This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
A piano, we learn in Tuner, is never perfectly tuned. The skill is in pitching the keys relative to each other to deliver a beautiful sound. Although sometimes, as we learn in this month’s other film, Köln 75, people do their best work on an imperfect instrument.
What are the odds that in one month we get two films that turn on piano tuning? More than that, two great films that turn on piano tuning? Serendipity has delivered a double bill for the ages.
Tuner first. It’s a simple premise: Leo Woodall is Niki, a New York piano tuner, apprenticed to, and increasingly covering for, his geriatric mentor Henry, played by Dustin Hoffman at his quirkiest.
Niki suffers from a condition that makes him, as he puts it, allergic to loud noises. He wears two layers of ear protection to go about his life. We’re given a sense of how that feels thanks to some tremendous sound design which emphasises all the city noises that the rest of us filter out.
Henry and Niki spend their days maintaining beautiful instruments that the super-rich use simply as interior design pieces — one of the themes of the film is people who don’t appreciate what they have. These craftsmen ply their trade for customers who are entirely indifferent to their skill.
Then Henry falls ill, accumulating huge hospital bills, just as Niki discovers he has an unusual skill: his astonishing hearing allows him to crack safes. Can you tell how this is going to go yet?
The skill in a film like this is in the execution. Writer-director Daniel Roher, who won an Oscar for his documentary about Alexei Navalny, has moved comfortably over to fiction. The story is tight. The cast is perfect all the way down, with Woodall making a comfortable transition to leading man.
The relationship between Niki and Ruthie, a young composer whose piano he rescues, is sweet. The gang who contract Niki’s services and then don’t want to let him leave flip back and forth between menacing and comic without ever being implausible. I wasn’t completely sure about the ending, but honestly, that feels like nit-picking. It was under two hours and a pure joy.
Which is also the case with Köln 75, the tale of how the jazz musician Keith Jarrett came to record the best-selling piano album of all time on an instrument that was, when he arrived at the concert hall, unplayable.
The true story behind this recording is so amazing that it’s remarkable it’s taken 50 years to make it to the big screen. Jarrett was a brilliant pianist, but jazz was out of favour. He was being driven across Europe in his tour manager’s car. The woman who had booked him into the Cologne Opera House was an 18-year-old named Vera Brandes, who was trying to make it as a concert promoter. Although the performance was Jarrett’s, this is really her story.
Mala Emde portrays Brandes as a force of nature, possessed of a remarkable ability to persuade people to do what she wants. Music is a chance for her to escape her oppressive father, a man who wants her to be an ambassador or at least, like him, a dentist. Booking Jarrett is her great triumph, until she discovers that the wrong piano is on stage, and the star is refusing to play on a broken-down instrument that is too small for the space.
The journalist Tim Harford has argued that it was the constraints of the instrument which made Jarrett’s performance that night so good. The musician was forced to improvise around the piano’s weaknesses, leading him to places he might never otherwise have found.
The film doesn’t really go into that, but it makes a good attempt to explain why all this matters, even if you think free jazz sounds like a piano falling down the stairs. I would say that this is the only film this year in which a character will yell “Piano tuners? Follow me!” but it’s only May and we have two films on the subject already. Who can say what the autumn will bring?
This is my final column in this slot, as I’m stepping back to give more time to writing books. I wrote my first film review, for Edinburgh Student, in 1993, and, when I got the chance to do the job again, 30 years later, I was delighted.
Much had changed in the interval. In earlier days, distributors were desperate to be reviewed, sending us invites to local screenings in the post. Nowadays critics are the enemy. Many of the screenings I attend are packed with influencers, who can be relied upon to gush on the socials. Grumpy gits wondering if the third act worked aren’t wanted.
Perhaps the industry can be forgiven for a defensive crouch. Ticket sales remain 30 per cent down on pre-pandemic levels. Covid, and then the writers’ strike, wrought havoc with production. I can remember several months where I worried there would be nothing to write about.
But I’m stubbornly optimistic for the art form. Months like this one, where I can pick out two new films that are simply excellent, convince me that there’s a future yet.
As a farewell, here are some others that I’ve especially enjoyed telling you about. They’re all worth a look: Blink Twice, Conclave, Hamnet, The Long Walk, The Ballad of Wallis Island, Black Bag, Warfare, American Fiction and Dead Man’s Wire.
