Category: Crime drama

Double Indemnity (1944)

Barbara Stanwyck is the dark force beyond Fred MacMurray in Wilder’s classic Double Indemnity

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: Fred MacMurray (Walter Neff), Barbara Stanwyck (Phyllis Dietrichson), Edward G. Robinson (Barton Keyes), Porter Hall (Mr Jackson), Jean Heather (Lola Dietrichson), Tom Powers (Mr Dietrichson), Bryon Barr (Nina Zachett), Richard Gaines (Edward Norton)

In the wake of the Second World War, morally complex and dark (in every sense of the word) stories spoke to a nation coming to terms with what it had been through. Out of this was born a new genre: film noir. Double Indemnity might just be the best example and one of Billy Wilder’s best films.

Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is a bored insurance salesman, smitten with the sexually alluring Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), wife of a potential client. When she suggests that, with his help, they could get rid of her husband and collect a massive insurance payout on his death, Neff is quickly won over. But murder is a hard thing to get away with – particularly when Neff’s colleague and close friend Barton Keyes (Edward G Robinson), the best investigator in the business, smells something amiss in the ‘accident’.

Double Indemnity is one of those films that it’s easy to forget was as influential as it was, precisely because it’s narrative and filmic techniques have been so comprehensively imitated in a host of films since. But imagine: this was one of the very first real film noirs. It was one of the first films that used shadows and darkness as effectively as this to reflect mood and atmosphere. It was the one of the first films to use a femme fatale as prominently (and unapologetically) as this. It’s also one of the first films where sex permeates almost everything you see in the picture.

Phyllis is a woman who understands the power of sensuality, who is well aware of how she can use her body and aloof mystery to get what she wants out of men. But even more than that, Stanwyck’s wonderfully cold performance suggests she hardly seems to care about anything at all: in fact the impression is almost that she is locked into moving forward, passing through husbands and lovers, leaving men dead on the wayside. That’s the magic of Stanwyck in this film: can you remember a character as unremittingly, unapologetically sinful, manipulative and conscience-free as this?

Of course Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff is the perfect rube for this fiercely intelligent and determined woman. MacMurray’s slight B-movie blandness – his lack of star quality, his everyday, folky unimaginativeness – is perfect for the overconfident, slightly smarmy, laziness of Neff. It’s never said outright, but you suspect that the attraction of the danger Phyllis offers is escape from his own dull life. Does he love Phyllis? I would say almost certainly not – but is he horny for her? You better believe it. It’s a man on the cusp of a mid-life crisis getting a chance to throw himself into a sex-driven affair.

What do these two think of each other? Both of them seem barely capable of trusting each other, using sex and flirting almost as a filler between bouts of mutual suspicion. Does she care for him even a little behind her use of him? And does he feel anything like a bond with her inbetween the bouts of sex? They stumble so quickly into the plan that it almost feels like they are going through the motions – she is so used to manipulation and murder, it’s all she knows; he is so bored with his life that the excitement of violence and murder with his sex seems impossible to resist.

And Wilder lets sex run through this whole film. From Phyllis’ long descent down her flight of stairs at her first entrance to the irresistible anklet, everything about Stanwyck in this film is about the power of her sex. The dialogue exchanges between Neff and Phyllis crackle with magnetism. Later, Wilder skilfully shoots a sex scene without showing a thing: we cut from the two of them kissing on a sofa, to their positions shifted, Phyllis fixing her dress and Neff reclining smoking.

It helps that the dialogue is scintillating. Each exchange is packed with crackling and quotable lines. You get a perfect marriage here between Wilder’s acerbic cynicism and dry wit, and Raymond Chandler’s arch, spiky, carefully constructed dialogue, with its gritty poetry. I mean just watch the exchange here – perfection.

And they write some knock-out speeches too – but then you would if you had an actor as brilliant as Edward G. Robinson to deliver them.

Neff’s voiceover uses the technique where it should be used – not to tell us information any well informed viewer can already work out for themselves, but to allow us insight into Neff himself and his situation, that complements and develops our appreciation of the picture (it’s also beautifully well delivered by MacMurray). I’d also add it’s the same conceit as Sunset Boulevard – its lead character narrates the film mortally wounded – and it works just as well here, stressing the disaster that hangs over every action by our anti-heroes.

Added to this, the film looks beautiful. The shadows have an all-consuming inky depth. Cinematographer John Seitz is not afraid of turning the lights down and down, and the darkness absorbs and consumes the whole picture. It allows striking lighting effects – the blinds that seem to be in every room allow slits of light through them that draw lines across the faces and bodies of the actors (as many viewers have commented, it also has the effect of making half the characters appear like they are behind bars). The darkness looms in from the corners of the frame, trapping the leads into the action – and into their own disastrous decisions.

Wilder’s skilful camera placement is what makes this film really work. He presents action constantly in challenging and different ways, never doing the expected. During the actual murder (committed while Phyllis drives), the camera never looks at Neff committing the crime, but closely follows the look of almost sensual satisfaction on Phyllis’ face: she never once looks at what is happening in the seat next to her, but her face makes us experience the killing in an even more disturbingly intimate way than watching it would be.

But what makes this film truly brilliant and unique is that its main relationship isn’t even the one you expect. Neff and Phyllis may have an electric physical relationship, but the real romance in the film is between Neff and his colleague Keyes. These two share a deeply close and personal bond. Theirs is a friendship that skirts around a platonic romance – made sharper of course as Keyes is the only man who stands a chance of working out what exactly is going on. There is a fine visual motif throughout of Neff lighting matches (with his thumb!) for Keyes – a gesture that feels both manly and intimate.

Keyes is played by a career-best Edward G. Robinson. Robinson blazes through the big speeches – but with a confident skill that never makes them feel like showboating moments. He gives Keyes an eccentric brilliance, mixed with a delicate humanism. To be that good at sniffing out wrongdoing and deceit from his fellow men, you can’t help feeling that he must have a pretty good idea about what human fallibility feels like. It’s this warm human understanding that Robinson does so brilliantly. It’s also what helps to make this relationship so moving. It’s hard not to share the obvious awkward discomfort MacMurray gives to Neff when he feels as if he is letting down his friend, and betraying the trust between them.

It’s this that makes Double Indemnity stand out. It’s a film that’s actually about the relationship between two men – part friendship, part father-and-son, part romantic – their love for each other, which happens to have an irresistible femme fatale thrown into the middle. It feels like a very unique and different approach – a touch of Wilder magic if you will – that makes the film stand out. It’s also what lies behind the link it has with audiences, the human interest that makes you come back again and again to this film about two ruthless killers.

