This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The screenwriter Blake Snyder, who died in 2009, was one of those creatives who taught more successfully than he did. He’s credited with writing just two films, of which the most successful is 1992’s cop comedy Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.

This is famous only because Arnold Schwarzenegger judged the script dreadful but, in an effort to sabotage Sylvester Stallone’s career, pretended to be interested so that his rival would go for it.

But Snyder’s 2005 book about how to structure a film, Save The Cat, is one of the most successful and influential screenwriting manuals ever written.

It laid out a precise structure for a successful film, right down to saying which page of the script should feature which elements. There are other books on story theory, but Snyder’s is shorter, which may explain its success in Hollywood.

The thing about formulae is that they’re an aid, not a guide. Take Gladiator II. A sequel to the 2000 Oscar-sweeping epic, it follows the structure of the original closely. An obvious problem is that the original killed off almost all its leading characters, and in any case the actors are all a quarter of a century older.

The solution is to have Irish heartthrob Paul Mescal step into Russell Crowe’s sandals. He lacks Crowe’s heft, both physically and as a character, so Pedro Pascal and Denzel Washington are drafted in to carry the plot along.

Ridley Scott, the director of the original, returns to oversee this. He’s had what might politely be described as an erratic output of late, but here he’s on ground that suits him. The simplest way to describe the result is to say that if you enjoyed Gladiator, you’ll enjoy Gladiator II. And that’s not something we could take for granted.

William Tell, another historical epic, this time the tale of the crossbow-wielding Swiss hero, sets out to follow the same formula. All the bits are in the right places, there are some decent fights, and obviously there’s an apple on a boy’s head, and yet it’s ultimately a miss.

I think Snyder would say that the problem is with the hero: I never felt engaged by Tell. The supporting cast, especially Connor Swindells as the villain, and Ellie Bamber as a princess with ideas, are having more fun. Alternatively, the problem is the weapon: as an Englishman, I can never feel about a crossbow the way I do about Robin Hood’s longbow.

If you’re in the mood for something less bloody, We Live In Time is a dying-mum romantic weepie. It tells the story of Tobias and Almut from terrific meet-cute — she runs him over — to ho-hum bereavement.

There were sniffles in the cinema as the credits rolled, and that’s largely down to Andrew Garfield, who does the emotional heavy lifting as the soon-to-be-bereaved Tobias. His portrayal of a man suppressing grief and dread is finely judged.

The problem here is his opposite number. Florence Pugh’s Almut is a chef who learns she has fatal cancer just as she’s asked to represent Britain in a sort of culinary Olympics. She decides not to tell Tobias she’s competing, even allowing him to organise their wedding for a day when she will be abroad.

He learns about this after she forgets to pick their daughter up from daycare because she’s training. At this point, the thought occurs that she might be a selfish cow.

We have of course seen plenty of films in which a work-obsessed father encounters a life tragedy and learns the value of family. We Live In Time reverses this, in that a work-obsessed mother is told she has months to live and decides to spend it learning to cook octopus.

We’re asked to believe that this is the right choice, after she gives a speech about how she wants her child to have something to remember her for. Maybe a better way to achieve this would be to spend her few remaining weeks on earth with her.

But then we get very little sense that Almut has any interest in her daughter, who seems to be there only to make her mother’s departure even more tear-inducing. I don’t mind being manipulated, but I’d like it to be done with more subtlety.

A much rawer but also more convincing portrayal of motherhood comes in Nightbitch, an adaptation of the magical realist novel by Rachel Yoder, which stars Amy Adams as a woman stuck at home with a toddler she simultaneously adores and resents. So subsumed into parenthood is her identity that her character is simply called “Mother”.

Once a successful artist, now she’s making hash browns and putting on weight whilst her husband feels she’s become a stranger. Struggling to cope, Adams starts to believe she’s turning into a dog. Or is she actually turning into a dog? It’s not exactly clear.

Not everything about this film works: the middle section is a little flat, and, being a literal soul, I never quite know what to do with fantastical elements. But it has moments of laugh-out-loud humour and captures, with painful honesty, the struggle and isolation of early parenthood. And, crucially, it has heart: we feel Adams’ visceral love for the child she fears has destroyed her life.

There is a cat in this film, and it isn’t saved, but Snyder would approve, I think, of the thing it gets right: giving us a central character we care about.