Ten years on, it’s moving to hear Visconti, his lifelong friend and collaborator, talking about recording in secret what they all knew would be his last project. It would be wrong to call it going out on a high, under the circumstances, but it’s heartening that Bowie could craft such a poignant, defiant, dignified exit.
The result comes across like a cross between a buddy movie and a horror movie – a war movie without the war. Ultimately, it all comes down to the core relationships, so it’s just as well that Hoffman and Jonsson are both terrific; their stars are certain to rise further off the back of this.
Much of that war is waged with a combination of fists, feet, blades and assorted ironmongery; people are routinely hurled through walls, thrown off rooftops and otherwise beaten to a pulp, and the athleticism and fight choreography is impressive, even if the action is edited so frenetically that it’s almost impossible to follow.
You could almost call [Eno] a meta-artist. And this is his meta-documentary; it is not, ultimately, as radical as it purports to be, or as revealing as it could have been perhaps (some external viewpoints would have been welcome), but stimulating and cerebral all the same.
This is the second highest-grossing movie of the year in Japan, but unless you’re a teenager, an anime junkie or really, really care about volleyball, you’re unlikely to get much out of it.
Admittedly some of these moments get a little gushy. Beyoncé has much to be thankful for and she spends a little too long doing the thanking, from her parents to her dancers to guests like Diana Ross. But there’s always another slab of concert action round the corner to jolt the whole show back to life.
It’s not exactly boring – there’s always something new to behold – but nor it is particularly exciting, and it lacks the breezy wit of Marvel’s best movies. One of the strengths of the MCU to date is how it has taken time to define each character individually and lay out the grand narratives over successive movies, building a sense of momentum. Here, it’s all thrown at us at once.
What really redeems the film are the brilliantly observed characters: these are archetypes of modern Britain that nobody really nailed before. Created by the principal actors themselves, they are generally portrayed with affection rather than condescension, and performed so convincingly that a newcomer might well believe they were real people.
There are action thrills, to be sure, but they are folded into what becomes a sort of group therapy session on the psychology of grief, guilt, vengeance, chance and coincidence. Even more blessedly, it’s often hilarious.
