Film reviews: Misbehaviour | Calm With Horses | My Spy | Bacurau

Misbehaviour starts out as a comedy about the protests at the 1970 Miss World pageant but grows into a thoughtful examination of the issues involved, while Dave Bautista is the latest action star to make a buddy movie with a child
Misbehaviour: after a shaky start, director Philippa Lowthorpe and screenwriters Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe find an interesting and nuanced storyMisbehaviour: after a shaky start, director Philippa Lowthorpe and screenwriters Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe find an interesting and nuanced story
Misbehaviour: after a shaky start, director Philippa Lowthorpe and screenwriters Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe find an interesting and nuanced story

Misbehaviour (12A) ***


Calm With Horses (15) **


My Spy (12A) **


Bacurau (18) ***



Another week, another jaunty British comedy based on true events... Hot on the heels of Military Wives comes Misbehaviour, a light-hearted look at the bizarre, retrograde Miss World pageant of 1970, which was disrupted live on air by feminist protestors. Not to conflate the two movies just because they focus on women, but there is something dispiriting about the way both seem content to let this simple fact do the heavy lifting instead of trying to subvert the creaky old tropes of British mainstream cinema.

The good news about Misbehaviour, though, is that after a shaky start, director Philippa Lowthorpe and screenwriters Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe gradually find a much more interesting and nuanced story to tell as the Miss World competition gets underway and they focus on the contestants caught in the eye of the storm. Before that, however, there are some frustratingly rote scenes to get through as the film dramatises the shenanigans involved in getting Bob Hope (played by Greg Kinnear) on board while also attempting to flesh out the burgeoning friendship between Keira Knightley’s Sally Alexander and Jessie Buckley’s Jo Robinson, the Women’s Liberation Front activists who spearheaded the protest.

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Frustratingly only Knightley – playing a mature student with a young daughter and a naive belief that she’ll be respected for her intelligence – has been given much of a character to play; as the already radical Robinson, Buckley’s role is so thinly conceived she might as well be a spray-painted slogan on a bus stop. But with the arrival of the contestants in London, Lowthorpe’s film shifts gears, letting the wacky ironising subside in order to broaden the film’s scope to explore the story from the complex and conflicted perspectives of the women being objectified. It’s the film’s smartest move, not least because of Gugu Mbatha Raw’s calm, dignified performance as Ms Granada representative Jennifer Hosten, who saw the event as an opportunity to break down the racial barriers holding her back.


Relentlessly bleak Irish crime drama Calm with Horses offers very little that hasn’t been seen before in countless films about troubled young men caught in inescapable cycles of violence. Musician-turned-actor Cosmo Jarvis takes the cliché-ridden lead as a former boxer and one-time contender called Arm who’s pledged his loyalty to the Deevers, a local crime family who’ve given him a job as an enforcer. Alas, his devotion is complicated by the increasing sense of duty he feels towards both his young autistic son, Jack (Kiljan Moroney) and his disapproving ex, Ursula (Niamh Algar), who needs money to relocate to a better area with a specialist school more suited to their boy’s many needs. In his punch-drunk confusion about what it means to be a real man, Arm soon incurs the wrath of the Deevers after reneging on a job that his low-life cohort Dympna (Barry Keoghan) has repeatedly assured the family has been dealt with. Though there are some tender scenes between Arm and Jack and Ursula that offset all the macho posturing, the film falls into the trap of equating brutality with gravitas and the end result oscillates between bogus sentimentality and self-serious pomp, with the normally excellent Keoghan especially tiresome playing a character that’s little more than a third-rate riff on De Niro in Mean Streets.


At some point every wannabe Schwarzenegger feels the need to do their Kindergarten Cop. Vin Diesel attempted it with The Pacifier, Dwayne Johnson tried it with The Game Plan (and again with The Tooth Fairy) and John Cena recently made the ultra-dire Playing with Fire. Now it’s the turn of Guardians of the Galaxy’s Dave Bautista. Following the tried, tested, still unfunny route of pairing a hulking action star with a cute child, My Spy casts Bautista as JJ, a reckless CIA agent demoted to surveilling single mother Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henry) and her nine-year-old daughter Sophie (Chloe Coleman) as part of a criminal investigation into the arms-dealing brother of Sophie’s late father. Terrible at his job, JJ is soon outsmarted by lonely, precocious Sophie, who blackmails him into spending time with her while also trying to set him up with her mother. It’s pretty weak stuff, though it does raise the odd smile as Sophie forces him to indulge her action movie fantasies. As JJ’s bafflingly awestruck tech-support, Kristen Schaal also provides the odd chuckle.

Bacurau sees Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho move from the subtle political satire of arthouse favourites Neighbouring Sounds and Aquarius to the full-tilt, in-your-face, sledgehammer messaging of an exploitation movie. Co-directing with his former production designer Juliano Dornelles, they’ve concocted an unashamedly trippy and trashy near-future dystopian horror, one that follows the inhabitants of the eponymous village as they take a stand against a group of rich foreigners (mostly American, mostly white) who have paid a lot of money to hunt them to death. As a parable of modern-day colonialism, corruption, race relations and wealth inequality the film doesn’t require much explanation – and nor does it hide its debt to/reverence for the work John Carpenter (aside from the general premise, there are blatant soundtrack nods and even a little tribute to a notorious shock moment from Assault on Precinct 13). Unfortunately it’s also over-long, unevenly paced, shakily acted in places (particularly the American cast) and hardly original. Still, the bloody finale does have a certain Grand Guignol panache. ■

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