This is a film in which everyone was at their best. MacMurray never did anything again to match it, Stanwyck seized the part with such commitment that she spawned countless imitators, Robinson is just magnificent. Wilder’s direction is perfect, the film looks ravishing, the script is to die for. Double Indemnity may not only be the most influential film noir ever. It might also be the best.

Fallen (1998)


Denzel Washington and Embeth Davidtz on the run from a nasty Demon in Fallen

Director: Gregory Hoblit

Cast: Denzel Washington (Detective John Hobbes), John Goodman (Detective Jonesy), Donald Sutherland (Lt. Stanton), Embeth Davidtz (Gretta Milano), James Gandolfini (Lou), Elias Koteas (Edgar Reese), Gabriel Casseus (Art Hobbes)

Every so often, a film comes round that you know, while you watch it, is a fairly average, unspectacular piece of film-making. But for some reason something about the film just clicks with you and you end up enjoying something basically nothing special. For me, Fallen is one of those films.

What’s particularly nice about having this film as a bit of a guilty pleasure is, I’m pretty sure, most people have never heard of it. Detective John Hobbes (Denzel Washington) has recently been present at the execution of a notorious serial killer. Moments before his death, the killer grabs his hand and mutters a message in a strange language. As a copycat killer continues the crimes – and begins to frame Hobbes – the detective slowly realises his nemesis is no man, but a demon, able to possess humans by touch. He failed to possess Hobbes – and now wants to destroy his life.

There is nothing really new here: Hobbes is straight out of film noir, while the plotline of his mentally handicapped brother raising a son is pure TV-movie of the week. The demon possession idea is not exactly new (although it’s snazzily shot) and the demon quickly heads the way of most creatures in these films: foul-mouthed and delighting in sex and violence. There is a secret underground movement of those aware of the demons on Earth (fortunately we only see one of them) combatting their evil. Nothing really new.

But Fallen makes these elements seem somewhat fresh. The idea of the demon moving from person-to-person via touch is very interestingly presented. At one point Hobbes has a conversation with the demon, as it switches from host to host. Later Gretta (Embeth Davidtz) is pursued down the street by the demon, moving swiftly from person to person in a chain of touching hands. The various actors do a good job of conveying a single consistent character for the demon (fortunately he favours possessing recognisable character actors from US TV drama). Hoblit’s direction has plenty of these interesting new ways of presenting things. He’s also able to keep a good air of menace throughout the film.

It’s not perfect of course. The investigation of the demon’s background hits all the familiar beats from Dante to the Bible. Hobbes must be the only person in the world who (having decoded a message) has to ask A NUN whether the word “Apocalypse” means anything to her. A detective who has never heard of the word apocalypse? Times have changed: it’s the sub-title to a bad X-Men film now. At least one character is so obviously set-up as a candidate for long-term possession, you immediately suspect he’s innocent.

But the film has a fine closing scene, and a decent twist which plays with your initial expectations. It also gives you plenty of clues throughout (from the first shot of the film) about how the action might play out, more than enough for you to work it out for yourself. The idea of the “final confrontation in the wilderness” is again a familiar one, but the supernatural element makes this feel different. It’s actually a twist I didn’t see coming first time around (I was young at the time, not sure if I would be caught again today) – but it’s well presented and doesn’t cheat the audience.

Probably the main reason the film works so well though is Denzel Washington. Here is an actor giving a performance probably beyond the material, encouraging others to lift their game. He perfectly captures both Hobbes’ dedication and his purity of soul, with plenty of little touches that never feel heavy handed. He makes the plotline with his brother hugely sweet. He gets the balance just right between scepticism and dawning horror. It’s a real professional performance that plays off his charisma very well – imagine how awful it would have been with Keanu Reeves in the lead.

But I love that twist ending, and I’m a sucker for these demonic possession films (like disaster films or period epics) so I’ve seen this 3-4 times and really enjoyed it each time. As well as Washington, John Goodman and Embeth Davidtz give very good performances, and there is always enough mystery that you never feel you are racing  far ahead of the film (of course we know from day one it’s about demonic possession, but the characters never feel dense catching up with us). Fallen is a high quality piece of B-movie thrills. If you haven’t heard of it, do check it out.

Wild at Heart (1990)


Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage in the hideously empty Wild at Heart

Director: David Lynch

Cast: Nicolas Cage (Sailor Ripley), Laura Dern (Lula Pace Fortune), Diane Ladd (Marietta Fortune), Harry Dean Stanton (Johnnie Farragut), J.E. Freeman (Marcello Santos), W. Morgan Sheppard (Mr Reindeer), Willem Dafoe (Bobby Peru), Crispin Glover (Dell), Isabella Rossellini (Perdita Durango), Sherilyn Fenn (Car Accident Girl), Sheryl Lee (Good Witch)

David Lynch is an eccentric film director. I think that is a fair comment. At his best, he combines his “view askew” look at the world with genuine comedy and pathos. At other times, his films disappear down a self-reverential rabbit-hole that seems designed to frustrate and alienate the viewer. Wild at Heart is the latter type of movie.

Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) is released from prison after his self-defence response to a knife-wielding man at a party turns into a homicidal fury. The knifeman may (or may not) have been hired by Marietta (Diane Ladd), mother to Sailor’s “girl” Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern, Ladd’s real life daughter) a woman with a sexually troubled background of abuse, who is in the middle of a sexual awakening. Together they go on a road trip to – well just kinda to get away I guess.

I’ve got to confess I really hated this movie. I only stuck with it to the end, because (a) it wasn’t that long and (b) I wanted to have actually watched the whole thing before I laid into it in this review. This film is the absolute worst elements of Lynchian oddness and gore mixed with pop-culture references to the 1930s through to the 1950s.

In fact it’s a film that is so totally obsessed with these two things that there is literally no room in it for any real plot or emotion. Instead it’s full of pointless, smug and irritating visual and audio quotes from Elvis to The Wizard of Oz, and empty characters played by showboating actors giving massive performances under ostentatious make-up, all to hide the fact that the film (for all its bombast) is a shallow as a puddle. It’s a horrible piece of intellectual fakery, that pretends to be about deep profound themes about love and death but tells us nothing about them. In the end it gets more delight from Dafoe blowing his head off with a shotgun than it does from anything to do with its so-called themes.

