BROS (Netflix)

This 2022 movie is new, belatedly, to Netflix in UK. It’s a romcom about two guys who don’t want their lives to be like a gay version of When Harry Met Sally. Bobby (Billy Eichner) is a popular podcaster heading up a team to launch a LGBTQ ‘History Museum’. Aaron (Luke MacFarlane) has an IT job but dreams of being a chocolatier. They become sex-buddies but resist – not for long – becoming a ‘couple’. When they do become a couple things get complicated; why wouldn’t they?

The first half of the movie is a lot like episodes of Will & Grace (and even has Debra Messing in a cameo – as herself); lots of snappy dialogue and . When it stops trying not to be a romcom and becomes a romcom, it climbs out of the shallows and becomes a serious ‘Relationship Movie.’ The sex scenes are pretty hot stuff (hot stuff and pretty); the two leads are attractive and believable; the supporting cast, especially the History Museum boardroom, are a joy.

My favourite gay Netflix series is still Hollywood, which revised Tinseltown history to turn the deeply closeted Rock Hudson into a liberationist pioneer. But Bros is fairly charming, a big improvement on Smiley and Fire Island.

Alien: Romulus

After venturing into ‘Origins’ territory with Prometheus and Covenant, Romulus takes us back into the original quartet, with a new crew exploring the abandoned Nostromo docking station, which is overrun with face-huggers, who now seem to roam free without lurking in their Classic Greek plant pots. Corridors are lavishly decorated with eviscerated victims of the invaders.

Romulus does little more than rehash the first Alien, with the crew being picked off one at a time and trying vainly to find safe zones in the space station. But in the original all the crew members – not just Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, still much missed) – were distinct and distinctive characters. Here they are just meat for the grinders. Only the ‘synth’, Andy (David Jonsson) has a degree of individuality, and he is upstaged by the CGI guest reappearance of Ian Holm, the original synth from the Nostromo.

Explosive ‘birthings’ and close-ups of the silver-jawed aliens are not enough. The pace is relentless, the soundtrack loud, the lighting too dim for my tired eyes. Re-watching Covenant recently, it seemed to be reaching for an epic, mythical Lord of the Rings grandeur. Romulus has more of a Deadpool or Fast and the Furious crude immediacy. Under-scripted and down-marketed, this is a real dog’s breakfast of a movie. One of the most anticipated films of the year, a huge disappointment.

Katherine Mezzakappa:

THE MAIDEN OF FLORENCE

Florence, 1584. The virility of Vincenzo Gonzaga, heir to one of Mantua’s most powerful families, has been called into question ahead of his marriage to a princess of the Medici clan. A bridal ‘surrogate’ is called for, a virgin whose deflowerment will scotch the rumours. The chosen virgin is Giulia, a girl of rare beauty growing up in an orphanage in Florence, the illegitimate daughter of another noble family. In return for her maidenhead, she will be rewarded with a generous dowry and a respectable husband.

Prince Vincenzo is a ‘playboy’ of his time; spoilt and selfish but stunningly handsome; Giulia falls for him and he for her. Their mating is very unromantic: the ‘rules’ require medical witnesses not just to confirm Giulia’s virginity but also to verify every stage of her deflowerment. Giulia is narrating her story and both procedures are so clinical as to remove most of the erotic element. The process is fully successful; Vincenzo impregnates her, but this child, a prince’s bastard, is also confined to an orphanage.

The husband they find for her, Giuliano, is a good kind man, a musician, and they will have a happy life punctuated by a number of childbirths and, inevitably, some child deaths. But Giulia resolves to find her first child, the prince’s bastard, even though this involves further dealings with Cavaliere Vinta, the Gonzagas’ creepy majordomo.

Katherine Mezzakappa’s novel, a true historical story melding into fiction, is finely researched and fully convincing. Giulia’s narrative voice is modern, but never clunky or anachronistic; Florence, observes Giulia, is “too small for secrets to remain secrets for long,” Renaissance Italy is brought vividly to life. From a squalid episode in 16th-century history Mrs Mezzakappa has crafted a literary gem, a story richly steeped in romance and drama.

