Film reviews: Wake Up Dead Man | Christy | Blue Moon | Pillion

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (12A) ★★★

Christy (15) ★★★★

Blue Moon (15) ★★★★

Pillion (18) ★★★★

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery continues writer/director Rian Johnson’s ongoing mission to expand his distinctly non-cosy crime franchise by using the whodunnit to comment on the culture at large. After satirising inherited wealth in Knives Out and the tech oligarchy in Glass Onion, this third instalment sets its sights on the weaponisation of religion as an instrument of fear by sending Daniel Craig’s flamboyant Southern sleuth, Benoit Blanc, to the aid of Josh O’Conner’s Father Jud, a boxer-turned-priest whose attempt to fight the good fight in the name of Jesus comes up against coterie of true believers in an upstate New York parish radicalised by the church’s charismatic monsignor, Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin).

This loyal congregation (led by Glenn Close) don’t take kindly to Father Jud’s efforts to tone down all the fire-and-brimstone sermonising and are quick to point the finger at him when a “perfectly impossible” murder happens right under their noses, mid-service. Its impossibility is, of course, precisely what attracts the strictly secular Blanc to the crime, which involves a crypt, a missing fortune and a disparate bunch of suspects, among them an alcoholic doctor (Jeremy Renner), a former bestselling sci-fi writer (Andrew Scott), a cellist with a mysterious medical condition (Cailee Spaeny), a small-town attorney (Kerry Washington), a failing right-wing political influencer (Daryl McCormack) and the church groundskeeper (Thomas Hayden Church).

All of which takes a lot of setting up and in a bold-bordering-on-self-indulgent move Johnson elects to keep Craig offscreen for the first 40 minutes. Consequently, O’Connor doesn’t so much steal the film as have it handed to him (mercifully he’s got the chops to carry it off). When Craig does appear, there’s a slight grinding of gears as the film readjusts to his presence, though even relegated to the sidelines, Craig reminds us what a deft comic actor he’s become over the course of these films, further helping Johnson deconstruct the genre without diminishing its many pleasures.

Sydney Sweeney delivers a nuanced, emotionally bruising performance as pioneering female boxer Christy Martin in David Michôd’s shattering biopic Christy. Coming on like every other underdog fight flick, the film gradually finds a rhythm and a groove of its own as it drills down into Martin’s rise in the late 1980s and 1990s, when she went from knocking people out in “Toughwoman” amateur bouts to becoming the first female boxer to sign with legendary promoter Don King (Chad L Coleman).

Though there’s an undeniable thrill here in seeing Sweeney’s Christy defy expectations, this isn’t some shallow triumph-over-adversity tale. The film’s sensitive exploration of both her sexuality and the abusive relationship she subsequently fell into with her trainer and eventual husband, Jim Martin (Ben Foster), reveals it to be a far more devastating exploration of the insidious effect the blatant misogyny and homophobia she faced had on her, not least because she unwittingly internalised much of it.

In a knock-out turn, Sweeney excels at letting us see the psychological torment of Christy’s conflicted life. Foster, meanwhile, all paunch and comb-over, is thoroughly menacing as the dangerously creepy Jim.

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Ethan Hawke can also be seen sporting a comb-over — albeit to less intimidating effect — in his latest film Blue Moon. Marking his ninth collaboration with Richard Linklater, it casts Hawke as Laurenz Hart, the diminutive Broadway songwriter whose partnership with Richard Rodgers resulted in some of the most famous and beloved songs ever written, among them My Funny Valentine and the titular Blue Moon. This isn’t really a biopic, though; it’s a dramatic reconstruction of the night Hart’s partnership with Rodgers came to an end, with Hart holding court in a New York bar while Rodgers (played by Andrew Scott) celebrates the opening night of future musical theatre colossus Oklahoma! — his first collaboration with one Oscar Hammerstein. Using forced perspective to reduce Hawke’s height, Linklater nevertheless gives him the space to deliver an outsized performance that captures what a towering and tragic figure Hart was. The result is a witty, acerbic and playful howl of protest against the dumbing down of popular culture.

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Revolving around a young, sexually inexperienced gay man inducted into a world of BDSM in Bromley after a chance encounter with a handsome biker on Christmas Eve, Pillion certainly makes for one of the more eye-opening festive features available. It’s also one of the funniest and most poignant, thanks largely to rising Brit star Harry Melling’s turn as the aforementioned neophyte, whose bewildered delight at hooking up with Alexander Skarsgård’s sub-seeking sex god is properly hilarious. What follows may take some dark turns, but debut writer/director Harry Lighton has absolute control over the film’s tone, which is sweet and tender when it needs to be without ever resorting to sentimentality or selling the protagonist's journey of self-discovery short.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is on selected release from 28 November and streams on Netflix from 12 December; Christy, Blue Moon and Pillion are in cinemas from 28 November

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