Lynch piles on the violence for the sake of it, all in the name of parodying the aggression that lies under his apple-pie surface Americana. This worked in Blue Velvetbecause the contrast was so great, and the characters (for all their larger-than-life qualities) felt real. Here, everything feels artificial. A constant visual image of fire and flames runs through the story – it’s a reference back to the murder (it’s not a surprise to say) of Lula’s father (burnt alive on the orders of his wife it turns out). This adds nothing at all to our understanding of anything – particularly since Marietta is the most obviously corrupt and hypocritical character from the start, drawing attention in such a ham fisted way to her past misdeeds, and the impact of them, hardly seems necessary.

The film is full of signs of man’s inhumanity – the brutal shootings, the torture of Harry Dean Stanton’s luckless PI (toned down considerably from the original cut), Sailor’s brutal murder at the start, a road accident peopled with twisted bodies – but it’s all so bloody obvious. We get it David, the world is bad and people suck. Just because you’ve shot this with some tricky angles and carry it across with a tongue-in-cheek delight at your own naughtiness doesn’t make this a masterpiece. It just highlights the shallow emptiness you are peddling as art.

The rampant self-indulgence spreads to the actors. You’d think Cage would be perfect for Lynch right? Wrong. His hideously self-conscious performance of overt oddity here just makes his performance all the more unbearable. Diane Ladd gives the sort of performance many call brave, but is really just about shouting and smearing lipstick all over her face. By the time Willem Dafoe turns up with ludicrous teeth, ripping into the scenery, you’ve lost all patience. The only person who emerges with any credit is Laura Dern, who at least invests her characters with some level of humanity and sweetness. Everyone else (everyone!) is a stock cartoon drawing.

But even Dern is cursed with Lynch’s awful sexual abuse sub-plot, which is genuinely offensive in its trite shallowness and in its suggestion that having sex with your uncle as a young teenager will turn you into a real goer later in life. Did he really deal with the same themes with such sensitivity in Twin Peaks? As for the so-called romantic happy ending – it’s unearned in any way by the film, which has treated the subject with scorn. The film’s dark wit isn’t even particularly funny – everything is so dialed up to eleven, that all the comic beats get smothered in over acting or over stylised dialogue and action.

Wild at Heart won a flipping Palme d’Or (to be fair the announcement was booed). But don’t be fooled. This is a film pretending an intellectual depth it never gets anywhere near to achieving. It’s a horrible, pathetic, cruel and empty film that thinks it’s a satire on the dark heart that lies at America’s soul. It’s not. It’s just a cartooney, self-important lecture which mistakes oddity and eccentricity for heart. Lynch is a talent for sure, but here his talents are sorely misdirected into indulgent, childish emptiness and faux profundity. Don’t watch it.

12 Angry Men (1957)


Henry Fonda must win over 12 good men and true in 12 Angry Men

Director: Sidney Lumet

Cast: Henry Fonda (Juror #8), Lee J Cobb (Juror #3), Ed Begley (Juror #10), E.G. Marshall (Juror #4), Jack Warden (Juror #7), Martin Balsam (Juror #1), Jack Klugman (Juror #5), Joseph Sweeney (Juror #9), John Fiedler (Juror #2), Edward Binns (Juror #6), George Voskovec (Juror #11), Robert Webber (Juror #12)

A young man is on trial for murder. The jury retires to consider. On the first vote, only one man (Henry Fonda) questions his guilt. The other jurors are convinced they are right – can Fonda turn them around?

Who hasn’t done jury service and dreamed of being Henry Fonda? 12 Angry Men is perhaps the most compelling courtroom drama ever, for that very reason: hardly any of us are judges or lawyers, but we’ve all got a decent chance of doing jury service. What would we do in this situation? How thoughtful would we be about the evidence? And, of course, that little stab of ego – could we be charismatic and persuasive enough to sway a room of people? I think this is why this film sticks with people and has become such a persuasive part of our popular culture – we all wanna be Fonda.

12 Angry Men is a film that I feel touches perfection. I thought quite heavily about whether I could identify any flaws in it at all: the closest I got at was the shot Lumet throws in of the suspect (a sweet looking kid). I suspect this shot was required so that the 50s audience could be confident that Fonda was crusading for someone who at least looked innocent (although it always makes me think, since so many of the other jurors make snap decisions, why doesn’t at least one of them look at that cute kid and think “he ain’t no killer…”). Aside from that, I don’t think there is a single mis-step in the filming, acting or writing of the film – and how many times can you say that?

Lumet is a director who doesn’t get a lot of public recognition. He subordinates his skills to the requirements of the story, rather than an auteur who imposes his style. This works perfectly for this compelling slow-burn. Lumet’s expert filming quietly lets the actors and dialogue stand front-and-centre, while cleverly using his camera language and shot choices to amp up the tension.

At first, Lumet uses wider and high angle shots, allowing us to get a sense of the room and the characters. But the real effect of this plays out over the rest of the film, as Lumet slowly moves to tighter angles at POV height, until the final sequences are played out over a series of close-ups cutting from juror to juror, at low angles. What this achieves brilliantly is to make the film feel tighter and more claustrophobic – the room feels like it’s actually shrinking in on the jurors as they argue. You can get a sense of it in the videos below, both early and later in the film.

The film also works so brilliantly because it offers a brilliant insight (and critique even?) of the legal system. The one legal professional we see is a bored judge. All references to the unseen lawyers mention either their showmanship or inadequacy. Even the jury system is subtly called into question: several of the jurors are motived more by prejudice and personal experience than by any analysis of the evidence. Others are flawed in other ways; #12 switches sides indecisively three times while #7 is so impatient and bored with the whole process, he follows the direction of the least resistance. Without #8, a decision would have been made with no discussion at all. Even the very process of taking the vote is shown to root many of the jurors down to “sides” and creates an atmosphere of competition that becomes as important as seeing justice done. And in a system of trial by your peers, only #4 in any way identifies himself as sharing the background of the man on trial. Is this a perfect system?

These ideas, though, are skilfully interwoven in the background of a gripping legal thriller. 12 Angry Men is completely objective. We never see the witnesses whose performance is the cause of such analysis. We never see the scene of the crime. We don’t have any confirmation at all that either side is right. It’s a film about the importance of reasonable doubt – and the need to be absolutely certain before sending someone to the chair. Fonda feels that doubt – and persuades the other jurors of it – but we never know if he was right or not. We never know if any of the suppositions in the jury room are true – the important thing is how high the possibility is that they might be true – and how much that affects our willingness to convict.