A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE

Second prequel to the original A Quiet Place, this is (like the middle one) an introduction to the day the invaders arrived on Earth, but the location is Manhattan, the city that learns to sleep without snoring (remember, the invaders are sightless but possess acute hearing). We follow the struggle for survival of Samira (Lupita Nyong’o), a black poet, and Eric, a college student who latches on to her. Samira has a cat – I’m sure I’m not the only viewer who was more concerned about the cat’s survival than any of the humans; it uses up about a dozen of its nine lives (including two drownings). As the cabbage-head monsters (they are seriously scary but also totally daft) decimate the city’s population, these three slowly work their way towards an evacuation point. Djimon Hounsou is among the evacuees; we saw him in the previous sequel.

There are plot holes which need to be explained. Have the cabbage-heads come to Earth purely to harvest humans for food? This will be a movie better seen at home, when we can turn on subtitles to let us in on the whispered conversations in darkened buildings and subway tunnels. There are a couple of epic street scenes reminiscent of the “zombie ladder” in World War Z and the movie had me on the edge of my seat almost all the way through, but the law of diminishing returns will set in if there are too many sequels rehashing the same storyline. Perhaps we need to see the home life of the cabbage-heads or be introduced to the cabbage-head Queen and her Council.

Meanwhile, next month’s Alien sequel/prequel – Romulus – is my most keenly awaited movie of the summer!

Jess Walter: THE ANGEL OF ROME

I read an enthusiastic review of this short story collection and decided to try it. A widely mixed bunch, several gay-themed. The title story is about a young American theology student in Rome befriending an A-list movie actress (fictionalized: is it Loren or Lollobrigida?) I watched My Week With Marilyn at the same time, which was a lot busier and more entertaining. Similarly themed, ‘Famous Actor’ has a woman in Oregon enjoying a one-night stand with an actor past his prime; some acerbic dialogue and merciless appraisals of his movie career gave this real juice.

‘Town & Country’ is the best of the gay tales. Jay’s widowed dad, a serial adulterer sliding into dementia, doesn’t remember his son came out. A daughter in ‘Mr. Voice’ recalls several weddings and two funerals in her mother’s complex history.

The concluding story, ‘The Way the World Ends’, offers dystopia flavored with graveyard humor. Four climatologists, drunk and stoned, discuss the doomsday scenario for the planet while a mixed-race night porter, newly out, worries about joining a banned Pride march in 1960s Mississippi. Here’s a sentence David Sedaris would be proud of: ‘He wouldn’t mind having a year or two of being gay before getting beaten up for it.’

 It’s easy to find echoes of other writers if you look for them. As well as Sedaris, I sensed traces of John Updike here and there, a true maestro to be influenced by. Jess Walter introduces a bunch of highly original characters. He writes extremely well, with occasional flashes of real brilliance. The cover blurb promises a “dazzling collection” of stories: I was duly dazzled.

Jeffery Deaver: THE WATCHMAKER’S HAND

The crane attached to a 78-storey building project collapses into a street in Manhattan after acid eats through the metal plates securing its concrete counterweights. Only one person is killed, but the damage is immense. A new eco-terrorist announces to the media that more cranes will be toppled unless the city commits to build more low-rent homes. Paraplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme investigates and soon learns that the perpetrator is an old enemy of his, a mercenary assassin known as The Watchmaker. And his real target is not Affordable Housing but revenge on Lincoln who thwarted him previously.

A cat-and-mouse game is under way. Can Rhyme and his team identify the next target building before The Watchmaker brings another crane down? And who at police HQ or City Hall is leaking details of the operation to the terrorist?

This is the fifteenth instalment of Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series, which began with The Bone Collector in 1997 (memorably filmed with Denzel Washington as the wheelchair-bound investigator). Rarely has a crime thriller equalled that ground-breaking debut, but The Watchmaker’s Hand is close to Deaver’s top form – terse and tense, expertly plotted and brilliantly exercised. The book has a lengthy ‘coda’ which gives the story an extra grandeur.

Unputdownable reads are not easy to find in the age of AI and streaming networks, but here’s one that will nail you to your seat.

John Hart: THE UNWILLING

North Carolina, 1972. In a grungy suburb of Charlotte, Jason French, a Vietnam war hero who ended up with a dishonourable discharge, comes home after a spell in prison for crimes of violence. His father is a police detective. His parents and 18-year-old brother Gibson are still mourning the death of Jason’s twin brother, also in Vietnam. Within days of Jason’s return a local good-time girl is horrifically tortured to death. The killer leaves evidence which frames Jason for the murder. His father and brother separately try to locate the real killer, a sociopath hired by a Death-Row prisoner known only as X, the most chilling psychopath since Hannibal Lecter.

