THE New Year opens for Moviola in our area with two films which are distinguished by the remarkable veteran actors starring in them – Thelma and The Critic.

Thelma is the most requested film of the month, with more than 30 screenings across our region. Amazingly, it is the first action movie leading role for its 95-year old leading lady. June Squibb began her career in the musical Gypsy on Broadway in 1959 and has been in many of the great films of the past four decades, including The Age of Innocence (1993), About Schmidt (2002) and Far from Heaven (2002). For her role in Alexander Payne’s multi-Oscar-nominated 2013 film Nebraska (2013), she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Film was in her blood. She was born in Vandalia, Illinois, in November 1929, and her mother, JoyBelle, was a silent film pianist. She was once asked about ageism in show business and replied: “Well, it’s like anything else. I always feel, rules are meant to be broken.”

In Thelma, written, directed and edited by Josh Margolin, she plays a woman who falls victim to a phone scam and sets out to find the perpetrators with the help of her grandson (Fred Hechinger) and friend (Richard Roundtree, in his final role). Clark Gregg, Parker Posey and Malcolm McDowell also star.

You can see Thelma at Beaminster (Public Hall), Hawkchurch, Kingsbury Episcopi, Bransgore, Charlton Marshall, Codford (Woolstore Theatre), Donhead St Mary, Nether Wallop, Pewsey (Bouverie Hall), Trent, Hanging Langford, Watchet (cinema), Fawley, Wookey Hole, Odcombe, Shrewton, Chilthorne Domer, Winsford, Cheddon & West Monkton, Edington (Somerset), Sixpenny Handley, Winterslow, Calne, Castle Cary (Caryford community hall), Motcombe, Ringwood (Greyfriars) 2.30, Bishopstone (Salisbury) and Westbury-sub-Mendip.

 

For dates and venues see the Arts Diary, and for more on this month’s Moviola films, visit www.moviola.org

Ian McKellen, at 85 almost a spring chicken compared to June Squibb, stars in The Critic, a period thriller film directed by Anand Tucker and written by Patrick Marber, based on the 2015 novel Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn. The A list casts also includes Gemma Arterton, Mark Strong, Ben Barnes, Alfred Enoch, Romola Garai and Lesley Manville.

In 1934 London, Jimmy Erskine (Ian McKellen) is the film critic for The Daily Chronicle, a tabloid newspaper now owned and run by Viscount David Brooke (Mark Strong) after the death of his father. Erskine delights in writing vitriolic reviews of plays that he believes fall short of his high standards, despite requests from Brooke to tone it down.

After Erskine and his secretary and lover Tom Turner (Alfred Enoch) are arrested for homosexuality, Brooke dismisses him, along with other older employees. Erskine plots his revenge by persuading Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), a young actress, to enter a Faustian plot whereby she will seduce Brooke, who is already in love with her, in return for future glowing reviews.

The film had mixed reviews, but it’s McKellen and he is ALWAYS worth watching! You can see this melodrama at Yetminster (Jubilee hall), Kingston St Mary, Frogham, Halstock, West Lydford, Watchet (cinema), Netherbury, East Knoyle, Norton St Philip and West Camel.

A serious and thought-provoking film, Freud’s Last Session, has screenings at Wootton Bassett (RWB Academy) and South Petherton (David Hall). This 2023 drama stars Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud and Matthew Goode as the theologian, academic and novelist CS Lewis, famously the author of the Narnia chronicles. It is based on the stage play of the same name by Mark St Germain, which itself is based upon the book The Question of God, by Armand Nicholi.

It focuses on a fictional meeting between Lewis and Freud, two days after the start of the Second World War. The two men debate the existence of God, as Freud greatly resents Lewis’s recent rejection of his own strain of atheism in favour of Christianity, and many other subjects. The two men discuss issues such as Lewis’s post-traumatic stress disorder as a First World War combat veteran, Tolkien and the Inklings, and the nature of Freud’s and Lewis’s relationships with other people.

At its close, the film records that Freud died by suicide several weeks later due to the intense pain from his oral cancer; it also notes that Freud met with an unidentified Oxford don in the last days of his life, who could possibly have been Lewis.

The month’s other Moviola films are Twisters at Leigh (near Sherborne); Firebrand, about Henry VIII (Jude Law) and his last wife, Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander), at Chard (Guildhall) and South Petherton (David Hall) and the great 1998 film Cinema Paradiso at Mere (Lecture Hall).

Pictured: Thelma and The Critic.