A mood of theatricality prevailed at this year’s edition – a bleak but furiously cinematic Marilyn Monroe biopic and a forbiddingly austere French courtroom drama being the most distinctive offerings
Or, rather, it’s the story of “Marilyn Monroe”, the alter ego of a young woman named Norma Jeane: an artificial creation that the young star comes to despise, but also becomes addicted to, as she navigates a succession of traumas, starting with her childhood subjection to the volatility of her disturbed mother .
The film is candid but not scabrous, despite scenes such as a horrifically unromantic liaison with JFK. With its sexual violence, graphic abortion scenes and general tone of nightmare, Netflix will no doubt have to slap on all the trigger warnings it can think of, andwill surely attract much criticism for stressing the abuse and the victimhood – indeed, the martyrdom – at the expense of Monroe’s singularity as a screen talent.
. The former was Florian Zeller’s involving but staid drama with Hugh Jackman as the dad of a troubled teenage boy: nicely performed, but not nearly as inventive as Zeller’s, an oddly sober piece from the usually extravagant Darren Aronofsky – an unapologetically chamber-bound adaptation of Samuel D Hunter’s play, with Brendan Fraser as a morbidly obese man confronting his past.
. It matters little: this derivative exercise in smash-the-patriarchy sci-fi was a gorgeously mounted, barely coherent mess: Harry Styles was insipid, Wilde’s direction lavishly overblown, but Florence Pugh emerged with credit, dismantling her Stepford-style crypto-Barbie protagonist with wit and brio.
A more substantially regrettable misfire, however, came from Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Mexican auteur behind
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