Category: Political drama

Suffragette (2015)

Votes for Women is the cry in this bad movie made about an important issue

Director: Sarah Gavron

Cast: Carey Mulligan (Maud Watts), Helena Bonham Carter (Edith Ellyn), Anne-Marie Duff (Violet Miller), Romola Garai (Alice Haughton), Ben Whishaw (Sonny Watts), Brendan Gleeson (Inspector Steed), Samuel West (Benedict Haughton), Meryl Streep (Emmeline Pankhurst), Adrian Schiller (David Lloyd George), Geoff Bell (Norman Taylo r), Finbar Lynch (Hugh Ellyn)

Votes for Women was a historic movement that looked to settle a gross injustice. It’s a major issue brimming with importance: and Lord doesn’t Suffragette know it. In fact, Suffragette is practically a textbook example of an important issue being turned into a bad film. Clunky, weighed down with its own bombast and stuffed to the gills with clichés, Suffragette fails to move and makes its vital political points seem leaden and dull.

Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) is a young washerwoman, who one day finds herself accidentally swept up in a suffragette protest. Before she knows it, her friend Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff) has inveigled her to give testimony at a parliamentary hearing, where she meets Edith Ellynn (Helena Bonham Carter). Ellyn believes that peaceful struggle will lead nowhere and violent action is the only way to get what they want. As the violence escalates, Inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson) is tasked to infiltrate and bring down the suffragette movement.

It should be more interesting. But Suffragette is a sluggish “issue drama” whose every frame drips with the self-importance of people who feel they aren’t just making a film, they’re making a “statement”. This feeling infects everything, from the heavy-handed dialogue (too many scenes feel like speechifying rather than dialogue) to the obvious characterisations. Nothing in the film ever really rings true, and nothing ever really grips. On top of that sloppily written, it doesn’t really have any dramatic structure and events eventually peter out.

Mulligan’s saintly character – as a kind of suffragette every woman – goes through everything from abuse from her boss, to losing her home and children, to being force-fed in prison. It strains credulity – particularly as she’s playing some fictional archetype. The truly noble suffragettes are all working-class and put-upon, while Romola Garai’s upper-class wife quickly turns her back on the cause when things get risky. Bar Brendan Gleeson’s humane Inspector and Finbar Lynch’s decent husband (and even he performs an act of betrayal), every single man in this is a bastard – a paternalistic liar, a wife-beater, a bullying husband or an abusive boss. It’s just too bloody much. The film seems not to trust its audience to understand the story unless it’s acted out by a series of caricatures, as if we can’t appreciate that gender equality is a good thing in itself without a saintly sad-faced girl being mistreated by a series of misogynist ogres.

Mulligan is rather good but her angry denunciations and points during her scenes with Gleeson just sound like she’s mouthing research from the writer. The end result is, despite all the things Maud goes through, you just don’t really care about her. She feels like an empty character. Even the end of the film doesn’t revolve around her: Emily Davison is reintroduced just in time for the conclusion at the Derby. Why not just make a film about Davison? Why did they feel the need to place this uninteresting fictional character at the heart of it? Did they just feel it had to be a working class hero?

Because the script tries to cover every single element of the suffragette movement, it often feels like a box-ticking exercise. Meryl Streep gets the best tick, popping up to deliver a single speech as Emmaline Pankhurst before disappearing. But the collection of events thrown together don’t convince. Helena Bonham Carter does her very best to make Edith’s radicalism seem compelling and thought-through, but even that seems like a tack-on rather than something that really teaches us about any of the characters. Moral questions around violence and protest are almost completely ignored, and the film doesn’t really distinguish between those (essentially) willing to kill and those who wanted to protest within the law.

On top of its mediocre writing, the film is also only competently directed – its pace is often way off and sluggish, and most of the scenes are shot with an unimaginative televisual eye, mixed with standard “throw you into the action” shots for major protests. It all contributes to the entire venture not coming to life at all. For such a huge issue, and for all the importance it’s being treated with here, it just seems lifeless and rather dull.

This is despite the decent acting (Anne-Marie Duff is excellent, as are most of the rest of the principals) and the efforts of all involved. But it’s just not engaging. The most moving and gasp-inducing moment is the end credits roll of dates where countries gave women the vote (1970 for Switzerland!) – but when the most moving thing you see in the film could have cut and pasted from a Wikipedia page you are in trouble.

