Film reviews: Parallel Mothers | Flag Day | Amulet

Parallel Mothers (15) ****

Flag Day (15) ***

Amulet (15) **

Sing 2 (U) ***

Pedro Almodóvar loves stories about lives intersecting in strange ways and his new film, Parallel Mothers, is one of his most intriguing to date. It stars frequent muse Penélope Cruz as Janis, a 40-year-old photographer who befriends 17-year-old Ana (Milena Smit) when both give birth within hours of each other in the same hospital. Both are single mothers and both vow to keep in touch, even though the demands of early parenthood don’t initially leave much room for a budding friendship.

Janis, for instance, has to juggle her career while raising a baby daughter and dealing with the baby’s father’s suspicions that he’s not her real dad. And Ana is struggling to cope now that her own divorced mother has decided to pursue her career as an actress instead of helping her raise her little girl. As ever, Almodovar revels in the melodrama domesticity can evoke and when these two women finally reconnect months later, tragedy and deception bind them together – which is about as much as can be revealed without spoiling the story’s many twists, as it takes a darker turn to explore how the ghosts of the past need to be confronted in order to create a viable future.

That’s a common Almodóvar theme, but here he expands it into an examination of Spain’s past by setting the film against the backdrop of a campaign to excavate a mass grave outside Janis's childhood village that dates back to the Spanish Civil War. As the film opens we learn that Janis’s grandfather was among the victims buried there and it’s this connection that transforms her life: the future father of her child is a forensic archaeologist whom she’s been hired to photograph; when she asks for his help, they promptly fall for each other, though the resulting pregnancy brings their nascent relationship to a halt when he refuses to leave his cancer-stricken wife (again, the melodrama).

Sean Penn and Dylan Penn in Flag Day PIC: Vertigo Releasing

But Almodóvar’s great skill lies in his ability to weave such a weighty historical story into a such an absorbing, soap-opera-like tale of two women finding each other – something brilliantly aided by Cruz and Smit, whose shared ability to respond to the shifting dynamics of their characters’ relationship generates plenty of tension as their secrets are gradually laid bare.

Flag Day, the latest film from Sean Penn, sees the actor-turned-filmmaker direct himself alongside real-life daughter Dylan Penn in a film that comes on like a crime thriller but soon reveals itself to be a family drama about a young woman’s complex relationship with her conman father. Though there are shades of Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon in the story and the casting, the film itself is based on a memoir by American journalist Jennifer Vogel, whose father (played by Penn) was a notorious counterfeiter who died while being pursued by the FBI in a high speed chase – a dramatic demise that Penn uses to bookend the film.

Mostly, though, Flag Day centres on the impact his narcissistic need for approval had on Jennifer, who hero-worshipped him from a young age, but struggled to reconcile her childhood love of him with her increasing awareness of his delusional self-regard. As the grown-up Jennifer, Dylan Penn handles the dramatic fireworks well, holding her own against her dad, whose ability to drill down into the very Willy Loman-esque self-pity underpinning his character’s pathetic efforts to justify his criminality is the film's strongest element. Whatever frisson this familial casting coup gives Flag Day, though, isn’t quite enough to disguise the hackneyed way the story sometimes plays out, or the grandiose way Penn uses elliptical editing, Terrence Malick-style camera work and ornate voice-over to make it seem more profound than it really is.

The final 10 minutes of Romola Garai’s directorial debut, Amulet, offer such an entertainingly outré twist on demonic horror cinema that it’s something of a shame the preceding hour-and-a-half is such a bore. Mixing horror clichés with Instagram-ready visuals and a vague #MeToo-themed story involving a refugee running from his past in a never-named war zone (he’s played by God’s Own Country’s Alex Secareanu), the film isn’t so much a slow-burn horror as a drearily executed one, with sometimes strikingly composed individual scenes failing to generate much in the way of atmosphere or tension.

Imelda Staunton’s occasional presence as a not-quite-what-she-seems nun injects the film with the same campy menace gleefully embraced in the finale, but for the most part this is just another scare-free genre film jumping on the “elevated horror” bandwagon.

Despite casting Bono as the voice of a reclusive rock-star lion, animated jukebox musical Sing 2 is a slightly more bearable kid’s film than its anaemic predecessor. Returning director Garth Jennings opts for a let’s-put-on-another-show plot by giving the film’s troupe of anthropomorphic talent show rejects (led by Matthew McConaughey’s koala impresario Buster Moon) a chance to prove themselves on a bigger stage. Inevitably this results in a U2-heavy sing-along involving the aforementioned Bono-voiced lion, but Jennings throws in some left-field music cuts too – Prince, Mercury Rev, Billie Eilish – and the poppy animation and frantic pacing keeps things moving along. Scarlett Johansson and Reese Witherspoon are among the voice cast.

Parallel Mothers, Amulet and Sing 2 are in cinemas from 28 January; Flag Day is on selected release and on digital from 28 January.

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Film reviews: Parallel Mothers | Flag Day | Amulet | Sing 2