Film reviews: Selah and the Spades | Tigertail | Coffee & Kareem | Why Don’t You Just Die!

Selah and the Spades announces an impressive new directorial talent while Tigertail, another first timer’s ode to his immigrant father, fails to shine quite so brightly

Selah and the Spades, the auspicious debut from Tayarisha Poe

Selah and the Spades (15) ****

Tigertail (PG) ***

Coffee & Kareem (15) *

Why Don’t You Just Die! (18) ***

Style isn’t everything in Selah and the Spades, but it’s a big reason this pleasingly strange first feature from photographer-turned-filmmaker Tayarisha Poe stands out as much as it does. Set in an elite American prep school ruled by five underground “factions” all catering to the students’ myriad vices, the film – which Poe adapted from an online multimedia project she created over several years – subverts the standard Mean Girls rites-of-passage tropes with a seriousness of purpose more akin to Brick, Rian Johnson’s high school-set detective noir from 2005. Like the kids in that film, the multiracial student body of Haldwell private school talk with a kind of hard-boiled lyricism that can sound contrived and inauthentic coming from mouths so young – until you realise it’s a way for Poe to reflect the insularity of a world in which the very real pressures of adulthood are already being felt by characters too mired in the moment to see beyond it.

Rather than Raymond Chandler thrillers, though, Poe’s titular protagonist, Selah Summers (Lovie Simone), is more like a teenage riff on The Wire’s Stringer Bell. She may share a surname with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (a deliberate reference), but as her school’s cool-headed supplier of party drugs and tequila shots, she’s all business, running her crew, the Spades, with the ruthlessness of a gangster. That the primary concern of the Spades – and the other factions that secretly rule the school – happens to be the forthcoming prom in no way detracts from the gravity of what’s at stake.

A frequently alluded-to incident with a never-seen student has already revealed a weakness in Selah’s operation and, as the blood-sniffing heads of the other factions threaten to make a power play, the pressure her own pathological obsession with perfection is putting on her is making her feel more vulnerable than she’d like. Rooted in her icy relationship with her mother, this feeling is intensified as she seeks out a successor in the form of a newly arrived sophomore student called Paloma (Celeste O’Connor), a budding photographer whose quiet, watchful savviness becomes an immediate threat to Selah’s own supremacy.

Poe’s meticulous scene compositions, her elliptical treatment of violence and her inspired use of music (diegetic R&B cuts fused with a score that veers from dreamy synth-pop to discordant jazz) all help put us in the headspace of a tunnel-visioned protagonist who’s both poised and poisonous. Aided by a great lead performance from newcomer Simone, this is an auspicious debut.

As one of the writers, directors and co-creators of Aziz Ansari’s excellent Netflix show Master of None, Taiwanese-American filmmaker Alan Yang has proven himself an incisive comic chronicler of modern American life (he also has credits on Parks and Recreation and The Good Place). For his first film, Tigertail, though, he’s opted to explore the Asian-American immigrant experience in the sombre register of a well-meaning, somewhat generic indie movie about compromised love and intergenerational conflict.

Based loosely on his own father’s story, the film stars The Farewell’s Tzi Ma as Pin-Jui, a first-generation Taiwanese immigrant living an emotionally closed-off life in New York, where he struggles to communicate with his high-flier daughter Angela (Kristine Cho). The recent death of his beloved mother has caused him to reminiscence about his regret-filled past and as the film jumps back-and-forth between the present day scenes and his life as a vibrant young man in Taiwan who dreamed of moving to America, we see how the pain caused by the sacrifices he made to make those dreams a reality hasn’t diminished with time.

Though ultimately the film is too muted and predictable to make the inevitable emotional redemption really hit home, it’s still well acted, with a script full of astute observations that tap into the everyday complexities involved in trying to making a new life for oneself in another country far from home.

As an inept white cop struggling to bond with the obnoxious streetwise kid of his black girlfriend, Ed Helms shouts and screams a lot in Coffee & Kareem, an explosion-heavy action comedy of the sort that ran its course in the mid-to-late 1990s. Unfortunately, Helms’s schtick is painfully unfunny, much like that of his pint-sized co-star Terrence Little Gardenhigh, whose character’s casual homophobia and dropping of f-bombs isn’t cute just because he’s supposed to be 12, something director Michael Dowse (Stuber) might have done well to remember. Taraji P Henson and Betty Gilpin co-star.

For those who like their entertainment drenched in inventively bloody violence, Russian black comedy Why Don’t You Just Die! serves up an endless stream of slapstick torture porn. It centres on young gun-for-hire, Matvei (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), who shows up at the apartment of a corrupt cop intent on killing him, but soon finds himself on the receiving end of his target’s ruthless training and extreme interrogation techniques. What follows in Kirill Sokolov’s directorial debut is a lurid but inventively executed tale of familial and professional mistrust as flashbacks fill us in on who these men are, while introducing us to the associates who have brought them together. For those with strong stomachs there are a few belly laughs to be had. ■

Selah and the Spades is available on Amazon Prime now, Tigertail and Coffee & Kareem are streaming on Netflix now, Why Don’t You Just Die! is available to download on most VOD platforms from 20 April.