Two new black comedies with heart you have to watch

A fearless and near flawless piece of home-grown cinema, a Judd Apatow comedy about grief and growing up, and an uproarious mockumentary based on Topshop supremo Philip Green, are our top picks for weekend watching.

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A fearless and near flawless piece of home-grown cinema, a Judd Apatow comedy about grief and growing up, and an uproarious mockumentary based on Topshop supremo Philip Green, are our top picks for weekend watching.

Eliza Scanlen is a teen with terminal cancer in the beautifully nuanced family drama Babyteeth.

BABYTEETH

Four stars

Director: Shannon Murphy

Starring: Eliza Scanlen, Toby Wallace, Essie Davis, Ben Mendelsohn

Rating: M

Running time: 118 minutes

Verdict: Brave, funny, heart-wrenching

Babyteeth raises the stakes of the conventional coming-of-age drama by giving its young protagonist just a few short months in which to grow up.

Milla (Eliza Scanlen) is on cusp of adulthood. She also has terminal cancer, which means the gutsy high school student simultaneously has nothing – and everything — to lose.

After a chance encounter at the train station with a streetwise addict who is significantly older than she is, Milla impulsively decides he’s “the one”.

In contrast to her over-protective mother’s fraught focus on the future, and her school friends’ callow self-absorption, Moses (Toby Wallace) tends to live in the moment.

Eliza Scanlen and Toby Wallace in Babyteeth

When he’s not off his scone, or raiding her medicine cabinet, the small-time drug dealer has something Milla needs.

To the horror of her liberal parents, she falls head over heels for the homeless no-hoper who perversely winds up giving her some.

In an extraordinarily assured feature film debut, director Shannon Murphy and screenwriter Rita Kalnejais show us what Milla sees in Moses without airbrushing any of his defects.

And even though lets her down time and again, Milla’s gut instincts ultimately serve her well.

Brave, funny, heart-wrenching ... Babyteeth is an utterly committed piece of filmmaking. One scene, in particular, goes right to the very edge of wrong – before resolving itself beautifully.

Even when emotions become so exaggerated they threaten to topple over into melodrama, confident characterisations ground us.

Wallace’s nuanced performance (which won him the Venice Film Festival’s prestigious Marcello Mastroianni prize) fleshes out a familiar type.

Scanlen, who played Beth March in Greta Gerwig’s acclaimed version of Little Women, is superb as the fiercely naIve 15-year-old.

The physical resemblance between Scanlen and Essie Davis is a bonus. But it’s the latter’s hungry love and inconsolable grief, which she anaesthetises with prescription drugs, that convinces us of their deep maternal bond.

Ben Mendelsohn in a scene from Babyteeth.

Mendelsohn is a perfect foil in the role of Milla’s psychiatrist father, whose heartache lies further below the surface, but is no less affecting for that.

The devil is in the domestic detail of Kalnejais’s rich and unpredictable script, based on her own stage play. Murphy and her cast know exactly how to realise it.

The scene in which an overwrought Anna (Davis) demands Henry (Mendelsohn) interrupt his breakfast to check the water pressure in the shower is pitch perfect.

As is the nocturnal encounter in which Anna confronts Moses, who has broken into their house to plunder their extensive pharmaceutical collection.

In Babyteeth, teenage rebellion takes on a metaphysical edge – complemented by Amelia Gebler’s costumes and Sherree Philips’ exquisite production design.

A fearless and near flawless piece of cinema.

Opens in selected cinemas on July 23

Peter Davidson in the semi-autobiographical The King Of Staten Island.

THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND

Four stars

Director: Judd Apatow

Starring: Pete Davidson, Beth Powley, Marissa Tomei

Rating: MA 15+

Running time: 137 minutes

Verdict: A surprisingly tender Judd Apatow comedy about grief and growing up

Emotionally arrested man-boys are Judd Apatow’s speciality (Knocked Up, The 40-Year Old Virgin).

