At The Movies: Wildfire heroics heat up The Lost Bus, Fish Flew Away a forgettable farce

The Lost Bus (NC16)

130 minutes, premieres on Apple TV+ on Oct 3
★★★☆☆

The story: During the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history, bus driver Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey) and schoolteacher Mary Ludwig (America Ferrara) brave the blaze to navigate her students to safety.

British film-maker Paul Greengrass dramatises headlines, whether the Sept 11 terrorist attack aboard the eponymous hijacked flight in United 93 (2006) or the 2009 hijacking of an American containership in Captain Phillips (2013).

The Lost Bus is his Hollywood adaptation of the 2021 non-fiction book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle To Survive An American Wildfire.

Harried divorcee Kevin is a recently returned Paradise native, struggling to balance the demands of his new job with those of his sick mum (McConaughey’s mother Kay McCabe McConaughey), his estranged teen son (McConaughey’s son Levi McConaughey) and his dying dog.

His travails are laid on thick, uncharacteristically of Greengrass. But the director is simultaneously lighting the spark for the main, exciting story ahead: A power line in the canyon malfunctions, and 22 kids are stranded at an elementary school when dry winds whip the embers into a series of fast-spreading fires soon engulfing the West Coast valleys.

Kevin drives his bus up, setting aside concerns for his safety and his family back home to evacuate them.

He needs no trite backstory to earn audience sympathy. His and Mary’s harrowing rescue of the terrified children are inspiring acts of everyday heroism. They steer blind through the asphyxiating fumes, as the overwhelmed Cal Fire crew fight a losing battle.

Greengrass is a former journalist who made even his three Jason Bourne spy thrillers (2002 to 2016) reportage-real, and his signature shaky-cam documentary verite is virtuosic. The inferno is all-consuming in its immediacy and fury.

Hot take: This real-life disaster epic immerses viewers in the heat of the action.

Fish Flew Away (PG13)

109 minutes, opens on Oct 2
★★☆☆☆

The story: A man leaps into the sea in an unexplained act of suicide, leaving his two wives – one current, the other long divorced – to contest the inheritance of his small courtyard.

Tong Liya (How Long Will I Love U, 2018) plays young demure widow Feihong in the Chinese comedy Fish Flew Away, and Song Jia (The Shadow Play, 2018) is a firecracker co-starring as the gruff but big-hearted former spouse Li Yu. The latter has been running a nursing home on the plot of land Feihong now claims is hers.

The last will and testament has gone missing, along with the deliveryman.

When the notary office proves no help, Feihong and Li Yu head to their late husband’s ancestral village to settle the property rights, piling into a van with his senile mother (Zhao Shuzhen) on a road trip that becomes a soppy and predictable journey of sisterhood under director Zhou Quan (Betwixt And Between, 2024).

The adversarial pair learn mutual trust and rediscover themselves as single women. They are not the only ones. Home ownership as a signifier of economic and emotional independence is at the forefront of feminist advocacy in China today.

But this scattershot romp is just a string of episodes – a scuffle with debtors the most nonsensical – sustained by the actresses’ hard work on their odd-couple dynamics. It is incapable of social commentary nor even of very much humour.

Hot take: Female empowerment is ill-served by so forgettable a farce.