The film is one brilliant set-piece after another, as each piece of evidence is interrogated. I honestly can’t decide which one I like the most. What makes it work is the variation of how each case is presented. The film is as comfortable with the drama of #8 flinging a replica of the “unique” murder weapon onto the table, as it is with a careful dialogue-led dissection of the eyesight of a key witness. Who can resist Fonda limping around an approximation of the next-door neighbour’s flat to see if he can cover a certain distance within a certain time. It helps that the dialogue is incredibly rich – it has to convey a lot of information, but also manages to sketch out each of the characters so swiftly and carefully that each of them feels real.

And we’ve come all this way and not even mentioned the performances. Again, each viewing gives me a chance to appreciate a new performance: my eye was caught on this viewing by Robert Webber’s seemingly cool and collected advertising man, who has far less certainty than he projects. Needless to say each actor is brilliant. Fonda (who also produced) is the very image of moral authority – as well as a generous collaborator on the movie. Is this his best performance? It’s got to up there – #8 is a humanitarian, but he’s never smug or self-serving, just a man who feels a strong sense of his own obligation.

If Fonda is the superego, Cobb’s #3 (the primary antagonist, if there is such a thing) is the ego – raging, elemental, decisive, unshaken in his beliefs. Cobb’s performance veers the closestto a little too stagy, but it’s a character that demands it. His bluster and swaggering are vital to the character in order to make his later emotional collapse work as well as it does – and #3’s final emotional disintegration really rings true. It’s a ferociously intense performance.

Each actor gets his chance to shine. Voskovec’s sensitive immigrant has a wonderful speech on the responsibility of passing judgement. The most barnstorming speech is Begley’s racist outburst late in the film. It’s beautifully done as this loud-mouthed bully explodes with frustration, then slowly and even rather sadly collapses as he talks on and on, each sentence making him weaker and weaker, more defensive and vulnerable. But it’s never a scene about just one man – the reactions are as well judged as everything else. And I can’t tell you how much I love #4’s “I have [listened to you]. Now sit down and don’t open your mouth again” one-line response which caps the scene.

In fact just mentioning #4 brings on my love of E.G. Marshall’s performance in this film. #4 should be one of the least engaging characters in the film – coldly analytical, professional, assured and clear minded. But he’s always human, never an antagonist, but a respected citizen – the only one of the jurors who is motivated by judgement rather than prejudice. I love his calmness, his cool lack of regard for #3 and #10’s loud-mouthed berating, his patient, studied explanation of his convictions. I adore his calm puncturing and counterview of each point Fonda puts forward, until he is finally won over – and its his winning over which makes the film work. If this thoughtful, intelligent man has doubts, shouldn’t we all?

But I repeat they are all great. Jack Warden’s #7 is totally convincing as (the film’s real villain?) a man indifferent to right and wrong when compared to his own needs. Balsam’s decent but ineffectual #1 is the perfect mediocrity in above his head. Sweeney’s wry, observant and shrewd #9 is a delight (Sweeney was the only member of the original TV play to be retained). Fiedler’s #2 grows in moral force throughout, belaying his quiet appearance. Klugman’s #5 is quietly defiant and conflicted. Binn’s #6 reveals himself as a mild, humble and honourable man.

I think I could watch 12 Angry Men every week of the year. It’s brilliantly filmed (how could I not mention the oppressive rain soundtrack that accompanies the latter part of the film) and wonderfully directed. The script is simply perfect, Reginald Rose expanding and enriching his original TV adaptation. The acting is nearly flawless from all concerned. It’s, quite simply, a great movie. I simply can’t imagine anyone not reflecting on this movie when heading into jury service. It subtly comments on the legal system, but never gets bogged down in this, telling a gripping and compelling story about things we never see. It’s pretty damn near close to perfection.

The Girl on the Train (2016)


Emily Blunt on a commute into danger in the underwhelming Girl on the Train

Director: Tate Taylor

Cast: Emily Blunt (Rachel Watson), Rebecca Ferguson (Ann Watson), Haley Bennett (Megan Hipwell), Justin Theroux (Tom Watson), Luke Evans (Scott Hipwell), Allison Janney (DS Riley), Edgar Ramirez (Dr Kamal Abdic), Lisa Kudrow (Martha), Laura Prepon (Cathy)

Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt) is a lonely, divorced alcoholic who takes the train into New York every day to spy on her husband (Justin Theroux) and his new wife (Rebecca Ferguson), whose house the train passes. However, she also becomes obsessed with the seemingly happy marriage of her ex’s neighbours (Luke Evans and Haley Bennett), who live an apparently Instagram-perfect life of coffee on the balcony and candlelit sex in their perfect living room (with the curtains conveniently left open – everyone leaves their curtains open in this film, no matter what they are doing). When the picture-perfect wife goes missing, she inveigles her way into their lives to try and help.

This is not a good film. It’s not a terrible film, but it’s a flat and lifeless one – a plot-boiler that simmers along without ever really getting exciting.  The story feels like it’s been pulled together from crumbs swept from the table of Gillian Flynn. It’s a hotchpotch mess, tangled, unclear and not that interesting. I can’t be the only person un-intrigued by the mystery of who shags who among the middle classes. Even a murder doesn’t spice it up. The small cast makes many mysteries obvious – when one character is found to be pregnant, but two of the three male characters we’ve been introduced to have been ruled out, you don’t need to be Poirot to work out who the father might be. Even the title is a call back to better thrillers, with its Girl with the Dragon Tattoo styled title.

The story drifts on and on, never really getting anyway or explaining anything properly. It doesn’t help that it’s mediocrely filmed. Look at the lean, compelling and sharp film David Fincher made of (the much better) Gone Girl. Then look at the murky, plodding, dull execution here. Particularly damningly it’s a shock to find out this is less than 2 hours, because it feels a hell of a lot longer.

The story has been switched from the book’s original London to somewhere outside Manhattan, which doesn’t help either. There is something quite small scale and domestic about the story that the sweeping vistas and huge houses of wealthy American suburbia don’t match up with. The very concept of the film – seeing into houses from commuter trains paused at signals – doesn’t even work removed from London’s architecture (the train in this film stops regularly on a huge expanse of track due to rail works that go on for ever and ever). Edgar Ramirez’s psychiatrist keeps the name Kamal Abdic (with its suggestion of middle Eastern roots) but now seems to be Mexican. Everyone in the film looks like a fashion model. Lots of other small moments just don’t make sense in the way they would have done in the original setting.

