Lame and formulaic: Black Widow reviewed

Black Widow is the latest Marvel film and although I’d sworn off these films a while ago, due to sheer boredom, I was tempted back by the fact that this one stars a lady (Scarlett Johansson) and another lady (Florence Pugh) and even a third lady (Rachel Weisz) and is directed by a lady (Cate Shortland). Could be wonderful, I thought, except it isn’t. More women is its only decent idea. Otherwise, it’s business as usual. Otherwise, it’s all formulaic bish-bosh, smash-crash action scenes broken up by lame jokes and lame philosophising along the lines of: ‘Your pain only makes you stronger.’ Not if you’re dying in hospital and they’ve run out of morphine, I was minded to shout at the screen. This is, in short, a dumb film with an even dumber film trying to climb out.

Now we have dealt with that, on to The Truffle Hunters. The Truffle Hunters is not like Black Widow. It did not cost umpteen million dollars and there is no CGI and no violently thumping soundtrack and no Ray Winstone as an evil villain with an accent that is sometimes cockney and sometimes Russian and sometimes a combination of both. (Did his character grow up in the Mile End area of Moscow, perhaps?) Instead, this is a documentary filmed over three years about old men who still truffle hunt with their dogs as per tradition amid the mountains of Piedmont, Italy. Nothing much happens over the 90 minutes — no space stations are shot out of the sky, for example, and no one peels their own face off — but also everything happens, because life happens, and age happens, and the true love that exists between man and dog happens.