don't forget you can see the front pages of the papers online on the bbc news website. it's all there for you — 7 days a week at bbc.co.uk/papers and if you miss the programme any evening you can watch it later on bbc iplayer. thank you penny smith, and rosamund urwin goodbye. hello and a very warm welcome to the film review on bbc news, and the good news is mark kermode is back from his summer holidays. nice to see you. nice to see you, it feels like it's been ages. it does, it really does actually. what have you chosen this week? so the children act, which is a new film starring emma thompson, we have this week. also, very different, alpha, the new movie by albert hughes. and black kkklansman,

the spike lee film. and the children act... yes. i'm very interested to hear what you say because i've read the novel... 0k. and i like it. so, so? and, you know, adapted from the novel by ian mcewan... yes. ..in the screenplay. so emma thompson is a high court judge, whose work is engulfing her life. she is involved in matters of life and death, very, very complicated cases — one of which is about a boy who's 17 years old, who's refusing a blood transfusion on religious grounds. but he is still technically a child, there is an argument about whether or not he's being forced into this position by his parents. she has also to deal with cases of conjoined twins and, you know, these are weighty philosophical issues. when she comes home, she brings the work home with her, and her husband, played by stanley tucci, is starting to feel shut out of their marriage. here's a clip. i'll make reservations for dinner, as i've had an awful day myself. and, um, we'll go drink some wine and... and i can get some opera tickets for saturday night. no, i'm due tojudge all weekend.

you can't switch it? mm—mm, two judgements for monday. hmm. what? 0h, nothing, it's just like last weekend and the 50 weekends before that. that's how it is. yes. um, look, i don't know how to say this, um, but here it is. ithink... i think i want to have an affair. yeah. now, i... stanley tucci is terrific. yeah, he is. i'm a big fan of his. he is. the way he says "yes" is really, really well done. i have to say that the performances are terrific.

i mean, emma thompson i'm a huge fan of anyway, and she's really great in this role. it's hard to think of many other people who could carry this role. what then happens is that as part of this case of having to rule about the 17—year—old boy who doesn't want the blood transfusion, she makes the strange decision to go to the hospital to see him, which is unusual. and that encounter with him sparks something with him, if you're aware of things like enduring love, you'll be aware of those ideas of a very short encounter coming to mean something much more. what the film is really about is about the way in which her marriage is sort of falling apart and somewhere else in her life, something else — and all these things are colliding. what i like about the film is that, you know, it's notjudgemental about the characters. i think it is a very good portrayal of people being shut out of their marriage by work. i also think that it deals, you know, in a very sort of sensible way with some very complex issues. however, i think the performances are better than the film itself. i think there are moments, there's one moment —

a lot of emma thompson's performance is very restrained, you know, she telegraphs a lot with very little, but there are also moments in which she has kind of like an emotional breakdown, which reminded me oddly enough of that brilliant scene in love actually, in which she goes off in the bedroom and cries. 0h, superb, yes. however, there are other things about the film which also reminded me of love actually, and not in a good way. there are certain moments in which the drama, i think, is melodramatic, cheesy, doesn't work, and isn't particularly sort of well structured. so i think what it is is really well played and i'd certainly recommend seeing it for those performances alone. i think there are some problems with the writing and the direction can feel a little bit staid. and i'm wondering how filmic it is because as i was reading the novel, i thought "oh, you could see this, dare i say, as a television drama." you know, ifelt that, in a good way, as i was reading it, i felt... that is a really interesting point because there are definitely moments watching the film in which televisual is the sense that you get from it. i know actually, nowadays of course, television is as cinematic

as cinema itself. that's true, yes... but there are moments in it which you think, "this isn't coming to life as a film, but that's — that is balanced by the fact the performances are so good." yeah. i mean even from just watching that clip, i could tell you were enjoying it, and you can see how well those relationships... and i have not seen the pre—screening because i was told that would end in divorce because we both have to go and see it... 0k. so this is why i haven't seen it, so we're still going. it's definitely worth seeing, i just have reservations about the writing and directing, but no reservations at all about the performances. all right, 0k, well, it's on the list for the bank holiday weekend. alpha, your second choice. so this is an odd one. it's the new film by albert hughes, one half of the hughes brothers, who back in the ‘90s made dead presidents, which is one of the great overlooked movies of the ‘90s, a real masterpiece. set 20,000 years ago, a young man, played by kodi smit—mcphee, goes on a hunting trip. he hasn't yet learnt to kill, and he is lost and left for dead. he's attacked by a pack of wolves.