But what can you say about a drama about women’s rights where the male Inspector comes out as the most interesting and nuanced character? That just doesn’t feel right. And that’s the problem with Suffragette. Nothing feels right. Everything feels off. The history doesn’t ring true, the characterisations feel forced, the events seem predictable and clichéd. There’s nothing to really get you impassioned here – other than with frustration about a bad movie fudging an important subject.

Ten Rillington Place (1971)

Richard Attenborough brings the killer John Reginald Christie to life in Ten Rillington Place

Director: Richard Fleischer

Cast: Richard Attenborough (John Reginald Christie), Judy Geeson (Beryl Evans), John Hurt (Timothy Evans), Pat Heywood (Ethel Christie), Isabel Black (Alice), Robert Hardy (Malcolm Morris), Geoffrey Chater (Christmas Humphreys), André Morell (Judge Lewis), Tenniel Evans (Detective Sergeant)

Films about real-life serial killers have that eternal problem: how far can they go in giving us answers? How much can we ever really understand why a killer does what they do? Is there any way of really putting ourselves in their shoes – and do we really want to? Ten Rillington Place avoids a lot of these issues by making no attempt to give understanding to Christie at all, simply presenting his actions, and by putting the focus on the tragic death of Timothy Evans.

In a miscarriage of justice Timothy Evans (John Hurt) was tried and executed for the murder of his wife Beryl (Judy Geeson) and their baby daughter in 1950. The real murderer? The man who lived downstairs, John Christie (Richard Attenborough), a socially maladjusted, softly spoken man who confessed to killing at least eight people three years later at his trial for murdering his wife. Christie had an uncanny gift for gaining the confidence of desperate women, would offer to perform illegal (and free) medical procedures (such as abortions), during the course of which he would gas them with carbon monoxide, strangle them, possibly carry out acts of necrophilia and then bury them in his garden or in the walls of his house. Evans never suspects until far too late that Christie is the killer and, scared that he will be accused, follows Christie’s advice to the letter – advice that will only make him look all the more guilty.

Richard Fleischer’s chillingly documentary-style film-making goes into forensic detail on the events of the murder of Beryl Evans and her daughter, and the wrongful conviction of Timothy Evans for the crime – largely on the basis of Christie’s testimony at Evans’ trial. Fleischer shoots the film with a deeply disciplined restraint, a calm documentary style that avoids any sensation lingering on the crimes, but still carries great emotional impact.

The film covers the period from Evans moving into the flat above Christie, Christie’s murder of Beryl, Evans panicked flight to Wales on Christie’s advice, his series of confessions to the police, his trial and execution. Book ending the film we get a scene with Christie murdering his neighbour Muriel Eady – a terrifying demonstration of Christie’s murder rituals, as well as an indicator of how easily he could gain the trust of his victims. What it strikingly doesn’t try to give us is any psychological explanation for why Christie did what he did. There are no revealing flashbanks, no cod-psychology. Instead we just see a killer, kill people. We might get an idea of what he gets out of it, but no explanation of what turned him to it. The film is all the more powerful for it.

Instead the focus is on the victims, and the Evans story is heart-rending, partly because of Fleischer’s calm, sensitive direction, but mainly due to John Hurt’s astonishingly powerful performance. The film, and Hurt, don’t shy away from the qualities that made Evans seem like such a natural fit for a murderer at his trial. He’s a compulsive liar. He brags. He fights and argues with a fury. He’s not really that sympathetic a guy at first. But he’s certainly innocent. Hurt brilliantly demonstrates his vulnerability and simplicity – Evans was illiterate and almost unbelievably trusting, a liar who fell victim to a superb, manipulative liar.

His shock and slowly growing realisation of the nightmare he is in are incredibly moving, as is his powerful grief when he finds his wife killed – and his trusting innocence when he turns (unknowingly) straight to his wife’s killer for advice on what to do. Every action Evans takes in the film makes you want to jump in and urge him to do something – anything – different. Unsympathetic as he is at the start, by the conclusion you almost can’t bear to watch him incriminate himself with each action. Hurt is sublime, with his weak manner, his confusion, his touching faith that it will all be okay and his feeble mantra of “Christie Done It” – it’s one of the greatest performances in his career.

Judy Geeson gives a marvellously emotional performance as Beryl Evans. Geeson has the perfect look for the part, and she completely embodies a woman who has found herself in a difficult situation, in love with a weak man. You understand completely how she is drawn towards Christie as a confidant, and why she would feel the desperation to abort a child she and Evans could never afford. Her eventual murder is horrifying in its struggle and desperation, the growing horrible realisation in her eyes that she is in mortal danger – this is a particularly strong sequence, difficult to watch for the viewer, as we know what a terrible series of decisions she is making.

