that are somewhat hit and miss, the film explores the phenomenon of 'open' marital relationships. It's never as funny as its writers seem to think it is, or as the insistent jazz soundtrack implies, but it bowls along engagingly enough and any script with jokes about Abraham Lincoln, Walt Disney, Malcolm Gladwell, Meatloaf and the Tom Cruise vanity project Vanilla Sky can't be all bad.
Also showing...
Another week, another horror film. Whatever might be the collective noun – a spook, perhaps, or a slash – they just keep on coming. I'm told it's because horror is a genre much-favoured by Gen Z, those aged between about 16 and 25, and the industry is desperate to lure them into cinemas.
Anyway, last week we got Ready Or Not 2, which was fun in a gory way, and this week it's They Will Kill You (15, 94 mins, two out of five stars), which isn't. It's a comedy-horror in which a moderately suspenseful story is all too quickly possessed by abject silliness.
Zazie Beetz plays Asia, who escapes her abusive father but is racked with guilt for leaving her kid sister in his 'care'. A decade after trying to kill him, then being caught and jailed, she sets out to find her long-lost sibling, tracking her down to a grand Manhattan hotel run by a creepy cult.
They Will Kill You is a comedy-horror in which a moderately suspenseful story is all too quickly possessed by abject silliness
Zazie Beetz plays Asia, who escapes her abusive father but is racked with guilt for leaving her kid sister in his 'care'
Like Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill films, Asia is well-equipped to deal with creeps (played by Patricia Arquette and Tom Felton among others), and very soon all satanic hell breaks loose. But the violence is so preposterous, presented with such ropey CGI, that any Tarantino-fuelled pretensions director Kirill Sokolov might have look increasingly deluded.
The violence in the Russian-language Two Prosecutors (12A, 118 mins, four out of five stars) is mostly implied, but what a gripping, powerful and unsettling film it is, set in the Soviet Union in 1937 at the height of Stalinist terror, and brilliantly directed by the Ukrainian Sergei Loznitsa. I saw it at last year's Cannes Film Festival, where it deservedly won one of the prizes.
It's about a young, fair-minded state prosecutor who slowly finds that the principles of justice are no match for a corrupt regime in which 'experts are substituted by ignorant charlatans'. You can draw your own modern-day parallels.
All films are in cinemas now.
