Is director Jordan worth all thehype? It’s a Nope from me

Despite all the hype, slick marketing and, indeed, an Oscar, I’ve never been quite convinced of the talents of actorturned-director Jordan Peele. I liked his first film, Get Out… until the point came when I didn’t. And his second, Us, released two years later in 2019, left me wondering whether he really was reinventing the horror-flick wheel quite as radically as his growing army of admirers would have us believe.

Now he’s back with his third picture in five years, Nope, and sadly my scepticism has only grown. This is the least effective of the trio: painfully slow, overburdened with plot and not exactly awash with the sort of performances to make you pleased you bought a ticket.

Clearly deliberately, it has the most unsettling of openings, but it’s indicative of what’s to come that it confuses far more than it intrigues.

In one strand, a bloody flashback takes us to the studio set of an American sitcom, where a chimpanzee has run amok, brutally attacking his human co-stars.

Back in the present day, on a parched Californian horse ranch, O.J. (British Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya) watches incredulously as his horse-wrangling father is suddenly killed by a small object dropping from the sky. Did it fall from a plane? Or from something more sinister, hiding up there in the clouds? Come on, this is a Peele movie – which do you think?

But goodness, it takes a long time

to get where we’re pretty sure we’re heading. Presumably acting to instructions, Kaluuya gives a strangely flat, almost deadpan performance, while singer-andactress Keke Palmer, playing his fame-seeking sister Emerald, delivers something far noisier and in-your-face.

Neither is really successful in a film where story strands are unconvincingly joined and perfectly good visual effects turn out to be not enough. Yes, it’s a big ‘nope’ from me.

The Eiffel Tower is built in the shape of an A, the end captions of Eiffel helpfully remind us. So what a good thing, I found myself thinking, that its builder, Gustave Eiffel, had a passionate affair with a married woman called Adrienne rather than one called Yolanda, Quincy… or Sylvie, come to that. Ah, but did he even have a passionate affair with a married woman called Adrienne?

As Martin Bourboulon’s goodlooking period picture admits, it is ‘freely inspired by a true story’. Many will see that as cinema speak for ‘made up’, although its makers say there is historical evidence for an affair but possibly not when he was building his iconic tower. Hmm.

I loved the re-creation of late19th Century Paris, and the AngloFrench actress Emma Mackey, star of TV’s Sex Education and Kenneth Branagh’s Death On The Nile, certainly catches the eye as the spirited Adrienne.

But despite her best endeavours, it’s the story of how the tower came to be built that holds our potentially flagging interest.

I found some of the ingenious engineering far more interesting than the hotel bedroom passion. Good to know that something as big and skilfully designed as the Eiffel Tower eventually comes down to ‘up-a-bit, down-a-bit’ too.

The tragic story of Anne

Frank, the Jewish teenager who hid with her family in an Amsterdam attic for two years before being betrayed and sent to Bergen-Belsen where she died just months before the end of the Second World War, still echoes powerfully down the decades.

But in his well-intentioned effort to breathe new life into a familiar story, the Israeli film-maker Ari Folman comes badly unstuck with Where Is Anne Frank, an animated feature that not only places Kitty, the imaginary friend to whom Anne apparently wrote her diaries, centre-stage but updates part of the story to the present day.

The internal logic of the story – which sees Kitty appearing and disappearing according to her proximity to the original diary and to the Anne Frank museum – eventually becomes maddening and distracting. Anne’s awful fate, however, remains as heartbreaking as ever.