Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: Christmas would not be Christmas without a Mark Gatiss ghost tale

Christmas would not be Christmas without a ghostly tale adapted and directed by the great Mark Gatiss. Though the stories of M.R. James have been his principal inspiration, he has turned in recent years to Arthur Conan Doyle, to Edith Nesbit and now to E.F. Benson – best known today for the Mapp and Lucia novels but, in his own time, renowned as a master of what he called “spook stories”.

In a World War II air raid shelter, Roger Winstanley (Tobias Menzies) strikes up a conversation with a Wren, Verity Gordon Clark (Nancy Carroll), and tells her about a nightmare that has tormented him since he was 16.

In this recurring dream, he finds himself at a country estate, confronted by a silent family – one of whom is a schoolmate he barely knows.

Invariably, the stern matriarch, Mrs Stone (Joanna Lumley) says to him: “Jack will show you your room – I have given you the room in the tower”. As much as this recurrent sequence fills Roger with dread and premonitions of evil, it remains a dream – until all his worst fears are realised when he visits the home of a friend.

Gatiss has had a good year with the launch of his excellent postwar detective series Bookish (U&alibi), season two of which is already in the works. The Room in the Tower is his eighth festive special for the BBC: long may he continue.

DOCUMENTARY

Cover-Up (selected cinemas now; Netflix, Boxing Day)

“The son of a bitch is a son of a bitch, but he’s usually right, isn’t he?” Richard Nixon’s verdict upon investigative reporter Seymour Hersh is probably a more treasured accolade than the Pulitzer Prize he won for breaking the story of the 1968 My Lai massacre.

Twenty years in the making – it took a long time to convince Hersh, now 88, to participate – Cover-Up is true to one of his own maxims: “Get out of the way of the story”. Co-directors Laura Poitras (who won an Oscar in 2015 for Citizenfour, her portrait of Edward Snowden) and Mark Obenhaus barely cross-examine the prickly veteran, leaving him free to tell his own extraordinary tale.

From his beginnings at the Associated Press, via the New York Times and the New Yorker, to his current work on Substack, Hersh has delivered an unrivalled series of scoops (and a few howlers). In 1974, he disclosed the CIA’s “Family Jewels” dossier, an inventory of its illegal activities including the MKUltra mind-control programme and the infiltration of the peace movement. Thirty years later, he revealed the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

The subtext of the documentary is that media companies no longer have the resources or, in many cases, the inclination to subsidise long-haul investigations of the sort that Hersh has pursued for more than half a century. Yet the need for such journalism has rarely been greater. We’re a culture of enormous violence,” he remarks. “You can’t just have a country who does that and looks the other way.” (His terrific 2018 memoir Reporter is also worth your time.)

STREAMING

The Lowdown (Disney+, Boxing Day)

Hot on the heels of his sublime performance in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, Ethan Hawke is terrific once again as self-styled “truthstorian” Lee Raybon in Sterlin Harjo’s neo-noir detective story set in Tulsa.

As a freelance hack and owner of a magnificently eccentric bookstore (Hoot Owl Books), Lee sees life through the lens of literature – he quotes David Foster Wallace and follows clues related to the great crime writer Jim Thompson – and considers himself a hard-boiled social crusader. “We call up bad guys,” he tells his 13-year-old daughter Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) “Make `em answer the phone.”

In this case, he is investigating the Washberg clan – the “Oklahoma Illuminati” – after the death of Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson) is ruled a suicide. Lee doesn’t buy it; which brings him face to face with Dale’s brother Donald (Kyle MacLachlan) who is running for governor, and his widow Betty Joe (Jeanne Triplehorn).

Shabby, broke and frequently beaten up, Lee nonetheless considers himself an indomitable ethical warrior in a fallen world. Even as he is tortured by neo-Nazis he insists that the title he writes for, the Heartland Press, be accurately described: “It’s a long-form magazine! It’s not a newspaper!” Also: look out for cameos by Killer Mike and Peter Dinklage.

FILM

Paranormal Activity (Ambassadors Theatre, London, until February 28)

Shot for only $15,000, Oren Peli’s eponymous horror movie (2007) was a classic of the found-footage genre, grossed $194,000,000, and spawned six sequels. Screen-to-stage adaptations do not always work, but Felix Barrett’s production, written by Levi Holloway, delivers all the jump scares, psychological tension and ghostly unease you could wish for.

