Film Reviews: The Penguin Lessons | Warfare | Freaky Tales

★★☆☆☆

Warfare (15)

★★★★☆

Freaky Tales (15)

★★★★☆

Steve Coogan is always better on film when he’s playing a variation of himself; whenever he’s called upon to play a straight role, his limited range makes hard to see past the man himself. That’s one of the problems with The Penguin Lessons, a loose adaptation Tom Michell’s 2016 memoir of the same name. Recounting Michell’s time as an English teacher in a Buenos Aires boarding school during the military coup of 1976, it zeroes in on the relationship he forged with a penguin he rescued from an oil slick and subsequently kept in the school — an eccentric decision that made him a hit with the students and staff alike.

Michell was in his 20s at the time and somewhat callow and disinterested in the surrounding political turmoil. Coogan, by contrast, is a long way from his 20s, so the film — directed by Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty), from a script by Jeff Pope (Philomena) — now comes freighted with a tragic backstory to help explain his character’s political disengagement before addressing it more directly with a heavy-handed plot development in which Michell’s involvement with the family of a ‘disappeared’ woman eventually snaps him out of his apathy. It’s at this point he starts using the penguin, whom he names Juan Salvador, to inspire his privileged students. Alas, Coogan’s half-hearted/half-embarrassed attempt to shrug off the Dead Poets’ Society-style inspirational teacher clichés is at odds with the sentimental tone the film eventually strikes — and Cattaneo’s pacing is far too sluggish for the initial fish-out-water jokes to work, with Federico Jusid’s overbearing score filling the dead air where the laughs are presumably supposed to come.

The whole penguin rescue thing, meanwhile, becomes symbolic of how one seemingly insignificant person can still make a difference. It’s a metaphor, in other words, albeit “not a very good one”, as Jonathan Pryce’s haughty headmaster later proclaims, inadvertently summing up another problem with the film’s spoonful-of-sugar attempt to make a feel-good movie about a fascist regime that was, as the film’s closing titles remind us, responsible for the deaths and disappearances of 30,000 people. A whimsical misfire.

During his press tour for last year’s Civil War, Alex Garland hinted that he was done directing movies. Warfare, though, suggests he’s only semi-retired from the craft. Co-writing and co-directing it alongside Iraq war veteran and ex-Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, Garland delivers one of his best films to date, an ultra-intense true-life tale set during a military siege in Ramadi when a group of Navy SEALS got pinned down by al-Qaeda insurgents after a routine surveillance operation turned bad.

Stripped of expositional dialogue, character backstories and music, the film — based on a compendium of memories from the surviving members of the unit, Mendoza among them — embeds us in the moment, unafraid to present an abstract portrait of the minute-to-minute chaos of combat. Instead, it trusts that the cast (which includes Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis and Joseph Quinn), the impressionistic sound design, and Menzel and Garland’s ability to create and sustain tension is enough to guide viewers through this particular war-is-hell tale. That means there’s no explicit political analysis or opposing viewpoint either, but far from diminishing the film, its ability to capture the visceral horrors of war so completely stands as its own indictment of the current fist-bump emoji mentality used to glorify combat without any understanding the wide-reaching consequences for those on the ground.

Despite making the billion-dollar-grossing Captain Marvel movie, directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson) are indie filmmakers at heart and both sensibilities collide in entertaining ways in Freaky Tales, a riotously violent quartet of interlinked stories that take place over the course of a single 24-hour period in their native Oakland, California, circa 1987.

A retro title crawl sets the underground comic-book tone with chat about possible alien interference, but the film promptly gets down to business with a scrappy story about a bunch of punky outsiders figuring out how to stand-up to the Neo-Nazi skinheads terrorising their streets every night. Thenceforth we follow a couple of aspiring female hip hop artists trying to score their first break, before switching things up again with The Last of Us star Pedro Pascal as a debt collector trying to atone for past sins. Finally, tying the film together, we follow a local basketball star (Jay Ellis) out for bloody vengeance after racist thugs attack his family during a bungled robbery.

Essentially a cinematic mix-tape, it may wear its Tarantino influence a little too heavily (it’s a bit Pulp Fiction, a bit Kill Bill, a bit Grindhouse, and even features Tom Hanks as a video shop owner with a logorrhoeic propensity to reel off movie recommendations), but Boden and Fleck’s own idiosyncratic sensibility helps it transcend its influences enough to become its own cult oddity in the making.

The Penguin Lessons and Warfare are in cinemas from 16 April, Freaky Tales is in select cinemas from 18 April and on digital platforms from 28 April