Florence Foster Jenkins, Knight of Cups, Evolution The Film Review

Hello and welcome to The Film Review on BBC News.

To take us through this week's cinema releases is Mark Kermode.

A very mixed bag this week. We have Florence Foster Jenkins with Meryl

Streep. Knight of Cups, the new movie by Terrence Malick. And

evolution, one of the strangest films I have seen in many a year.

And you have seen a few. Let's start with Meryl Streep. What is not to

like? Is it worth going to see it just for her? Well yes, but there is

so much more. It is based on true story of a New York socialite,

patron of the arts, somebody who loved opera. But she could not hear

her own singing voice. She loved to sing opera, but she was way off the

note. She was surrounded by people who told her she was fabulous, for

reasons both emotional and financial. They told her she sounded

wonderful. This was great until she decided she wanted to sing on stage

at Carnegie Hall. Then it became much harder to keep a lid on the

naysayers. Here is a clip of her doing her vocal lessons, getting

Maestro, it is true a lot of singers my age are

on a decline, but I seem to get better and better.

You were laughing all the way through that. But I think we are

laughing with her and not at her and that is crucial. Cosme McMoon is on

the piano and hearing her for the first time and he suddenly realises

what he has to do. There have been several stage plays and there was a

recent French film which won several awards. In this case Stephen Frears

directed in a way which is often funnier, but I think crucially it is

affectionate. Hugh Grant plays St Clair Bayfield, her partner and

manager, who is basically the person who constructs this world around her

in which she is able to believe in the sound of her own voice. The film

is generous not only to her, but also to him. You do believe he

actually does love her. He does want the very best for her. The film

walks a very fine line between very comedic, and it is funny, but also

having a real sense of pathos. It is a film in the end which turned the

central character into a heroic figure. Meryl Streep gives Florence

Foster is Jenkins real strength, somebody who believes in the

transformative power of music, regardless of which notes she is

hitting. During the course of the movie you come to love her as much

as the film-makers do. You see her as somebody who you want to applaud

and who is basically good-hearted. That is Florence Foster Jenkins.

Knight of Cups, can you explain the title? Tarot cards and the story of

looking for the Pearl and drinking from the cup and forgetting. This is

Terrence Malick. He is an extraordinary film-maker and it is a

stellar cast with Christian Bale, Christian Bale, who plays a creative

type who is wandering through a landscape of fabulous wealth and

extraordinary privilege and complaining about how it is that his

life has gone wrong. The film drifts in and out of focus. It reminded me

of the most expensive advert for Infinity by Calvin Klein that I have

ever seen. There is more than a hint of truth in that assessment. It is a

shame because it is a film that falls over into terrible indulgence.

You do not end up sympathising or engaging with the characters. You

end up thinking, which part of this am I meant to care about? Terrence

Malick is a brilliant film-maker, but this is a film that has lost its

way and lost its audience. I ended up being bored and that is the worst

possible thing. How do somebody like Cate Blanchett get involved in it?

It is a film which is finding its way and is trying to find a new

language, it is trying. It is very trying. Evolution on the other hand,

I was trying from what I have read to understand the story. I am not

clear whether there is a coherent one. There is. It is surrealist. It

is set on a fantastical island which appears to be peopled by young boys

and strangely detached women. We begin with a sequence of a young boy

swimming in the sea. He thinks he sees something, he rushes out of the

sea and Russia is home to tell stories of having seen a dead boy

and a starfish. Here is a clip. From there the film becomes stranger

and stranger. The boy is fed what looks like worms in spinach, the

woman meet on the beach at night to engage in some strange Congress.

There was something of the tone of Never Let Me Go which was

heartbreaking and strange. It also reminded me of the early films of

David Cronenberg, films that are referred to as body horror films,

films in which you feel that what they are doing is getting towards

some kind of emotional trick even though you do not understand the

narrative. But it is a film that has really stayed with me. In the few

days after I saw it, some really wanting, visual images. I was

sifting through it trying to find out what it may or may not mean, but

I did not want to solve its puzzle. It is bewildering, strange, baffling

and magical and often a very disturbing tale. I was really moved

by it because I did not know where it was going and I found it really

arresting and really haunting and those I2 things as a condiment. Take

a minute to talk about what is the best thing to see at the moment. I

know you feel it is something that I want to see and plan to see, but I

am anxious. This is son of soul and it is set in Auschwitz in 1944. From

the subject matter you know it will be a difficult film. I think it is

an extraordinary piece of work. It manages to find exactly the right

visual register to talk about this incredibly difficult subject. It is

a film in which watching it is an overpowering and overwhelming

experience. Indeed it ought to be. It is a film in which the style and

the substance are actually perfectly matched. My own feeling was that it

was made with real moral integrity. It was a film that absolutely wanted

to find the right way of talking about the subject. I have spoken to

many people who have seen it and feel exactly the same, it is an

overpowering, overwhelming experience, and that is as it should

be. If people want to stay in, let's talk about what might be... This is

on DVD and it is not the film you think it might be. It is the story

of a mother and child trapped in a room, which sounds like horror

story. But it is something completely different. It is a film

about the love between a mother and a child and it has wonderful music

and a superb central cast. It manages to approach what sounds like

an utterly horrible subject matter in a way that is not like that at

all. It is one of my favourite films over the last few years. You know

that the only thing it is? It is not that film. It is a difficult watch

as women, but it has rewards as well and brie lies in one lots of for it.

And rightly so because it is extraordinary. I think the director

has done a brilliant job of doing it and he has judged it just right. As

ever, many thanks. A quick reminder: You'll

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