The book is narrated from several viewpoints, including three of the Frenches and Reece, the killer-for-hire. As well as a crime procedural, this is also a story about fractured families, especially about brothers. And teenage Gibson falls in love for the first time with a local girl who becomes a potential target for the sociopath. Tenderness and terror side-by-side: a potent mix.

John Hart, like Hannibal Lecter’s creator Thomas Harris, takes a few years to produce each new book, but they are, like Harris’s, well worth the wait. Stylistically arresting and cunningly plotted, The Unwilling is an A-list example of the psychological thriller. They do not come better than this.

My only complaint is that the publishers have economised on paper by printing to the very bottom of each page, omitting the normal margin; sorry to say this, but I hope Bonnier Books will risk cutting down a few more trees in future (recycling better).

Katie Hutton: THE MAID OF LINDAL HALL

Katie Hutton’s trilogy of Cumbrian family sagas becomes a quartet and advances to the 1930s. Annie of Ainsworth’s Mill is now Annie McClure. She and her husband Robert run a foster home for children who would previously been consigned to the workhouse. Her latest protegee, Molly Dubber, follows other orphaned girls into domestic service, initially with a dotty old spinster who is being drugged into near-unconsciousness by her malevolent companion.

Molly’s next posting is to Lindal Hall, the mansion home of Mr Gascarth, a kind and decent man who has nightmares about the trenches in the Somme. Recognizing Molly’s intelligence, he advances her education to improve her prospects. He also falls in love with Molly, who is torn between her employer and another young veteran, her foster-mother’s stepson, blinded in France and now making a precarious living as a piano-tuner. And Molly has yet to learn the truth about the terrible event that orphaned her into the care of the McClures.

In a lesser writer’s hands this could be a sloppy romance from the Barbara Cartland school. Katie Hutton has been influenced by writers of a greater calibre. As in her previous sagas, Elizabeth Gaskell and Thomas Hardy come to mind. Although Molly Dubber is cut from a different cloth than Far From the Madding Crowd‘s Bathsheba Everdene, her romantic dilemma is a similar one, and it’s easy to see elements of Mr Boldwood and Gabriel Oak in her two admirers (a Captain Troy figure has only a fleeting role). If Gaskell and Hardy have inspired Katie Hutton, she does them proud. The Maid of Lindal Hall is an enthralling story, beautifully told.

The First Omen

It’s 1971 and a young American  nun, Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), is sent to Rome to help in a convent school while she waits to take her final vows. She befriends two other novitiates; one introduces her to bars and discos; the other has scary visions, as does Margaret. A rebellious priest (Ralph Ineson) tells her the convent is involved in a conspiracy to midwife the birth of an Antichrist, fulfilling Biblical prophesies.

After a gory opening with a two-minute cameo from Charles Dance, the movie slips into a low gear for half-an-hour or more before the Revelations start to kick in to make it an over-ripe prelude to the Omen originals. Bill Nighy looks very uncomfortable in his role as a cardinal who may or may not be fully protective of our heroine; in one early scene I thought his lines were being dubbed, God knows why.

There’s a garish glamour to the whole show that calls Dario Argento to mind. There are some welcome nods to the Gregory Peck Omen, but the link to that movie at the end of this one is clumsy and seems to leave open the possibility that The First Omen will not be the Last Omen. A prequel with a sequel – not sure that’s a good idea. Sadly, Bill Nighy does not bring anything like the degree of class that Gregory Peck brought to the first Damien story in 1976. For diehard fans of Satanic-themed movies (count me in!) this is rather thin fare.

LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL

Pretending to be “found footage” from the 1970s, this is the night TV chat show host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) hoped his show would get a boost from a Halloween special featuring a Latino medium and a teenage girl possessed by a demon. He got more than he bargained for. Obviously, things were going to go horribly wrong, and they did – horribly.

This is – almost – a gloriously original movie, or at least it’s an original twist on familiar tropes, in the vein of, let’s say, Scary Movie. Some projectile vomiting heralds the inevitable “hommage” to The Exorcist. Lilly, the possessed girl (Ingrid Torelli), is clearly referencing Linda Blair, but she reminded me a bit of Pamela Franklin (The Innocents, 1961).

Late Night With the Devil is unusually short, less than 90 mins. A  bit gross towards the finale, but not as sickeningly gross as the majority of current horror films. Recommended.