Film reviews: I'm Still Here | The Monkey | Captain America: Brave New World | I Am Martin Parr

The Monkey (15) ★★☆☆☆

Captain America: Brave New World (12A) ★★☆☆☆

I Am Martin Parr (12A) ★★★☆☆

Picking up Oscar nominations for best film, best international feature and best actress, I’m Still Here finds director Walter Salles returning to his native Brazil with his first film since 2012’s adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Adapted from a non-fiction account of one middle-class family’s quest for answers when their family patriarch is “disappeared” by Brazil's increasingly hardline military junta of the 1970s, it really zeroes in on the wife who’s left behind. Played by the excellent Fernanda Torres, this is Eunice Paiva, a remarkable woman whose quiet fortitude is plain to see as she tends to her five children while simultaneously piecing together what, exactly, made her husband an enemy of the state — all the while navigating the Orwellian nightmare of a government that refuses to admit her husband has even been incarcerated.

The film is at its most terrifying during the initial arrest, in which Eunice and one of her daughters are also taken in by authorities and literally kept in the dark about what’s going on. But Salles is also good at slyly contrasting the brightness of their family life, pre-arrest, with the encroaching government oppression — a timely reminder of how fascist governments take control.

Thenceforth, I’m Still Here takes on the quality of a sprawling family saga, jumping forward decades at a time as it elliptically teases out the significance of a title that speaks to both the resilience of the Paiva family, and Eunice in particular, and the extent to which the psychological trauma of this incident has defined them. When one major character is struck down with Alzheimer’s, Salles uses it as a tragic, pointed, reminder of the need to combat historical amnesia.

Longlegs writer/director Osgood Perkins squanders his new-found credibility with The Monkey, a not-very-good adaptation of the Stephen King short story of the same name. Where King’s tale of a family cursed by a cymbal-banging wind-up monkey toy rooted its hoary horror conceit in plausibly realistic characters dealing with generational trauma, Perkins roots his loose take on the same idea in a world seemingly ripped off from the Final Destination franchise.

The titular monkey has the same function as “Death” in those movies — once it’s wound up, it kills at random and nothing can stop it, something that ruins the lives of belligerent twin siblings Hal and Bill Shelbourne when their childhood encounters with said toy result in the gruesome deaths of their babysitter, then their mother.

Cut to 25 years later and Hal (now played by Theo James) is a deadbeat dad who refuses to see his teenage son more than once a year out of fear he’ll pass this hazily defined curse on to him. Nevertheless, when the monkey makes a re-appearance, and people start dying again in elaborately bloody ways, he’s forced to confront his estranged and embittered brother (also played by James), who wants to lure Hal’s son into the monkey’s general vicinity for his own nefarious purposes.

Explanations about how the curse works get increasingly convoluted, robbing the film of the simplicity that made the aforementioned Final Destination such a slick and sick delight. But it’s really Perkins’ broad comedy approach that proves instantly tiresome, turning this gore-fest into a snore-fest.

Essentially a soft reboot for the titular Marvel superhero, Captain America: Brave New World finds Anthony Mackie’s character from the previous MCU films assume the mantle (and shield) from Chris Evans’s Steve Rogers. Having moved from sidekick to main character, he finds himself embroiled in a generic political thriller plot to protect Harrison Ford’s newly elected president of the United States, who has been targeted by a mad scientist for past misdeeds via a sleeper-cell assassination plot borrowed from The Manchurian Candidate, but given a Marvel make-over with a new “Red Hulk” character. Alas, it’s only intermittently entertaining and still requires a lot of nerd homework to get all the references.

I Am Martin Parr offers a slight but watchable primer on the beloved British photographer whose close-up documentary portraiture of working- and middle-class Brits going about their daily lives has helped transform the way the world sees Britain and Britain sees itself.

The film follows Parr in the wake of his treatment for cancer as he bumbles around seaside promenades and suburban streets during the 2022 Jubilee, shooting people and objects in a way that interrogates and subverts the Union Jack clichés. Meanwhile, curators and fellow artists — among them Grayson Perry — wax lyrical about why he’s so important to photography.

Curiously, though, while many of them refer to critiques of his work being condescending or exploitative, the film features no dissenting voices — and it ignores altogether a 2020 racism scandal that resulted in Parr resigning his position as artistic director of a Bristol photography festival.

I’m Still Here, The Monkey and I Am Martin Parr are in cinemas from 21 February; Captain America: Brave New World is out now.