Friday new releases: 16 February 2024

May December, Bob Marley One Love, Madame Web and Red Mole: A Romance are in cinemas, Suncoast is on Disney+

A few weeks ago, I encouraged readers to check out Todd Haynes’ most recent film, Dark Waters, and now I’m going to encourage you to go and see his new one – May December.

Natalie Portman plays an actress on a research trip for her new film. She’s visiting the woman who she will be portraying (Julianne Moore) as well as friends and family. The kind of totally normal thing that actors do to prepare for a role.

Except …

In this case, the way that Portman goes about her work, it feels kind of exploitative, predatory. Which in a way is appropriate because the character she is going to play gained her notoriety for exactly the same thing. She was once jailed for the crime of statutory rape, having a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old colleague at the pet store where she worked. (The character is inspired by Mary Kay Letourneau, who as an elementary school teacher abused, had children to and then married Vili Fualaau.)

The film could be about the process an actor goes through and how that process appears to normal people, or it’s a portrait of a relationship whose complexity is almost impossible to divine, or – as Haynes’ suggested to me when I interviewed him for RNZ – it’s about who gets to tell our stories and define our narratives.

Oh well, it’s his film, he should probably know.

Anyway, it is endlessly fascinating, superbly directed and performed (Charles Melton as victim/husband Joe is a revelation), and I expect you will want to talk to someone about it at length afterwards.

There’s something a little bit off about Bob Marley: One Love, a new biopic of the reggae superstar directed by King Richard’s Reinaldo Marcus Green and it took me a while to put my finger on it.

Kingsley Ben-Adir plays Bob (also called Nestor or Skipper depending on the circles he is moving in) and even though it’s a good performance from a top actor, I never got the sense that who he was portraying was actually Bob Marley.

He doesn’t physically resemble the man and, even though stage mannerisms are carefully recreated, he doesn’t feel like the guy who shows up in the archive shots during the credits.

A little bit of familiarity can get in the way of these things, which is why it’s good that Rita Marley is a much less well-known figure. It allows Lashana Lynch to steal the film, frankly.