Amanda Knox, The Jinx and Bridget on Brexit – Reviews #246

A few things I've seen over the last couple of weeks.

FILM



I Married a Communist (Robert Stevenson, 1949) – If you’re interested in the history of Hollywood, then this is essential viewing: a movie released at the height of the communist witchhunt, which slips the commies seamlessly (and stupidly) into a standard crime melodrama template. And who else would have made it – at least like this – but red-baiting RKO studio chief Howard Hughes, his rationality thrown to the wind by three too many plane crashes.

Robert Ryan, whose presence is as dispiriting proof as any that prominent liberals were complicit in this dark chapter of American history, stars as the VP of a shipping line who’s targeted by his former comrades in the party, who like nothing better than seducing vulnerable young men and throwing older ones in the river.

It’s clear that the screenwriters either don’t want to expose the public to leftist ideas, don’t want to risk boring their audience with ideology or don’t know what communism is, as the sequences of indoctrinated worker John Agar making speeches at union meetings are done as a wordless montage (!), and the whole exercise is really extremely silly (compounded by Laraine Day’s terrible performance as Ryan’s concerned wife)… but there’s something about the movie that kept me enthralled.

Partly the rich characterisations from lovesick party whore Janis Carter and hired assassin William Talman – a womanising shooting gallery owner – partly the fact that it’s shot by Nick Musuraca and utilises RKO’s undeniable genre expertise, and partly the considerable curio value of seeing a film this vile, irresponsible and thick: Cold War paranoia writ large, if not very well. (2)

***

TV



The Jinx (Andrew Jarecki, 2015) – Capturing the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki explores the life (and possible crimes) of real estate scion and suspected triple murderer Robert Durst, in this six-part HBO mini-series. It starts uncertainly, unnecessarily padding its run time and becoming frequently entangled in an unnecessarily complicated structure, but by the straightforward, utterly gripping Episode 4 (surely no coincidence) – based around a murder trial – it's really motoring, and the final two episodes are outstanding, some long-winded making-of elements compensated for by the sheer scale of the subsequent revelations.

I remember, when training as a journalist, my class being given reams of paperwork about an ongoing murder investigation. We spent a good half hour searching dedicatedly for the truth, before our trainer helpfully pointed out that we were journalists. "I'm not expecting you to solve the case," he said witheringly, "you just have to write a news piece about it."

We did, but it wasn't nearly as satisfying. And that's where The Jinx comes into its own. It's perhaps less effective as a creative exercise than either Serial or Making a Murderer, and yet unlike those retrospective pieces it actually moves the story along, and – incredibly – manages to solve the case. While there are serious questions to answer about the documentary's own timeline and its commitment to entertainment over, say, morality, the final 15 seconds are as extraordinary as anything I've ever seen on TV.

See if you can spot the almost imperceptible 'tell' that Robert Durst does when he might be telling an untruth. Lol. (3.5)

***



Amanda Knox (Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn, 2016) – The Amanda Knox story done Making a Murderer-style: though the teaser trailers and the opening monologue play with the idea of her possible guilt, this Netflix Original is a single-sided polemic aimed at clearing her name. Which has, of course, already been cleared by the Italian Supreme Court, so fair enough.

This film does a fine job of undermining the case against her and underlining the media feeding frenzy that assisted it, by letting tabloid sleazeball Nick Pisa and mad prosecutor Giuliano Mignini speak for themselves, and then elegantly slicing their testimony into finest fillets of unapologetically self-serving bullshit and dangerous, errant nonsense. Among Mignini's more outlandish pieces of deduction (and there are several) is that when he accused Knox of murder she put her hands over her ears because she was reliving the screams of her victim. Pisa is just an unmitigated arsehole, who either didn't know or didn't care what normal, empathetic people would make of his contributions. It takes something to be the most appalling person in a documentary about a murder, when you were just there to report on it, so well done to him. 'Nick Pisa-shit', am-I-right?!

Speaking about the case, and glimpsed in incredibly eerie home videos shot just before her trip to Italy, Knox is so appealing and so pretty that you can't help but hope that she's innocent (shallow, I know), and certainly there's no smoking gun included, though her decision to try to pin the murder of English student Meredith Kercher on her own boss was, at best, astonishingly selfish. Her then boyfriend and co-defendant Raffaele, meanwhile, is just an adorable bundle of cute, with his broken English and wide open face and, oh yeah, four years spent in prison for murder. Whoops.

This isn't the best true crime work you'll ever see, but it's professionally put together, and weirdly entertaining for a film that's about what it's about. It somewhat skids about on the surface rather than providing the depth of research or emotion that would blow you away, but for its multi-faceted approach and its access - if not its intimacy - it's well worth seeing.

So did Knox do it? Probably not. There definitely isn't enough credible evidence to say anything stronger against her: the most damaging piece is that Raffaele told the police that her alibi was false, but then he was under unfathomable pressure, the adorable bastard. (3)

***



Spiral: Season 4 (2012) – "Précédemment dans Engrenages..." This knockout fourth season of the French crime series is for the most part a return to realism after the silliness of the previous run, with Laure and co investigating both left-wing bombers and Kurdish paramilitaries. And while it never comes close to Season 2 – a devilishly intense, tightly-coiled beast of an eight-parter – it's the second-best series of shows that Spiral has offered, with Tintin given more to do than ever before, and a final episode that offers everything you could want, and then some. It's hard to recall a show with so many great recurring characters, the programme's nuanced view of its heroes and effortless way of manipulating our sympathies - either gradually or via short, sharp shocks - creating a litany of special moments that jar your emotions as they pull the rug out from under you. A dark, nauseatingly suspenseful joy. (3.5)

***

LIVE



Bridget Christie: Because You Demanded It (Leicester Square Theatre, 20 October 2016) – This new show from my absolute favourite stand-up is very good, but with a few obvious flaws. Christie's delivery is rarely utterly seamless, but at the Leicester Square Theatre on Thursday she stumbled over her words at least a dozen times and at others seemed to be almost reciting by rote: of course that's mostly what stand-up is, but the illusion of it just having occurred to the performer is central to its success. And while the material has some dizzying peaks (including one masterfully contextualised routine in which she argues that "A paedophile who voted for Remain is better than a non-paedophile who voted Leave"), it has just a handful of small additions to the show that premiered at the Edinburgh Festival a couple of months ago.

