Review: Sixty Six

It’s 1966 and England is hosting the World Cup Finals. It’s also the year that 12-year-old Bernie celebrates his bar mitzvah. But guess what? The final match and Bernie’s big celebration both fall on the same day. And, as England’s hopes of taking the trophy rise, so the scale of Bernie’s bar mitzvah falls. Suddenly, even close family concoct reasons to be stuck in front of the TV on the day that Bernie has looked foward to for years, and has planned down to the smallest detail. But at least the growing soccer mania leads to an improvement in Bernie’s relationship with his rather distant father.

Gregg Sulkin makes a likeable lead as Bernie and Eddie Marsan gives a solid performance as his dad, but the real revelation in this engaging coming-of-age comedy is Helena Bonham Carter, who’s nicely cast as an ordinary wife and mother.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 12A
Running time 93mins

Review by David Aldridge

News: Helena Bonham Carter

Despite having won yet more rave reviews as the beleaguered mother in this week’s latest addition to the ranks of British light comedy that is Sixty Six, Bonham Carter’s next project was an altogether more hammy role – as the somewhat sinister and decidedly scruffy-looking pure-blood Bellatrix Lestrange in next summer’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. With her added to the cast, there’s practically no big-name British actor left who hasn’t appeared in the Harry Potter franchise…

Bonham Carter does have a few more “serious” roles coming up in the next year, however. She’ll take on the role of Collette alongside Susan Sarandon’s Eleanor in Eleanor & Collette – a story of female bonding as Bonham Carter’s lawyer and Sarandon’s psychiatric patient come together to sue a mental hospital. She will also be taking on a spot of romantic comedy, as one half of a pair of ex-lovers who are reunited within the confines of a transatlantic flight, in Stand By Love.

Surely most anticipated, however – although probably not for the Harry Potter fans among you – will be the Johnny Depp-starring Sweeny Todd, based on the hit Broadway musical and directed by Bonham Carter’s quirky long-term boyfriend (and father of her son) Tim Burton. As Depp and Burton have – as yet – failed to make a bad film together after five joint projects, it should be something pretty special…

News: Sacha Baron Cohen

The star of the snappily-titled Borat: Cultural Learnings for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan has hardly been out of the news for the last couple of months, constantly plugging his latest movie as his alter ego – even prompting official rebuttals from the Kazakh Embassy in the US, swiftly countered by press conferences by Borat himself.

More recently, Baron Cohen himself, rather than his character, has been making headlines for the vast sums of money being thrown at him by Hollywood for his next project, based around the extroverted homosexual Bruno character from Da Ali G Show. Universal finally won the bidding with a whopping $42million, putting Baron Cohen firmly in the comedy A-list.

In the meantime, Baron Cohen has several other projects on the go, reprising his voice role from Madagascar in Madagascar 2, possibly appearing in Tim Burton’s much-anticipated Sweeny Todd alongside Helena bonham-Carter and Johnny Depp, and is still attached to two other films: as a Hasidic Jew turned heavy rocker called Curly in Curly Oxide and Vic Thrill and an idiotic walking disaster in – yes, another comedy – Dinner for Schmucks. Whether any of these will still see the light of day after the success of Borat remains to be seen…