Avatar: The Way of Water, Empire of Light and more: What to watch at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse for Christmas 2022

Sponsored feature | Mark Walsh takes a look at some exciting big screen releases.

Corsage

Sometimes an actor can work away for years, before a single role elevates them to deserved prominence. So it was with Vicky Krieps, who appeared in films and TV series in her native Luxembourg and had roles of varying sizes in the likes of Hanna and A Most Wanted Man before her defining role in Phantom Thread. Once you’re able to show you can deliver a performance the equal of Daniel Day Lewis, other meaty roles shouldn’t be far behind.

Corsage is another excellent showcase for her supreme talent, on which she’s also served as an executive producer. Krieps plays Empress Elisabeth of Austria, otherwise known as Sissi, who’s doing her best to put on a public face and submitting herself to a gruelling regime to maintain her appearance as she turns forty. Frustrated by the cold distance her husband (Florian Teichmeister) maintains, she embarks on acts of subtle rebellion, from a dalliance with her English riding instructor (Colin Morgan) to using an attendant to double for her at public functions.

Marie Kreuzer’s film isn’t the first to tell Sissi’s story, nor is it the first to examine the pressures of status without direct authority. What makes Corsage stand out from the crowd are the combinations of Kreuzer’s direction, keeping a period feel but using subtle and deliberate anachronisms (including covers of Help Me Make It Through The Night and As Tears Go By on the soundtrack) to emphasise Sissi’s progressiveness and isolation, and Krieps’ spiky, absorbing performance, railing against her physical and societal restrictions, and for Vicky Krieps another milestone in what should be a very successful phase of her career.

Corsage has a preview on Sunday, December 18 and opens on Friday, December 30.

Empire of Light

Lovers and producers of film are usually also lovers of cinema and the experience it offers. Cinema is at a critical juncture after the pandemic (as it was after the arrival of streaming, and VHS, and television, and so on) but somehow the smell of the popcorn and the whirr of the projector keep people coming back, but that’s not always a guarantee. Sam Mendes’ new film is set in a cinema on the coast in the Eighties fighting to keep its audiences and offering a second home and family to a group of misfits.

Olivia Colman is on blistering, awards-worthy form as Hilary, the cinema manager stuck in a rut after partially recovering from a previous bout of depression. Her manager (Colin Firth) is only interested in secretive sexual favours and the other staff (including projectionist Toby Jones) are content to go through the motions. But her spirits are lifted when she strikes up a friendship with new ticket-seller Stephen, a relationship that’s tested both as Hilary confronts her demons and Stephen is threatened by local skinheads.

Mendes, directing for the first time from a script he’s written alone, explores through his characters the love of cinema and documents an era when its charms were fading. For me personally, this was a tough watch as the parts of the cinema shown fallen into disrepair (as well as the cinema’s exteriors) were filmed at the former Dreamland cinema on Margate seafront, where I spent much time as I grew up on the Kent coast. Seeing the insides of the cinema where I queued to see classics from The Usual Suspects to Con Air now a hollow, decrepit shadow of its former self added a remarkable poignancy to Mendes’ love affair to cinemas, complemented by Roger Deakins’s predictably gorgeous cinematography.

Empire Of Light previews on Monday, December 26.

Avatar: The Way of Water

James Cameron doesn’t know how to make unsuccessful films. Terminator 2: Judgement Day was the third biggest film of all time when it was released. Titanic and Avatar remain in the top three to this day, even when adjusted for inflation. But he’s also a great innovator, pushing the boundaries of early CGI in The Abyss and his time-travelling robot sequel, and Avatar made technical innovations in motion capture of actors and made 3D worth watching.

The Avatar sequel arrives in cinemas and while the story remains carefully under wraps, we do know that it will combine Cameron’s twin obsessions with films set around water and cutting edge film making. In fact, The Way Of Water depends on the combination of those elements, for the first time using extensive motion capture underwater to turn six feet tall humans into ten feet tall Pandorans with a bluer complexion.

If, like me, you remember the incredible spectacle of Avatar fourteen years on but the plot is a little hazier, then you may need a reminder that the original culminated in marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthinton) having permanently become a Na’vi after defeating the Resources Development Administration’s heavy Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang). The sequel sees Jake and his mate Neytiri (Zoe Soldana) raising their adopted daughter Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, in a different role to the first film). Lang, CCH Pounder, Giovanni Ribisi and Dileep Rao also return from the original film, while the major addition to the cast is Kate Winslet as a member of the reef people tribe the Metkaniya.

So confident are the studio in Cameron’s product that a third film, with Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis in the cast, has already been filming. The only question that remains is not if this will be one of the most successful films of all time, but by how much…

Avatar: The Way Of Water is screening in 2D and 3D from Friday, December 16.

Broker

Hizokaru Koreeda has a gift for telling stories of alternative families, from the children raising themselves in Nobody Knows to the three sisters and their half-sister in Our Little Sister and the unconventional family of Shoplifters. When researching the Japanese adoption system for 2013’s Like Father, Like Son, Koreeda learned the story of Japan’s only baby box, where unwanted children can be left for adoption in an attempt to avoid the social stigma of parental abandonment.

He’s located his film in South Korea where such boxes are slightly more commonplace in real life, but crafted a fictitious tale involving a couple selling box babies to the black market, a woman who catches them in the act when regretting leaving her own child and two detectives following the group on a road trip as the unusual temporary family searches for potential new parents, complete with a stowaway child. Japanese director Koreeda (who also writes and edits) uses Korean talent both in front of the camera, ncluding Parasite’s Song Kang-ho, and behind it, from cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo (Snowpiercer, Burning) to composer Jung Jae-il (Squid Game).

Broker previews on January 1.