Ma (2019)

Older people wanting in with younger - intergenerational ingratiation - is the really interesting thing at the core of this well-acted horror thriller and is something reflected not only in Octavia Spencer's Ma's relationship with the group of high schoolers she lures to parties in her basement but also in the relationship Juliette Lewis's mother-character has with the Julie Roberts-lookalike daughter she hopes will stay interested in their movie-nights-in together, but the thriller makes little of this, instead squeezing in issues of race, gender, animal cruelty, catfishing, Munchausen By Proxy, bullying and trauma, so that Ma, in the end, becomes a broad caricature - in fact, she recalls Homer Simpson the way she gets about in that one outfit, her scrubs - and her psychoticism in the end is a generalised disorder, themeless, levelled at everyone for everything, and manifests in outrageous, unjustified Human Centipede flourishes - she's just a rank nutter who needs to be violently dispatched, undermining the already longwinded, not-very-interesting psycho origin story told across too many flashback interruptions.

★★☆☆☆

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I, Tonya (2017)

Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding stares down the camera and announces we've reached the part of the ice-skater's life story that we've all come to the cinema to see and in fact it is at this point the movie lags and threatens to become repetitive and boring, but the details of Harding's life in the earlier stages of the movie, the question of whether Harding was complicit in the kneecapping of ice-skating rival Nancy Kerrigan, the all-round terrific performances, some neat 'how do they do it' ice-skating routines, and the dismaying idea that class injustice has pervaded even our Olympic sports, overall make I, Tonya an engrossing watch.

★★★★☆

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