Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
September 30, 2025
September 14, 2025
The Thursday Murder Club
Netflix unveils their adaptation of the first mystery in Richard Osman’s ongoing best selling book series of cosy crime.
In Coopers Chase, a luxurious retirement village, three friends meet every Thursday to solve cold cases for fun. They are Elizabeth Best (Helen Mirren), who it’s hinted at with anvil subtlety used to be a spook, Ron Ritchie (Pierce Brosnan), former firebrand union leader, and Ibrahim Arif (Ben Kingsley), psychiatrist at large. A chance encounter leads them to recruit former nurse Joyce Meadowcroft (Celia Imrie) as a trial replacement for their founder, now comatose and tended by her husband (Paul Freeman). Their weekly hobby turns deadly serious when one of the part owners of Coopers Chase is found murdered as tension mounts around the plans of David Tennant’s Ian Ventham to redevelop the land (including a cemetery). The Club members decide to help/hinder the official police inquiry to the exasperation of Daniel Mays’ detective. But as they doggedly pursue suspects and a mystery third man, are they ready for the truth to be too close to home?
It is perhaps unfortunate that this should drop on Netflix just as BBC Four finishes its rerun of Joan Hickson’s definitive interpretation of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple; who of course made her debut in a short story called “The Tuesday Night Club”. The coup de grace of this film is absurd compared to the deduction or insight of Miss Marple. It is not a puzzle the viewer could have been privy to, unlike the business with the Major’s glass eye in A Carribbean Mystery. And the chicanery of the Thursday Murder Club in playing the police is a world away from the hilarious absurdism of poor Detective Inspector Slack finding Miss Marple pop up at his crime scenes like a bad penny. Instead we find ourselves closer to the world of Last Night in Soho. Which is not somewhere you want to be. Again murder is more or less hand waved away by – the victims having it coming, or – the killers being motivated by love. No. That’s not how the game is played.
This is not a bad film, but just about reaching the level of undemanding fun with some huffing and puffing when you have a cast this high powered isn’t really good enough.
2.5/5
September 7, 2025
The Pillowman
Martin McDonagh’s departure from his Irish settings features his trademark blend of macabre madness, but set this time in Mitteleurope rather than the Syngean Wesht.
Katurian (Fra Fee) is in deep trouble. Somebody in this unnamed (and semi-mythical) totalitarian state has been acting out particularly horrible short stories by a writer, and he’s the writer so he’s the prime suspect. Abrasive policeman Tupolski (Aidan McArdle) and his thuggish underling Ariel (Julian Moore-Cook) have Katurian prisoner in their Spartan barracks. And by Lenin if they have to beat the eyes out of his head and unsettle him with asinine nonsense they are going to make him confess. Unless of course he didn’t do it, but if not him then who; could his brain-damaged brother Michael (Ryan Dylan) really have done such horrible things? Would Tupolski really torture innocent Michael just to make Katurian confess? Why does Katurian write such horrible stories in the first place? And what does horrible parenting have to do with it all?
Harold Pinter is a strong presence in this play. The first act is pure comedy of menace as Katurian is bewildered and intimidated by Tupolski’s odd interrogation. The second act has some of McDonagh’s most soulful material, as Katurian is flung into a cell with Michael. The dark and comic invention of Katurian’s reimagining of the Pied Piper of Hamelin remains astonishing. (Plus we can now see the germ of A Very Very Very Dark Matter in a throwaway joke about Shakespeare’s real inspiration) And then there’s the third act’s mashing together of Pinter and Orton: “My father was a violent alcoholic. Am I a violent alcoholic? … Yes, I am. But that was my personal choice”. McArdle is on top form with the tour de force of Tupolski’s story – “The Little Deaf Boy, on the Big Long Railroad Tracks, in China” – which Tupolski insists is better than anything Katurian ever wrote. It is wilfully offensive, almost accidentally, as Tupolski keeps adding details to patch up plot holes pointed out by Katurian. And intriguingly a seachange has occurred since a 2017 production, and now audiences are no longer self-censoring themselves, but, as they did in 2006, just enjoying its absurdity.
4.5/5
The Pillowman continues its run at the Gate Theatre until the 7th of September.
September 3, 2025
Eddington
Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix reunite after Beau is Afraid for another exploration of a downtrodden man being forced to confront nightmares come to life.
Phoenix is Joe Cross, the Sheriff in Eddington in New Mexico who has asthma, so a May 2020 mask mandate to combat COVID demands he enforce on others what he cannot abide himself. His refusal to do so and to urge against public shaming of an old man trying to buy groceries leads him to impulsively announce a run for Mayor against the smarmy incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Garcia’s past involvement with Cross’ wife Lou (Emma Stone) adds a personal niggle to the political confrontation. And the politics of neighbour against neighbour, over COVID and a planned water hungry desert centre in the high desert, takes a surreal escalation when Black Lives Matter riots sweep the town despite its near total absence of black people. All that needs to happen next would be some sort of Antifa Ex Machina.
Writer/director Aster has once again constructed a film that starts with plausible foundations in apparent reality, personal and professional conflicts meshing, so that if you left thirty minutes in and returned for the last thirty minutes after a coffee queue from hell you would struggle to comprehend how things had developed organically from arguments over decency and community to this First Blood fever dream with military grade weaponry and auteur level pans on Main Street. Indeed there’s no point at which you could say the order “Let’s go to MARS!” was issued, and yet here we find ourselves in orbit anyway. Like their previous collaboration Beau is Afraid this runs on past where it should probably end, but the escalating craziness of the journey is its own reward. Aster is developing a veritable freehold on “My, that went places”.
Phoenix is in fine simmering form. Beau’s monstrous absent mother here becomes an all too present monstrous mother-in-law, reminding him that he does not measure up to his Sheriff father. Stone is very subdued in a small role, and Austin Butler has a glorified cameo as a cult leader who seems to exist purely so Aster can take a dig at QAnon – as he satirises all the manias of 2020. Pascal, in serendipitous timing, arrives at this role as Pedro fatigue has set in. This makes him oddly perfect for the Mayor who says all the right things; and yet clearly stretches mandates when it suits him, and is obviously corrupt besides. Cameron Mann’s accidental influencer Brian, parroting the buzzwords of whatever is the political flavour of the month, is the most ludicrous example of a town filled with lies.
3/5
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