God’s Own Country (15) ****
Dir: Francis Lee
With: Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu
WITHIN the first ten minutes of God’s Own Country, the lead character, Johnny, vomits into a toilet in some wind-blasted Yorkshire farm that is itself going down the U-bend; sticks his arm into a farmyard animal All Creatures Great and Small-style; and continues his day by having soulless sex with a stranger at a cattle market. By eck it’s grim up north. It would be easy to dismiss Francis Lee’s debut feature as Brokeback Mountain with Yorkshire accents, but superb performances all round, particularly by Josh O’Connor as Johnny and Alec Secareanu as migrant worker Gheorghe, make this a very British work with well-honed ideas of its own about love in a cold climate.
ALISON ROWAT
Moon Dogs (12A) **
Dir: Philip John
With: Jack Parry Jones, Christy O’Donnell
Runtime: 90mins
Having impressed with his work on TV’s Being Human and Downton Abbey, director Philip John makes his big screen debut with road movie Moon Dogs but struggles to navigate overly familiar genre elements and poorly developed characters. The story finds step brothers Michael (Jack Parry Jones) and Thor (Christy O’Donnell) setting out from Shetland to Glasgow so that the former can check up on a possibly cheating girlfriend and the latter can confront the mother who walked out on him as a baby. En route, they team up with an Irish waitress (Tara Lee) and romantic complications ensue. But eye-catching location work aside, Moon Dogs quickly becomes an arduous journey.
ROB CARNEVALE
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