But this semi-autobiographical collaboration with Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson introduces a note of poignancy to the mix.

Seth Rogen’s character hid his vulnerability beneath a barrage of one-liners.

Davidson wears his ADHD on his sleeve – an aspiring tattooist, he’s inked every part of his body he can reach. Now that he’s run out of canvas, he has begun practising on his hapless mate Igor (Moises Arias).

While the bong-fuelled banter is familiar from previous Apatow films, The King of Staten Island feels as though it has more skin in the game, perhaps because it’s based in part on Davidson’s own life (like his character, Davidson suffers from Crohn’s disease and mental health issues and his father, a first responder, died as a result of the September 11 attacks in New York).

Scott Carlin (Pete Davidson) and Ray Bishop (Bill Burr) in The King of Staten Island.

The filmmakers set the tone in the opening scene, during which Scott Carlin (Davidson) unclicks his seatbelt, shuts his eyes, and then plants his foot on a busy stretch of highway.

Swerving at the last minute to avoid a major collision, he manages to clip the rear of another vehicle, sending it spinning into another car.

Scott’s sorry. But not sorry enough to turn around and face the consequences.

Preoccupied by his own existential predicament, he hasn’t really registered the frequency with which the other people in his life tend to wind up as collateral damage.

People such as Scott’s worn-out mother, Margie (Marisa Tomei), who has been trying to protect him from himself ever since his firefighter father died on the job 17 years ago.

Scott’s would-be girlfriend Kelsey (Beth Powley) is familiar with his flaws. But that doesn’t stop her from getting hurt, over and over again.

Peter Davidson give a disarmingly honest performance.

Scott’s imprudent decision to tattoo a nine-year-old boy at the beach one day leads, indirectly, to a burgeoning romance between Margie and the boy’s hot-headed father, Ray Bishop (Bill Burr), who also happens to be a fireman.

Threatened by Ray’s presence in his home, Scott winds up getting them both thrown out, which is how a lost soul who is desperately in need of a father figure winds up getting a fire station full of them.

The basic synopsis might sound a little bit schmaltzy, but there’s something about Davidson’s performance style that feels disarmingly honest.

Funny, raw, and surprisingly touching.

Now showing

ALSO SHOWING

GREED

107 minutes (MA15+)

Michael Winterbottom skewers the exploitative practices of global fashion brands in this uproarious mockumentary based on Topshop supremo Philip Green. Long-time collaborator Steve Coogan stars as Sir Richard “Greedy” McCreadie, a self-made billionaire whose retail empire is in crisis. The fall out is threatening to put a dampener on his Gladiator-themed 60th birthday celebrations on the Greek island of Mykonos. Isla Fisher plays McCreadie’s ex-wife. David Mitchell has the role of bumbling biographer.

Now available on digital release

Steve Coogan in a scene from Greed.

RELIC

89 minutes (M)

A horror movie about dementia? Now that’s a truly terrifying premise.

When Edna (Robin Nevin) goes missing, her daughter (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter (Bella Heathcoate) drive to her crumbling home in rural Victoria to find out what has happened to her. Whereupon time starts to play tricks upon them, and some very strange things ensue. Australian director Natalie Erika James rachets up the tension in an extraordinarily accomplished feature film debut, from a screenplay by James and Christian White.

Now streaming on Stan

THE VERY EXCELLENT MR DUNDEE

TBC

More than 30 years after he became an Aussie icon, Paul Hogan is reluctantly thrust back into the spotlight when he accepts a Knighthood to salvage his 10-year-old granddaughter’s sullied reputation. But wherever 80-year-old Hoges goes, trouble follows. First, he is caught brawling with a rude Dundee impersonator on Hollywood Boulevard. Then he upsets Grease fans by stepping in for a no-show John Travolta in a charity duet with Olivia Newton-John. Chevy Chase, John Cleese, Shane Jacobson and Julia Morris also feature.

Now streaming on Amazon Prime Video