Film reviews: Tuner | My Mother’s Wedding
Starring Leo Woodall as a piano tuner turned safe cracker, Tuner is summer movie with brains, writes Alistair Harkness
Tuner (15) ★★★★
My Mother’s Wedding (15) ★★
Rising Brit star Leo Woodall gets a brilliant showcase for his leading man talents in Tuner, an intense crime thriller about a young piano tuner (Woodall) who discovers his perfect pitch makes him an ideal safe cracker. He plays Niki White, a former music prodigy with an acute hearing condition that makes him sensitive to noise. When his piano-tuning mentor and surrogate father Harry (Dustin Hoffman) falls ill, he’s forced to put his nascent talents to use working for a security company that covertly rips off its clients in order to pay for Harry’s treatment.
Here the film plays like an engrossing cross between Uncut Gems and Good Will Hunting as the maverick Niki is drawn deeper into the criminal underworld while simultaneously getting involved with a classical music student (Havana Rose Liu). It shouldn’t work, yet because co-writer/director Daniel Roher (making his fiction debut after making the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny) grounds the film with such richly developed character work everything feels in perfect harmony, especially Hoffman’s joyous turn as the wry, spry Harry. A summer movie with brains.
Made back in 2023, My Mother’s Wedding marks the directorial debut of Kristin Scott Thomas; sadly, despite a stellar cast featuring Scarlett Johansson, Emily Beecham, Sienna Miller and Scott Thomas herself, it’s a fairly perfunctory family drama.
Johansson leads the cast as the eldest daughter of Scott Thomas’s Diana, whose wedding to her third husband brings plenty of family dysfunction to the surface as Johansson’s Royal Navy commander Katherine returns home for the nuptials, alongside her two sisters, one of whom is a movie star (Miller) contemplating a marriage to a rich older man, the other an NHS worker (Beecham) convinced her own husband is cheating on her.
All three are in thrall to their now deceased, war-hero fathers and, though Scott Thomas — working from a semi-autobiographical story — eventually gets proceedings to a interesting place, too much of it feels like frothy filler.
In cinemas from 29 May
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