Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This is a David vs Goliath courtroom drama loosely based on an actual legal case.   The issue with any such film is its inherent predictability, because we know David is going to win, or why else make the film? As we saw with ‘Erin Brockovich’ this problem is not insuperable. But in that instance David (in the form of Julia Roberts) was easy to root for, and Goliath, the company that was giving people cancer, was easy to hate, whereas in this case it’s a little less clear cut. Admittedly the little guy here, Jerry (played by Tommy Lee Jones) is sympathetic, as a 75-year old owner of a small funeral business, but the injustice done to him doesn’t seem that compelling. Due to financial problems Jerry made a verbal agreement with Mr Loewen, CEO of the Loewen Group, to sell part of his business. But then Mr Loewen didn’t back up the verbal agreement by signing a written contract, probably because he was banking on Jerry having to file for bankruptcy so that his business could be bought...

It's 1942 in Port Talbot, and Philip Burton (Toby Jones) is a teacher who lives on his own, frustrated that the War interfered in his aspirations to make a career in the theatre, as a playwright, or director.  One of his pupils, Richard Jenkins, a miner's son (played by Harry Lawtey), shares something of Mr Burton's passion for the stage, and he has some raw talent.   So Mr Burton takes him under his wing, helps him develop that talent, and uses his contacts to open up a remarkable opportunity for him to go to Oxford University. The only snag is that for him to take up that opportunity he'll need to become Mr Burton's adopted son.   Well, that happens and so Richard Jenkins becomes Richard Burton (yes, that Richard Burton). Everything seems to be going swimmingly well except that out of the blue young Mr Burton gets the idea that maybe old Mr Burton's motives might not be what they seem - after all he does live alone. When he gets drunk and angrily expresses hi...

This film is based on a true story about a man who was either a Lovable Eccentric or a Crazy Egomaniac depending on your point of view. His name is Donald Crowhurst and since he is played by Colin Firth we are naturally sympathetic to him, especially given that the early scenes establish that he loves his family, comprising wife Rachel Weisz and three adorable children. The year is 1968 and Donald, a somewhat unsuccessful inventor, gets the idea into his head to enter the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race.  It's a crazy idea because Donald is at best only an amateur sailor, and because to raise the money to build a boat he has to give his house and business as security. His wife is unbelievably supportive.  Early on I think she is just humouring him (fair enough) but you'd think that she'd blow a fuse at the idea of their home and livelihood being put at risk.  Then again it was 1968 and women were expected to be subservient....

This film about a real-life serial killer (from the 1960s) suffers from a huge handicap in that it is bound to suffer in comparison with the masterpiece that is 'Zodiac', also about a real-life serial killer of a similar vintage. On the other hand I figured it should have a couple of things going for it. Firstly, whereas the Zodiac killer was never caught, the Boston Strangler was, so at least there should be a satisfying conclusion to the police investigation (spoiler alert, I was completely wrong in thinking this) Secondly, the hunt for the Strangler is shown here from the viewpoint of a woman journalist, so we get the added dimension of the misogyny she suffers in trying to pursue the story, because (shock horror) women weren't meant to do that sort of thing then.   The journalist in question is Loretta MacLaughlin, played by Keira Knightley.   For some reason I always struggle to lose myself in any of her performances, which is certainly the case here because thr...

This is yet another film I had been avoiding for no good reason, I just thought it was going to be a silly bit of sub-Freudian psycho-nonsense. But I was reassured from the outset - the makers of this film are not content with simply a caption telling us that this is a real story, they have distinguished broadcaster and journalist Alistair Cooke on screen to tell us directly that this is the case, and have him provide voiceover narration throughout complete with the dates of each important event. The unfortunate person at the centre of the drama is a timid housewife and mother Eve White (played by Joanne Woodward) who, suffering from headaches and blackouts, becomes a patient of a psychiatrist with the sinister name of Dr Luther (played by Lee J Cobb). He uncovers a second personality hiding within Eve White, who is her opposite - extrovert, outspoken, flirtatious, etc, who is dubbed Eve Black (see what they did there?). Whilst Dr Luther is trying to find a way of "curing" Ev...

Both the writing and direction of this film are credited to Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza.  The latter is a former  U.S. Navy SEAL and the film is based on his experience of an incident du ring the Iraq War. More specifically it's about Mendoza's platoon breaking into a local house to carry out some surveillance in support of a wider military operation.  Unfortunately the house becomes a target for insurgents, and the question is whether the platoon can be rescued. The film aims for absolute realism so there's no score and events are shown in real-time.  It makes for a thoroughly gripping and tense viewing experience, and at times a terrifying one. The sense that I was watching c inéma vérité was enhanced by the fact that none of the actors were familiar to me, except for Kit Connor from the excellent Netflix series 'Heartstopper' who I somehow failed to recognise (that's military camouflage for you, I guess). As one example of how nothing here is sugar-coated t...