Emily Blunt is pretty good in the lead role, much better than the film deserves. Okay the drop-dead gorgeous Blunt doesn’t even remotely look like the overweight, sweaty alcoholic described in the book. But she nails her drunk acting, and carries the emotional heft of the film rather well, with an engaging vulnerability. She is, perhaps, even a little too engaging – the book’s original version of her character is apparently pretty unlikeable. The script trims away her needy obsessiveness, and creepy stalker tendencies. But Blunt is a little too likeable, and a little too sophisticated (despite prosthetic eyebags), to really convince as the pathetic Rachel. The switch to America doesn’t help here either – basically Brits make better losers than Americans tend to.

The rest of the cast are okay, but there is hardly a stand out among them. I have to admit I found Haley Bennett and Rebecca Ferguson (with their identikit blond hair dyes) hard to tell apart at times (this may be due to staying up all night watching the 2017 British election the night before).

By the end, when the killer is revealed (with a graphically suggestive flashback) you’ll find it hard to really care. In fact the final reveal is so clumsily put together all the implications aren’t clear at all. It’s a load of fuss about nothing. Taylor is trying to turn a pulpy novel into an arty thriller – but he doesn’t have the cinematic know-how to do it. He’s far too bland and middlebrow. Maybe that makes him a suitable match – a derivative director for a derivative book – but it hardly helps make this a good film. If he’d gone for a more B-movie approach, playing up the dark satire you could find in the story, then we could have had something interesting here. But he didn’t and we don’t.

Donnie Brasco (1997)


Pacino and Depp deliver low-key, carefully controlled, sensitive performances: how often do you get to write that?

Director: Mike Newell

Cast: Al Pacino (Benjamin “Lefty” Ruggiero), Johnny Depp (Joseph Pistone/Donnie Brasco), Michael Madsen (Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano), Bruno Kirby (Nicky Santora), Anne Heche (Maggie Pistone), James Russo (“Paulie” Cersani), Željko Ivanek (Tim Curley), Gerry Becker (Dean Blandford), Robert Miano (Al “Sonny Red” Indelicato), Tim Blake Nelson, Paul Giamatti (FBI Technicians)

The Mafia film genre is a crowded market, so it’s a brave film maker who enters it with something a little different. But we get that with Donnie Brasco, which focuses on the bottom rungs of the Mafia ladder, suggesting that being a low-ranking member of “this thing of ours” is in many ways quite similar to being a corporate drone in the big city, only with more killing.

Joseph Pistone aka Donnie Brasco (Johnny Depp) is an undercover FBI agent, infiltrating the New York Mafia. He wins the trust of “Lefty” Ruggiero (Al Pacino), a Mafia hitman. Drawn deeper into the Mafia world, the pressure builds on Pistone/Brasco, who slowly becomes more and more indistinguishable from the criminals he spends his time with – and feels guilty about the deadly fate Lefty will meet if the Mafia discover he inadvertently introduced a rat into the family.

Newell’s film (from Paul Attanasio’s excellent script) is a dry deconstruction of the gangster life, bringing it closer to the grind of the 9-5. The criminals put in long hours to earn the income they need to push up to those above them. Class distinctions abound – in one scene, Sonny Black (a good performance of ambition and resentment from Michael Madsen) forces a smile onto his face while mob bosses laugh openly at his dress sense. Lefty whines like a mule about everything from his lack of recognition to how put-upon he is (never has a mantra about 26 hits over a lifetime sounded more like complaints about constant filing requests). He could easily be mistaken half the time for a harrassed office junior who never made the grade. When violence comes, it’s sudden, graphic, confused and brutal – a hit in a basement goes far from smoothly with one victim struggling for his life while another screams in pain.

On the other hand, the gangsters are also suggested to be maladjusted teens who never grew up. The more time Donnie spends with them, the less and less capable he becomes of relating to (or even communicating with) his wife and family. The gangsters have a routine lack of empathy for each other and treat the rules of “our thing” like a boys’ clubhouse. Many of their actions have an ill-thought-out juvenility to them: Sonny at one point steals a lion for Lefty as a gift – in a bizarre scene immediately afterwards, Lefty and Donnie feed it hamburgers through the window while it sits in the back seat of Donnie’s car. On a work-trip in Florida, the gangsters behave like kids – mucking around in the pool, delightedly going down waterflumes, burying Lefty in the sand on the beach while he sleeps. Even Lefty is overcome like a star-struck teen when meeting a famed Florida boss.

It’s not surprising that Donnie and Lefty, both outsiders in a way, are drawn together as kindred spirits in this strange, unbalanced world. Donnie obviously is an FBI agent, but Lefty is a world-weary old-timer, with a sense of honour who seems (apart from his ease with killing and violence) to be the most “normal” of the gangsters. The film is a careful construction of the growth of loyalty between these characters – particularly the slow development of Donnie’s feelings of genuine friendship towards Lefty. What’s effective is that this is a gradual process without a definable key moment. Instead, it becomes rather touching as Donnie starts to avoid moving closer to better “contacts” in order to remain close to Lefty. Donnie Brasco might be one of the few films that really gets a type of male friendship, and the unspoken emotional bonds that underpin them.

Perhaps the best things about Donnie Brasco are the two wonderful performances we get from actors who never knowlingly underplay. Watching this and Ed Wood is a reminder of the actor Johnny Depp could have been, before clowning in Pirates of the Caribbean seemed to shatter his focus. Brasco/Pistone is a brilliantly low-key presentation of a fractured personality. At first, the differentiation between the two personalities is distinct and clear – but as the film progresses, Depp allows the two to almost c/ollapse into each other. Everything from his body language to his manner of speaking slowly repositions itself as he becomes more consumed by the gangster world. Depp is also very good at not losing track of Pistone’s horror at murder and violence, while allowing the Brasco persona to take part in its aftereffects. The quiet building of guilt in his eyes at the fate he is creating for Lefty is also gently underplayed, making it more effective.

However, this is Al Pacino’s movie. It’s certainly Pacino’s last great performance: with the added frisson that he’s Michael Corleone demoted to the bottom rung of the ladder, Pacino is magnetic. Lefty is a put-upon whiner, who still has a charisma of his youth that draws Donnie (and others) in. A man of strong moral principles, who treats Donnie with a fatherly regard, uncomfortable with much of the ostentation of his fellow gangsters, he’s also a ruthless killer who blithely shrugs off his killing of an old friend. All Pacino’s bombast is only rarely deployed for impact – instead Lefty is a low-key, almost sad figure, whose chance in life has passed by.