he wounds one of the wolves and then befriends it, and then it becomes a story of a boy and his dog on a quest to get back home. there are some remarkable things about it, certainly in terms of the visuals. there's very, very little dialogue, what dialogue there is is subtitled, but it's really a bit of visual storytelling, and visually, it is very arresting. there are moments in it in which it kind of — it wanders a little bit off the beaten track and it becomes slightly almost hallucinatory, which i rather like and i do think that albert hughes is a very talented director. however, it has to be said, this has been sitting around for, i think, it's about a year. it was originally meant to be released about a year ago. there was some controversy as well about animal rights on the set and so, it has had a sort of strange route to the screen. i think there are things in it that are — that are very impressive. and as i said, as its heart, it is the story of a boy and his dog on a quest, and that happens to be a story that i'm a sucker for. well, i am too, as you know. yeah.

so i may well enjoy that one. and goodness, well, it's the new spike lee. the new spike lee, tell us all. well, he's back in full force. this is based on the stranger—than—fiction story of ron sta llwo rth. john david washington is stallworth, who in the 1970s becomes — he joins the formerly all—white colorado springs police force and he decides to infiltrate the ku klux klan, and he — initially he gets an advert from the press with the phone number, and he rings up and says "i'm a white supremacist and i want tojoin the klan", and they believe him, and he starts working his way right up the chain, right up to david duke, grand wizard. but when it comes to actual face—to—face meetings, of course, they have to get somebody else to play ron, so what they do is they pull in his partner, flip, played by adam driver, who isjewish, and they say "ok, well, i'll do the voice on the phone, you do it in person". but they have very different, initially very different, attitudes to the case. here's a clip. well, i'm not risking my life to prevent some rednecks from lighting a couple of sticks on fire. this is the job. what's your problem? that's my problem.

for you, it's a crusade. for me, it's a job. it's not personal, nor should it be. why haven't you bought into this? why should i? because you're jewish, brother. the so—called chosen people. you've been passing for a wasp. white anglo—saxon protestant, cherry pie, hot dog, white boy. that's what some light—skinned black folks do — they pass for white. i thought this was really good. firstly, it's a film of balancing acts. the central balancing act is between humour and horror, and it's no surprise to discover that it's produced byjordan peele, he made get out, which of course was a horror film that was submitted to one of the awards as a comedy, and then jordan peel said, actually, "it's a documentary". and of course there is documentary in this, it takes an historical story and brings it right up to date with, you know, shocking footage of charlottesville, and it's very, very contemporary — i mean, the issue of neo—nazis and extreme right—wingers is still very, very contemporary. but this could be a deeply serious film throughout. that is what you would expect, given the subject. and what he manages to do,

because they say at the beginning it's based on some for real, for real stuff, meaning you could hardly believe that some of this happened. and it does play fast and loose with the truth. it takes the story and fictionalises it. but what it does is, in much the same way as get out, it balances those two elements, and the balancing act, i to have to say, is brilliantly done. i mean, i think this is spike lee's best film since four little girls because it's very hard to get that balance right. there were moments in the screening that i saw in which people were belly laughing, and there were moments in which people were hiding their faces and recoiling because you are dealing with some really, really, you know, profoundly disturbing stuff. and it's an angry film, it's a film which, although it's set in the past, in the 1970s, feels urgently contemporary. i love the look of it, i love the fact that it actually looks like a film made in the 1970s. spike lee has cited things like serpico and french connection and dog day afternoon as kind of visual cues for it, and the performances are really great. adam driver, john david washington in the centre of it, john david washington is brilliant, i mean, carrying this drama.

