Monday new releases: 12 August 2024

Bookworm, It Ends With Us, National Theatre Live: Dear England and The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan are in cinemas

An interesting array of beards above. It’s been a quiet week at the streamers so all of this week’s new releases are in theatres.

One of many pleasures to be found in Ant Timpson’s Bookworm is that the South Island landscape gets the kind of glorious treatment that is normally reserved for certain big fantasy films. New Zealand plays itself, for a change, and Timpson’s eye (with cinematographer Daniel Katz) for those wide expanses is a knowing riff on how we are normally shown those vistas, and the gag about going up to the rocks “where Liam Neeson played that talking Lion” is a decent one at star Elijah Wood’s expense.

(From memory, though, Frodo’s journey was to a very North Island Mount Doom and it was the rest of the fellowship that got to traipse around Canterbury and Otago. I stand to be corrected.)

Wood plays Strawn, a down-on-his-luck Magician (or “illusionist”) who travels half way across the world to look after an eleven-year-old daughter he has never met, after her mother has an accident with a toaster.

Mildred (Nell Fisher) has been promised an expedition into the wilderness to find evidence of the mythical Canterbury Panther, a big black cat that locals have been sighting for years without conclusive proof.

Against his urban, soft-centred instincts, Strawn agrees to chaperone Mildred on this trip but it is her knowledge of obscure bushcraft – gleaned from the books that gives the film its title – that gets them both into and out of trouble as the trip takes a much more adventurous turn than either was expecting.

The relationship between Strawn and Mildred is nicely grown, helped by the fact the her precocity stays just this side of being really annoying and that Wood – as he often does – leaves his own ego at the door and is content to look pretty ridiculous almost all of the time.

In the final climactic chase both characters are wearing their pyjamas – very fetching designs from Jaindra Watson but quite silly nonetheless.

And one final pleasure to cite: Northern Irish actor Michael Smiley can still be pretty terrifying even when he is ostensibly being funny, adding some grit to a very likeable family adventure film.

I worked in the book business for a few years and never heard anyone have a good word to say about Colleen Hoover’s oeuvre apart from an incredulous gratitude for how much money it made. Her books – initially self-published –have been driven to quite extraordinary levels of success thanks the BookTok social media phenomenon. Essentially, word-of-mouth on steroids.

The new film adaptation of her biggest hit so far, It Ends With Us, gives us an idea of why her work speaks so effectively to so many people. It’s essentially a romance with all of the fantasy details that adds so much escapist appeal to that genre. The central character is called Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) and she’s a florist. Actually everyone has an incredible name: her first love is called Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), her new beau is a neurosurgeon called Ryle (director Justin Baldoni).

And the coincidences are stunning. After a meet-cute with Ryle on the roof of an apartment building she aspires to but doesn’t live in, Lily becomes best friends with his sister Allysa (Jenny Slate) – not knowing that they are related to each other, of course – and when she goes out for dinner with her mother (Amy Morton) to introduce her to Ryle, the restaurant they choose belongs to long-lost Atlas.