From the first strains of Nirvana’s Lithium, the audience is on edge, big screens on the walls of the auditorium feeding CCTV images from the two-storey set. Lou (Melissa James) and James (Ronan Rafferty) have moved from Chicago to London, hoping to break the pattern of psychic disturbances that have plagued her – and strained their marriage. Both have dark secrets in their past that seem to have attracted a demonic presence.

Even to eyes now familiar with the magic that AI can conjure, the special effects are impressive and unsettling, and the production is immersive in the best sense of that over-used word. You’ll never dread the ringing of a bell more.

FILM

Goodbye June (selected cinemas now; Netflix, Christmas Eve)

With its glittering cast, family dynamics and Christmas setting, Kate Winslet’s directorial debut could easily have ended up as Grief Actually. That it escapes this fate reflects the caustic wit of the screenplay – written by her son, Joe Anders – and the movie’s readiness to confront the blunt force trauma of bereavement.

After June (Helen Mirren) is hospitalised and her doctors conclude that her cancer is now untreatable, her four children – Julia (Winslet), Connor (Johnny Flynn), Molly (Andrea Riseborough) and Helen (Toni Collette) – gather, along with their father Bernard (Timothy Spall), to keep vigil at her bedside.

The successful, driven Julia and Molly are not on speaking terms – the latter declaring that “I have wanted to circumcise your face for quite some time”. Connor is a psychological mess (wait for his heart-breaking reading of the e.e. cummings poem, if there are any heavens). And Helen, a sage-smudging New Age therapist, is pregnant and has broken up with her partner. Bernard, mentally as well as physically devastated by an old workplace injury, festers in denial, drinking warm lager and watching football at his wife’s deathbed.

Mirren is superb as the fading matriarch, ochre-skinned and racked with pain. “I’ve never died before – I want to look nice when it happens,” she says. “Honestly, I wish I’d been a bit more of a slut.” The portrayal of the labyrinthine limbo of an English hospital is very good – and Spall steals the show in a pub scene that I shall not spoil.

FILM

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (selected cinemas now)

Quentin Tarantino has always wanted to release Kill Bill – originally divided into two “volumes” in 2003 and 2004 – as a single movie, and now we can see why. Weighing in at 270 minutes (with a 15-minute intermission), the tale of “The Bride” (Uma Thurman) and her revenge upon the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad is epic in every sense.

In its sometimes-unhinged mash-up of genre tropes from anime, spaghetti Westerns, Chinese wuxia, grindhouse B-movies, and Japanese chanbara, Kill Bill was the pivot of Tarantino’s career: from the indie ambition of Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) to the grander sweep of Inglourious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

The famous House of Blue Leaves sequence, in which the Bride (aka Beatrix Kiddo) squares off against yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) has been beautifully enhanced, and O-Ren’s animated origin story is also ten minutes longer. But Tarantino has not meddled unduly with his masterwork, allowing the narrative arc to lead naturally towards Kiddo’s final confrontation in Mexico with her former mentor and lover Bill (David Carradine).

Thurman delivers one of the great performances in the history of action movies. Who else, after all, can execute the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique?

STREAMING

Fallout season two (Prime Video, December 17)

Like The Last of Us (Now TV), the first season of this post-apocalyptic series showed, in April 2024, how excellent a video game adaptation could be in the right hands.

In the year 2296, Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) has left behind the life of a subterranean vault-dweller and is on the trail of her father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan again), former overseer of Vault 33, alongside Walton Goggins (so good in the third season of The White Lotus) as mutilated bounty hunter “The Ghoul”.

Their quest takes them to New Vegas, where many of the secrets of the nuclear catastrophe of 2077 are to be found. Key to this plotline is Mr House (Justin Theroux), who knew the Ghoul back in the 21st century as Western actor Cooper Howard. In a seasonally appropriate treat, Macaulay Culkin is joining the cast – though not, it appears, as a heavily-radiated Kevin McCallister.

FILM

Avatar: Fire and Ash (general release, December 19)

It is 16 years since the first instalment of James Cameron’s sci-fi saga became the highest-grossing movie of all time ($2.9 billion). In 2022, Avatar: The Way of Water took $2.3 billion – a remarkable pick-me-up for cinemas after the pandemic.

