Jimpa review – Olivia Colman and John Lithgow show up for indulgent queer family drama

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Sophie Hyde’s semi-autobiographical tale about sexual identity and intergenerational dynamics falls flat, but is buoyed by Colman and Lithgow’s committed performances Sophie Hyde has directed an earnestly intended but very indulgent film, somewhere between autobiography and autofiction; it blandly congratulates itself on its sensitivity and cathartic honesty, but is without the spark of her 2019 quarterlifecrisis comedy Animals . When the teen female lead takes soulful photos on a hipstery disposable roll-film camera instead of on a smartphone like anyone else, it is frankly a little bit insufferable. Yet there are focused and committed performances from Olivia Colman and John Lithgow. Adelaide-based film-maker Hannah (Colman), based on Hyde, goes on a trip to Amsterdam with her smiley husband and non-binary child Frances, played by Hyde’s own child Aud Mason-Hyde; this is to visit Hannah’s charismatic, brilliant and impossibly life-affirming father, Jim (Lithgow), adorably calledJimpa...
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Raging Grace review – scary movie suffers an absence of scares

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An undocumented Filipino cleaner is employed at a vast, remote mansion to care for a bedridden David Hayman, while hiding her daughter Grace

There are interesting ideas – and a tremendous final choir sequence – in this scary movie; it offers a critique of British colonialism, and also plays with the text of Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden that urged the United States to assume the thankless imperial task of civilising and subjugating the people of the Philippines, and nobly overlooking how ungrateful they are going to be. There is ingenuity here, and good acting, but the film for me feels flawed by its strained melodrama, an absence of scares and by a very odd scene of almost unreal, farcical absurdity.

Joy (Max Eigenmann) is a Filipino woman in the UK with a young daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla); Joy is doing undocumented work as a cleaner and faces racism and exploitation and imminent expulsion. But then she is employed by the haughty Katherine (Leanne Best) to work in a remote, vast mansion as a housekeeper to Katherine’s bedridden and ailing uncle, Mr Garrett, played with relish by David Hayman. Katherine has no idea about Joy’s daughter and there are some weirdly Feydeau-ish scenes when Joy has to hide the girl and somehow distract Katherine from spotting her.

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