Film reviews: King Richard | Ghostbusters: Afterlife

King Richard (12A) ****

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (12A) **

Power of the Dog (12A) **

The early days of tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams’ ascendency to the top of a sport they’ve dominated and transformed is the subject of King Richard, a lively, highly entertaining biopic of their ultra-focussed father, Richard Williams, played here with a combination of grit and outsized charisma by an on-form Will Smith.

The Williams family story is one of the most fascinating in modern sport, so it’s no surprise it’s makes good fodder for a movie. For years Venus and Serena – who grew up in gang-plagued Compton – were the tennis world’s worst-kept secret, a self-creation myth in the making, with Venus even popping up as a character in David Foster Wallace’s wilfully abstruse 1996 debut novel Infinite Jest, just two years after making her professional debut at age 14. But that part of their journey is also dominated by Richard’s iron-clad belief in not just his daughters’ talents, but his own ability to help them flourish, so it makes sense to examine their story through his.

That can present some problems, no doubt, and director Reinaldo Marcus Green (Monsters and Men) never quite resolves how to portray Venus and Serena (respectively played by Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton – both fantastic) as anything other than idealised teens who rarely push back against their parents, nor seem to inspire any jealousy in their other sisters. But Green does also subtly chip away at the mythos of Richard via Aunjanue Ellis’s no-nonsense turn as his wife Oracene, whose centrality to their daughters’ success is gradually revealed in ways that challenge Richard’s own myopic view of exactly how things happened.

Through it all Smith is good at digging beneath the surface of Richard’s bluster and showmanship as he negotiates a sport rife with racism, classism and exploitation, not to mention a socio-economic system that won’t tolerate people like him messing up. There’s entertaining support too from Jon Bernthal as Rick Macci, Venus’s permanently exasperated coach and, though we know how Venus and Serena’s story turns out, Green smartly curtails it at a point that provides all the drama of a classic underdog sports movie, right down to the rousing, Rocky-style finalé.

Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) in the Ecto-1 jumpseat in Columbia Pictures' Ghostbusters: Afterlife

The ghoulish force of nostalgia haunts Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a disappointing exercise in fan service that attempts to capture the spirit of the beloved 1984 blockbuster by aiming its proton pack directly at all the elements that made it fun and trapping them in a story designed to appeal to kids weaned on Stranger Things and all those toxic super-fans who objected to 2016’s gender-swapped iteration.

Eradicating that film from the franchise's timeline, this latest reboot comes from director Jason Reitman, who echoes his own family connection to the original (his dad, Ivan Reitman, directed it) by giving his next-generation Ghostbusters a direct connection to its Bill Murray-led team. Thus we have Carrie Coon as Callie, a cash-strapped single mother whose dire financial straits have forced her to move her two kids – awkward teen Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and awkward tween Phoebe (McKenna Grace) – into the spooky farmhouse that her estranged, recently deceased father has left her.

Though it’s no secret her father was one of the original Ghostbusters, the film is at pains to keep his precise identity a secret for much of the first act, a groaning choice given the extent to which the film tips its hat the moment it introduces us to the science-obsessed Phoebe in her off-the-peg nerd glasses. Nevertheless, the early parts of the film do have some of charm. That’s thanks mainly to the sardonic Coon, a sarcastic Paul Rudd (playing a seismologist reduced to teaching summer school to bored kids), and Grace, whose droll turn as Phoebe is quite fun even though the film does nothing to help her transcend the "science girl” cliché that movies always deploy when they want to champion gender equality in a way that won’t threaten or confuse the delicate sensibilities of ageing fanboys.

Sadly, from the moment the film re-introduces the original Ghostbusters (via YouTube clips of the first film presented as vintage news), Reitman pretty much gives up any pretence that this is an actual film in need of a plot and story of its own and starts blitzing us with artefacts, characters and who-you-gonna-callbacks that are as tiresome as that pun.

There’s something a little over-cooked about Jane Campion’s new film Power of the Dog, her first feature since 2009’s Bright Star. Though boasting a stellar cast and typically sumptuous visuals, this western-themed study in masculinity is built around a plot revelation so obvious and drawn out it dulls the impact of the more intriguing and macabre twist it ultimately builds towards.

Benedict Cumberbatch takes the lead as Phil Burbank, a slumming-it cowboy in 1925 Montana who runs a cattle ranch with his more refined brother George (Jesse Plemons). When George suddenly takes a wife in a local widower named Rose (Kirsten Dunst, brilliant), an outraged Phil devotes himself to persecuting her and her effete son (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Alas the film is so coy here in its attempt at misdirection, it blinds Campion to the tragic trope the story ends up perpetuating, something that also gives Cumberbatch’s performance the whiff of Oscar bait.

King Richard is in cinemas from 19 November; Ghostbusters: Afterlife is in cinemas from 18 November; Power of the Dog is on select release from 19 November and streams on Netflix from 1 December.

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Film reviews: King Richard | Ghostbusters: Afterlife | Power of the Dog