Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This spy thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh  has a simple and effective setup: George (Michael Fassbender) is given the job of uncovering a traitor among his colleagues, the sting in the tail being that one of the five suspects is his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). In the first half of the film we see George spying on Kathryn, culminating in one of the best scenes, in an intelligence briefing, when George for the first time is visibly shaken - could indeed his wife be guilty of betrayal? Actually it quickly turns out that his concern is not that she is a traitor but rather that they are both being set up, so the tension that had been building around Kathryn's loyalty is dissipated, and then everything gets resolved a little too easily for my taste.   I ended up not sure what was going on in George's head.  Did he really suspect Kathryn, in which case I wasn't sure what convinced him she wasn't?  Or was his trust in her rock solid throughout, in which case wh...

The other evening I was wondering whether to watch the award winning ‘Anora’ or a well-reviewed crime thriller, and …. well here we are. The story is based on real events about an extreme white supremacist group active in the early 1980s, who called themselves the Order.  We follow them as they are building up to committing a major terrorist atrocity.   Disappointingly though they are arrested by FBI agents before we get to know what they were planning let alone them getting anywhere close to putting it into action. This is one of the reasons why I was left feeling underwhelmed at the end. Jude Law plays a veteran FBI agent and Nicholas Hoult plays the leader of The Order.  Both give decent performances but their relationship never catches fire.  At times the film tries to suggest they are opposite sides of the same coin but it feels half-hearted.   As a thriller it fails to deliver, there being no memorable sequences in terms of excitement or suspense. ...

Nowadays this 1960 drama is all but forgotten, which is a shame all things considered.  I watched it in my late teens when I was first getting into film and although no single scene had stayed with me I did  remember enjoying it a lot, no doubt in part because it stars two of my favourite actors from the period, Burt Lancaster and Jean Simmons. Simmons is Sister Sharon, a small-time revivalist preacher in 1927, whilst Lancaster is Gantry, a struggling salesman who latches on to her. We learn that at one time he was training to be a priest until a scandalous sexual liaison with a minister's daughter (Lulu, played by Shirley Jones) puts an end to that.  This may help explain why he takes to revivalism as the proverbial duck takes to water.   His charisma and showmanship brings Sister Sharon to the attention of church leaders in Zenith (a fictional city, presumably twinned with the town of Climax from Billy Wilder's 'Kiss Me, Stupid') who reluctantly agree to payro...