Fleischer’s film was motivated by a very firm anti-death sentence stance. The scene of Evans’ execution is shocking in its brutal suddenness. Shot with a handheld camera and in a single take (in near silence other than Hurt’s deep breathing), the execution is over and done with in less than a minute – from Evans sitting in a room, to the reveal of the executioner’s noose next door and the terrible drop (with a jump cut straight to Christie stretching his back). It’s a brilliantly low-key, but resoundingly powerful scene that sticks with you for all time.

All this way and we’ve not mentioned Richard Attenborough’s transformative performance as Christie. Attenborough presents the softly spoken monster as a bland, empty non-entity, a man who has almost nothing to make him stand out from the crowd. He never makes the part into a great monster or any sort of domineering force of nature. In partnership with Fleischer, he shows Christie was a total blank canvas of a man, “evil” only in the most mundane and uninteresting way. He’s so mild-mannered, you can see why so many women trusted him. Attenborough is chillingly blank throughout, in a deeply unsettling performance of crushing mundanity. He’s brilliant in this film – Attenborough was completely committed to its anti-death penalty stance – and he avoids the temptation of trying to explain or make sense of Christie.

That’s the trick of the film – Christie is not a special man. He performs dreadful acts, but he is a nothing of a person, devoid of motive (the lack of motive is something those at Evans’ trial use most to argue against Christie’s possible guilt), a totally forgettable man who committed crimes memorable only for their cruelty. Fleischer, and Clive Exton’s careful, thoroughly researched script, is simply superb in presenting Christie with all his filthy blankness, Rillington Place in all its crushed lack of colour, and the murders in un-flashy documentary sadness. Ten Rillington Place is an engrossing true-life story that turns a miscarriage of justice into a Greek tragedy. It’s a much overlooked classic.

The Death of Stalin (2017)

Hilarious hi-jinks in Soviet Russia as the politburo struggle to deal with The Death of Stalin

Director: Armando Iannucci

Cast: Steve Buscemi (Nikita Khrushchev), Simon Russell Beale (Lavrenti Beria), Paddy Considine (Comrade Andreyev), Dermot Crowley (Lazar Kaganovich), Rupert Friend (Vasily Stalin), Jason Isaacs (Georgy Zhukov), Olga Kurylenko (Maria Yudina), Michael Palin (Vyacheslav Molotov), Andrea Riseborough (Svetlana Stalin), Jeffrey Tambor (Georgy Malenkov), Paul Whitehouse (Anastas Mikoyan), Paul Chahidi (Nikolai Bulganin), Adrian Mcloughlin (Joseph Stalin)

Armando Iannucci is a brilliant television satirist, who spring to wider fame with the success of foul mouthed political satire The Thick of It (re-imagined as Veep in the USA). His sweaty, sweary, fly-on-the-wall style, and characters who embody the panicked agitation of the nakedly ambitious but not-too-bright, was a perfect match for our modern world. Does the style work for the past? You betcha.

In Soviet Russia, a country near paralysed with terror, the ruthless dictator Stalin dies. This starts an immediate scramble to succeed him, with the leading candidates being weak-willed, vain and foolish deputy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), vaguely principled but fiercely ambitious opportunist Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) and sinisterly sadistic police chief Beria (Simon Russell Beale). Soviet Russia though is a pretty ruthless place for political manoeuvring, with retirement usually coming in the form of a single bullet to the back of the head.

First off the bat, The Death of Stalin is a blisteringly funny film, a real laugh-out loud riot. Why does it work so well? Because it understands that, hand-in-hand with the horror, Stalinist Russia was so completely barking mad that it lends itself completely to black comedy. Imagine The Thick of It, but with Malcolm Tucker executing rather than dismissing terrified ministers. Welcome to the madness. Events that seem crazy are pretty much true: although time has been telescoped, the struggle for the succession did more or less play out like this (with less swearing).

Every scene of this dark farce has a memorable, stand-out line or moment. The sweaty panic of these over-promoted yes-men is brilliantly reminiscent of the sort of panic you can imagine seeing in your office, with the exception that it probably isn’t literally life-and-death. Iannucci completely understands the wild improvisation of the fiercely ambitious in high-stress situations. If you think the ministers of The Thick of It were adrift when confronted with parliamentary enquiries, imagine how their counterparts struggle when faced with the threats of a bullet in the head.