and again, he's also the centre of balancing the humour and the horror. i thought it was really remarkable and i think you'll like it. ok, i certainly did like what you've chosen as best out. yeah, i'm sorry... oh, my goodness! i'm back, you see? you're back to mamma mia, you can't give it up. but i sobbed, i sobbed. i do, and my love, my life... oh, i know. that's gone. what makes it so brilliant is if it didn't have that emotional sucker punch, it wouldn't be half the film that it is. it's not just that you smile and all the rest of it, it's that when you weep, you weep buckets. i thought it was — i thought it was really good. it does what a film's meant to do — is it reaches in and it grabs you by the heartstrings. it was, dare i say, so much better than i expected. yeah. and that's a plaudit in itself. i know! no, absolutely, and believe me, i went in thinking "this can't, this isn't gonna work, i mean there's no way that the godfather 2 structure can work with mamma mia" and you come out saying, i just want to go see it again and again and again. you do.

a very quick thought about dvd? yeah, so in the fade, which is a hamburg—set revenge thriller. diane kruger won a best actress award at cannes a year ago now and i think it's really worth it for her performance. it's about her husband gets murdered, neo—nazis are implicated, the law fails her and she takes the law into their own hands. her performance is brilliant. the film, actually rather like children act, has some flaws, but she carries it shoulder high and it is worth seeing for her performance. all right. mark, lovely to have you back, thank you very much indeed. see you soon. thank you. and all our previous programs are on the iplayer, of course. thanks for being with us. bye— bye. hello there. more sunshine today. fewer showers. it still didn't feel very warm oui’ fewer showers. it still didn't feel very warm our nerve. 21 was the top. that was in southampton. 8000

showers here in cambridgeshire and also ina showers here in cambridgeshire and also in a sex for a while. schmeichel a futile in showers. —— and also in sex. —— essex. everything is coming in from the atla ntic everything is coming in from the atlantic this cloud is swamping the uk, bringing with it outbreaks of rain. still some clear skies across eastern parts of the uk. temperatures not as lota night because of this cloud spilling in. rain developing more widely across northern ireland and push into other western areas later in the night. lowest temperatures will be across eastern england and eastern scotland, where we could see numbers down to six or seven degrees. these areas probably starting dry early on sunday but not staying dry, because this rain, which we have already seen this rain, which we have already seen widely in the west, will push east. heavy rain at times, especially across wales and the south—west of england. it should brighten up after the rain in northern ireland. some blustery

winds, particularly for england and wales. strong and gusty winds around the coast of wales in southern england. the heaviest rain in the south—east, arriving in the afternoon. i7 south—east, arriving in the afternoon. 17 degrees, you might get that if you are lucky, but for scotland, only 12 or 13. that if you are lucky, but for scotland, only 12 or13. here, the rain might not amount to a good deal. for all of us, rain might not amount to a good deal. forall of us, it rain might not amount to a good deal. for all of us, it simply moves away in the evening. overnight the cloud will break but we will keep a few showers going in the north, temperatures 11 or 12. monday, few showers going in the north, temperatures 11 ori2. monday, bank holiday for most of us, will be a much better day. sunshine, for a start. maybe a few showers coming across northern parts of the uk and across northern parts of the uk and a bit ofa across northern parts of the uk and a bit of a breeze blowing. the sunshine, temperatures are bound to be higher, significantly so in scotland, and low 20s likely in east anglia and the south—east of england. monday, we are in between two weather systems. this one will arrive in the north—west on tuesday and push its way further east on wednesday. it might well need some showers coming up from the near continent, a bit of uncertainty about the forecasts are wednesday.

it could be the worst of the rain will stay away from the south—east and east anglia. for most of us tuesday will be a fine day. a bit of warmer weather, perhaps mid—20s and the south—east. saying fine for most of wednesday. a bit of rain coming in from the west bayview was getting very close to kent and sussex as well as essex. that is it from me. i will see you through the night. this is bbc news. our top stories — on his visit to ireland, pope francis pledges to end abuse, corruption and cover—ups in the catholic church. translation: the failure of the ecclesiastical authorities, bishops, religious superiors, priests and others others, adequately to address these repugnant crimes has rightly given rise to outrage. on the road with the hungry migrants fleeing venezuela as peru closes its borders to those without passports. a year after the rohingya expulsions began, angry protests in the teeming refugee camps of bangladesh. and we meet the former russian official who tried and failed to get the soviet union to sober up.