Since it's essentially a show about Brexit − set up with the premise that we all need a break, so the show will be about gardening, bringing her on to thoughts about foreign and indigenous plants − that's problematic. The news, particularly this news, is moving so fast that you could conceivably write five minutes of great new material every day, but then quantity was never Christie's strongpoint: while in her award-winning purple patch, she was essentially repurposing the same material across different mediums: radio, interviews, shows and even a (completely delightful) book. All of which makes it sounds like I didn't like enjoy the show, which I absolutely did.

My problem (well, one of my many problems) is that I wanted the things I like to be things I can love: I want Thea Gilmore to stop writing two songs an album about how you'll never be able to stop her from speaking out, and actually just speak out: as far as I'm aware, she's only ever written one real protest song, and that was 10 years ago. Christie can be staggeringly incisive, is superb at mining the humour from almost impossible sources (women's rights, feminism, FGM, an 80-year-old man falling down a lift shaft) and is better at building a routine than just about anyone I've ever seen, as evidenced by the brilliant (if familiar) story of the Daily Mail printing a photograph of her, believing it to be Charles II.

The material frequently spears the ludicrousness of racism, the decision to hold the EU referendum in the first place, and our decision to vote to punch ourselves in the face − and there's a brilliant bit about a short, fat, sweaty bald man propositioning her in a hotel lift − before a climactic piece of unexpected (and unexpectedly sublime) physical comedy, but the show doesn't quite deliver on the promise of the premise (Bridget Does Brexit), due to some uncertain delivery and the fact that, even in just two months, the story has rather moved on. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Rick's 100 favourite movies: Part 1

I love movies. The film bug got me when I was 13. I was nursing a knee injury and looking for something to do that didn't involve playing football. I saw Star Wars, then not long afterwards On the Waterfront and Les 400 Coups, and that was that. Since then, my obsessions have moved from method-ish tough guys like Brando, John Garfield and Jean Gabin (and the juvenile delinquent poster boys such as Jean-Pierre Leaud), through the Empire, Leonard Maltin and Cahiers canons, to the current state of affairs, a heady, happy place where I can watch anything, enjoy the connections between everything, and mine whatever I like, lauding unheralded celluloid heroes like Lillian Gish and Jack Conway, trumpeting B-movie mystery-comedies from the 1940s (a constant and total favourite) and arguing the case for maligned or barely seen movies, whether it's MGM's "chocolate box" Little Women, Bernard Shaw's miraculous Major Barbara, or astounding arthouse movies such as The DreamLife of Angels and Seraphine.

As a massive nerd, I've always been an obsessive list-maker, as well as a journalist and writer, so I can tell you how many feature films I've seen (4,137), which ones I've seen on the big screen, and what the best movie I saw in 2011 was (Ghost World, again). Now and then I'll put together a list of my favourite movies. I have far more than a hundred favourites, but it's a fun game to play and hopefully representative of what I love about cinema: its ability to transport and transform, and its use as a crutch, a time machine and a tool for social change, in the best and worst senses of all those ideas. I created a new list this week (looking at the last top 100 I compiled, at the end of 2014, I've swapped out a quarter of the hundred), so I thought I'd share it with you here. Numbers 100-76 are below, with the others coming up soon. Did I mention that I love movies?

100. The Killer (John Woo, 1989)

Woo's A Better Tomorrow had as good a plot, and his Hard Boiled matched this one for action, but The Killer was by far the director's most effective marriage of the two, as noble hitman Chow Yun-Fat attempts to pay back the innocent woman caught in the crossfire, bringing him into conflict - and then partnership - with cop Danny Lee. It's full of breathtaking shoot-outs (yes of course with doves) and effective reflection, transcending its pulpy origins to become the definitive modern action film.

99. Little Women (Mervyn LeRoy, 1949)
A bewitching, exceptionally rewarding adaptation lit by Allyson's warm characterisation, O'Brien's lump-to-the-throat emoting and cinematography and music that - at least to me - seems perfectly pitched. Full review.

98. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel Coen, 2013)
Unusually and arrestingly affecting. Perhaps my relationship with the Coens could yet blossom. Full review.

97. Forbidden Games (Rene Clement, 1952)
Its high points are so high, its view of childhood so arresting and deftly realised, that poorly-framed interiors and a handful of duff scenes seem a little beside the point. Full review.

96. Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954)
Is it better than Singin' in the Rain? Well, no, but this is 'favourites', not 'best'. Enrapturing and deeply moving, with an ending that destroys and exalts me every time. Watch 'The Heather on the Hill' here.

95. Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944)

Perhaps the best of Sturges' immortal satires, though they're all pretty special. He coached star Eddie Bracken intensely on both this and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and the results are astonishing.

94. The Railway Children (Lionel Jeffries, 1970)
"Daddy! My daddy!"

93. Born Yesterday (George Cukor, 1950)
A dazzling film, containing one of the three or four best female performances in American cinema in the shape of Judy Holliday's endearing, eye-wateringly hilarious Billie Dawn. Born Yesterday is a flawless metaphor about the working classes and the emancipating power of knowledge posing as an utterly delightful romantic comedy. Full review.

92. The Iceman Cometh (John Frankenheimer, 1973)
One of the great casts brings to life one of the great plays. I love the 1960 TV version with Jason Robards (who did more than anyone to reinvigorate interest in the work), and he's a better Hickey than Lee Marvin, but screen titans Robert Ryan and Fredric March are in sensational form.

91. Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984)
Appallingly and sickeningly misogynistic, but that opening 40 is like nothing else I've ever seen, an astounding meditation on the impermanence of memory and the fatal allure of the past. I was obsessed with watching the film as a teenager, and completely overwhelmed by it when I did.

90. My Life as a Dog (see below)

"This movie, directed and largely written by Lasse Hallström and released in 1985, when he was thirty-nine and I was sixty-three, made me like life and human beings much more than I had ever done before. Quite a favour!” - Kurt Vonnegut

89. A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951)
Chaplin said this was the best movie ever made about America, and who am I to disagree? The pre-crash Monty Clift was surely the handsomest man ever to have lived.

88. Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986)
Probably Woody's best movie, though I have another of his films higher up since I watch it the most. Review.

87.Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
It's a shame I can't watch this any more because I hate Polanski so much (though I can watch Woody Allen films, apparently). Still, I know the script off by heart, so perhaps I can just say it to myself. In some ways it's the ultimate '70s movie, a paranoid howl of despair that explodes genre convention, but it's also a gorgeous homage to the '40s, full of the most extraordinary Robert Towne dialogue.

86. The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt (Peter Godfrey, 1939)
Probably my favourite studio-era B-movie, though Confessions of Boston Blackie and The Saint in New York are up there too. A mixture of thriller tropes and screwball comedy, with Ida Lupino in incredible form as PI Warren William's dizzy new girlfriend, and Rita Hayworth as the femme fatale, just months from Only Angels Have Wings.

85. Séraphine (Martin Provost, 2008)

It’s such a different sort of movie: spiritually profound, quietly sincere, unusually yet perfectly-paced: not rushing to introduce its obscure, anti-social heroine, taking her faith seriously, and finding both humour and poignancy in her singularity and complete lack of interest in societal niceties or norms. Full review.

84. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2013)
A plotless ramble through the life of a 27-year-old dancer - who encounters assorted epiphanies and disappointments - shot like Woody's Manhattan or À bout de souffle, scripted with a nod to Whit Stillman and emanating its writer-director's usual good-natured angst, uncertainty about contemporary life and warm-hearted, off-kilter sentimentality. Full review.

83. Partie de campagne (Jean Renoir, 1936)
Renoir couldn't be bothered to finish this film because it kept raining. Review.

82. The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941)
Writer Lillian Hellman’s vision of America – imagined by Gregg Toland, enlivened by a killer ensemble, given order by the gifted Wyler – is far darker than anyone could have expected, the blanched Davis poisoned by greed, leaving goodness, humanity and virtue all gasping for breath. Full review.

81. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
This film is just so, so good. More than 20 years on, the freshness and effortlessness of it all is still astounding. Its vernacular. Its spiky, absurdist humour. Its moments of heart. Those long, wordless takes. The diner. The toaster. The watch up Walken’s ass. The legion of stylised lines that never feel mannered or forced. Actors like Samuel L. Jackson, Travolta and Uma Thurman producing performances from nowhere that continue to reward and astound. QT hasn’t done anything comparable since. Nowadays I will him to succeed – and with Django he did – but there was a brief time when all you could do was watch in slack-jawed amazement as he created dizzying, dazzling films that re-wrote the rules of genre cinema.

80. Another Country (Marek Kanievska, 1984)

"A sad, scintillating film." Full review.

79. A Thousand Clowns (Fred Coe, 1965)
85% of this film resulted in outright, prolonged laughter. 60% visibly moved me. 100% of Robards' performance is beyond brilliant.

78. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates, 1973)
"This is real life. But with better dialogue." Full review.

77. Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)
I had this in my previous two lists too.

76. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F. W. Murnau, 1927)
Perhaps the most famous silent film of all, and one of the best, equipped with an emotional tractor beam too often absent from Murnau’s eye-wideningly inventive works. Full review.

***

Thanks for reading. The other 75 are coming up soon, here's the list so far:

Mankiewicz, The Shadow Line and the original House of Cards - Reviews #235

FILMS



Somewhere in the Night (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946) - This was unexpectedly terrific: a very, VERY underrated movie from the great writer-director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. It’s a brilliantly-plotted mystery-noir, full of that classic Mankiewicz dialogue: wise, hard-boiled and exceedingly sarcastic.

John Hodiak plays an amnesiac war hero searching for a shadowy hoodlum by the name of Larry Cravat, his Third Man-ish investigations bringing him into the orbit of a wry, warm-hearted chanteuse (Nancy Guild), her nice guy suitor (Richard Conte) and a gently omniscient detective (played with great charm by Lloyd Nolan).

There are outstanding self-contained, character-led scenes, including an absolute gem featuring Josephine Hutchinson (a former Warner female lead who never quite made it), fine, unexpected examples of jocular post-modernism – in the shape of meta movie gags about Lugosi, lighting and how detectives behave – and a succession of quite magnificent surprises, right up to the finish.

From the film’s reputation, I was expecting something fairly shabby and perfunctory, but instead got a film that’s impressive, interesting and almost impossible to second-guess. The leads are strictly second-tier, but while Hodiak is fairly bland, the director takes Guild into strong territory (like Hutchinson before her, she was on the cusp of superstardom that never came) – the actress emerging as a sort of Ella Raines-Ronnie Lake hybrid, with a gift for a one-liner – as Nolan and Conte hoover up everything that’s left. (3.5)

See also: I wrote about Mankiewicz's masterpiece, All About Eve, here.

***


They're even giving great performances in the publicity stills.

Watch on the Rhine (Herman Shumlin and Hal Mohr, 1943) - A talky, grown-up and extremely powerful propaganda piece - from Lillian Hellman, via Dashiell Hammett – about German émigré Paul Lukas, his American wife (Bette Davis) and their three children moving to the States, where they face persecution from a dissolute, amoral Nazi sympathiser (George Coulouris). There’s a false note in the characterisation of the kids, who speak in that generic ‘foreign’ Old Hollywood way (all stilted full sentences), and Beulah Bondi is wasted in a weak part as a French maid, but much of the film is truly great, with perfect performances from Lukas and Davis, and mature, incisive writing that hammers its points across – even while showing the Nazis as cruel, sadistic thugs, rather than the genocidal ethnic cleansers they were soon confirmed to be. (3.5)

***



Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965) - A ‘60s time capsule with a European feel about the romantic adventures of capricious British model Julie Christie, who moves through relationships with a TV journalist (Dirk Bogarde), a louche, selfish playboy (Laurence Harvey) and an ageing Italian prince (José Luis de Vilallonga), on her way to partial self-discovery. It’s inconsistent and holds you at arms’ length, but Christie is very good in her Oscar-winning role, and there are some excellent insights and fine lines from Frederick Raphael – who went on to write one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen on TV, the BBC’s novelistic, challenging and brilliant adaptation of his book, The Glittering Prizes. Jim Clark’s editing is also extremely good, full of tricks inspired by the Nouvelle Vague, though the direction from John Schlesinger includes too much that simply feels like padding, particularly a party sequence as incoherent and unfulfilling as the one with which he almost sank Midnight Cowboy. The film’s bagginess and aloofness is compounded by a motivational murkiness and lack of clarity that’s not intentional: it strives to be adult and complex, but comes off as merely unclear, despite Christie’s best efforts. The idea that anybody would go after Harvey while they had Dirk Bogarde at home is also, of course, ridiculous. As you would expect, Harvey is as dreadful as ever. (2.5)

***


It is only as terrible as this half the time.