Because that’s the great thing about this film – while still being hilariously foul-mouthed, it actually gives a pretty good idea of what it might have been like to live in Soviet Russia. The characters are constantly having to adjust to who is in favour and who isn’t, what it is permissible to think and say and what isn’t, who is “dead and who isn’t”. Iannucci totally understands human nature doesn’t change – those left alive around Stalin are just the sort of shallow, selfish, weaklings he’s been lampooning in The Thick of It. Most of the ordinary people we see are just desperate to keep their heads down – getting noticed for regular joes in this film is basically a death sentence.

The opening sequence really gets this idea across. Paddy Considine is hilariously nervy and terrified as a radio producer ordered to send a recording of the live concert they’ve just broadcast (unrecorded) to Stalin. The frantic rush to reassemble the orchestra, fill the audience up again with people from the street, replace the conductor (the original having passed out in terror at the possibility that he may have been bugged questioning Stalin’s musical knowledge) is brilliantly funny – but works because the genuine expectation that doing the slightest thing wrong could lead to immediate execution is completely clear. Especially as the scene is intercut with Beria’s heavies rounding up innocent civilians to disappear into a gulag.

Iannucci doesn’t dodge the ruthlessness. The film is punctured throughout by executions, often carried out with a black farcical desperation. It doesn’t shy away from the brutality of Beria, whose violence, sadism and pathological rape addiction we are constantly reminded of (and which are even more effectively sinister as he’s played by the cuddly Simon Russell Beale). In turn, a frantic Beria berates the rest of the politburo for their participation in the orgy of killings and show trials Stalin organised. We see people about to be taken to their deaths hurriedly offering terrified goodbyes to their loved ones. The final sequence of the film, as the battle for the succession reaches its end-game, tones down the jokes to give us an alarmingly realistic picture of a coup. Black farce ending in death: it’s as legitimate a picture as any of living in Stalinist Russia.

All of this is presented in a razor-sharp and witty script, and the cast who deliver it are brilliant. In a fantastic touch, the actors (with the exception of Isaacs) use their own accents, which only adds to the crazy fun. The acting is, across the board, fabulous. Russell Beale gives his greatest ever film performance as a grubby, ambitious, not-quite-as-smart-as-he-thinks Beria, with bonhomie only lightly hiding his chilling sadism and cruelty. Buscemi is equally brilliant as Khrushchev, who has the ego and self-delusion to convince himself that he is the only hope for a reformed USSR, while actually being a weaselly political player with naked ambition.

Around these two central players there is a gallery of supporting roles. Tambor gives a brilliant moral and intellectual shallowness to the hapless Malenkov. Friend is hysterical as Stalin’s drunken son, a deluded man-child barely tolerated by those around him. Palin’s cuddliness works perfectly as fanatical Stalinist Molotov. Whitehouse, Crowley and Chadihi are also excellent, while Riseborough does well with a thankless role as Stalin’s daughter. The film may be hijacked though by Isaacs as a swaggeringly blunt General Zhukov, re-imagined as a bombastic, plain spoken Yorkshireman, literally entering the film with a bang half-way through and bagging most of the best lines.

The Death of Stalin is not just a brilliantly hilarious comedy, it also feels like a film that completely understands both the terror and the confused ineptitude of dictatorship. In a world where it is death to question the supreme leader, is it any surprise that his underlings are all such clueless, ambitious idiots? Has anyone else understood the black comedy of dictatorship before? I’m not sure they have. You’ll laugh dozens and dozens of times in this film. And then you’ll remember at the end that when this shit happens, people die. This might be the best thing Iannucci has ever made.

Election (1999)

Reese Witherspoon runs for office in high-school satire Election

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: Matthew Broderick (Jim McAllister), Reese Witherspoon (Tracy Flick), Chris Klein (Paul Metzler), Jessica Campbell (Tammy Metzler), Phil Reeves (Principal Walt Hendricks), Molly Hagen (Diane McAllister), Colleen Camp (Judith Flick), Delaney Driscoll (Linda Novotny), Mark Harelik (Dave Novotny)

High school can be a great setting for films that want to comment on our adult world, because they are such exact microcosms for society. Few films get this idea as effectively as Alexander Payne’s simply superb Election.

