Friday new releases: 8 March 2024

The Great Escaper, Cabrini, Imaginary, Let the Dance Begin and How to Have Sex are in cinemas this weekend

Watching ‘national treasure’ Michael Caine twinkle his way through the crowd-pleasing The Great Escaper, I was minded to go back to a review I wrote of another of his films about England, Harry Brown, which came out in 2010. We thought Caine was on his last legs then, at the age of 74.

Harry Brown was a nasty, reactionary piece of work about a pensioner who becomes a vigilante on the streets of his council estate. At the time I wrote:

Making the ineffectual detective (Emily Mortimer) female just accentuates the reactionary attitudes on display – it’s anti-feminist as well as anti-progressive. This shouldn’t be surprising territory for Caine who once abandoned Britain when he decided that he didn’t enjoy paying the tax that made things like police forces and education systems possible.

It was a good performance in an ugly film, but now he’s put in an even better performance in a much nicer film. A much more thoughtful film.

It’s based on the true story of Bernard Jordan, the 89-year-old Navy veteran who – after missing the deadline for the official D-Day 70th anniversary celebrations – decides to make his own way across the channel anyway and pay his respects.

Caine pulls out all the stops here. He is a cheeky chappie around the staff and a lonely and frightened old man on the ferry. And then, when he gets to France, he is a grieving and traumatised old soldier. It’s tremendous work and he’s clearly taking his own masterclass advice about how to work from the eyes first.

But he’s not the only one giving a lesson. John Standing as the toff who takes Bernard under his wing, has a moment that made the audience at my screening gasp – that’s why films with audiences are still the best – and Glenda Jackson takes a role that could easily have been a single note but imbues it with some of the fierceness she showed in both her early performances and her political career.

For all the jingoistic context, and the suppressed grief, this is a love story and a moving one at that.

Coincidentally opening in the same week as The Great Escaper is Let the Dance Begin, an Argentine film that might as well be the same story. An ageing man takes a long journey in order to settle something in himself and make peace with his past. This version of the story chooses a fairly ridiculous path but ends up in roughly the same place.

A star tango dancer (Darío Grandinetti) now has a successful acting career in Madrid but is called home when his former partner (Mercedes Morán) passes away suddenly. (You may notice from the fact that the deceased dancer has a leading actor’s name attached that there’s a bigger story that has not yet been revealed.)

In fact, it takes a long time – with a few dead ends – to get to a truth that you may have already guessed. In a Kombi full of secrets, our power tango couple and their musical accompanist (Jorge Marrale) head into the beautiful mountains of Mendoza to tie up the loose ends of their lives.

Not being a catholic – or any faith at all to speak of – the story of Francesca Cabrini, the first United States saint, was entirely new to me. After nearly two and a half hours of the film Cabrini, I am much better informed so – on that basis alone – job done.

A recovering consumptive with a powerful belief that she must do as much as possible for the downtrodden in the little time she presumes she had left, she has become the patron saint of immigrants but could just as easily be the patron saint of stubbornness.