CHRISTOPHER Morris is the Halley’s Comet of film-making, his pictures coming around at ridiculously long intervals and lighting up the sky.
His first feature film was 2010’s Four Lions, a satire about British jihadists. While his second, The Day Shall Come, covers roughly similar terrain – the madness and paranoia of the post “war on terror” world – it is a more sombre affair, as if all hope is, if not lost, then in desperately short supply. But yes, there are laughs. A long way short of the quantity Morris dealt in during his Brass Eye/The Day Today years, but laughs there are.
Billing itself as “based on a hundred true stories”, The Day Shall Come is set in Miami where Moses (Marchant Davis) is trying, and failing, to get a black power movement going. With no money, and with Moses struggling to stay on his meds, The Star of Six is unlikely to be appearing on the FBI’s radar any time soon.
Then again, it depends how much the authorities want another conviction. After an operation goes disastrously wrong under FBI section chief Andy Mudd (Denis O’Hare), ambitious agent Kendra Glack (Anna Kendrick) looks for a way to get herself back in the agency’s good books. When she sees a video of Moses preaching (non violent) revolution her interest is piqued.
The lead writer is Jesse Armstrong (Succession) who worked with Morris on Four Lions and The Thick of It with Armando Iannucci. No-one does verbal take-downs like Armstrong, and some of the funniest moments in the film are when Kendrick’s character is letting rip against her incompetent peers.
But once the farce peaks it is as if the balloon pops and all the air rushes out of the film. While I’m all for movies that come in around the 90 minute mark, this simply felt unfinished.
Farming (18)****, written and directed by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, had its premiere at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, where it won two awards, best film and best performance for the lead, Damson Idris. Another based on a true story picture, the title refers to the 1960s-1980s practice of Nigerian parents sending their children to live with white working class families in Britain. Out of this informal fostering arrangement one side got cash, the other an education until their parents could come and collect them. That was the idea, anyway.
As we see Enitan (Idris) receiving the tough love of racist foster mum Ingrid (Kate Beckinsale) before trying to find acceptance in the unlikeliest of places, Farming makes for a harrowing watch, but Idris is a star in the making, and Beckinsale is terrific as a Tilbury mommie dearest.
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