In an Illinois high school, Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) is a civics teacher who loves his job but is increasingly annoyed by high-achieving student Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), who he also unconsciously blames for the dismissal of his friend Dave for having an affair with her. Tracy is a ruthless careerist, the sort of girl whose hand is always first up in class, and she wants more than anything to win the election to school president. Feeling it his duty to stop Tracy, McAllister persuades football star Paul Metzler (Chris Klein) to run against her – and slowly unleashes a hurricane of ruthless campaigning and dirty tricks that leads to disaster.

This sharp and brilliant satirical comedy avoids jumping to any easy conclusions: instead it ruthlessly skewers everyone involved. Other films would make McAllister a crushed victim, broken down by events and Tracy’s unstoppable force of will. Instead, Payne turns him into an increasingly self-deluding whiner whose impending mid-life crisis becomes more and more evident. There is a particularly sly decision to cast Broderick as this weak-willed, selfish, self-proclaimed victim. Who cannot think about Ferris Bueller now all grown up into a klutzy loser, ineptly trying to initiate an affair with his wife’s best friend and mentally super-imposing Tracy’s head onto his wife’s body during a routine pregnancy-focused coupling?

In fact, watching the film it’s fascinating to see how much it charts McAllister’s disintegration into bitterness and self-justification. By any measureable standard, everything he does is fairly indefensible, while his annoyance with Tracy is rooted in his barely self-acknowledged sexual fascination with her. By the end of the film, as his cheery voiceover recounts his failures and personal and professional disasters with a self-deceiving optimism, you can’t help but begin to wonder how much this manic cheerfulness infected everything McAllister has told us from the start.

It’s things like this that make the film so much more than a straight political satire. Tracy Flick may be a ruthlessly ambitious young woman, who believes she has a nearly divine right to win – but she’s also the child of an equally ruthless woman (using Tracy to relive her own life), who has been sexually exploited by one of her teachers, whose smiles and enforced cheerfulness and drive hide a volcanic anger and insecurity. She could have been simply a smiling force of political ambition – but instead she feels like a real person diverting her own problems into a domineering careerism.

All of which adds a rich hinterland to the film and helps make it even funnier than it could have been. This might be the best political satire ever made. It’s certainly one of the funniest. There are zinger lines every few minutes. The satire is pin-sharp. Tracy is the qualified political hack that the normal people can’t relate to. Paul the Bush-like jock who can speak the language of the common man but manifestly lacks all qualifications. Tammy represents the anarchic frustration and alienation so many feel for the political process. The entire election is a shrewd, subtle skewering of every campaign in politics you’ve ever seen. Even the jobsworth geeks who run these things get it in the neck – “Larry, we’re not electing the fucking Pope” McAllister snaps (at the end of his tether) as he has the ludicrously elaborate election rules explained to him again.

But the film doesn’t forget the humanity: McAllister is a deluded man, but he feels real. He’s so inept at everything from seduction to deception it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for him. (As if to visualise his uselessness, he spends the last third of the film mostly with a massive swollen eye from a bee sting). Tracy has her own problems. Paul, far from being a heartless jock, is the most sensitive and caring person in the film (even if he is as dim as a failing lightbulb). Tammy’s a touching combination of good natured cynicism and obsessive, vengeful stalker.

Of course, it also helps that the acting is outstanding, the comic timing (both in acting and direction) perfect. Reese Witherspoon might never have been better than as the ruthless Tracy, a hurricane of hilarious repeated concepts from political biographies. Chris Klein is very sweet as Paul, a guy it’s impossible not to like. Jessica Campbell is perfect. Broderick holds the entire film together with a superb schleppy moral weakness. Payne’s direction brings all these elements together brilliantly – and has a way with the freeze frame and quick edit that provides a series of striking visual gags.

Election is a classic film – a brilliant satire on politics and elections, but also human nature itself. The characters have depth and reality that makes the jokes hit home with force. The use of voiceover narration from all the main players helps bring us even closer to them, and helps expose their inner personalities even more. I think this might be the best film Payne has made – Sideways and The Descendantsreceive the greater plaudits and attention, but this is his sharpest, wittiest film, and the one that is perhaps the most rewarding of repeat viewing. It’s simply a brilliant, small scale classic.