Somehow this 2019 film went under my radar despite it being right in my wheelhouse: a political thriller based on a real-life case of a whistle blower in the runup to the Iraq War. The whistle blower in question was Katherine Gun, a translator at GCHQ, and she leaked a memo which revealed that the US and UK governments were looking to dig up dirt on some UN delegates who were likely to vote against a vital UN resolution. She is played by Keira Knightley who gives the best performance I can remember by her.  She is ably supported by a fine cast, including Matt Smith, Matthew Goode and Rhys Ifans as Observer journalists, and especially Ralph Fiennes as Gun's defence lawyer when she is charged under the Official Secrets Act. I guess you could criticise it for being a little predictable but it has the merit of being an accurate depiction of a brave action which might have saved a lot of lives.  And I was certainly on tenterhooks as to how it would all end. RATING :  ✓   ...

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. ...

This film is based on a real event in which a freight train went out of control with no driver on board.  Naturally the freight includes some highly toxic and flammable chemicals and it is only a matter of a couple of hours before the hurtling train will come off the rails in a heavily populated area (where else?), endangering many lives. It’s a straightforward story which Tony Scott directs capably, without too much embellishment. He is assisted by a decent screenplay which keeps things moving, and by Denzel Washington and Chris Pine enjoying themselves as a driver and conductor who end up as the heroes.  The supporting cast is solid as well.  To add some drama Washington’s character has been served with redundancy papers a few weeks previously, and Pine’s character is having marital problems.  Thankfully these issues don’t get in the way of the unfolding excitement. The screenplay neatly uses the media coverage to fill us in on various expository details without th...

This film by Todd Haynes is based on real events concerning a long-running legal battle with DuPont. Mark Ruffalo stars as a corporate lawyer Robert Bilott who reluctantly gets dragged into representing a farmer from his home town whose cattle are dying in large numbers and in mysterious ways. Superficially it starts off as though this is simply going to be Erin Brockovich Redux. But whereas ‘Erin Brockovich’ is ultimately a feel-good story ‘Dark Waters’ is much less so. Erin Brockovich’s story is one of personal triumph, given her lack of legal training, whilst in contrast the DuPont case, which runs for many years, takes a heavy toll of both Bilott’s health and of his finances, putting his marriage under great strain. Haynes could of course have chosen to focus on Bilott's legal successes but instead we zoom in on the reality of what it is like to single-handedly take on a ruthless corporate behemoth.  This makes for a less commercially attractive film maybe but also a more truth...

This 1964 World War II drama directed by John Frankenheimer is a beauty: lovely black-and-white photography including some great tracking shots, a gripping story (based very loosely on real events), a fine cast headed up by Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield and Jeanne Moreau, and, for those who like that sort of thing, lots and lots of 'steam engine porn'.  The film covers similar ground to the more recent 'The Monuments Men', but is far superior in every way.   The source is a book by Rose Valland,  a  French art curator, a  member of the   French Resistance ,  and one of the most decorated women in French history.   Maybe she deserves a film in her own right?   Here she has to make do with a couple of scenes at the beginning.  (She fares even worse in 'The Monuments Men' where the screenplay makes her seem quite irrational in her behaviour.) There's an interesting moral question at the heart of both films: is great art worth...

OK, the big problem with this 1988 drama set in 1964 Mississippi, based on real events, is that it is telling a story about racism from an all-white perspective and with none of the black characters having any agency.  If you can get past that (I could) then there's a lot to enjoy.   And to be fair to the makers of the film, although it can be criticised as a white-saviour narrative, the saviours here ( two FBI investigators, Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe) are not romanticised, and there is no triumphalism at the end.   Justice gets done but there's been too much hate and ugliness before then to leave the viewer with a feel-good feeling.   Although US black-white relations are in many ways much better now, we know that there's still a lot more to be done. There's a KKK meeting here, where we see white folks happily absorbing racist bile, that brought to mind  the MAGA movement. To make the story more commercial the informant who helps the FBI, aft...

My main reason for watching this film was to see Jodie Foster's performance.  Her recent film appearances have been few and far between, so I welcomed the opportunity to see her in a performance that garnered her an Oscar nomination (her first since 1994). However her character doesn't have a lot to do, and I came away more impressed with the lead performance of Annette Bening, and a supporting performance by Rhys Ifans. It's the kind of film that wouldn't normally appeal to me much, a sports drama of sorts about a real person, Diana Nyad, and her remarkable feat of endurance: in her early '60s she became the first person to swim the 110 miles from Cuba to Florida. Despite Bening's compelling performance, I always feel uneasy about celebrating someone's monomaniacal commitment to doing something which is, when you come down to it, essentially pointless.  But the film could be said to be a celebration of the human spirit and I  did find the conclusion of the ...

This 1972 film is something of a curiosity - a stripped-down Western starring Robert Redford and directed by Sydney Pollack.  It is partly based on what little we know of the real-life Jeremiah Johnson, a "mountain man'', or in other words an explorer of sorts who survives by hunting and trapping.   A lot of legends have grown up about Johnson, but it's not obvious that his life story makes for a compelling drama, yet this film made money, which must say something about Redford's superstar status back in the day. Not that Redford was first choice for the part; at one stage it was going to star Clint Eastwood, which is more obvious casting.  The director was going to be Sam Peckinpah, who no doubt would have made the most out of the more violent aspects of the Johnson legend. For example, Johnson got into a vendetta with Crow Indians, and legend has it that he would eat the livers of those he killed.   Needless to say we don't see Redford doing that; his Joh...

