SCREEN

A boy reaches breaking point at reform school; teenage road trippers head to Syria; Tap return for one last gig; and more…

A surfeit of celebrity cameos: Macca in Spinal Tap II

STEVE One hundred years after Proust, Joyce and Woolf first sought to chart the streams, gyres and eddies of modern consciousness, filmmakers still struggle to bring much of the rich and strange quiddity of the interior life to the screen. Hot Milk, released just a couple of months ago, was a case in point. In Deborah Levy’s novel, the narrative soared and swooped through a free-associative cosmos, from an Almería beach out to the Milky Way and down to the depths of the Mediterranean, via Greek myth, late capitalism and feminist theory, with mordant wit. Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s sullen, torpid adaptation lost so much of this cargo that even Vicky Krieps on horseback in the Spanish sun was scant consolation.

The really striking literary adaptations of recent years – Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, Andrew Haigh’s All Of Us Strangers, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone Of Interest (and Under The Skin) – have taken a less literal, more cavalier and surreal approach to their source material, summoning the full hallucinatory, sensory potential of cinema – from sets and costume to CGI and, in particular, the disorientating possibilities of score and sound design.

Small Things Like These, Tim Mielant’s 2024 film with Cillian Murphy, felt very much like it belonged to the doggedly realist tradition of adaptation, painstakingly recreating the texture of mid-’80s provincial Ireland as it slowly, patiently brought the horrors of the Magdalene laundries to light. It gave little hint that they might be capable of a film like Steve.