Excuse My Dust (Roy Rowland, 1951) - A broad, nostalgic musical-comedy about an aspiring inventor (Red Skelton) at the birth of the automobile revolution. Skelton is as funny as a hernia (and his various car crashes as funny as, well, a car crash), but the Arthur Schwartz-Dorothy Fields songs are good and Monica Lewis puts her numbers across with great gusto, sass and style. I like the hilariously incongruous ballet featuring female lead Sally Forrest too: it's very stylish and well choreographed and confusing. In support, Preston Sturges regulars William Demarest and Raymond Walburn are rather wasted, though Demarest does blow a sort of weird raspberry at one point. In addition, an uncredited Buster Keaton came up with a few of the gags and worked behind the camera (some of the Skelton business is a little better than normal, though he himself is dire), while the star's car was previously seen in Orson Welles' butchered 1942 masterwork, The Magnificent Ambersons, which is where the similarities between the two rather cease. (2)

***

BOOKS



The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford (1945) – Nancy Mitford’s romantic comedy about the pretty, fickle, impulsive, small-eyed Linda Radlett is a playfully heightened, impeccably-written slice of escapism, laced with insight, understated emotion and dazzling wit, based upon her own life – and her experiences as a member of Britain’s most notorious family. It’s not especially ambitious in terms of scope, but it is magnificently realised, full of brilliantly-drawn characters, sublime running gags and effortlessly turned phrases. The chance to get a tour of Mitford's world and her brain is a rare sort of treat, and despite her rarefied upbringing, there’s a worldiness and a compassion here, allied to a rare intelligence and a matchless, piercing viewpoint, that can’t be missed. The foreword by her sister Decca is hilarious too. (4)

***



The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett (1934) – Hammett’s celebrated crime novel is, well, a bit of a damp squib, really. I came to it as a fan of the movie (which came out later the same year, having been shot in just 12 days!), the defining mystery-comedy of its era, and the first time that a modern, happy and equal marriage (at least within the parameters of its period) had been depicted on screen, touched with the alchemic chemistry of stars William Powell and Myrna Loy. All I can say now is that screenwriters Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich did an incredible job of adapting this book, which is less escapist, more cynical, more repetitive, less funny and conspicuously less fun than the film, consisting chiefly of second-gen Greek immigrant PI Nick Charles saying that he’s not sure who committed a murder, while various dislikeable supporting characters try to either stitch up or have sex with one another. The relationship between Nick and his wife Nora (based on that of Hammett and his long-term partner, Lillian Hellman) isn’t bad, and sometimes the book’s eruptions of violence, drunkenness and cutting sardonism draw you in, but there’s always a long lull just around the corner. A real disappointment. (2)

***

TV

The House of Cards trilogy:



House of Cards (1990) - One of the most exquisite achievements in the history of British TV: a paraphrasing of Macbeth, with a repulsive psycho-sexual undercurrent, about Tory chief whip Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson), who reacts very poorly to being overlooked in a cabinet reshuffle, and proceeds to destroy everyone in his path to power. Andrew Davies’s script – including those celebrated, conspiratorial fourth-wall-busting asides – the immersive direction, and a pair of sensational performances from Ian Richardson and Susannah Harker (as his mistress and most prized media contact, Mattie Storrin) make it simply unmissable: a dark, daring and delicious satire about an old soul poisoned by avarice, but with a twinkle in his eye. (4)

To Play the King (1993) - An interesting sequel to House of Cards, about Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson) locking horns with the Prince of Wales (Michael Kitchen), resulting in a constitutional crisis. It’s less novel and more of-its-time than the original, but exceptionally well-written and acted, with an unforgettable climax containing more than a hint of The Godfather Part II. Kitty Aldridge’s performance as Urquhart’s new mistress, Sarah Harding, is emblematic of this sequel’s standing: better than almost any you’ll see on TV, but not in the same league as Susannah Harker’s last time out. Still, I can't help but think that this was a major influence on one of last year's most overrated plays, Charles III, which has an almost identical storyline (though was written in blank verse). (3.5)

The Final Cut (1995) - A very good but nonetheless slightly disappointing conclusion to the House of Cards trilogy, with prime minister Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson) dealing with revolt and rebellion that threatens to push him out of Number 10. For the most part, it feels more like a cynical political drama than the black satire of House of Cards – while traversing some rather over-familiar ground – and the supporting cast isn’t in the same class as before (Isla Blair and Paul Freeman are simply lightweights compared to Richardson), but it’s still consistently entertaining, with confrontational storytelling, fine dialogue and a flamboyant if conventional pay-off. (3)

***



The Shadow Line (Hugo Blick, 2011) - The BBC at its best, a bleakly brilliant mini-series from writer-director-producer Hugo Blick that plunges you into an unexplained, nightmarish and narcotic netherworld, then begins to illuminate and tie up a few threads while leaving others dangling for the longest time. Chiwetel Ejiofor is a cop with a past, Christopher Eccleston a dealer with a heart, Rafe Spall an out-there gangster (whose tics are a thing of joy) and Stephen Rea a tall, quiet mystery man by the name of ‘Gatehouse’. It’s idiosyncratic and almost matchlessly imaginative, with more than an echo of Edge of Darkness (arguably the finest thing the Beeb did in the ‘80s) in its marriage of introspection and action, the latter showcased in a succession of creepy, eerie and ultimately breathtaking set pieces. (4)

***



State of Play (David Yates, 2003) - A dazzling drama from the pen of Paul Abbott, about a political scandal that begins to mount after the death of a political researcher, who was having an affair with her boss, up-and-coming MP David Morrissey. As reporters John Simm and Kelly MacDonald begin to investigate, further revelations follow thick and fast, impacting on the livelihoods – and lives – of them all, as well as editor Bill Nighy, a pale, sexy, floppy-haired, cool-as-flip freelancer (James McAvoy), a callow, irritating PR weasel (Marc Warren) and Morrissey’s unhappy, conflicted and opinionated wife (Polly Walker). The meshing of acting styles is simply exhilarating, the direction from future Harry Potter helmer David Yates is swift and immersive, and the writing is absolutely extraordinary: clever, funny, thematically complex but entirely accessible, and eloquently and pointedly personal while operating within a moral morass.

