I don’t believe in the term “guilty pleasure”: if a film, however ropey, gives me pleasure, I’m not ashamed to concede that something about it is working. Still, the delight I take in Fifty Shades Darker (Universal, 18) pushes this attitude to its limit. The first film based on EL James’s potpourri-porn novels was surprisingly sly, pruning and embellishing the author’s lilac prose with something like irony. This follow-up, directed in gaudily gilded fashion by James Foley, falls into more of the source material’s pitfalls of whiplash plotting and inconsistent, doll-like characterisation.
Still played with sporting gumption by Dakota Johnson, S&M novice Anastasia Steele has gone from a curious but self-contained woman to a yes-no-yes-no marionette to sexual impulse – not necessarily her own. Yet the surface pleasures remain as the camera creamily wallows in yacht-rock luxury, the soundtrack curls up in the breathy cooing of Taylor Swift et al, and the two gorgeous leads amply expose their gorgeousness. It’s not profoundly sexy, it’s not built to last, but it’s swipe-right film-making of the most superficially attractive order.
On to something sincerely beautiful and heart-lifting that I can recommend without a caveat. Mike Mills’s generous, sun-warmed and achingly autobiographical coming-of-age tale 20th Century Women (Fox, 15) is a valentine to the women of various ages who raised him, some more knowingly than others, in the elastically progressive Los Angeles of the 1970s. At the centre of it, in the funkiest, most sweetly spontaneous and best performance of her career, is Annette Bening as a single mother making an effort to move with the times, but still uncertain where or when she’s allowed to stop. Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning play younger models of new femininity, empowered with attitude but no less nervous of what the future holds for them all. It’s a sharp, complicated paean to the ways in which family life can shape our politics and vice versa, made with the soft, loose weave of a mohair throw.
A heart-in-mouth dramatisation of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings (not, admittedly, a subject many British viewers might feel like facing right now), Patriots Day (Lionsgate, 15) rather athletically walks a line it really ought to trip over. You keep fearing director Peter Berg will give in to gross bad taste or grisly sentimentality as the film alternates the perspectives of perpetrators, victims and emergency services – anchored by Mark Wahlberg’s empathetic, independent-minded cop – but it remains a sensibly humane study throughout.
If you’re in an especially sober mood, the rerelease of the week is a hefty, handsome Blu-ray package of The Sorrow and the Pity (Arrow, E), Marcel Ophüls’s still-penetrating five-hour documentary on the Nazi occupation of Vichy. If the week’s heatwave has you lighter-headed, the retro, Ray Harryhausen-built fantasy of The Sinbad Trilogy (Indicator, U) remains beguilingly cheap and cheerful.
Finally, the new documentary of the week is another fresh-from-the-Sundance-shelf Netflix premiere. Building an engrossing state-of-the-media study from two battling subjects – celebrity wrestler Hulk Hogan and defunct snark website Gawker – you’d think you couldn’t care less about, Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press emerges as rather more than the sum of its parts. Its morally ambivalent examination of Hogan’s suing of Gawker over a leaked sex tape extends into a far broader essay on free speech, extending all the way to Donald Trump’s current reign of terror.
