Babystar (Germany 2025: Dir Joscha Bongard)

"Can't we just be normal for one day?" asks 16 year old Luca (Maja Bons) of her parents, Stella (Bea Brocks) and Chris (Liliom Lewald). While it may be getting pretty hard to work out exactly what is 'normal' these days, Luca and her family's life is definitely not.

For Stella, Chris and their daughter lead an 'always on' life, live streaming to social media platforms each and every aspect of their existence via their 'Our Bright Life' channel. From Luca's filmed birth and podcasted discussions with her mother (including one excruciating clip where Stella explains periods to her daughter in front of a huge online audience), the brand sponsored family monetise at every opportunity, unashamedly pimping Luca's youth for likes; Chris is on a life mission to look good for the cameras, and their home, an immaculate sterile environment, is custom built for all camera access. "We're being paid for just being ourselves", explains Luca. But who exactly are their real selves?

As we meet the family they are introduced to a group of very young fans who have been bussed out to their country retreat, just a small handful of their 4 plus million subscribers. The childrens' questions alarmingly focus on Luca's body, age and partner status, and it's clear from the start to team handler Julie (Joy Ewulu) that the object of their attention is not entirely happy.

Nevertheless, as Stella and Chris remind her, without their online influencing lives the family would have nothing; they are, clearly, comfortably rich. But even while Luca is seemingly locked into this lifestyle - "your Mercedes Benz doesn't pay for itself" says dad about his daughter's luxury car - it doesn't stop her wanting to achieve her own agency via branded videos. At other times she seems hopelessly infantilised, occasionally still sleeping in her parents' bed after having nightmares.

But Stella and Chris want another child, information which disturbs Luca; whether this is natural sibling anxiety or concern over lost business opportunities is initially difficult to tell, but for whatever reason the news (broken to her in a streamed restaurant scene where Luca is given a cake with the words 'only child' struck through) forces her to leave her family and set up shop in a hotel, a disastrous form of independent living which just makes her even unhappier, as she watches - online, natch - her parents prepare for the birth of their second child.

Billed as a satirical comedy, Bongard's beautifully mounted, glacially observed film is just too prescient to promote laughter; this reviewer watched in quiet dread as Luca's parents, clearly aware of their daughter's antipathy to the new arrival, constantly sought to film her reactions. As the centre of this film Maja Bons is excellent, her character oscillating between child and woman, needy but confident, pulled in different ways by her frankly awful parents and Julie, initially a friend but later just one more manipulator. 

I have a feeling - or make that a fear - that the 'futureshock' aspect of Babystar's setup may soon become a reality, in the same way that Spike Jonze's 2013 movie Her anticipated the arrival of Alexa by less than a year. While I'm pleased that the director gave us a slightly redemptive ending, it's the cold hard reality of commerce and technology that you'll remember here.

Late Fame (USA/France 2025: Dir Kent Lee)

Willem Dafoe, an actor who often relishes big parts in smaller films these days, is Ed Saxberger, a poet whose heyday was 1979, although it's strongly suggested that he was a man out of time even in those days (a blast of the eponymous song by no wave artists 'Mars', dating from more or less the same year, plays as we meet him).

Like many before and after him, Saxberger was unable to sustain a living as a writer and ended up, ironically, working for the postal service, living quietly in a small New York apartment and busily ignoring calls from his sister to come and visit his dying brother.

Returning home one day, Ed gets a visitor; an initially shy, preppy guy from his neighbourhood named Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), who has recognised Saxberger as the poet from 1970s New York whose volume of poems, entitled 'Way Past Go' and long out of print, once wowed the city.

Meyers fan boys the poet and begs him to meet his friends, a group of very well off New Yorkers keen to rekindle the poetic muse in a place that has long outgrown the beatnik generation, who name themselves 'The Enthusiasm Society', which Saxberger describes as "Victorian". Once under the spell of the group, who deify Saxberger and feel that the world should once more know about him, he's seduced into accepting an offer to write some new work for a poetry 'happening' they're organising. He also meets Gloria (Greta Lee), a vampy singer/actress to whom he's instantly attracted and who seems to like him more for what he represents - a link to a bygone age - than as a person.

But the shine quickly rubs off 'The Enthusiasm Society', whose desire to bring culture back to New York seems like one more thing for bored rich kids to amuse themselves with, and Saxberger is gradually sidelined. In their local coffee shop the group's arch enemies are another similarly entitled bunch, a phone addicted collective called 'the influencers', but after a while it's difficult to differentiate between the two similarly attention seeking parties.

"There's no fool like an old fool" is the saying, and Saxberger's brief rise and fall on the back of Meyer and his gang is painful to watch; it may be my slightly advanced years, but I found nothing here to suggest a comedy. Whatever muse visited the poet in his heyday seems to have long departed, but when it comes to talent the rest of 'The Enthusiasm Society' seem happy - although this is a relative word - to recite other dead poets; the whole idea of the group's event feels increasingly thin and borderline narcissistic.