Eye in the Sky (2015)

The great Alan Rickman is an exasperated General, in drone-strike moral fable Eye in the Sky

Director: Gavin Hood

Cast: Helen Mirren (Colonel Katherine Powell), Aaron Paul (Lt. Steve Watts), Alan Rickman (Lt. General Frank Benson), Barkhad Abdi (Jama Farah), Jeremy Northam (Brian Woodale), Iain Glen (Foreign Secretary), Monica Dolan (Angela Northman), Richard McCabe (George Matheson), Phoebe Fox (Carrie Gershon), Babou Ceesay (Sgt. Mushtz Saddiq), John Heffernan (Major Howard Webb)

As Shakespeare said, sometimes we are urged: “to do a great right, do a little wrong”. Eye in the Sky is a film about that dilemma. Numbers 2, 4 and 5 on the terrorist “Most Wanted” list are meeting in a house in Kenya. They are preparing suicide bombers. A series of attacks could be minutes away. A drone strike will probably save hundreds of lives. Seems obvious doesn’t it? Unfortunately, sitting in the fatality zone is an innocent young girl, just trying to sell bread. Take out the bombers and you’ll save dozens of other children – but you’ll almost certainly kill this one child.

Your initial reaction to this sort of situation would probably be “thank goodness that’s not my decision”. Problem is, you get the feeling many of our elective representatives feel the same: as the situation escalates (from capture, to kill, to controlled strike, to a certainty of civilian casualties) so does the buck-passing, from politician to politician all unwilling to make a call.

Guy Hibbert’s well researched and thought-provoking script combined with Gavin Hood’s taut direction make this a gripping conversation thriller about the impossibility of moral debates. Hibbert’s script brilliantly piles moral debate on moral debate – just as we accept the desirability of one action, the circumstances change with bewildering speed. Everything, from a change of travel plans to battery failure on a vital piece of equipment, amps up the pressure and makes the situation more morally unpalatable.

The buck-passing becomes almost a dark farce in this expert script. A put-upon civil servant is repeatedly sent to communicate with a string of senior leaders, from the Foreign Secretary to the Prime Minister. Later a crucial decision takes place over a conference call, with an ever-expanding series of international attendees. It’s like a deadly serious Yes, Minister, with Jeremy Northam’s junior minister a flummoxed and vacillating Jim Hacker.

The military seems equally divided – senior officers focus on the big picture, aware of the evil they must do but seeing it as a necessity to prevent worse acts, but the junior ranks actually executing the strikes push back with increasing distress. Mirren’s colonel pressures a sergeant into effectively falsifying a fatality prediction for the girl, to push her superiors into authorising the strike on this vital target. A shallower film would have played great play of this. But Hood and Hibbert never take that easy route.

The film also explores distance conflict. Nearly all the participants are based thousands of miles away, watching on screens and pushing buttons. Rickman’s General has a knock-out final speech about his first-hand experiences of the horror of suicide bombings – and compares this to the moral objections of the greatest opponent of military action in the film, who has watched it all play out with “coffee and biscuits”. Remote warfare is neither in itself good or bad – and those objecting to actions are not angels, just as those pushing for action have their own moral reasons for doing so, and the film demonstrates that amidst all this, the “right answer” (if there is such a thing) can be almost impossible to identify.

Conversation thrillers like this are dependent on the quality of the actors – so it’s lucky we’ve got a great cast here. A gimlet-eyed Helen Mirren is as tough as you’ve seen her as the field commander who suppresses all doubt in pursuit of the greater good. In his last on-screen role, Alan Rickman gives one of his best performances as a wry, humane general who has come to terms with the hideous moral cost soldiers have to bear. His increased exasperation at the procrastination of his political masters adds some black comedy, but he also gives the character a wonderful humanity (a prologue in which he struggles to buy his grandchild a present is not only wonderfully witty, but humanises the character immediately).

Few actors do tortured conscience under the surface better than Aaron Paul – and his drone pilot turned reluctant killer provides much of the moral force of the film. Paul’s sensitive and anguished divide between following orders and living with the knowledge he’s wilfully condemning a child to death is beautifully done. Barkhard Abdi grounds his field operative not only with much of the film’s more conventional derring-do, but also layers the character with dedication and selflessness.

Eye in the Sky is a marvellous piece of tense and layered film-making. It makes high drama out of moral quandaries, and really makes us pause to stop and think about the impact of our decisions both in a wider context, and a very painful immediate one. The professional military figures – even Mirren’s cold Colonel Powell – are motivated by a painful familiarity with acceptable loss, rather than gung-ho aggression. The politicians struggle to reach a decision not only through reluctance, but with empathy for their potential victims. It overeggs the pudding with its final shots of the young girl who has unwittingly been at the centre of a major international incident, but other than that it hardly puts a foot wrong.

