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 guilty?  Or was his trust in her rock solid throughout, in which ...

The critics weren't much taken with George Clooney's fourth outing as a director, and sadly neither was I. The subject of the film is the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section Unit, which was a program set up during World War II.  It comprised about 400 service members and civilians who worked with military forces to protect historic and cultural monuments from war damage, and towards the end of the war to find and return works of art etc. This program had a noble aim, but from the above description it's obviously not going to be easy to find a satisfying way to dramatise its work.  On the evidence of this film it may be an impossible challenge. Clooney and his co-writer tackle it by firstly making the program into a race against time - can art works be recovered from the Nazis before they are destroyed? - and secondly by reducing the program to a small gang - not so much the Dirty Dozen as the Arty Eight. For this approach to work, the viewer has to care about their m...

I love a film that immerses the viewer in an unfamiliar world, in this case that of elite orchestral conductors. In the lengthy opening scene, a live interview in front of an admiring audience, it is established that  Lydia Tár is a  very successful conductor, now with the Berlin Philharmonic.  It also hints at her arrogant uncompromising nature which (spoiler alert) will contribute to her ultimate fall from grace. After that we don't get a lot of handholding as we follow Lydia in Berlin, juggling the demands of her professional position and of her personal life, married to Sharon  who also happens to be a senior member of the orchestra. Although at first all  seems well, even in the early scenes there is an underlying tension, perhaps because there is a former pupil of Lydia's, Krista, who is trying to get in touch with her.  We gradually learn that Krista got on the bad side of Lydia, which has led to Krista's once-promising career stalling.  Things ...

Anyone coming to this expecting the usual merry japes will be very disappointed. This is a sort of origin story for Robin Hood (played by Russell Crowe), and a rather dour one at that, which starts with him as an archer in King Richard’s army, and it is only at the very end of the film that he has become an outlaw. I don’t think Sherwood Forest is ever mentioned, and the climax of the film is a battle between English and French soldiers on the south coast. During the film Robin gets to pretend to be  Robert of Loxley,  the husband of Lady Marion (Cate Blanchett, great as always), and as such he plays a key role in helping King John defeat a French invasion.  Robin in this version of the legend is even more of a proto-socialist than usual.  He fails in his attempt to get King John to sign a forerunner of the Magna Carta, but by way of compensation the film ends with Robin and Marion setting up some sort of commune in the forest. So a lot of liberties are taken with bo...