I always remember Abbott telling Charlie Brooker (in a personally inspiring special edition of Screenwipe about how to write) that he would throw in outrageous twists at will, then say to himself: “Write yourself out of that corner, you bastard”, and that gloriously abrasive, unconventional approach works absolute wonders here. It’s only Warren’s subplot that seems a little out-of-place, a cartoonish, relentlessly one-note storyline that occasionally stalls a mini-series of otherwise unstoppable momentum – and magnificence. (Also: Kelly Macdonald is bae, especially her voice.) (4)

***

Thanks for reading.

Gish and Griffith: pockmarked with greatness

You know D. W. Griffith - he made the most racist film of all time, The Birth of a Nation, which rather inconveniently also created cinema as we know it. You may notice that a Klansman appears to be the hero.

I've been watching a lot of Griffith's films lately, partly because the BFI in London has had a special season on, and partly because I'm enduringly and indelibly obsessed with the actress who starred in so many of his films, the immortal (not actually immortal, she died in 1993) Lillian Gish.

Depending on your mood, and his, Griffith's films can be either unbearably corny or rather moving in their sincerity, but while he was unquestionably a shamelessly sentimental bigot with a yen for preposterous third-act melodrama, he was also the most important and influential filmmaker of his generation. Here's a whizz through all the Gish-led Griffith I've got my mucky little mitts on lately:



An Unseen Enemy (D. W. Griffith, 1912) - Panic Room, 1912-style. It's all a bit silly, but worth it for the debuts of the Gish sisters, with Lillian compulsively watchable throughout.

Title cards include:



Oh, D. W., you are giving silent films a silly name. (2.5)

***



The Musketeers of Pig Alley (D. W. Griffith, 1912) - The 'first gangster movie' still looks decent a century on, with a hokey but atmospheric opening, a slightly static middle where people mostly walk in and out of a saloon, and then an absolutely spectacular denouement, featuring one eye-popping close-up, a tense shootout in an alleyway and an irreverent ending that makes the most of star Elmer Booth's dazzling charisma.

Lillian Gish is 'The Little Lady', whose patronising nickname masks the fact that she's an asskicking feminist who clobbers an amorous assailant, chooses whichever man she likes, and unwittingly starts a gang war by being hot at a party. Walter Miller plays her boyfriend, a musician who may as well just have 'mug me' tattooed on his face, while Booth is The Snapper Kid, a swaggering gunman who's like a sexy, funny, easy-going Al Capone, though the film came out when Al Capone was 13.

Underworld, Little Caesar and The Godfather all redrafted the genre rules across subsequent decades, but this is the film that wrote them, in 16 brisk, bruising minutes, with Booth something like the cinema's first anti-hero: a likeable guy swaggering around the wrong side of the law, far removed from the tedious, moustache-twirling villainy that blighted many films of the period. Tragically, he died just three years later, on the cusp of superstardom, in a car accident caused by future Dracula director Tod Browning. He had been about to start filming Griffith's epic, Intolerance. (3.5)

***



CINEMA: A Romance of Happy Valley (D. W. Griffith, 1919) - The hero in this film is a lot like me, a young man who sits at his desk, in his flat, in the unforgiving city, thinking about Lillian Gish.

A Romance of Happy Valley was made by D. W. Griffith during his white-hot streak between the enduringly controversial Birth of a Nation (1915) and his epic of the French Revolution, Orphans of the Storm(1921) , a period that also took in Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919) and Way Down East (1920), and essentially laid the template for cinema as we know it.

Set in the Kentucky where he grew up, it's notably less ambitious than almost all of those films (Broken Blossoms is the only one on a similar scale): a gentle, pastoral comedy-drama about a farm labourer (Robert Harron) who goes off to seek his fortune in New York, leaving behind the lovestruck, pure-hearted and relentlessly stoic Jennie (Lillian Gish), his childhood sweetheart.

It's corny in places, predictably racist in a couple of others (uh-oh, a white guy in blackface who's greedy and feckless), and saddled with an overlong, melodramatic and improbable climax, but it's also extremely involving and often very moving, with an unexpectedly wry, even occasionally subversive sense of humour.

Harron provides plenty of those virtues in a committed, appealing performance, while Gish is as transcendent as ever, whether bidding him an awkward, adoring goodbye, seeing off 'a descendant of Judas Iscariot' who fancies getting off with her, or romancing a scarecrow that's dressed as her lover, a touching, understated sequence that influenced 7th Heaven and then The Artist.

Her singular artistry and Griffith's trendsetting direction - rich in close-ups, including an unforgettable flourish featuring the lovers' hands, and still yet to be emulated let alone overhauled by his European rivals - make this a little gem, despite a bit of his signature silliness. (3.5)

This screened at the BFI along with Griffith's 1909 short, The Cricket on the Hearth (D. W. Griffith, 1909). My only comment on that one is that I had absolutely no idea what was going on. (1.5)

***



True Heart Susie (D. W. Griffith, 1919) - Maybe my favourite ever Lillian Gish performance, with everyone's favourite tiny-mouthed acting titan playing the "simple, plain" Susie, an angelic, motherless farmer who sells her cow to fund sweetheart Robert Harron's college career, then watches, powerless as he falls for a tight-skirted, powder-faced party animal (Clarine Seymour).

Yes, that is the best premise for a movie ever, thank you for asking.

True Heart Susie is old-fashioned, rose-tinted and heavy-handed in its depiction of the afflictions besetting America (adultery, dancing, lipstick), with a lurch towards melodrama in the final quarter that's more convenient than credible, but it's also utterly beguiling: beautifully directed by a filmmaker who could do Americana with the best of them, when he wasn't doing racism with the worst of them. At one point he uses a hedgerow to split the screen into two: ecstasy on the left, despair on the right.

