Film reviews: The Sheep Detectives | Our Land | Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition
There’s lots of goofy, family-friendly fun to be had with The Sheep Detectives, albeit in a fictional English village setting that’s been weirdly Americanised, writes Alistair Harkness
The Sheep Detectives (PG) ★★★
Our Land (12A) ★★★★
Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition (12A) ★★★★
Crime doesn’t get much cosier than the woolly murder mystery driving The Sheep Detectives, a kind of digitally enhanced, Babe-style riff on Agatha Christie revolving around a flock of talking sheep who take it upon themselves to solve the mysterious death of their owner.
A game Hugh Jackman stars as George Hardy, a reclusive, ethically minded farmer who raises sheep for their wool and reads his beloved flock whodunnits every night, not realising they understand every word and discuss the plots after he’s gone to bed. That comes in handy when George is found dead. Unable to communicate with humans, the sheep, led by their smartest member Lily (voiced by Julie Louis-Dreyfus), have to find ways to nudge the baffled local plod (played by Succession’s Nicolas Braun) into finding the killer among several local figures and a few recent arrivals who may benefit from George’s death.
Directed by Minions’ Kyle Balda and featuring a ridiculously stacked cast (Emma Thompson, Hong Chau and The Bear’s Molly Gordon bolster the human cast, while Bryan Cranston, Patrick Stewart, Regina Hall, Bella Ramsay and Chris O’Dowd are among the actors lending their vocal talents to the sheep), what follows is a lot of goofy, family friendly fun, albeit in a fictional English village setting that has been weirdly Americanised with anachronistic production design and some very strange attempts at English accents.
Still, amid all the anthropomorphic zaniness, there is some Pixar-style substance courtesy of screenwriter Craig Mazin, here adapting German author Leonie Swann's best-selling crime novel Three Bags Full. Best known these days for bleak HBO shows such as Chernobyl and The Last of Us, he’s found kid-friendly ways to incorporate discussions of death and grief and existential despair into proceedings. There’s also a subversive gag about sheep dealing with difficult things through collective amnesia that could — if you’re so inclined — be read as a sly pop at the wilful ignorance of certain reactionary political movements.
Sticking with the English countryside, Our Land serves up a level-headed examination of the right-to-roam movement seeking to gain responsible access to the vast swathes of privately-owned land that are off limits to the general public in England and Wales. Interviewing campaigners, nature writers and estate owners, director Orban Wallace avoids amped-up confrontations, preferring instead to hear the nuanced arguments of both sides of the debate and resisting the urge to make the landed gentry “look like upper class twits” — as the relative of one estate owner pre-emptively accuses the filmmakers of doing.
That said, there’s no getting round the fact by including Francis Fulford, a reactionary upper-class mainstay of media and various reality TV shows, the film does indeed provide us with a living parody of poshness who witters on about woke culture and complains about the public being thick and wanting the right to drop litter and start fires on the land his family has been privately enjoying for hundreds of years. But for the most part everyone’s thoughtful about the issues at hand, which are brought into sharp relief when a group of campaigners decide to hike from Scotland (where we have the right to roam) into England. As one rambler puts it while straddling the border: “My right leg is unlawful, my left leg is lawful.”
Oscar-winning actor Javier Bardem isn’t someone you’d expect to pop up in a documentary about Iron Maiden, but as an avowed super-fan of the British heavy metal legends he’s a frequent talking head in Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition, a hugely entertaining film charting their fascinating career and the broad church that constitutes their global fanbase. Formed in 1975, the band were pioneers of the new wave of British heavy metal providing disaffected youth not into punk an alternative outlet for their angst.
Touring relentlessly, they built up a huge following with no airplay (radio stations refused to play them), but they also cannily created their own mythology via their skeletal mascot, Eddie, something that helped buttress their appeal while also allowing them to navigate a frequently changing line-up in the early days as they started selling albums by the truckload. Bruce Dickinson’s arrival in 1981 as their largely permanent frontman helped send them stratospheric over the coming decade, but as the film shows, their history and literature-tinged lyrics also made them anomalies in an era of excess and inspired them to start touring behind the Iron Curtain.
Boasting extensive new audio interviews with surviving band members from the various eras (the band only appear in person in archival footage), the film provides a raw and honest account of Iron Maiden’s highs and lows while also — via the contributions of celebrity fans such as Bardem and regular fans from all walks of life — getting to the heart of why they mean so much to so many.
The Sheep Detectives and Our Land are in cinemas from 8 May. Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition is in cinemas from 7 May.
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