One extraordinary scene late on deserves particular mention. I won’t spoil things too much, but Lefty prepares to leave the house after a phone call full of bad news. Carefully, sadly, he smartens himself up then returns (after saying goodbye to his wife) to gently remove his valuables and leave them in a drawer for his wife – he even carefully leaves the drawer ajar so she can find it. Setting himself before leaving the house, he takes a small look around. It’s a beautifully gentle scene, which could be overloaded with meaning from another actor, but Pacino plays it with such quiet but intense focus, and such careful precision it works brilliantly. Take a look at the scene here (warning spoilers!)

Newell’s strength as an actor’s director is apparent in all the performances, and Donnie Brasco is a film of many wonderful scenes and moments. The film never loses track of the danger of undercover heart – and several striking scenes have Pistone close to being discovered. The film is not perfect: the aim of the FBI investigation, and the impact Donnie’s work are never really made clear and the scenes involving Pistone’s homelife feel far more predictable and conventional than the rest of the movie (Anne Heche has a thankless part). But when it focuses on the two leads, and their dynamism together, it’s a damn fine film. It’s not going to challenge Goodfellas as a story of low-key hoods, but it’s certainly a worthy addition to cinema’s mafia films.

Child 44 (2014)


Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman investigate murder in Stalinist Russia: It should be more interesting than it is

Director: Daniel Espinosa

Cast: Tom Hardy (Leo Demidov), Noomi Rapace (Raisa Demidova), Joel Kinnaman (Vasili Nikitin), Gary Oldman (General Nesterov), Vincent Cassel (Major Kuzmin), Jason Clarke (Anatoly Brodsky), Paddy Considine (Vladimir Malevich), Fares Fares (Alexei Andreyev), Charles Dance (Major Grachev), Tara Fitzgerald (Inessa Nesterova)

Adaptations of bestselling books are tricky things. Your source material already has a pre-existing fan base but you also need to bring new faces into the multiplex. Is that easy to do? Not always – and many films fail to strike a balance between telling the story for newcomers and satisfying the old fans. This is one of those failures.

Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy) is a war hero and NKVD officer in 1950s Stalinist Russia. Initially complacent and sure that he is a good man doing his best in the system, his life is shattered after his wife Raisa (Noomi Rapace) – a woman who secretly hates her husband – is maliciously reported as a traitor, and Leo refuses denounce her. Banished to the outbacks of Russia, Leo feels compelled to find some redemption by investigating a child murderer. But Stalin has ruled murder is a capitalist crime “impossible” in the paradise of Communist Russia, making it a crime the all-powerful state has decreed cannot exist.

It’s hard to put your finger exactly on why this film never comes to life. It ticks nearly all the boxes of the original book’s plot (it in fact changes the one part of the book I found a “shark jump”, the identify of the killer itself). It’s well shot. There are some very good actors in it. It’s a good story. But it just doesn’t work – you never really invest in it. Perhaps the problem is the film has to jettison the interior monologues of the characters, so we lose much of the context of the action.

The book’s strength was its exploration of the nature of investigating crime in Stalin’s Russia: where crimes only exist if the state agrees they can, where investigation is largely unnecessary as the perpetrator is always proclaimed at the start, where those investigating the crimes are constantly in fear of being denounced for failures (“if the man I follow escapes, I will be accused of working with him”). The film fails to get this Stalinist tension across, so is left with just the bare workings of the plot without the novel’s context, making it seem like a “murder of the week” TV movie.

The attempt to get all the plot ticked means many actors get wasted in heavily reduced parts. A particular victim is Gary Oldman, who can’t be on screen for more than 15 minutes, and switches from obstructive boss to confidante as the plot requires. For the leads, Hardy and Rapace give quality performances (Rapace in particular is very good), and I did like the way the film really explored how Raisa’s feelings for Leo change from disgust and fear towards true affection. But you never really feel or care for them as you should.

However, they, along with the rest of the cast, suffer from the decision to give all the actors thick Roosian acksents. Why was this decided? Not only does this make some lines hard to hear (particularly Hardy’s) and stifles variance in delivery, but there is no need for it. Every character is Russian. They are all talking Russian. It’s all set in Russia. Why not have them use non-strongly accented versions of their own voices? Do we really need thick Slavic vowels to remind us we are in Russia?

Child 44 is a disappointing film, and perhaps the worst thing about it is, if you watch it before reading the book, you’ll probably wonder what all the fuss was about. By largely failing to get across the full complexity, danger and madness of the Stalinist system, it reduces the book’s plot into something flimsy and everyday. The whole adaptation has almost completely missed the point of what made the book so different and compelling in the first place. By doing so it turns the story into something that feels much more derivative than it actually was.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)


Tom Cruise and Cobie Smulders on the run – not as exciting as it should be

Director: Edward Zwick

Cast: Tom Cruise (Jack Reacher), Cobie Smulders (Major Susan Turner), Aldis Hodge (Captain Anthony Espin), Danika Yarosh (Samantha Dutton), Patrick Heusinger (The Hunter), Holt McCallany (Colonel Sam Morgan), Robert Knepper (General James Harkness)

Titling a sequel to any film Never Go Back is a real hostage to fortune. It’s not a great surprise that a quick internet search for reviews of this film throws up a plethora of puns around the film’s subtitle. It’s pretty obvious: but considering the general meh nature of this film, it’s also kinda fair.

Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) travels back to Washington DC to visit Major Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), a Military Police officer who has helped him with a number of problems in the past. He arrives, however, to find her under arrest for espionage – and after he starts asking questions, he quickly joins her in lock-up, under arrest for murder. Busting out of prison, they go on the run together to try and find out who has framed them.

Now I loved the first Jack Reacher film: I’ve seen it three times now and it has a brilliant combination of well-cut action sequences, witty lines, an involving plot and some interesting eccentric fringe characters (not least Werner Herzog’s Russian mobster mastermind), which fleshed the movie out into an entertainingly different man-gotta-do movie. This sequel shakes up the formula – but in doing so makes itself much more of an identikit movie, full of tropes we’ve seen before.

