I first saw Hidden Figures (Fox, PG) alone in a screening room on the morning after Donald Trump’s election victory, in a mood that would swiftly kill the pleasures of many an innocent, well-meaning movie. In this case, however, it proved perversely perfect timing: Theodore Melfi’s rousing, grand-hearted story of the black female Nasa mathematicians who defied civil rights-era workplace prejudice to advance the space race was, corny as it sounds, just the direct, hopeful fight-the-power story my bruised liberal heart needed that day. A few months later, with real-world matters no brighter, it’s still a healing tonic. Its politics aren’t especially subversive, while cinematically, it follows the Oscar-approved based-on-a-true-story formula to a cosy T. But those mainstream trappings work in its favour: long buried in the margins of history, this is a story that deserves to be told in big, broad, all-welcome fashion. Good-humoured, right-on and acted with soulful conviction, it’s the most feelgood film this feel-bad moment could possibly have summoned.
It’s not quite as feel-deep an experience, however, as French director Katell Quillévéré’s rapturous, shattering Heal the Living (Curzon, 15), which had already thoroughly milked my tear ducts by the time it landed the killer blow of playing David Bowie’s Five Years over the closing credits. On paper, this adaptation of Maylis de Kerangal’s bestseller (Mend the Living) sounds ickily schematic, as it interweaves the narratives of strangers unwittingly connected by a teenager’s death and subsequent organ transplant. In practice, illuminated as it is by Quillévéré’s vivid, athletic command of image and sound, it’s quite sublime: an imaginative but elemental opera of feeling, free of singing but scored with glimmering beauty by Alexandre Desplat, and probing the toughest truths of what it takes to be, and stay, alive. Think the very best episodes of ER, elevated to the heavens.
The murkiest, most bilious depths of hospital hell, on the other hand, are gleefully explored in A Cure for Wellness (Fox, 18), a grotesquely absurd, indulgent and wholly thrilling wallow in lunatic gothic horror from Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski that has to be the year’s most extravagantly demented big studio film. Beginning as a less poised, more fun riff on Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and ending somewhere north of Ken Russell’s The Devils, this 150-minute freakout leads Dane DeHaan’s disaffected Wall Street suit through a veritable obstacle course of lurid spookhouse tricks, snaking sexual desires and surprise eel attacks – all in an attempt to retrieve a colleague from a Swiss health spa run by a preening Jason Isaacs. Trace in it a satire of contemporary wellness culture if you will, but don’t let that spoil the stupid fun of it all.
I laughed with Verbinski’s film more than I did while watching The Hippopotamus (Network, 15), which also takes a winding, eccentric tour through a bizarre rural retreat – though this farcical adaptation of Stephen Fry’s novel works so hard for its wackiness that I found it more exhausting than anything else. File it in the “respectable British misfires” column alongside Trespass Against Us (Lionsgate, 15), an alternately dour and fevered underworld drama set in the under-explored traveller community that is at once energised and slightly hobbled by the star wattage of Michael Fassbender as a reluctant, family-reared criminal – you can’t take your eyes off him, but you never quite believe him in this milieu either.
On the classic front, the UK branch of the Criterion Collection scores a real cinephile coup with a wonderfully restored rerelease of Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (Sony, 15) – first released in 1991, hauled out only on special occasions since, and still among the most formally and emotionally expansive experiences in Chinese-language cinema. Weighing in at nearly four hours, it takes a Taiwanese teenager’s desperately sad, painstakingly scrutinised criminal downfall as the through line for a poetic, discursive meditation on a country’s own tricky coming of age.
Finally, the week’s most entertaining documentary is an iTunes exclusive worth hunting out. A riotous rock doc with a sly political punchline, Liberation Day (Dogwoof, E) tracks the inevitable friction resulting from an unaccountable cultural meeting, when a Slovenian art-metal band are somehow enlisted to play North Korea’s first ever international concert. It’s like a Christopher Guest scenario brought strangely and rather touchingly to life.