Martin Scorsese's previous film 'The Irishman' was both very long and quite dull.   So for a while I resisted seeing this 206-minute epic, especially since I found the trailer rather offputting.  Eventually though the favourable critical response overcame my objections, and I am glad to be able to report that this is a pretty impressive effort from the veteran director (I'm sure that's a relief to him.) It's an adaptation of the non-fiction book of the same title which recounts how in 1920s Oklahoma there were a series of murders of Osage Native Americans after oil was discovered on their tribal land. The main villain of the piece is a local rancher and bigwig, King Hale, here played by Robert De Niro.  We sense straight away that he might be a bad 'un despite his outwardly benevolent attitude to the Osage, and that he might use his rather malleable and somewhat simpleminded nephew Ernest (played by Leonardo Dicaprio) to further his schemes. One of these sch...

This is a 'black comedy thriller', according to Wikipedia, directed by Richard Linklater, based on real events and people.  As is often the case, it falls between two stools, being neither very funny nor very thrilling.  The plot is pretty simple.   Bernie (played by Jack Black) is a mortician and pillar of the small-town community that is Carthage, Texas.   He becomes the constant companion of 81-year old millionaire Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine) but her possessiveness and unpleasantness drives him to kill her.   He manages to keep this hidden for nine months by pretending she has gone away, but eventually the truth comes out, and he is convicted of murder. It's well acted and well directed, and features interviews with some actual townspeople from Carthage.  It's all fine but I couldn't help thinking that if it wasn't based on real events it wouldn't have got made, and would that have been much of a loss? RATING : x Curb Your Enthusiasm...

I'd been putting off seeing this film for getting on for fifty years, for no very good reason other than that I thought it might be a bit depressing, watching a young Al Pacino play the real-life cop, Frank Serpico, battling in vain against corruption in the 1970s NYPD. But hey, it's Sidney Lumet directing Pacino, a couple of years before they got together again for the brilliant 'Dog Day Afternoon'. The big surprise for me is that the first half of the film is quite light and entertaining - Frank has a playful side to his character, and has oodles of charm even if it is lost on most of his colleagues and superiors. The trouble for Serpico is that those colleagues who are on the take (seemingly most of them) can't leave him be, when all he wants to be is a good, honest cop.  As a result Frank becomes increasingly concerned for his safety (rightly so, as it turns out) and resorts to whistle-blowing, first within the department, and then outside. This takes a big toll...

For a while I had this confused with 'World War Z', but sadly no zombies turn up in this rather dull film, about the exploits of a Major Fawcett, who  achieved some fame in the early years of the 20th century by exploring the Amazonian rainforest.  The most interesting thing about him is that he became convinced that the forest contained a lost city.   Then in 1925, at the age of 58, he and his companions on his latest expedition (including his eldest son) simply disa ppeared.  The other thing of note about him is that he served his country with distinction during World War I despite being well into his 40s. Whilst Fawcett was clearly a courageous and interesting person, his life is not that dramatic, so if he is played by an actor lacking charisma (Charlie Hunnam) in a film directed by someone who seems uninterested in building any dramatic tension or excitement (James Gray), the inevitable result is that I was sitting throughout desperately waiting for somethi...

It's a shame this film didn't trouble the box office since it has a lot going for it, not least the unusual setting of medieval France. Naturally, given that Ridley Scott is at the helm, it is visually impressive.  And it has a great cast, headed by Matt Damon, Adam Driver, and Jodie Comer, with even Ben Affleck turning in a decent performance. But I guess the thing that stood out for me was the intriguing story, apparently based on real events, told in three 'chapters', each setting out the truth from the viewpoint of each of the three main characters. This structure has clear echoes of the Japanese classic 'Rashomon', although in that film the different accounts contradict each other on key points, whereas here each account adds more information or gives a different viewpoint, but doesn't materially conflict with either of the other two accounts. For example, in the account of Jean, his response to his wife Marguerite telling him of her rape by Jacques is ...

At the risk of coming across as a Boring Old Fart, I do enjoy a film where the makers are sufficiently confident in the story (and in the actors and the audience) that they just let it enfold at the right pace, allowing characters and relationships to be properly developed. Admittedly the story here might seem a bit thin on paper, but it does have the merit of being based on something that actually happened back in the early 1960s when the Cold War was at its coldest, and there were real fears of a global nuclear war breaking out. Greville Wynne, an ordinary British businessman (played by Benedìct Cumberbatch), reluctantly agrees to help British and US intelligence by getting important information out of Moscow which could help prevent war.  The info is provided by Oleg Penkovsky, a senior Soviet officer (played by Merab Ninidze). The film takes the time to show us their relationship developing into mutual respect and ultimately friendship.  We believe in it and therefore we b...