Monday new releases: 22 July 2024

Twisters, Longlegs and Divertimento are in cinemas

Welcome new subscribers. This is the weekly rundown of new releases (or at least as many as I can get to!)

Twisters is as enjoyable a blockbuster as we’ve had in ages, mainly because the big disaster set-pieces are expertly paced and staged and the digital tornados are so utterly believable that at times I found myself gripping the arms of my theatre seat. What’s that old cinema promo gag? “We’ll sell you a seat but you’re only going to use the edge of it!”

But once the adrenaline wears off, there’s nothing left. This is mainly due to the two leads acting as if they are in different films – one trying too hard and the other not trying hard enough.

Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People, Where the Crawdads Sing) plays Kate, a meteorologist burdened by a tragic storm-chasing accident which took several of her young colleagues. She’s tempted back into the field by Javi (Anthony Ramos) who has a startup that can 3D map tornados and – hopefully – help predict them.

Since the mid-90s days of the Paxton/Hunt Twister – or perhaps even because of it – storm chasing has become big tourism and online business. When they get to Oklahoma, Tornado Alley is covered with adrenaline-seekers and influencers, including Glen Powell’s YouTuber, Tyler. At first he’s annoying but we soon find out there’s a heart of gold behind all the hair and teeth.

There’s a bit of online fuss at the moment about the discovery that a romantic finale was shot for the film in which a passionate kiss is exchanged between our two heroes but that it was cut from the finished film, rendering the whole thing somewhat chaste.

Well, I can see why that choice might have been made. There is very little actual chemistry between these two which would have made an ending like that unearned. I certainly didn’t notice its absence.

Chemistry is not automatic. Here we have a problem of balance. Edgar-Jones is playing for an internal emotional truth founded in her character’s trauma, loss and vulnerability.

Powell is playing for charm – and he’s milking it – but there’s no backstory to him. He talks about once being a pro rodeo rider but that’s story, not character.

She is three-dimensional but not really present. He is so present you can’t avoid him but is playing on one note.

Longlegs is also bringing people kicking and screaming back to cinemas. A stylish serial-killer horror by Osgood Perkins (son of Psycho’s Anthony Perkins), this about as classy as these things get, helped by a wonderfully bizarre turn from Nicolas Cage.

Maika Monroe plays a junior FBI agent with predictive as well as deductive powers. It’s the mid-90s, saving us once again from any plot holes that a smartphone might get in the way of. A series of unsolved occult murders are testing the feds who know from coded messages that there is a connection between them all but nothing forensically conclusive.