Weekly visions - week 35, 2026

Dead Again, directed by Kenneth Branagh, written by Scott Frank, US, 1991 - ⭐⭐ (down from ⭐⭐⭐)

Back in 1996 I rediscovered cinema as a social experience, starting the passion that brought me several friends, at least one very important relationship, two websites, not to mention this series of weekly posts, 30 years later.

The film that started it all was not this one, but Branagh’s In the Bleak Midwinter, a delightful (at least in my recollection) comedy about an amateur theatre company preparing their stage version of Hamlet. Unfortunately that’s one of many films by the same director lacking an easy-to-find Blu-ray release, and impossible to rewatch outside the UK/US.

Anyway, around the time of the theatrical release of Midwinter, the Italian TV aired Branagh’s previous work, which I liked but never revisited until now, when it’s become available on Netflix.

Did I have different taste back then? Was I enraptured by a British filmmaker that had not yet sold out to franchises?

This time it felt different. The story of a charming Los Angeles detective helping an amnesiac woman find her identity, only to find the two of them might have had a lethal connection in a past life, was artificial and pompous, much like the black and white treatment of scenes set decades before the main story.

What is clearly intended to be a riff on Hitchcockian tales of women living twice and the shadow cast by past wives ends up being a verbose affair with an ending that may feel fun, or nonsensical, depending on your mood of the day.
For a film that shows events taking place in two timelines, the ’tell’ component is dominant, with a lot of dialogue trying to explain the convoluted events.

Branagh himself and the wonderful Emma Thompson (at the time, probably the most admired couple in British cinema) take dual roles, with the director apparently wanting to contrast his serious ’next Olivier’ image with a funnier, charming one (including ‘driving on the wrong side of the road’, i.e. putting on an American accent, in a performance that reminded me a lot of Joshua Jackson).

Andy Garcia does his charming-but-shady part, Branagh’s fellow shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi plays an antiques dealer/hypnotist (yep), Fassbinder’s muse Hannah Schygulla is the Mrs. Danvers of the situation, Wayne Knight has a slightly more rewarding role than usual. I didn’t pay too much attention to the opening credits so I was surprised when none other than Robin Williams appeared in the role of a disgraced psychiatrist with very bad opinions.
Branagh’s future Hogwarts colleague Miriam Margolyes briefly appears, and even future Tuco Salamanca (Raymond Cruz) is in a scene.

Screenwriter Scott Frank will go on to write Out of Sight and co-author Minority Report, The Wolverine and Logan.

Get Away, directed by Steffen Haars, written by Nick Frost, Finland/United Kingdom, 2024 - ⭐½

In my imagination, Dutch director Haars took umbrage at Speak No Evil’s depiction of his fellow countrypeople by Danish director Christian Tafdrup, and decided to exact revenge on Scandinavia by helming this film, which puts an isolated Swedish community in a very bad light.
Or maybe screenwriter Nick Frost - at his first solo script - had something to say about his (‘half-Swedish’, according to Wikipedia) ex-wife.

If a story about a group of English-speaking people travelling to Sweden to join a traditional summer celebration sounds a bit familiar, please rest assured that this script by Nick Frost - at his first solo screenwriting effort - goes in a totally different direction from Midsommar. Unfortunately, it’s a bad direction, totally squandering its borrowed folk horror premise in a way that I don’t even want to get into.

Let’s just say that, if I hadn’t taken a break from watching the film about half an hour before the end, my brain wouldn’t have noticed a couple of clues and prepared me for the ending, and I could have thrown my iPad out of the balcony at the place I was staying.
So, let’s look at the positives: I lost 86 minutes of my life but I saved a few hundred euros.

Also, Aisling Bea’s delivery of the line ‘Don’t call daddy an egg!’ (Daddy being Frost himself) made me laugh, so maybe I only lost 85 minutes of my life.

By the way, the film was produced and shot in Finland and all the ‘Swedish’ people portrayed in the film are, as far as I could ascertain, played by Finnish actors. There must be some kind of rivalry there. Still, stronger together, no matter the references to Brexit.

Afraid, written and directed by Chris Weitz, US, 2024 - ⭐⭐

The director of About a Boy, and writer of Kenneth Branagh’s take on Cinderella, debuts in the horror genre (or should we count Twilight: New Moon? I honestly don’t know) with the story of an Artificial Intelligence ‘going rogue’, as we would say today, at the expense of a brave family led by John Cho and Katherine Waterston (who is, honestly, too good for this film).

You can guess pretty much anything about this film, so there’s no need for either me or you to spend too much time on it. I hope David Dastmalchian and Keith Carradine got a good paycheck.

Tangled, directed by Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, written by Dan Fogelman, based on the traditional fairy tale Rapunzel/Petrosinella, US, 2010 - ⭐⭐⭐½

I have big gaps in my Disney Animation knowledge, so, when I travel, I have options to choose from - instead of horrors - if I want to avoid scaring any young person that might walk past my seat by.
Having caught up with Frozen a few weeks ago, I tried the previous adjectival title, one that definitely doesn’t have as many fans or merchandising tied to it.

There were not a lot of surprises: even with a very vague knowledge of the Rapunzel story, one knows to expect a long-haired princess held prisoner in a tower, an evil ‘stepmother’ (as usual, old age is something horrible, kids), a charming guy disrupting the status quo, a mascot/sidekick animal or two. The usual story beats.
Alan Menken’s songs were in my opinion highly forgettable and quickly forgotten. Even the funniest scene, in the Snuggly Duckling inn, is very predictable from the moment our characters enter the pub.

But still I had more fun than I had foreseen, and the frying pan gag somehow never got old.
I hear great praise for Pascal the chameleon (oddly doing only occasional camouflaging), but canine-behaving horse Maximus is my favourite guy here.

It seems that, with this film, I have watched the entire directorial career of Disney animator-turned-co-director Byron Howard (Bolt/Encanto/the Zootopias), while it took 16 years for co-director Nathan Greno to follow up with another film (Skydance’s Swapped, on Netflix). The screenplay is by Crazy, Stupid, Love writer Dan Fogelman, also co-author of Cars and Bolt.