Film reviews: The Amateur | Holy Cow | The Return

★★★☆☆

Holy Cow (15)

★★★★☆

The Return (15)

★★☆☆☆

Rami Malek returns to the territory of his break-out role in TV’s Mr Robot with The Amateur, an espionage thriller about a CIA tech nerd (Malek) out for revenge after his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is killed in a London terrorist attack. Having also played the villain in No Time to Die, Malek gets to flip the switch on that screen persona too, though to the film’s credit, even when his character, Charles Heller, blackmails the shadier operatives in the agency to train him up as a field agent, he doesn’t suddenly morph into an uber-capable James Bond figure.

Per the title, Heller is like a weedier, more socially awkward Jason Bourne, someone trying to bring a corrupt system down from within without losing himself completely in the process. That he’s a bit rubbish with a firearm adds a pleasing layer of plausibility to his character’s transformation, but it’s also a red herring, distracting us from what he is really good at: constructing elaborate booby traps he may or may not have the psychological resilience to put into practice.

As Heller goes rogue, the film pinballs him from one Euro location to another while Holt McCallany’s corrupt CIA agent tries to figure out if his blackmail threat is real and Heller’s ambiguously motivated handler (Laurence Fishburne) continues to tracks him across the continent. Director James Hawes – who previously worked on Apple TV’s spy show Slow Horses – keeps things moving at a decent clip and solid support from Catriona Balfe, Julianne Nicholson and Jon Bernthal helps ground the preposterous action. Paradoxically, though, that also makes the film seem less realistic, playing like a relic from an era in which America’s government agencies at least projected an image of competence and accountability, not flagrant and dangerous ineptitude. In the current moment, The Amateur – despite it’s title – almost counts as a reassuring fantasy.

A major hit in its native France, Holy Cow marks debut writer/director Louise Courvoisier out as a filmmaker to watch. A sly coming-of-age film about a rural teenager’s efforts to win a local cheese-making competition, it eschews the simplistic uplift implicit in its overarching plot in favour of a more subtle exploration of the way life’s complications can unlock hidden potential in unexpected ways. Set in France’s Jura mountain region, an agricultural area famous for Comté cheese, it revolves around Totone (newcomer Clément Faveau), an 18-year-old tearaway suddenly forced to contend with being his seven-year-old sister’s primary caregiver following a family tragedy that’s left him in charge of their father’s dilapidated farm (his sister, an adorable moppet called Claire, is played by Luna Garret). Though the locals rally round them up to a point, Totone’s bleary eyed, frequently hung-over realisation that adulthood is not some far off state he can ease himself into results in a series of wry mishaps as he tries to launch himself as a cheesemaker in order to snag the 30,000 euro prize-money for making the best Comté.

Courvoisier, who grew up in the region, shoots the film with the eye of an insider uninterested in romanticising the countryside or defaulting to the precariousness-of-youth tropes one might find in a social realist tract about rural poverty. Instead, this is a film unafraid of getting in amongst the muck, yet is also fully attuned to the vibrant energy and amusing peculiarities of teenage life in the countryside, something further teased out in Totone’s burgeoning romance with Marie-Lise (Maïwène Barthelemy – excellent), a young, self-assured, female farmer who tends to the cows on a neighbouring dairy farm and teaches him more than a few things about life. The end result comes off like a joyous, sunny spin on a Dardenne brothers’ movie.

Ahead of Christopher Nolan’s big new adaptation of The Odyssey (due next year), The Return serves up a decidedly more modest take on Homer’s epic, one shorn of Greek gods and mythical creatures, but boasting its own selling point by reuniting Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche on screen for the first time since The English Patient. As Odysseus and his abandoned wife Penelope they’re by far the best thing about Italian director Uberto Pasolini’s retelling, which zeroes in on the efforts of Penelope and her son Telemechus (Charlie Plummer) to fend off the many suitors who have plundered their kingdom while Odysseus has been lost at sea following the battle of Troy.

Looking ripped and ravaged, Fiennes plays Odysseus like a PTSD-afflicted veteran grown so battle weary he can’t, at first, bring himself to react to his wife’s predicament. Meanwhile Binoche, frequently lit by the glow of flaming torches, teases out the double standards that Penelope has to contend with in her efforts to maintain both her virtue and her absent husband’s kingdom. Sadly, the film around them is pretty dull, and when Pasolini attempts to up the action ante it lays bare the limitations of the approach.

All films on general release