For starters, the main appeal of the first Reacher film was the character himself: a loner who plays by his own rules, operating like some sort of master-less samurai, was interestingly different; it was hard to predict how he might react in different situations. Here, teaming him up with Turner (good as Smulders is in the role) and a character who may-or-may-not-be his daughter turns Reacher into just another leg of a mismatched trio, an odd bunch on the run. Cruise tackles well Reacher’s conflicted reactions to taking on a father-child bond that has never crossed his mind before, but adding this parental element to the mix makes the movie start to feel like a high-class Taken reprise.

Secondly, Zwick’s direction doesn’t have the zing that the rather dry and uninvolving plot needs to bring it to life. There is very little of interest in the script, and no memorable lines at all. The best scene in the film is Reacher’s introduction – practically the only scene that captures the character’s slightly cocky defiance of authority, his seemingly omniscient awareness of how events will unfold and his simmering potential for violence coupled with a strong moral code. The storyline that built up to that opening scene sounds really interesting: I wish the film had been about that. No scene after that point really comes to life again. Zwick’s action directing is perfunctory and he can’t add the visual wit that Christopher McQuarrie introduced to such great effect in the first film.

Thirdly the story is just plain not that interesting. The conspiracy is hard to fathom (or care about) and the villains are poorly defined ciphers. In fact, outside of Smulders and Cruise, not a single actor makes an impression in this film: each supporting character is little more than a plot device, sketched with broad strokes. The family dynamic between Reacher-Turner-Dutton feels rather old-hat and robs us of Reacher’s most unique asset as a character – all part of turning the film into another run-of-the-mill thriller. For a fourth or fifth film in the series, doing something very different with the character might have worked: here we still want to explore the loner.

That’s really harsh: it’s not a bad film, just a disappointingly average one. There are some decent scenes and some grins. Cruise and Smulders give good performances. I’m glad they made a Reacher sequel. I just wish it had been a better one. I’m sorry, I can’t resist – this is one film that you will probably Never Go Back to.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

Philip Marlowe: You ain’t seen the great detective this dishevelled before

Director: Robert Altman
Cast: Elliott Gould (Philip Marlowe), Nina van Pallandt (Eileen Wade), Sterling Hayden (Roger Wade), Mark Rydell (Marty Augustine), Henry Gibson (Dr. Verringer), David Arkin (Harry), Jim Bouton (Terry Lennox), Ken Sansom (Colony Guard)

Philip Marlowe: The Great Gumshoe as you’ve never seen him before. Altman has taken Chandler’s original novel and re-set it into the 1970s. Marlowe (Elliot Gould) is still a private eye but a sort of eccentric Don Quixote, an ambling, mumbling oddity too noble to take on “divorce work”. After he gives his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) a lift to Mexico, he is left facing police wrath after Terry’s wife is found dead. He is cleared only when Terry is found dead in Mexico, having signed a confession. But Marlowe can’t believe his friend capable of murder – and investigates further.

Altman’s Chandler adaptation was widely criticised at the time – largely because it was completely mis-sold as a mystery detective yarn, which it certainly is not. There are no clues, the mystery is pretty vague at best and the detective hero not only does virtually no detective whatsoever, but is such a naïve soul with such a trusting 1950s style code of honour that he seems swept along by events like a broken reed in a stream. Far from the Marlowe of Bogart or Mitchum, Gould’s Marlowe was an almost wilfully uncool, awkward social misfit, whose lack of engagement with the world stemmed far more from his own lack of understanding than any cynicism.

On top of that, the film is an unusual blend of old and new. Marlowe is a scruffy man out of time, constantly smoking (no one else in the film does) and shuffling from encounter to encounter. Vital conversations happen outside of our (and Marlowe’s) hearing. The camera roams as wilfully as its lead character, rarely standing still to let us absorb the action, but constantly offering us a series of subjective angles. Like much of Altman’s work, the naturalistic sound recording lets dialogue overlap and clash. The entire soundtrack is a riff on the themes in the title song, the music popping up throughout like pleasant musak. Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography is both an inversion of film noir with its California brightness and (through a technique of deliberate overexposure called ‘flashing’) a sepia infected look at the 1970s that draws a link back to the source material’s 1940s origins.

But the tone of the movie is the most unusual thing: a strangely addictive hipsterish take on Marlowe, in which the majority of other characters are as shallow and self-obsessed as you would expect of the 1970s: aside from Marlowe, the only character who seems to apologise or keep to his word at any point is the film’s least sympathetic and most violent character. The eventual killer reacts to being confronted with his crime with a blasé self-entitlement. Across the apartment from Marlowe’s bizarre old-school Hollywood apartment block, a commune of hippie ladies exercise topless outside at all hours; everywhere you turn there are clashes between the old and the new.

The film’s opening immediately establishes what the film is going to be like, and is also one of the best sequences in the film: a quiet, gently paced quest Marlowe undertakes to find cat-food in the middle of the night and his inability to persuade said cat to eat the “wrong” brand of food that he brings back home. This secluded existence is only broken by the arrival of Terry Lennox, who immediately beats Marlowe at a bet on the number of 7s in the serial number on a $10 bill (which he wins despite Marlowe having the higher number of 7s, as he successfully lures Marlowe into an incorrect challenge). It’s a wonderful summation of the film’s plot, as well as a series of clear insights into Marlowe’s personality: a man out of time easily manipulated by those around him, who can’t fool a cat or win a bet with the best hand.

Gould’s performance is absolutely central to the mood and tone of the film. His Marlowe is a counterpoint to the hard-bitten detectives of film noir. Instead, he is a scruffy mumbler, whose continual, conversational patter throughout the film feels more like a commentary he is running for his own amusement than any attempt to communicate with the world around him. Gould’s charm and otherworldly quality basically is the film: he’s hardly off screen and he “sets the tone”: the film’s ambling, slightly confused glances at the modern world, where dialogue and motives are both equally unclear, exactly match the beats of Gould’s interpretation of the character. It’s a perfect performance for the film, a sly gag that also has heart and character.

The film’s off beat tone and lackadaisical attitude are punctured at several moments by astonishingly sudden upturns in tempo, and scenes that sizzle with the threat of (or actual) violence. These moments are linked to Mark Rydell’s brilliant performance as fast-talking Marty Augustine, a man whose actions are totally unpredictable. He is responsible for the film’s only real act of violence – but it’s a striking moment of brutality that no-one sees coming (least of all the other characters, on whose shocked faces and stunned silence the camera lingers).

