Delegates attending the reality of the 2024 Conservative party conference at the ICC until Wednesday 2 October might also want to let their hair down in a fantasy world.
And that’s precisely why Westside is home to two, brilliant 12-screen multiplexes – Cineworld Broad Street and Odeon Luxe Broadway Plaza.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man (15, 99 mins). Haunted by his own past, the oddball superhero introduced in comic book form in 1993 now gets a fourth film co-written by creator Mike Mignola himself.
Ron Perlman led the cast in both Hellboy (2004) and Golden Army (2008), followed later by David Harbour in a second, terrible Hellboy (2019).
Now it’s the little known Jack Kelsy who’s armed with a tail, the Right Hand of Doom and two salami-style packs where his forehead’s horns should be.
Looking like Hugh Jackman blessed with Alvin Stardust’s sideburns acting on either side of his chops – it’s the late 1950s! – Hellboy is soon stranded with a paranormal researcher.
Even in the middle of nowhere, there are local witches and a devil with links to Hellboy’s traumatic past.
The verdict: *** Endearingly old, The Crooked Man also relies heavily on half-light digital effects to power various body changes and phobia-inducing creatures.
The David Cronenberg body horror moments are less impactful than last week’s 18-rated social satire, The Substance. But Hellboy is a cinematic sugar fix – a less bloated but generally more fun, witches’ brew alternative to megabucks multiverses.
Hellboy never takes himself too seriously. And, with Jason Statham’s Crank series director Brian Taylor at the blood-soaked helm, neither should you.
Never Let Go (15, 101 mins) Halle Berry starred in the Bond movie Die Another Day (2002) and then the atrocious Catwoman (2004). Before then she’d already become the first woman of colour to win a Best Actress Oscar – for playing a struggling widow in Monster’s Ball (2001).
Here, Halle plays Momma who is living in woodland with twin boys Samuel (Anthony B Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV). They are allowed out, but only if they stay attached to ropes which protect them from an evil spirit.
The verdict: ** Questioning whether evil is real, director Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, 2006) delivers the film’s best moments when the boys realise they will have to quickly man up in between knowing and wondering. But it always feels too derivative to more than sporadically thrill and surprise.
Remember Knock at the Cabin (2023) by M Night Shyamalan or The Watched (2024) by his daughter Ishana Shyamalan? Both films took inspiration from the likes of Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever (2002). And so, ‘wood’ you believe it, you’ve been here before, perhaps even as recently as April when Nicolas Cage and another pair of twins were in Arcadian (2024).
The Outrun (15, 117 mins). In a bid to overcome the toxicity of living life on the edge in London during her 20s, Rona returns to the Scottish isles where she grew up.
The verdict: *** Rugged Orkney scenery and the New York-born Saoirse Ronan (Brooklyn / Little Women)… what’s not to like?
Playing a young woman called Rona trying to free herself of the (sadly universal) dangers of the demon drink, Saoirse once again proves herself to be a generational talent who lets her work speak for itself.
The camera adores her, never more so than in an emotionally-brave dip in the sea that’s a million miles away from James Bond-era Halle Berry.
Aside from Ronan’s stunning work throughout, the film is like a mental health hammock, dipping mid-section because of unfocused chronology challenges and some unsavoury, shock-factor group confessions.
But there are high-quality peaks at the beginning (don’t be late!) and at the end – which is as marvellous as cinema can ever be.
Pictures: Never Let Go, Lionsgate; The Outrun, Studio Canal; Hellboy: The Crooked Man, Icon Film Distribution.
● YOUR REVIEWER: Graham Young has been reviewing films for the media in Birmingham for the last 35 years, serving the Birmingham Mail, Birmingham Post, Sunday Mercury, BirminghamLive and BBC WM. He was the 1996 Regional Film Journalist of the Year, and runner-up 1997-99.
ENDS
