The King of Kings review – Charles Dickens retelling of the Jesus story does a serviceable job

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The famous author tells his son and their cat the story of Jesus in this mixed-bag family animation, voiced by an impressive cast This syrupy cartoon account of the life of Jesus (voiced by Oscar Isaac) is narrated, with consummate weirdness, by Charles Dickens (Kenneth Branagh). It’s in fact based on a story Dickens wrote for his children (and wasn’t published until 1934, decades after his death). The idea is that Dickens is telling the story of the New Testament to his young son Walter (Roman Griffin Davis) and Walter’s impish cat, explaining to the King Arthur-obsessed Walter how Jesus was the real King of Kings and all that. And so we see Walter and Charles, in their mid-19th-century garb, wandering through scenes of JC’s life nearly two thousand years earlier, from the nativity to the crucifixion – much like Scrooge and his spectral buddies in A Christmas Carol as they wander through past, present and future Christmases. It rather drags out what is already a pretty long running ...
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‘Audiences don’t want to be challenged’: director Cristian Mungiu on exploring bigotry – and giving up film

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His Palme d’Or-winner explored abortion in his native Romania, and in RMN the director is tackling anti-immigrant sentiment head on. He explains why Europe should pay attention and whether cinema is dead

“Let us mind our words, the west is watching,” says the local mayor, hoping to calm a worked-up crowd of Transylvanian villagers. But the villagers don’t mind their words. Gathered in a packed cultural centre to vent their anger about three Sri Lankans hired by the local bakery, they are angry at everything: the closure of the nearby mine; the villagers who have left for better-paid jobs in Germany and the workload in those jobs that remain; the west’s supposed assault on the nuclear family; the hypocritical European Union. “We got rid of the gypsies,” one irate man in the crowd bellows, “and now we fight over foreigners?”

It’s just one scene from RMN, the new film by Cristian Mungiu, a Palme d’Or-winning director whose work has opened up his homeland Romania to the scrutinising gaze of western European cinema audiences. When Mungiu toured the film around European festivals last year, some people in the Q&A sessions afterwards assumed that the opinions of the villagers were also his.

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