And yet it's only when Gish is on screen that it hits those heights. Without her, it's a standard, slightly overripe drama with a touch of visual poetry. But when she steps in front of the camera - her heroine too pained to watch as her love is snatched away, hiding her tears behind a fan, or collapsing in agony as soon as the ill-suited pair depart from sight - it becomes something else entirely. You sense that Griffith knows it too: in those scenes his lense is softer but his eye is sharper, and every detail his camera catches seems profound and vivid and alive, every muscle of Gish's genius twitching and sparking.

It's not a flawless film, but as a snapshot of two pioneers pockmarked with greatness, it can scarcely be beat. (3.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Humphrey Jennings, Vera Drake and my new favourite voice - Reviews #205

My continuing adventures in popular culture, both high (movies) and low (EVERYTHING ELSE):

FILMS:

Humphrey Jennings revisited:



Spare Time (1939) - "Spare Time is a time when we do what we like." Yes it is.

Humphrey Jennings' first great film shows a documentarian in transition. The opening two passages, set in Sheffield and Manchester, are altogether mesmerising, but show a somewhat aloof fascination with the working classes - a species previously alien to the Cambridge graduate - which had grown during his time working on the Mass Observation project. He seems sympathetic, but not empathetic, observing their rules and rituals without truly engaging with his subjects. That's especially true, I think, of the still contentious 'kazoo band' sequence, which hints at Jennings' past as a surrealist and manages to be utterly unforgettable, aggressively bizarre and also a little cold.

It's the final chapter, 'Coal', where Spare Time comes into its own, as Jennings alights in a Welsh mining village and something in his soul is stoked: the result a warm, tender portrait of soot-choked generations finding release through music in church halls and romance in sweetshop doorways, the whole piece scored by a beautiful amateur rendition of Handel's Largo. I've seen it on the big screen, the small screen, and in my mind's eye a thousand times, and it still takes the breath away.

The film also contains a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance for my all-time favourite newspaper headline: "Her scent was bats' delight". (4)



A Diary for Timothy (1945) - A masterpiece from Britain's most poetic propagandist, Humphrey Jennings, with an E. M. Forster script read by Michael Redgrave and directed at a newborn baby, who hears a chronicle of his first six months on Earth: of the sacrifices of WWII and the challenges ahead. It's more literal and staged than most of Jennings' others, but full of his sublime visual juxtapositions and the understated, heart-melting vignettes that became an increasing part of his wartime work. It also contains the only existing footage of John Gielgud's Hamlet (ooh sir), perhaps the most celebrated of the century. (4)



The Dim Little Island (1949) - Humphrey Jennings' reputation as "the only true poet that the British screen has yet produced" (Lindsay Anderson, 1954, that quote being the one that's always wheeled out) is based largely on his wartime work.

After an outrageously colourful career as a poet, surrealist and Mass Observationist, Jennings joined the General Post Office as a documentarian, which upon the outbreak of war was renamed the Crown Film Unit and started making propaganda films, including Jennings' calling cards: Listen to Britain and A Diary for Timothy, the latter a mainstay in my all-time top 10 since I first saw it in 2005.

The Dim Little Island, his penultimate film, was made four years after the end of the war and is preoccupied with what happens next, as the country is at once patronised and accused of going to the dogs. In turn, a comic artist (Osbert Lancaster), an industrialist (John Ormston), a naturalist (James Fisher) and the legendary composer Ralph Vaughan Williams give their thoughts on their chosen subject - and therefore on Britain itself - before Jennings starts cross-cutting, drawing some unexpected parallels between their ruminations.

The film lacks the seamlessness and effortless poetry of Jennings' best, not least because of the mannered, awkward voiceovers from Ormston and Fisher, clunky in both content and delivery. But the vivid footage and discussion of Britain at a turning point in its history, busily shedding its influence and relevance, makes it a fascinating historical piece, while the marriage of Vaughan Williams' beautiful music and erudite thoughts to Jennings' incisive, instinctive feel for imagery leads to some truly wonderful moments towards the end of this short, sometimes very special film.

It also shows my lovely office, which made me very proud. (3.5)

***



CINEMA: Vera Drake (Mike Leigh, 2004) - Vera Drake has the feel of one of those campaigning films of the 1950s and ‘60s – such as Victim, which lobbied for the legalisation of homosexuality – but made some 40 years after the law was changed. In that sense, perhaps it has no real reason to exist, but as a character piece and a historical document, it’s sort of fascinating. It’s also exceptionally well-acted.

The title character (Imelda Staunton) is a housewife and domestic cleaner who also works as a freelance, free-of-charge abortionist, helping out girls who get into trouble by pumping them full of soapy water, thus helping them to miscarry. But one day things go wrong, and her poor but idyllic working class existence implodes.

It’s really an ensemble piece, and though some performances do tend towards caricature (the shallow sister-in-law, the rapacious middle-woman, the stupid Irishman), they’re mostly extremely good, as the film effortlessly evokes the atmosphere of a working class community very similar to the one in which my dad grew up. Phil Davis is absolutely superb as Vera’s husband, Adrian Scarborough creates a multi-faceted, multi-layered character as his aspirational brother, and Eddie Marsan is the last word in anxious suitors as the adorable bundle of nerves courting the Drakes’ daughter. If Daniel Mays is caught acting a few times, he still makes a good fist of his conflicted character, wrestling with what he sees as his mother’s betrayal of her family, and of basic decency. As the middle class counterpoint to Drake's working class charges ("you had to have that, it was in no way extraneous," says Leigh a little defensively in the Q&A accompanying this screening), a compelling, breathless Sally Hawkins does at least enjoy a more pampered termination, having suffered through hell to get there.

Best of all, though, is Staunton, who has spent rather too much of her screen career playing wittering gossips. As the saintly Vera, who spends the first half of the film basically acting like your nanna and the second half choking back tears as her world crumbles to dust, she is little short of revelatory, Leigh’s intensive preparations – including an 11-hour in-character improvisation of the film’s turning point – provoking a wealth of complex emotion, impeccably captured by a series of immaculate, uncompromising close-ups.

