Ali & Ava, two people with nothing in common fall in love

Ali & Ava is a heart-warming film about seizing that second chance in life and not letting go.

Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook in Ali & Ava

Ali & Ava (M)
In cinemas
★★★½

Born and raised in Yorkshire, film director Clio Barnard has set all four of her feature films to date in the city of Bradford. Her latest, Ali & Ava, is an unusual romance in which a man and a woman with seemingly nothing at all in common fall in love.

Ali (Adeel Akhtar) is a Pakistani Muslim who has worked as a radio DJ but who is now providing electronic music for dance halls. He’s separated from his wife, Runa (Ellora Torchin), though for the time being they’re still living in the same house.

Ava (Claire Rushbrook) is several years older than Ali; she has five grandchildren and has endured a terrible marriage during which her late husband regularly beat her – putting on his boots to do so, as she painfully recalls. She works as an assistant in a local primary school, and she seems resigned to the fact that any kind of personal relationships are now a thing of the past – that, at least, is what her racist son, Callum (Shaun Thomas) evidently thinks.

Ali meets Ava when he comes to the school to collect the child of the immigrant parents who share the house in which he’s living. He offers her a lift home, and is undeterred to discover that she lives on the far side of the city.

It’s the beginning of a relationship based on love of music, though at the outset her fondness for country and folk music, which he despises, gets them off on the wrong foot.

Ali & Ava could be described as a working-class musical; the drab, smoky city backdrop evokes the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh (Rushbrook acted in Leigh’s Secrets and Lies in 1996) but the frequently interpolated scenes of songs and dancing undercut the potentially downbeat drama and setting.

In the end this is a heart-warming film about seizing that second chance in life and not letting go.

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Minions: The Rise of Gru (PG)
In cinemas
★★★½

It’s been 12 years since Despicable Me introduced the loveable villain Gru and his yellow, bug-eyed minions. The latest entry in the popular animated franchise takes us back to the ’70s when Jaws is screening in cinemas and Gru, still voiced – very amusingly – by Steve Carell is only 11 years old and living with his mother (Julie Andrews). At Careers Day in school the other kids want to be doctors or lawyers, while Gru is determined to be a super villain.

As it happens, his favourite villains, The Vicious Six, have an opening; their leader, Wild Knuckles (Alan Arkin), after successfully obtaining the magical Zodiac Stone from a jungle hideaway, was left to drown by his second in command, Belle Bottom (Taraji P. Henson), and Gru auditions to take his place, only to be rudely dismissed (“Evil is for adults,” he’s assured). But he manages to snatch the Zodiac Stone before fleeing with the five villains in hot pursuit and Wild Knuckles – who proves hard to kill – also taking part in the chase. This is where the Minions, or at least some of them, come to prominence as they set out to help their hero. They are led by Kevin, tall and thin, Stuart, the one-eyed one, and little Bob, and they’re soon joined by the resourceful Otto. All are voiced by Pierre Coffin, whose streams of barely understandable gibberish are hilarious.

There’s a terrific sequence in which the Minions are coached in the art of kung fu by Mme Chow (Michelle Yeoh) during a visit to San Francisco’s Chinatown.

It’s a pity that the film, like so many before it, steps back from its comical elements to stage an action-packed finale in which the villains are transformed into creatures – snake, dragon etc. This is much more conventional material.

But on the plus side director Kyle Balda and his team have fun in Minions: The Rise of Gru with the ’70s setting – the clothes, the Angela Davis hairstyle worn by Belle, the Easy Rider motorbike – all details that will appeal to the grandparents who join their grandchildren to see this frequently funny, handsomely animated and generally enjoyable movie.

A scene from Minions: The Rise of Gru

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Haute Couture
In cinemas
★★★

In French director Sylvie Ohayon’s Haute Couture, Nathalie Baye plays Esther, head seamstress at Dior’s workshop on Avenue Montaigne in Paris. A lonely woman, estranged from her daughter, Esther has sacrificed her life to her work, but now she is nearing retirement. When her handbag is stolen as she waits for a train on the platform of a metro station, it’s just one more setback in her life.

The thieves are Jade (Lyna Khoudri) and Souad (Soumaye Bocoum), Arab girls from the housing estates on the fringes of the city. Jade lives with her bedridden mother, Mumu (Clotilde Courau). In the first of a series of frankly unconvincing plot developments, Esther encounters Jade again and recognises her as one of the girls who stole her bag. Instead of reporting the girl to the police, Esther takes her out to a smart restaurant for dinner and then employs her as an intern at the workshop. Late in the film the screenplay attempts to explain Esther’s motives, but they’re not very credible.

At the workshop, Jade proves to be a quick learner and soon is trusted to handle the valuable materials, mostly silk, involved in the dressmaking process. She is befriended by Catherine (Pascale Arbillet) who has a similar working-class background, and falls foul of the jealous Andree (Claude Perron). She also falls for Abdel (Adam Bessa), another Dior employee.

Though the documentary-like scenes of the dressmaking process are beguiling in themselves, the film’s considerable contrivances prove irritating. Baye, a veteran of distinction, does her best with a character whose motives are murky, while Khoudri impresses as Jade, whose journey through the film is far more convincing.

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Lyna Khoudri in Haute Couture

9 Bullets
In cinemas
★★

Writer-director Gigi Gaston’s 9 Bullets is an energetic but fatally unconvincing road movie thriller. Lena Headey plays Gypsy, a burlesque dancer who has decided to reinvent herself and become a writer. She happens to live next door to an accountant employed by Jack (Sam Worthington), a ruthless drug dealer and Gypsy’s former lover. When the accountant makes the mistake of stealing from Jack, the vengeful villain orders the execution of every member of his family; only 11-year-old Jack (Dean Scott Vazquez) escapes – along with his cute dog – and Gypsy risks her life by driving the boy from California to Montana with three of Jack’s goons – who fortunately aren’t very competent – in hot pursuit.

The film’s title is derived from Gypsy’s contention that she has nine lives and is therefore confident that it would take nine bullets to kill her. Many more than that are aimed in her direction as this rather silly film unfolds. Though the screenplay hardly hangs together, both Headey and Worthington acquit themselves well; Vazquez, on the other hand, proves to be an irritating youngster.