For our third trip to the planet Pandora, Cameron introduces the volcano-

dwelling Mangkwan, a wrathful tribe of Na’vi led by Varang (Oona Chaplin); and the “Wind Traders”, a nomadic clan travelling in air-ships and led by Peylak (David Thewlis).

Still grieving from the tragedy with which the second movie ended, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) are back, as are Sigourney Weaver as their adopted daughter Kiri and Stephen Land as Colonel Miles Quaritch, former security chief for the colonial Resources Development Administration, now living as a “recombinant” hybrid clone.

None can doubt Cameron’s masterly use of CGI and performance capture technology. But what seemed – and was – revolutionary in 2009 must now compete with AI apps available on everyone’s iPhone and the radically enhanced world-building capacity of video games. Will Fire and Ash be a big enough hit to green-light the fourth and fifth instalments, due in 2029 and 2031 respectively?

TELEVISION

Amadeus (Sky Atlantic/Now TV, December 21)

For some admirers of Miloš Forman’s classic adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s play, which won eight Oscars in 1985, the very notion of a five-part television version is

heretical. I go to see Forman’s movie on the big screen whenever it is playing. But come on: it was released more than 41 years ago.

When the source material is this strong, there are always fresh angles to take and new nuances to be explored; especially so when the cast is so talented and the writer is Joe Barton, the creative force behind last year’s Black Doves (Netflix).

Paul Bettany is an inspired choice as Salieri, the court composer in Vienna who is quickly consumed by jealousy of the prodigy Mozart (Will Sharpe, excellent in season two of The White Lotus and Lena Dunham’s Too Much). Rory Kinnear plays Emperor Joseph II, and Gabrielle Creevy is Constanze Weber, Mozart’s wife.

The absurd and utterly contrived furore about “woke” casting – Ényì Okoronkwo plays the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, while Jyuddah Jaymes is Austrian composer Franz Xaver Süssmayr – only makes me look forward to the series more.

TELEVISION

Royal Institution Christmas Lectures (BBC Four, December 29-31)

Who better to mark the 200th anniversary of the lectures founded by Michael Faraday than the Sky at Night’s Dame Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock? As one of the scientific leaders behind the James Webb Telescope, she is definitely worth listening to on the daunting question which she addresses in these three talks: “Is There Life Beyond Earth”?

In April, transmission spectroscopy analysis of the atmosphere of the planet K2-18b, 124 light years from Earth, suggested that it might be able to sustain life. If Nasa’s Artemis programme proceeds to plan, humans will return to the Moon in 2027 for the first time since Apollo 17 in December 1972. It’s high time that we reclaimed the wonder of space from the clammy hands of Elon Musk.

FILM

Ella McCay (general release now)

It is hard to make a Frank Capra movie in the age of memes (the poster for Ella McCay has already inspired a viral “challenge”). But 85-year-old James L Brooks, back in the director’s chair for the first time in a decade-and-a-half, gives it his best shot in this charming political comedy.

Emma Mackey is the 34-year-old unexpectedly promoted to the governorship of an unnamed state in 2008, when her mentor is appointed to Barack Obama’s cabinet. The lurch between high politics and goofy family life is not always smooth, but Jamie Lee Curtis as Ella’s aunt Helen and Woody Harrelson as her feckless father Eddie are pitch- perfect. Genial popcorn fare.

FILM

Marty Supreme (general release, Boxing Day)

Oscar-nominated for his performances in Call Me by Your Name (2017) and A Complete Unknown (2024), Timothée Chalamet must be hoping that Josh Safdie’s

quadruple espresso of a movie will deliver him his first gold-plated statuette. And who knows? He might be in competition with Dwayne Johnson, the best thing about The Smashing Machine – directed by the other Safdie brother, Benny.

Set in 1952, Marty Supreme imports classic slapstick comedy and screwball patter to the improbable context of tournament table tennis and the dreams of a shoe salesman to conquer the world. Marty Mauser is a fizzing catherine wheel of a man – working all the angles, charming everyone he meets by any means necessary in pursuit of money, romance and victory.

Gwyneth Paltrow is terrific as retired movie star Kay Stone, whom Marty, competing in London, spots at the Ritz. There are cameos by director Abel Ferrara, high-wire artist Philippe Petit and conjuror Penn Jillette, along with Tyler, the Creator’s screen debut (credited as Tyler Okonma) as Marty’s friend Wally. But this is Chalamet’s movie, electrifyingly so.