Film Talk: Latest Movie Releases – Women Talking lands to hit hard and turn heads

2023 is rocketing along – no doubt about it – and the Oscars are now only just over a month away. And topping the bill this week, we’re taking a look at one of the fine flicks nominated for the coveted Best Picture crown.

Written and directed by Sarah Polley and with the incredible likes of Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand in front of the camera, Women Talking is looking to turn heads.

Based on the bleak and disturbing novel of the same name by Miriam Toews (itself based on real-life events), this one gives the chance for powerful talent to tell a powerful tale, and is set to leave audiences across the UK cut to the core.

Though it was first released in the States last year, today is the first chances audiences on this side of the pond have had to give it a viewing, and selected cinemas can expect to be packed to the rafters this weekend.

Of course, this won’t be the only flick drawing the crowds, and another one in particular is looking to set those pulses racing. Returning to the role for which he will always be most famous, Channing Tatum is stepping into (and out of) the shoes of ‘Magic’ Mike Lane for one final time.

With Salma Hayek Pinault joining the party and Steven Soderbergh resuming the director’s throne, anticipation for Magic Mike’s Last Dance has been high for some time.

But just how well does this one perform, and does the encore to the series do justice to its much-beloved intro? Its time to take a look at it in the flesh. Let’s do this...

WOMEN TALKING (15, 104 mins)

Released: February 10 (UK & Ireland, selected cinemas); February 17 (UK & Ireland, general release)

Words speaks louder than unspeakable actions in Women Talking.

Set predominantly in a hayloft where a group of sexually abused Mennonite women have gathered to debate their commune’s fate, writer-director Sarah Polley’s artful and sensitively handled translation of Miriam Toews’ novel harnesses the combined emotional power of an exquisitely calibrated script and a heavyweight ensemble cast.

Women Talking is nominated for two Academy Awards next month including Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay, the latter nod a deserved recognition of Polley’s mastery of dialogue, pacing and tone.

It’s intellectually meaty, elegantly structured and feels intensely theatrical in nature despite occasional forays outside the barn to witness children playing in a field, a wife returning home to her bullying husband or two girls quietly leading horses to secret stabling in the event they need to depart in a hurry.

The harrowing subject matter is inspired by real-life events in an ultraconservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia and resonates powerfully as part of uncomfortable and vital cultural conversations arising from the MeToo movement.

Polley does not have to explicitly depict abuse on screen – bruises and welts on legs, blood on bedsheets and anguish glistening in eyes are devastating cinematic shorthand, which connect with the same dizzying force as an angry fist. Mennonite men attribute the attacks on their women and girls to ghosts, demons and “wild female imagination”.

The shocking truth – that victims have been dosed with horse tranquilisers to incapacitate them during non-consensual acts – is exposed and the perpetrators are arrested.

The majority of men leave the commune to post bail, granting women two days to debate whether they wish to stay and forgive their abusers, stay and fight the men who violated them or leave the community and forfeit their place in heaven.

A cross-section of victims meets in a hayloft to trade heated opinions while benevolent schoolteacher August (Ben Whishaw) documents the discourse, quietly dampening his feelings for Ona (Rooney Mara), who is pregnant after one attack.

Family matriarchs Greta (Sheila McCarthy), Agata (Judith Ivey) and Scarface (Frances McDormand) are divided over the best course of action and there are differences of opinion among their children.

Greta’s daughter Mariche (Jessie Buckley) is resigned to forgiving the perpetrators while Agata’s younger daughter Salome (Claire Foy) has already taken a scythe to one man and acknowledges the inescapability of her fury.

Women Talking is an impassioned and wrenching study of empowerment, forgiveness and self-protection orchestrated to primal screams of female artists behind and in front of the camera including Polley, producer/star McDormand and Icelandic composer Hildur Gudnadottir. Mara, Buckley and Foy deliver disorienting blows with their characters’ keynote speeches while Whishaw’s softly spoken educator reflects rare decency across sharply divided gender lines.

