Demi Moore in The Substance, plus McCartney, Paddington and more - what’s on at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse
Our film critic, Mark Walsh, looks ahead to what’s coming to the big screen in this feature sponsored by the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse.
The Substance
Over the years, the likes of John Travolta, Michael Keaton, Robert Downey Jr. and Mickey Rourke have all experienced a career renaissance moment, reminding the world of what make them popular in the first place while adding range and depth to their already impressive careers. Maybe The Substance will mark the beginning of the next such resurgence, this time for an actor whose career peak was in early Nineties films such as Ghost, A Few Good Men and Indecent Proposal: Demi Moore.
In an art-imitates-life moment, Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, whose nominative determinism is fading as quickly as her star on the Walk Of Fame. After being dumped from her daytime TV show by a loathsome studio executive (Dennis Quaid), she discovers The Substance, which will grant her a youthful version of herself called Sue (Margaret Qualley) to perpetuate her career, with the two alternating a week at a time in their existence. But, as always, there are rules, and consequences if those rules are broken…
Coralie Fargeat, who previously impressed with the 2017 thriller Revenge, picked up the Best Screenplay award at this year’s Cannes Festival for her screenplay, which has drawn favourable comparisons to both the gaudy satire of Paul Verhoeven and the social commentary body horror of David Cronenberg. This blackly comic examination of the absurdity of notions of female beauty won’t be for the very squeamish, but it might just prove to be a career highlight for Demi Moore.
The Substance opens on Friday, 20 September.
Paul McCartney and Wings - One Hand Clapping
To be part of possibly the most successful band of all time, both critically and commercially, is one thing: to then follow that up with both solo and other group work that also consistently topped the charts is quite something else. But Paul McCartney segued from the most creative period of The Beatles into another defining chapter of his career, and the third album of his band Wings spent seven weeks at the top of the UK charts. During that seventh week, members of the group convened at Abbey Road to record a live album, and the film of that recording is finally reaching UK cinemas half a century later.
Regular members of the group Paul McCartney and his wife Linda, and Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine, were joined by guitarist Jimmy McCulloch and drummer Geoff Britton. Over the course of four days in August 1974, they recorded music from the band’s back catalogue, including Band On the Run, Jet and Live And Let Die, their then new single Junior’s Farm, as well as a trio of Beatles songs and other covers.
The film features the band at work in the studio and also enjoying down time, interviews and material from a solo acoustic set from Paul called The Backyard Sessions. The screening also includes an introduction from McCartney, a mere 50 years after he recorded the original album.
Paul McCartney And Wings – One Hand Clapping is screening on Thursday, 26 and Saturday, 28 September.
The Outrun
Despite only having turned 30 this year, Irish-American actress Saoirse Ronan has already clocked up four Oscar and five BAFTA nominations in an impressive career so far, marking her out as one of the most talented and dependable actresses of her generation. In her latest role, she plays a woman called Rona, recently released from rehab and heading home to the Orkney Islands to find comfort and healing.
Nora Fingscheidt, who gave us the impressive System Crasher in 2019, is the director and co-writer for the adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir. The action is divided between life on the Orkney farm tended by Rona’s father (Stephen Dillane), flashbacks to the childhood that took her mother (Saskia Reeves) to the mainland, and her studies in London and a former lover (Pappa Essiedu).
Fingscheidt opens up the contrasts between the bright lights of the city and the windswept isolation of the Scottish isles to explore Rona’s fractured psyche, and in the process extracts a performance from Ronan that already receiving the “career-best” acclimation from some quarters; it also suggests that, even with her achievements so far, we’re only now about to see the best of Saoirse Ronan, and hopefully her career will run and run.
The Outrun opens on Friday, 27 September.
October round-up
The Cambridge Film Festival will be once again using the Arts Picturehouse as its primary venue from the 24 October, but before then there’s a host of treats to enjoy across all three screens. First up is Hugo Max, a filmmaker and musician who’s touring the UK in October. He’s playing live viola scores to classic silent horror films, and on the 6 October he’ll be accompanying one of the greatest early horrors, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, possibly the foremost film of German Expressionist cinema.
Its influence can be seen throughout the classics of silent cinema that followed, and in everything from the classic Universal horrors from more than a decade later to the peak of the film noir period and the works of Ingmar Bergman. Caligari’s dark, unsettling set design and cinematography still hold up over a decade later and will be brought to life by Max’s live score. While he’s touring the UK accompanying a number of classic horrors, including Nosferatu (which also bears the imprint of this forerunner), this is the only date on his tour where Max will be accompanying this particular film, so don’t miss this chance to catch the film back where it belongs.
A much more recent pair of classics are the Paddington films, and I don’t say that lightly: director Paul King’s versions of Michael Bond’s stories about the Peruvian bear with a marmalade habit are both absolutely joyous, but the second in particular, elevated by supporting turns from the likes of Brendan Gleeson and Hugh Grant, seems destined to be a family favourite for generations. Both will be screening from around the 11 October onwards. And finally, the version of the Shakespeare classic Othello recorded at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and presented by the Globe has screenings on the 1 and 2 of October.
