Film reviews: A Rainy Day in New York | Days of the Bagnold Summer | The High Note | Echo in the Canyon | Guest of Honour

Woody Allen’s romcom A Rainy Day in New York is as dated and clunky as Simon Bird’s coming-of-age story Days of the Bagnold Summer is sweet, funny and unsentimental, writes Alistair Harkness

Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning in A Rainy Day in New York

A Rainy Day in New York (12A) **

Days of the Bagnold Summer (N/A) ****

The High Note (12A) **

Echo in the Canyon (12A) ***

Guest of Honour (N/A) **

Like a lot of late-period Woody Allen films, A Rainy Day in New York (which has been sitting on a shelf since Amazon Studios reneged on its production deal with the scandal-plagued filmmaker) is a movie that stumbles upon an interesting idea almost in spite of itself. Starring Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning, the film, which is set in contemporary New York, sees them play wealthy young students whose obsession with the old-timey aspects of the city’s history hints at a familiar Allen trope – the disparity between real life and a nostalgic desire to be borne ceaselessly into a past that only ever existed in fictional representations of it. Unfortunately, rather than offering any skilful invocation of this F Scott Fitzgerald-inspired theme, Allen (who has literally named Chalamet’s character “Gatsby”) is content for it to be a subtextual flourish in what otherwise plays as a very straight-up, very clunky, and very dated and annoying romantic comedy.

It doesn’t help that Chalamet and Fanning fall into the respective traps of doing terribly exaggerated impersonations of Allen at his most nebbish and Diane Keaton at her ditziest (they both look like they’re playing dress-up in a school play), or that Allen creates implausible scenarios in order to test the efficacy of their relationship. Fanning’s character, Ashleigh, for instance, is a student journalist who, over the course of 24 hours, gets swept up in a series of romantic encounters while on an assignment to interview a famous filmmaker (in reality, she’d be lucky to get a ten-minute roundtable interview). This in turn sends the phoney hating Gatsby (Allen cribs liberally from Salinger as well as Fitzgerald) on a jealousy-fuelled odyssey of his own, one that reacquaints him with Chan (Selena Gomez), the younger sister of a former girlfriend who’s clearly more suited to his romanticised worldview. Aside from Liev Schreiber (cast here as the aforementioned filmmaker), Gomez is actually the only cast member who seems able to transcend the limitations of Allen’s hodgepodge script and connect with the melancholic undercurrent so beautifully evoked by legendary cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s gorgeous shots of the titular rain-lashed city.

A paean to the slightly naff, drawn-out quality of the British summer school holidays, Days of the Bagnold Summer marks the directorial debut of The Inbetweeners star Simon Bird, who proves just as good at telling a story about a feckless teen as he was at playing one. Said teen is Daniel (Earl Cave), a sullen, long-haired, metal-loving goth whose plan to spend the summer with his newly married father in Florida is scuppered by the premature arrival of his pregnant step-mother’s new baby. Forced instead to spend the holidays at home, he retreats into a self-pitying spiral of monosyllabic misery that tests the patience of his long-suffering mum (Monica Dolan – brilliant), whose own attempts to have a life of her own have long since stalled. None of which sounds particularly enthralling, but what follows is a very sweet, funny and unsentimental coming-of-age story – one soundtracked by Belle & Sebastian – that captures in a really lovely way the rarely portrayed awkwardness of an inarticulate teenage boy learning to appreciate his mum for who she is.

The High Note sees director Nisha Ganatra follow up last year’s frustratingly flat Mindy Kaling/Emma Thompson comedy Late Night with an even more timid female empowerment movie. Set against the backdrop of the LA music scene, it stars Dakota Johnson as Maggie, a music fan hoping her three-year tenure as the harassed assistant to soul singing legend Grace Davis (Tracee Ellis Ross) will catalyse her own career as a producer. Sadly, what follows is pretty banal stuff, credible neither as a music industry drama nor a workplace comedy à la The Devil Wears Prada. A romantic subplot in which Maggie gets involved with a talented singer (Kelvin Harrison Jr) is also torpedoed by a jaw-droppingly silly last-minute twist.

LA’s rich history as a music hub is also at the heart of Echo in the Canyon, former Capitol Record CEO turned director Andrew Slater’s nostalgic documentary about the origins of the Laurel Canyon music scene – so named for the wooded LA neighbourhood that became a creative Mecca for bands such as The Byrds, The Mamas and Papas, Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills and Nash. Fronted by musician Jakob “Son of Bob” Dylan and pegged to a 50th anniversary gig and album Slater and Dylan put together to celebrate the genesis of the “California sound,” the film gathers together many of the scene’s progenitors to wax lyrical about the creative melting pot that made it unique. Though the contemporary concert footage of Dylan performing the defining songs of the era with the likes of Beck, Cat Power and Norah Jones is pretty dull, Dylan’s interviews with the luminaries of his father’s generation are relaxed enough to get everyone talking candidly.

A food inspector (David Thewlis) and his imprisoned daughter (Laysla De Oliveira) try to make sense of each other in Guest of Honour, a bizarre, absurdly plotted melodrama about abuses of power and the way guilt resonates down the years. Written and directed by Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan, the film uses multiple flashbacks and unreliable narration to tell the protagonists’ interrelated stories, but the odd centrality of a pet bunny called Benjamin to the plot becomes indicative of the many rabbit holes Egoyan seems intent on plunging us down without revealing anything of any real consequence. Luke Wilson co-stars. ■

A Rainy Day in New York, Days of the Bagnold Summer, The High Note and Echo in the Canyon are available to stream digitally on all major platforms. Guest of Honour is available via Curzon Home Cinema

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