100 minutes, opens on May 28
★★★★☆
The story: In the 72 hours leading up to D-Day, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) agonises over whether to launch the largest seaborne invasion in history or risk losing the war altogether – based on the advice of one man and his barometer.
A British movie obsessing over the weather sounds like a cultural parody, except there is nothing funny about the fate of the free world hanging in the balance.
The Battle of Normandy was a strategic multinational offensive to liberate France and Western Europe from Nazi Germany.
With just days to go after two years of planning, and at significant loss of tactical advantage, Britain’s chief meteorologist James Stagg (Andrew Scott) insisted the June 6, 1944 operation be postponed due to impending storms: It will be a catastrophe.
The World War II docudrama Pressure makes heart-in-throat theatre from isobar maps.
Australian director Anthony Maras’ (Hotel Mumbai, 2018) adaptation of the 2014 stage production by English playwright David Haig recreates the pressure cooker setting of the Allied Expeditionary Force’s HQ in Hampshire. This is where tensions rise along with the stakes as Stagg argues his dire warning to an enraged Eisenhower and the Allied commanders, who want to believe the sunny forecast of American weatherman Colonel Krick (Chris Messina).
They are a passionate ensemble, with Scottish actor Scott quietly moving as this brusque, unpopular lone voice of dissent.
Stagg’s scrupulous analyses of the jet stream would prove fundamental to the campaign’s victory.
More so today, he is an inspiring lesson in courage for his stoic professionalism despite a personal crisis back home, for speaking truth to power and for standing by scientific truths.
Hot take: Get to a cinema for this gripping true story, come rain or shine.
Daniel Day-Lewis (left) and Sean Bean in Anemone.
PHOTO: HBO MAX
122 minutes, premieres on HBO Max on May 29
★★☆☆☆
The story: Daniel Day-Lewis and Sean Bean square off as estranged brothers, Ray and Jem Stoker, on a tense reunion deep in the woods of late 1990s Northern England.
Day-Lewis is cinema’s greatest living thesp, the only winner of three Best Actor Academy Awards, for My Left Foot (1989), There Will Be Blood (2007) and Lincoln (2012).
He has emerged from his post-Phantom Thread (2017) retirement to co-write and star in the feature film-making debut of his son Ronan Day-Lewis, and Anemone, in trying to accommodate his weighty talent, is but ponderous.
The British family drama is all grey skies and glum faces as Jem tracks Ray down in his wilderness cabin. He has an urgent letter from Ray’s former partner (Samantha Morton) concerning their teenage son (Samuel Bottomley).
He also hopes to understand why Ray left home 20 years earlier, before the birth of his son, and turned hostile recluse. Anemone, the title, is a windflower that closes on itself, a metaphor for Ray withdrawing from the world.
Over several days, the siblings silently circle each other with hackles raised.
Ray was a British soldier in the Irish Troubles, the decades-long sectarian conflict. Something happened there.
And “That’s it?” may reasonably be the reaction to the thinly plotted script, when he finally reckons with his past in a prolix monologue that uncorks his guilt, torment, resentment and shame.
The fledging director overreaches. A trained artist, Ronan Day-Lewis assigns undue importance complete with unhelpful visual symbolisms to a trite story on generational violence: there is a bizarre magic-realist salmon, and, by the end, a biblical hailstorm.
Hot take: Day-Lewis Senior is a better actor than Junior is a film-maker.