Rydell’s exceptional performance is the stand out supporting one here, but there is also some very good work from Nina van Pallandt as a woman who is part vulnerable wife, part femme fatale, and whose emotional state and motivations constantly seem to shift and change (at a pace the audience barely keeps up with, let alone poor Marlowe). Sterling Hayden’s Hemingway-esque author is one of those primal force-of-nature performances that can grate, but it works in a film where so many of the other characters are restrained.

The film is an absorbing character study, and at the same time a sly commentary on both the 1970s, the source material and film itself: Gould’s Marlowe at points seems to be pushing on the wall of self-awareness (most notably in a hospital scene late in the film, a masterpiece of misdirection): later, Third Man style, he walks past another character without offering a beat of recognition, before (as the credits roll) he inexplicably starts dancing down a boulevard, the camera watching him in long shot. Hooray for Hollywood (the only other music in the film) bookends the film.

It’s a fascinating and highly enjoyable film with a series of striking scenes and character moments that capture the attention and imagination. It’s a film that needs, however, a certain expectation going into it. Don’t expect a detective story, don’t expect detection even, but instead a unique merging of comedy, social commentary, satire and drama powered by an almost wilfully off-hand lead performance. It’s the sort of unique concoction only Altman could have made. There isn’t really anything else like it.

Match Point (2005)


Love and lust collide in Woody Allen’s bizarrely classless Britain

Director: Woody Allen

Cast: Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Chris Wilton), Scarlett Johansson (Nola Rice), Emily Mortimer (Chloe Hewett Wilton), Matthew Goode (Tom Hewett), Brian Cox (Alec Hewett), Penelope Wilton (Eleanor Hewett), Ewen Bremner (Inspector Dowd), James Nesbitt (Detective Mike Banner), Rupert Penry-Jones (Henry), Margaret Tyzack (Mrs Eastby), Alexander Armstrong (Mr Townsend)

Match Point was originally intended to be filmed in New York, but Woody Allen could only raise the cash in Britain – so the location was shifted to London. The effect is a little bit like Julian Fellowes switching Downton Abbey to become a kitchen-sink drama in Liverpool: research has been done, the facts are all ticked off, but the understanding of the people and their situation just isn’t there. Maybe Allen should have hired Fellowes as a consultant. At least Fellowes could have told him an upper-class Covent Garden opera buff probably isn’t going to be in raptures about Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s The Woman in White.

Chris Winter (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) is a tennis pro, now making a living as a coach in an upmarket London club. He coaches Tom Hewitt (Matthew Goode), and they discover a shared love of opera. Soon Chris is a regular visitor to the Hewitt family, a suitor and later husband to Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer) and an employee at his father’s big city firm. He has everything he wants – except for Nola Rice (Scarlett Johnasson), Tom’s American actress fiancée…

The film was critically acclaimed in America but received a much more muted response here in Blighty. I can see why. Allen’s main problem is that he is tone deaf to the class hierarchy in this country. As such, he creates a Britain here that is close to something we would recognise, but subtly off. Chris is clearly from a lower social class than the family he marries into, he’s employed as a coach in a tennis club and he’s clearly less well travelled than the others. The family he marries into has a massive country house with servants, goes shooting at the weekend, runs a huge London business – it’s a modern day Downton Abbey.

If the same story was created by a British writer and director, Chris would clearly be presented as an ambitious, even ruthless, social climber looking to move up the ladder by doing everything he can to marry into a rich family and inveigling himself into their lives. Allen, however, doesn’t present the relationship like this – in fact, watching the film, I think it’s clear that he doesn’t really realise that Chris and his in-laws are in a totally different social class. He treats them all as if they are basically social equals, with money the only difference between them. For the British this just doesn’t fit in at all with our experience of the class system in this country – we know the Hewetts and Chris would always be aware of the social background difference between them, and that someone would comment upon it during the course of the film. No-one ever does. Class remains unmentioned. For a British person this just isn’t right.

So the “tragedy” if you like (or character flaw) of Chris should be that he is drawn sexually towards Nola Rice, despite it flying against his ambitions for moving upwards in his class. Instead, Allen’s script treats it solely as an affair of passion: the fact that the two “outsiders” in the social class (the working-class Irish boy and the American actress) are drawn to each other isn’t commented upon at all. The Hewetts are more suspicious of Rice because she’s an American and an actress, but the fact she (like Chris) doesn’t have a penny isn’t an issue. There is a lot of fertile ground here that any British director or writer would just know – but Allen fundamentally just doesn’t get it: he thinks the Hewetts are middle class not the loaded 1%+.

Of course, some of the problems are connected to Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the lead part. Watching him in this film, I can’t help but feel this is a solid 7/10 performance by an actor who normally bats a 5-6: he’s doing some of his best work on film, but his inadequacies as an actor can’t be overcome. It’s the eyes and voice for me: there just never seems much going on behind the eyes, and his unmodulated voice doesn’t bring any shading to his line deliveries. Chris should have the air of a slightly ruthless, ambitious but charming social climber – think Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets – but this is out of his range. Instead Chris is just a sort of blank that you can impose their own ideas on: it sort of works for the film, but it misses dozens of possibilities. He does well with the second half of the film and his guilt about the murder is well played, but it’s simply less subtle acting than is called for in the first half. He’s an average actor giving a performance above himself here.

Scarlett Johansson fares much better as a character who changes and develops dramatically over the course of the film, from mysterious, confident, sexy girlfriend to needy, frustrated, betrayed mistress. It’s a dramatic development throughout the film that is so skilfully done, it never feels jarring. Much of the cast is also strong: Matthew Goode is a real stand-out as Chris’ subtly spoilt brother-in-law, as is Emily Mortimer as a happy wife who never wants to think about the lie her life is. Rupert Penry-Jones and Margaret Tyzack have great cameos among the all star British cast.

The film takes place in a picture-postcard London (all the great sights are ticked off), and Allen directs with his traditional unfussy camera work. There is a certain pleasure to seeing big name British comic actors in tiny roles throughout (Paul Kaye, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Alexander Armstrong among others pop up in small roles).

Allen doesn’t understand Britain like he does Manhattan, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a decent film. The story’s theme of luck or chance vs fate doesn’t quite coalesce for me, but the feeling of events closing in on Chris late in the film does work very well, and I certainly felt the tension of whether Chris would get away with his eventual crime (even if I never really quite cared for Chris himself). Allen rates this as his favourite of his own films – which I guess goes to show you are never the best judge of your own work.