Project Hail Mary (12, 156 mins)
Verdict: Lord above, it goes on
Midwinter Break (12, 90 mins)
Verdict: Ponderous but powerful
Call me if you like, because as everyone knows it's the most distant planet from the sun and therefore the chilliest, but unlike those people who are rhapsodising about Project Hail Mary – and in fairness quite a lot are – I found it a bore.
It tells of a voyage to a star 11.9billion light years from Earth and, without hyperbole, seems to unfold in real time. Well, I'll admit to stretching a point.
But honestly. I wish co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller had cut a few billion light years, or their temporal equivalent, from the running-time.
Their leading man is Ryan Gosling, always engaging company over the course of a cinematic afternoon or evening… but not both.
OK, I'm exaggerating again. Project Hail Mary lasts a shade over two and a half hours. But that's longer than the last time Gosling ventured into space, as Neil Armstrong in the tremendous First Man (2018), and that was the true story of the moon landings.
Ryan Gosling starring as Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary
This film is based on the 2021 novel by Andy Weir, who has co-written the screenplay with Drew Goddard.
The same pair scripted Ridley Scott's The Martian (2015), also adapted from one of Weir's novels, and similarly reliant on the ability of an A-lister (Matt Damon in that case) to command an awful lot of solo screen time.
Damon played an astronaut who got stranded in space, a kind of sci-fi Robinson Crusoe.
Gosling's character is not an astronaut but a middle-school science teacher, Ryland Grace, despatched to that distant star with the somewhat pressing brief: to stop the certain extinction of the human race.
His personal existential problem has more to do with power. The starship he's on, the Hail Mary, has enough oomph to get him there but not to get him back. To save humankind, it seems he must sacrifice himself.
How he came to be in this startling predicament not even he knows. We first meet him coming round from a year-long induced coma, all but clueless as to where he is and why, and only gradually comprehending the zero-gravity of his situation.
With the help of many flashbacks, he is (and we are) able to piece together the reasons he came to be hurtling through space.
To start with he had two crewmates, but they are now dead. Back on Planet Earth, he was handed his mission by a dour bureaucrat (Sandra Huller), aware of his pre-teaching background as a brilliant molecular biologist who fell out with the establishment.
He was also picked because no one will miss him. Never mind all the other stuff we're expected to believe, here's the real doozy… that this affable and witty fellow who looks like Ryan Gosling has no wife or girlfriend or evidently even mates back home. 'You don't even have a dog,' she says.
So, did he volunteer or was he coerced? Either way, the sun and all other stars except one are effectively being eaten up by malignant microbes, which will soon render Earth uninhabitable.
It is the one exception, called Tau Ceti, that is our hero's destination. He must find out why it is immune from the infection, and send back his findings.
But wait. There is someone else out there – or rather something else – with the same objective. A spider-like creature apparently made out of rocks is also on a mission to save his species.
Ryland bonds with him and calls him Rocky, and all the serious sci-fi soon becomes overwhelmed by slapstick, even featuring a whiskery Marx Brothers routine.
The film morphs into an odd-couple road-trip comedy, with a derivative cutesy alien that, at least from where I was sitting, seemed to have blundered into the wrong picture entirely, maybe from Guardians Of The Galaxy.
Their leading man is Ryan Gosling (left), alongside Sandra Huller as Eva Stratt (right)
Project Hail Mary lasts a shade over two and a half hours. But that's longer than the last time Gosling ventured into space, as Neil Armstrong in the tremendous First Man (2018), and that was the true story of the moon landings
Nevertheless, there was quite a bit of chirpy laughter around me, which the movie's bladder-challenging duration only gradually suppressed.
Early audiences everywhere seem mostly delighted with Project Hail Mary so I'm prepared to concede that I might, rather like Tau Ceti itself, be an outlier.
In Midwinter Break, Lesley Manville's character Stella is in a sense engaged on her own project Hail Mary.
She is a devout Catholic who years earlier in Belfast was badly injured in the Troubles. Now her injuries are emotional.
She feels trapped in her long marriage to Gerry (Ciaran Hinds), a retired architect and altogether decent cove, although much less interested in the Holy Spirit than the type he gets from a bottle.
On a weekend in Amsterdam Stella explores the possibility of joining a sisterhood of like-minded women, initiating what could be considered a midwinter break in their relationship.
Polly Findlay's film, adapted from Bernard MacLaverty's novel, is beautifully observed and exquisitely acted, but undeniably slow.
Some might even find it sluggish. Happily, a sensible running-time kept me absorbed right to the end.
Also showing...
As SIGNS of the times go, how's this? Watching Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come (15, 108 mins, HHHII), a blood-spattered festival of gore in which an awful lot of homicidal mayhem unfolds in the name of entertainment, I was strongly reminded of modern-day reality television.
If Traitors had real murder and was blended with Channel 4's new hit Handcuffed, it would look just like this.
The story follows directly on from 2019's Ready Or Not, with Grace (Samara Weaving) again roaming a huge mansion trying to stay alive until dawn as ill-intentioned rotters from four wealthy, Satan-worshipping families hunt her down.
Their task is made easier because Grace is at first cuffed to her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton), and whoever prevails in this latest deadly game of hide and seek will win the coveted prize, basically the levers of control over the entire world.
You can almost hear a telly producer pitching it, maybe with Donald Trump as the presenter.
Anyway, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Elijah Wood also star, the latter as a kind of sinister rules official, like a Wimbledon umpire crossed with the devil, while film director David Cronenberg makes the most of an early cameo.
It's certainly riotous, but when male violence against women is the whole point of a film's narrative – and some of it here is extremely graphic – then a 15 certificate is rather questionable.
As we see in Broken English (15, 99 mins, HHHII), a fascinating if at times pretentiously wacky documentary about the eventful life of Marianne Faithfull, she was not averse to a spot of devilment herself.
It's actually very moving to watch her in terrible health, wired up to oxygen, studying clips of herself in her heyday hanging out with the Rolling Stones and making her own distinct mark on the 1960s. Even in that condition, her spirit and charisma shine through.
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