Monday new releases: 11 November 2024

Memoir of a Snail, Red One, Saturday Night, Suddenly and Here are all in cinemas

Weeks where I’m producing and hosting At the Movies can get very confusing for me. Which films did I review for the radio last week? Which ones am I reviewing this week?

After a quick audit, I can confirm that Robert Zemeckis’s Here was in At the Movies last week and (barring any disaster) Memoir of a Snail and Saturday Night will feature this Wednesday. Meanwhile, I talked about Suddenly on Friday night with Emile Donovan on Nights so if you prefer listening to reading those links might help.

Memoir of a Snail is a melancholy little gem from Australian animator Adam Elliot, who made Mary & Max back in 2009. If you told me that he’d been working on this new feature non-stop since then, I would totally believe you because the painstaking detail of the stop-motion animation is there for all to see.

It’s the story of twins, Grace (Sarah Snook) and Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who are separated by Child Services when they are orphaned when their paraplegic former street performer father passes away. He was also French, a stop-motion animator and a lover of the Luna Park rollercoaster – an example of the vivid character detail the film offers, matching the crammed visuals.

Grace and Gilbert end up at separate ends of the Australian continent, each desperately missing the other but trapped by foster-circumstances that conspire to keep them apart. While Grace eventually forms a best-friendship with the extraordinary octogenarian Pinky (Jacki Weaver), Gilbert suffers under the oppressive yoke of a family of evangelical orchardists.

Constantly surprising, consistently delightful and creatively absurd, Memoir of a Snail is about how we can let life tie us up in knots and how hard it can be to break free from them.

The first Christmas film of the season arrived this weekend and, even though my screening had plenty of kids watching, I don’t know if I’d be recommending Red One to young audiences any time soon.

JK Simmons is Santa Claus, powerful enough to run the entire North Pole complex on his own personal energy aura, but for some reason he needs a pseudo-military security detail led by someone called Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson). All that hardware fails to prevent Saint Nick from being kidnapped on the day before Christmas Eve, prompting a worldwide search featuring the unwilling participation of Christmas-hating hacker Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans).

It seems that Evans learnt the wrong lesson from the success of his wonderful one-note performance as Captain America for Marvel, choosing the one-note option rather than the wonderful option ever since. Johnson is much better as the cynical “too old for this shit” right-hand man.

The interesting freshness that Red One brings to the table is the idea that Christmas has become corrupted by the very existence of a “naughty list” – O’Malley is a Level 4 Naughty Lister – and that the original conception of a day in which all children are loved unconditionally has been lost. Drift is determined to retire because there are now more people on the Naughty List than not, and he can no longer see the good in what he’s doing.