In some ways, the film is almost nostalgic for the Britain that was, before pop culture hammered a rivet between the generations and Thatcher sounded the death knell for society, but there are untold horrors lurking beneath that cosy, perkily poverty-stricken surface, and Leigh isn’t afraid to show them all, ably assisted by an oft-overlooked actress at the peak of her powers. I don’t think it’s necessarily a great movie – I’m not sure quite what its point is, except that the law should have been changed in 1967, which it was – but it’s gripping and gruelling, while casting light on an under-reported chapter of British history.

(PS: I saw this as part of the Tricycle Theatre's British Screen Classics series, and at the end I got to meet Leigh, Staunton and Davis, which was just awesome. Thanks to my excellent wife for bringing a pen with her for autograph purposes.) (3.5)

***

BOOKS:

As well as the two Sandy books, this one:



Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (2011) - Wow. Just exquisite. Hilary Mantel's follow up to Wolf Hall is a fast, sleek, linear sequel without a wasted page. Bloody and brilliant. (4)

***

TV:



Wolf Hall (Peter Kosminsky, 2015 - It's a little hard to tell how good this edited highlights package is; without the bits between the bits that we know from Mantel's Booker Prize-winning books, perhaps it wouldn't work so well. It's also fair to say there's a little too much of people just walking around, while Bernard Hill and Jonathan Pryce are both largely going through the motions. Those shortcomings are largely blown away, though, by Mark Rylance's astonishing performance as brooding courtier Thomas Cromwell, his acting the most mesmeric I've seen since Rebecca Benson tore up the Apollo Theatre in last year's Let the Right One In, and reminiscent of Jason Robards at his early '60s peak. His voice is also utterly seductive, it may well be love. Kosminsky's unusual visual sense also grew on me, as did the sparing, simple traditional score, and the female characters were perfectly cast across the board. (3.5). I think.

***

THEATRE:


Sometimes starring Beverley Knight.

Memphis (Shaftesbury Theatre) - An explosive first half, full of stunning stagecraft, gives way to a somewhat muted second that's set too much around a sterile, uninteresting TV show. The story - about an interracial couple in '50s Memphis - is also rather slight, but the numbers are strong without being sensational, and the cast is first-rate, especially alternate female lead, Rachel John. (3)



Antigone (Barbican) - A frequently dazzling introduction to Greek tragedy, with Juliette Binoche a beautifully compromised heroine, and seamlessly modern staging. A few lulls, though also - surprisingly - a few lols. (3.5)



"There is no present or future - only the past, happening over and over again, now." A Moon for the Misbegotten (film, 1975) - In 1956, Jason Robards exploded onto Broadway in a then-neglected play by Eugene O’Neill by the name of The Iceman Cometh. As Hickey, the play’s bruised, brooding, evangelical salesman, flogging temperance to a bar-load of barflies, he gave a performance of bristling intensity that’s among the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen, thankfully captured in a 1960 live TV broadcast that’s essential for anyone who cares about theatre or drama or really life in general. That revival, directed by José Quintero, led to the comprehensive rehabilitation of a play that up until then had been regarded as one of O’Neill’s weaker efforts.

Thirteen years later, Robards and Quintero returned to O’Neill in A Moon for the Misbegotten (Robards had also appeared in a film of Long Day's Journey Into Night, playing a younger version of his character here), and once again it was filmed for broadcast, with one set, a minimum of credible make-up and a pair of Irish accents so improbable that you could sue the actors for lying. Regardless of how you feel about those things – and I’m pleased with the first, apathetic about the second and got over the distraction of the third after 20-odd minutes – it’s a stunning achievement, a remarkably grown-up, literate and moving film with the writer’s usual damaged souls marinated in alcohol, spewing out their skeletons as the liquor tips them into despair.

Colleen Dewhurst is Josie Hogan, a rough, big-breasted farmhouse girl with a reputation as a slut, who attracts the attention of a charming Broadway actor (Jason Robards), plagued by dark moods and a bleak past. Her father – played by Ed Flanders, 10 years her junior – is a drunk who may be a tyrant or a bastard or a great dad – it’s a play of shifting perceptions – and whose unconvincing ageing make-up has gone a bit crusty. Dewhurst and Flanders both struggle to come up with anything approaching a credible Irish accent – her attempt is particularly baffling – and yet both performances are nothing short of astounding, blessed with a vast depth of emotion that comes out in subtle inflections and fleeting gestures. Rather that way round than the other (hello, Meryl Streep, I am looking at you – when did you last make me feel anything).

And Robards, that eternally underrated actor, who played few lead roles in films because he was considered a bit ugly (how could anyone that talented be ugly? I suppose he did have an enormous head), is simply amazing, inhabiting O’Neill’s avuncular, semi-autobiographical boozehound, ravaged by self-loathing, while surely drawing heavily on his own fertile experiences as a substance-abusing manic-depressive. Swinging from uncertainty to euphoria to tenderness to bitterness, self-recrimination and finally self-awareness, he’s desperately moving and unwaveringly, compulsively watchable.

I’m not sure it’s for all tastes: the camera generally goes to the right places, but there’s little in the way of staging or action, just lots and lots of talking, some of it cyclical, some of it funny, most of it profound in O’Neill’s familiarly sad, elegiac and battered humanist style, lent an unbearable, unforgettable weight by two actors in exceptional form, and another who has probably never been surpassed. (4)



Maxine Peake in Hamlet (film, 2014) - Maxine Peake is a Hamlet of relentless game-playing, caustic sardonism and frequent spit-flecked fury in this engrossing, arresting Royal Exchange adaptation of Shakespeare’s finest. The story, as you may know, is that “a ghost and a prince meat, and everyone ends in mincemeat”. While the script is recycled from a West End production in 2009, and the supporting cast is a little bland, causing attention to wander when its hero(ine) is off-screen, that scenario is lit by staging of minimalist invention – including an ingenious ‘apparition’ scene featuring oversized yellow lightbulbs lowered to the stage floor – some perturbing grace notes (the Prince of Denmark mock-wanking), and the hottest Hamlet since John Barrymore. (3)

and sort of theatre, in a way:



Stephen Merchant: Hello Ladies... Live! (2011) - I'm generally a fan of Stephen Merchant, but I found this document of his first - and so far only - stand-alone stand-up show strangely slight, hackneyed and lacking in ambition. It includes newspaper clippings from 10 years earlier, which are funny but suggest a certain paucity of invention, and laboured gags about his height, his stinginess and Ricky Gervais. At times you can see the working, as he moves laboriously or unconvincingly from one topic to another. There are a few good jokes, though, and he has excellent comic timing to make up for a comic persona that's rather less appealing than the real-life Merchant appears to be. (2.5)

***

Thanks for reading.