There are some great elements here, notably Dafoe's Saxberger, whose lined face registers every emotion as, plucked from obscurity, he battles with the aims of the society while losing his heart (which one suspects has been closed off for a long time) to Gloria, clearly a woman with her own demons. Lee is similarly impressive as the many faceted, glamorous but damaged actress (a role destined for Sandra Hüller until a scheduling problem intervened, possibly for the best). Unfortunately the rest of the cast seem a little one dimensional; more importantly where the script should fizz it too often just simmers on a low heat (apologies for mixing the culinary metaphors). I also just didn't get the sense of then and now New York; through Saxberger's eyes his city has changed out of all recognition, but we see too little of it (a problem which also beset Marielle Heller's 2018 film Can You Ever Forgive Me? with which this movie shares some thematic elements) and we have to rely on the poet's own voice which, strangely because of his original calling, is rather monosyllabic. I couldn't help but be a little disappointed with Late Fame; it has a great setup but fizzles out, and needed a lot more pep.

Boorman and the Devil (USA 2025: Dir David Kittredge)

It’s been a long-held view that The Exorcist II: The Heretic is one of the worst big budget horror movies, or the most egregious squandering of a star cast, or indeed the least appetising sequel to a major motion picture, ever made. Phew!

For research reasons, in preparation for David Kittredge’s fascinating documentary, I watched TEII:TH for the first time since I originally saw it, at the cinema on a double bill with William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, back in the early 1980s. Yes I’ve been that disinclined to rewatch the thing. I'll save my comments to the end.

As the documentary’s title suggests, John Boorman is your guide through the gestation, filming and critical aftermath of his seventh feature film. Using a series of to camera pieces filmed when the director was 85 – eight years ago – it’s supplemented by interviews with two of the film’s leads, Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher (who died in 2022) and a host of behind the scenes people, including the villain of the piece, uncredited writer and script butcher Rospo Pallenberg, other directors like Mike Flanagan and Joe Dante, and a handful of critics.

Kittredge eases us into the story with a brief career retrospective of Boorman’s career up to 1975, demonstrating his commitment, idiosyncrasy and willingness to stick his neck out (Sean Connery in a mankini for his 1973 sci fi oddity Zardoz, anyone?). 

Although Boorman passed on the chance to direct The Exorcist (apparently Kubrick was also approached), he felt that the script for the sequel – one which was generally felt not to be needed - gave him the opportunity for a more metaphysical look at possession, and a chance to flesh out Regan’s character. The fact that, in the four years since the original's huge financial success, a slew of 'Exorcist' copycat movies had also done great box office, wasn’t entirely coincidental.

Boorman wasn’t particularly happy with William Goodhart’s original script, seeing it as overly intellectual and lacking in ‘jolts’, and co-opted Pallenberg, who in the later stages of the movie took the opportunity of Boorman’s prolonged absence from the shoot through illness to considerably, and more ambitiously, alter the plot.

BatD follows the casting of the film, with Max Von Sydow persuaded back by the prospect of a “beautiful, poetic, healing” script (ahem) and a very unwilling Blair similarly seduced, both by Richard Burton joining the project and a rumoured million dollar salary. The gradual derailing of the project began with the unexpected death of Lee J. Cobb, preventing his Lt. Kinderman character from returning in the sequel, which required a radical script rewrite (the first of many); and the movie’s multi continent location plan being nixed in favour of filming everything on the Burbank sound stages (which, viewed today, together with the use of old school ‘ghost glass’ effects, are probably the most interesting aspects of the film).

A combination of Blair’s constant lateness to the set and Burton’s acting and alcohol related limitations compounded problems, but it was Boorman’s illness, causing a 5 week shoot shutdown, that gave Pallenberg the opportunity for an unauthorised intervention, making character changes in the script and setting out a more ambitious ending, subsequently scrapped because of the need to wrap the movie. 

For me it's the latter half of the film that really lets it down. Nearly forty years on I can forgive the rather random plotting and the sometimes pallid script, because generally TEII:TH looks stunning. Sadly the finale, deemed incomprehensible via endless rewrites and Pallenberg's sabotage, is its most problematic element; that and Regan's tap dancing routine (which the actor fought against including, quite justifiably).

The documentary effectively charts the movie’s nosedive as it moved towards completion; its eventual terrible critical reception is therefore unsurprising, but Boorman’s tenacity and frankly charming ability to find some positives in the work adds an almost upbeat element to this cautionary tale. Boorman and the Devil elevates itself above the usual talking heads documentaries through Boorman’s sage voice but also because it’s both a great – if appalling – story and a salutary lesson for budding filmmakers of all generations.

Boorman and the Devil is released in cinemas from 25 September.