We Don't Need Two Metaphors

I’d say it’s rare for a football documentary to open with anything akin car chase, but that’s how Asif Kapadia elects to start his profile of legendary Argentine footballer Diego Maradona. However, it turns out to sit entirely in line with the crazy and breathless story that follows. It’s an exhilarating opening which elicits comparisons to William Friedkin’s The French Connection and Claude Lelouch’s short film C’etait un rendez-vous but here, thanks to the accompanying 80s inspired soundtrack (Todd Terje’s Delorean Dynamite), transports the audience back to 1984 and Maradona’s arrival in Naples. He has just been signed by local football club Napoli for a then world record fee of £6.9 million and was met at the Stadio San Paulo, Napoli’s home ground, by a fervent hysteria of fans and journalists that would come to typify his eight-year spell at the Italian club.

A Star is Born may have won plaudits and accolades in the last few months, but a star truly is born in Wild Rose , the story of an aspiring Glaswegian country singer, and her name is Jessie Buckley. Buckley stars as Rose-Lynn Harlan, a live-wire who dreams of Nashville and all of its musical heritage and glory. After a brief spell at her majesty’s pleasure, she is more determined than ever to achieve her goal, but must face up to the realities waiting for her at home: her exasperated mother (Julie Walters) and her two young children, Wynonna and Lyle.

After his Oscar winning space roller coaster ride, Alfonso Cuaron doesn’t so much come crashing down to Earth as land gracefully, so as not to drown out the sounds of swashing water that open his latest feature. Roma is set in a late 1970’s Mexico City and in the townhouse of a seemingly well to do Spanish family and their Mexican house staff. Principal maid and nanny Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) aims to ensure the smooth running of the family’s life. However, political unease in the city is growing and significant change is on the horizon much closer to home too.

Spoiler Warning: Lots of spoilers ahead Knowing very little about a film before watching it opens up the possibility of giving over time to a film that thoroughly squanders it, but also the possibility of being swept up in a film with no expectations or suggestion of where it will take you. In the case of Vox Lux , knowing little more than the title and cast members led to being wholly unprepared for the film’s startling opening. That intense reaction is indicative of the entire experience crafted by writer and director Brady Corner. This is a film of extremes. Extreme pain and extreme joy; extreme highs and extreme lows. All presented to question and challenge the acceptable boundaries of 21st century celebrity culture. Vox Lux opens with a school shooting in 1999; Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) survives but with spinal injuries. After singing at a candlight vigil soon after, Celeste launches on a path to popstardom with her sister Eleanor (Stacy Martin) and produced (Jude Law) in tow.

Now almost a decade into his feature filmmaking career, perennial London Film Festival favourite Ben Wheatley returns with Happy New Year, Colin Burstead : perhaps his warmest film to date and a perfect sweary antidote to the usual festive offerings. Colin Burstead (an excellent Neil Maskell) has hired a grand Dorset castle to bring his family together for a New Year's party. Like every family, they don't always get along but the Burstead are perhaps more resentful than most. So far so Agatha Christie but there's no chance of the butler being murdered here as the Burstead family are far too embittered to actually murder anyone; it’s as if their resentment for each other would only be exceeded by the resentment towards someone who no longer had to endure the curt and strained conversations.

A spiritualist, an artist and a geologist walk into a abandoned mining town. Even if you have heard of that joke before, you’ve probably never heard it told in quite the same manner as Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn tell it in their latest. Funded through Kickstarter, Two Plains & a Fancy is the first self-proclaimed ‘spa western’, which is an accurate description that doesn’t begin to hint at what is to come. It’s 1893 and the aforementioned trio (Marianna McClellan, Benjamin Crotty, Laetitia Dosch) have travelled to Colorado in search of the region's famous hot springs. What they don't know is that the price of silver has abruptly fallen the once thriving region is facing a severe downturn.