Review of 2013: Part one - Best films of this year

This year's review comes in two parts. The first is my top 10 of 2013, taking in everything from indie comedies to animation - and a couple of neat returns to form. The second contains my 20 favourite "discoveries" of the year, from silent film to a documentary from last year, along with the usual round-up of the year's highs and lows. Previous annual reviews are available here:

2010
2011
2012

Top 10 of 2013

1. Frances Ha



Director: Noah Baumbach
Starring: Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Adam Driver and Michael Zegen
What we said: "What a great film: Baumbach doing his thing, and Gerwig doing hers, this plotless ramble emanating its writer-director's usual good-natured angst, uncertainty about contemporary life and warm-hearted, off-kilter sentimentality. It cares about in-jokes, the intensity of true friendship (in the shape of Mickey Sumner, whose chemistry with Gerwig is absolute), and the random, aimless but fulfilling way in which we muddle through this world, in a way that's very unusual. It's also a very funny film in that shambling Baumbachian way, jokes tossed this way and that, muttered, thrown away and occasionally properly milked: like the beauty that closes the picture. What seems at first to be a succession of mild comic sketches is really a character study of a conflicted, grown-up child afraid of the world into which she's been unceremoniously dumped. Its cumulative impact is enormous." Full review.

2. The Way, Way Back



Directors: Nat Faxon and Jim Rash
Starring: Liam James, Sam Rockwell, Steve Carell and AnnaSophia Robb
What we said: "This is like a big hug in cinematic form, as awkward, taciturn teen Duncan (Liam James) is taken under the wing of a flamboyant motormouth (Sam Rockwell) whom he happens upon at a rundown waterpark. It's a bit like Adventureland, a lot like every other coming-of-age film you've ever seen - the stifling domestic strife, the pubescent blushing, then the sudden blossoming of one's self-confidence - and there are familiar lines and some unconvincing readings to go with the trite, cliched character of the boozy, easy next-door neighbour. But damn it if this isn't the funniest, loveliest film I've seen in ages, with a perfectly-pitched central relationship, a sure-footed story leading to a hugely satisfying climax, and a staggering performance from Rockwell as the wise, reflective, comically phantasmagoric Owen: a true screen maverick but one with a real and recognisable human frailty."

3. Paperman



Director: John Kahrs
What we said: "An intoxicating short: a silent, black-and-white masterwork that pays oblique - and then overt - homage to The Red Balloon, as a paper plane with a mind of its own (and a fair few friends) tries to unite two lonely souls. It's extraordinary."

4. Wreck-It Ralph



Director: Rich Moore
Starring (voice only): John C. Reilly, Jack McBrayer, Jane Lynch and Sarah Silverman
What we said: "We've seen a friendship between a hulking monster with a heart of gold and a sweet, brown-haired little girl before - in exec producer John Lasseter's Monsters, Inc. - and yet this feels so fresh and funny and original. We've been pitched into a 3D video game world packed with peril and racing cars, in the execrable Spy Kids 3: Game Over, but that was a film that did almost everything wrong, just as this one does almost everything right. There's a sense of ambition and imagination here that's been missing from most Disney animations since its brief renaissance in the '90s - I haven't seen them do anything this good since The Lion King." Full review.

5. Django Unchained



Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kerry Washington
What we said: "Tarantino’s direction has seemed to falter in recent years, being geared towards people with the world’s shortest attention span (Kill Bill: Vol 2), those with limitless patience who really like fire and blood (UpROARious P0th3ads), or sado-masochists (Death Proof). Here he’s absolutely on top form, delivering the requisite thrills through a fusion of pyrotechnics and restraint that he hasn’t had in check since Pulp Fiction. And this is, unquestionably, his best film since Pulp Fiction: a masterful, genre-bending movie that’s full of superb exchanges and exceptional individual scenes, but also works as a compelling and consummately confident whole." Full review.

6. Nebraska



Director: Alexander Payne
Starring: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb and Bob Odenkirk
What we said: "A(nother) road movie about old age and family: an unsentimental, monochrome variation on the likes of Don't Come Knocking and The Straight Story, bearing the unmistakable handprint of the mighty Alexander Payne." Full review.

7. Blue Jasmine



Director: Woody Allen
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin, Peter Sarsgaard and Sally Hawkins
What we said: "Woody Allen’s erratic latter-day renaissance continues with this throbbingly neurotic update of A Streetcar Named Desire. Back from Europe, he proves at home in San Fran, with a central character he understands, and who feels completely human, thanks to a writer on form and an actress on fire." Full review.

8. Gravity



Director: Alfonso Cuaron
Starring: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, Ed Harris and Orto Ignatiussen
What we said: "This film turned me into the aliens from Toy Story. 3D tears in zero gravity? 'Oooooooooooooh.'" Full review.

9. The World's End



Director: Edgar Wright
Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman and Rosamund Pike
What we said: "The first half is a wonder: affecting, surprising - with a first scene just as clever as Wreck-It Ralph's similar opening salvo - and full of brilliant gags. Despite being the weakest of Wright's "Cornetto trilogy", it's a fitting wrap-up too: narratively the most inconsistent, with an unconvincing, barely escalating external threat - a legion of blue-blooded aliens - but also the most ambitious, and arguably successful of the three in terms of characterisation, emotional maturity and belly laughs." Full review.

10. The Place Beyond the Pines



Director: Derek Cianfrance
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes and Anthony Pizza
What we said: "People Magazine's two sexiest men of 2011, together at last. It begins as Drive, turns into Prince of the City and then becomes a film all its own, and all the better for it: an epic tale of fathers and sons, heading inexorably for that place beyond the pines. I admire the film's sense of grandeur, its scope and scale, the energy of the action interludes, the artistry of much of the storytelling, and the intensity of the performances." Full review.