Savage House review – Claire Foy and Richard E Grant sell it hard in bewigged 18th-century caper

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The leads are the most watchable thing in this raucous period yarn about a grimy pair of status-obsessed nobles Black-belt performances from Claire Foy and Richard E Grant put some vim and vigour into this haranguingly one-note and unidirectional period romp of the raucously bewigged and be-poxed 18th century. It’s written and directed by American film-maker Peter Glanz, who gives us candlelit interiors like a knockoff Barry Lyndon, and periodic deafening orchestral stabs with a touch of Amadeus as furious people in costume storm down corridors. But Grant and Foy are always there, selling it hard and there are one or two nice lines. They play Sir Chauncey and Lady Savage, who are living in a vast crumbling country estate: he’s a parvenu, an adventurer, a lover of the new Hanover dispensation who loathes Jacobites, but fundamentally a social alpinist who married for money and took his wife’s noble name. She was entranced by his roguish ways and she forgave him everything but is, however...
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My Fairy Troublemaker review – sweet-tooth animation will be gobbled up by young ’uns

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Story of a misbehaving sprite who gets access to the human world, and a fellow rebel, looks good but the story is a little flat

This German-Luxembourgian animation is a passable if unambitious hour and a half for under-10s, heavily in the orbit of Pixar both in terms of visuals and in its central conceit of the business of tooth-fairying as a Deliveroo-esque big-tech courier outfit. But unlike Inside Out and Soul’s pint-sized explainers of the psyche, there’s virtually no philosophical sprinkling on the cupcake here. Not that that will stop the young ’uns from gobbling it up anyway – but they might have enjoyed something more nutritious.

The exam to become a fully accredited tooth fairy seems easy enough. As the would-be disco earworm at the start of My Fairy Troublemaker has it, “Sneak inside, take the tooth, make the toy, and disappear!” Cookie-scoffing, misbehaving Violetta (voiced by Jella Haase) is the only apprentice who fails to make the grade, unlike her swotty mate Yolando (Julian Mau). Stuck in her belief that she’s really “the most special tooth fairy ever”, she steals a gem that allows her access to the human world. But in hijacking Yolando’s assignment to obtain an incisor from city kid Sami (John Chadwick), she finds an ally in his older stepsister Maxie (Lisa-Marie Koroll) when she is trapped in our reality.

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