Kindness and compassion can be taught. It is never too late to learn.

MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE (15, 112 mins)

Released: February 10 (UK & Ireland)

Sex sells and for long stretches, it’s the only thing worth buying in the concluding chapter of director Steven Soderbergh’s pelvis-pounding trilogy loosely based on lead actor Channing Tatum’s experiences working as a male stripper in Tampa.

Billed as The Final Tease, the third film in a series that has unabashedly promoted pleasure over plot can barely muster the energy to stitch together some of the steamiest dance sequences in the franchise with a coherent storyline or empathetic, well-rounded characters.

Tatum affirms why he was voted People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2012 after the release of the first Magic Mike, performing a private dance for co-star Salma Hayek Pinault that beautifully showcases the art of stripping while dangling from the fixtures of an impeccably designed London apartment.

I fear a sharp rise in visits to A&E as audience members attempt to replicate his hypnotic bump and grind on a shelving unit and bring down the house in the most literal and painful fashion.

A narratively superfluous Zoom call with four members of the old guard – Ken (Matt Bomer), Richie (Joe Manganiello), Tarzan (Kevin Nash) and Tito (Adam Rodríguez) – is a bittersweet reminder of the salty humour and male camaraderie that are sorely lacking from the third hurrah.

Two-dimensional female characters including a bureaucrat (Vicki Pepperdine) with the power to closes theatres for code violations and the lead actress of a stuffy period drama (Juliette Motamed) who becomes the body-pierced MC of Mike’s razzle dazzle strip show are bound with fluffy pink handcuffs to the flimsy plot.

When we meet “Magic” Mike Lane (Tatum) again, he is working as a bartender in Florida after a business deal goes wrong.

At a charity fundraiser, he serves a drink to the hostess, wealthy socialite Maxandra Mendoza (Hayek Pinault), and she promptly whisks him away to London to stage a scantily clad dance show in The Rattigan theatre as an act of defiance to her media mogul soon-to-be-ex-husband Roger (Alan Cox).

“This is not a strip show. We are bringing the tsunami to London,” she purrs. The deluge never materialises.

Max’s chauffeur and manservant Victor (Ayub Khan Din) and precocious daughter Zadie (Jemelia George) struggle to justify their existence as Mike and Max oversee rehearsals for the big show, which effectively fills the pulse-quickening final 20 minutes.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance is hopefully true to the words of the title, signalling a lacklustre end to a flesh-fest that has gradually stripped away the freewheeling fun.

Tatum and Hayek Pinault look sensational together in a gender-swapped Pretty Woman premise but Reid Carolin’s script doesn’t sell us their love story or the preposterous obstacles standing in the way of Max’s one-night-only theatrical extravaganza.

Let the curtain, shirts and trousers fall.

EPIC TAILS (U, 95 mins)

Released: February 10 (UK & Ireland)

The smallest creatures make the biggest impact in a family-friendly computer-animated yarn directed by David Alaux with the participation of co-writers Eric Tosti and Jean-Francois Tosti, which playfully plunders Greek mythology under the gaze of petty gods of Olympus.

Dubbed for audiences on this side of the English Channel, Epic Tails is a sweet and sincere rites-of-passage comedy that hits easy targets for giggles whether that be ninja rats head-bopping in unison as they loot fish from a bustling marketplace or a hapless cat face-planting a mound of freshly sprayed monster mucus.

The script owes minor debts of creative gratitude to Finding Nemo and Coco for the anthropomorphic heroes and reanimated skeletons of the legendary Argonauts, who lose their heads and appendages to escape a prison cell then calmly reassemble to carry the flimsy plot on their scapulas.

Violence is intentionally cartoonish so there is zero chance that any fictional critters might be harmed during the ramshackle quest.

An arbitrary seven-day time limit, represented on screen by a giant hourglass, is introduced to spark dramatic tension but that’s largely forgotten until a hare-brained final act that rushes to a predictable, life-affirming resolution.