The Iron Lady (2011)

Meryl Streep impersonates the Iron Lady to excellent effect in this otherwise bland and forgettable, compromised mess of a picture

Director: Phyllida Lloyd

Cast: Meryl Streep (Margaret Thatcher), Jim Broadbent (Denis Thatcher), Olivia Colman (Carol Thatcher), Roger Allam (Gordon Reece), Nicholas Farrell (Airey Neave), Iain Glen (Alfred Roberts), Richard E. Grant (Michael Heseltine), Anthony Head (Sir Geoffrey Howe), Harry Lloyd (Young Denis Thatcher), Michael Pennington (Michael Foot), Alexandra Roach (Young Margaret Thatcher), John Sessions (Edward Heath)

In British politics has there been a figure as controversial as Margaret Thatcher? A domineering Prime Minister who reshaped the country (for better or worse depending on who you speak to), crafting a legacy in the UK’s politics, economy and society that we will continue to feel for the foreseeable future, she’s possibly one of the most important figures in our history. It’s a life rich for a proper biographical treatment; instead, it gets this film.

The film’s framing device is focused on the ageing Thatcher (Meryl Streep), now dealing with onset dementia and having detailed conversations with her deceased husband Denis (Jim Broadbent). Cared for by her daughter Carol (Olivia Colman), she reflects on her political career and the sacrifices she made personally to achieve these. Woven in and out of this are Thatcher’s increasingly disjointed memories of her political career.

The most surprising thing about this film is how little it actually wants to engage with Thatcherism itself. Perhaps aware that (certainly in the UK) Thatcher remains an incredibly divisive figure, the film’s focus is actually her own struggles with grief and approaching dementia. Her career as PM is relegated to a series of flashbacks and short scenes, which fill probably little more than 20-30 minutes of the runtime, shot and spliced together as a mixture of deliberately subjective memories and fevered half-dreams. Can you imagine a film about Thatcher where Arthur Scargill and the miners’ strike doesn’t merit a mention? You don’t need to: thanks to The Iron Lady it now exists.

Perhaps Thatcher’s politics were considered to “unlikeable” – certainly, one imagines, by its writer and director – to be something to craft a film around, so it was thought better to brush them gently under the table. Instead the focus is to make Thatcher as sympathetic as possible to a viewer who didn’t share her politics, by concentrating on her struggles against sexism in the 1950s and her struggles with age late on. Why not accept what Thatcher stood for and make a film (for better or worse) about that? Perhaps more material on her actual achievements in office were shot and cut (the film does have a very short run time and underuses its ace supporting cast), but the whole film feels fatally compromised – which is more than a little ironic since it is about a woman famous for her lack of compromise.

In fact it’s rather hard to escape the view that Roger Ebert put forward: “few people were neutral in their feelings about [Thatcher], except the makers of this picture”. It’s a film with no real interest in either politics or history, the two things that defined Thatcher’s entire life. And as if to flag up the mediocre nature of the material they’ve chosen, it’s then interspersed with too-brief cuts to more interesting episodes from Thatcher’s life than those we are watching. Only when the older Thatcher hosts a dinner party and launches into a blistering sudden condemnation of Al-Qaeda and support of military action against terrorism (followed by her casual disregard of a hero-worshipping acolyte) do we ever get a sense of finding out something about her, or of seeing her personality brought to life.

The film’s saving grace is of course Meryl Streep’s terrific impersonation of Thatcher. I call it impersonation as the film so strenuously avoids delving into the events and opinions that shaped Thatcher that Streep gets very little opportunity to really develop a character we can understand, or to present an insight into her. Her performance as the older Thatcher – losing control of her mannerisms, deteriorating over the course of the film – is impressive in its technical accomplishment, but that’s largely what it remains. As the film doesn’t allow us to really know Thatcher, and doesn’t work with what defines her, it largely fails to move us when we see her weak and alone. So for all the accomplishment of Streep’s work, I couldn’t say this was a truly great performance – certainly of no comparison to, say, Day-Lewis as Lincoln or Robert Hardy as Churchill. I’d even say Andrea Riseborough’s performance in TV’s The Long Walk to Finchley told us more about the sort of person Thatcher was than Streep does here.

Despite most of the rest of the cast being under-used though, there are some good performances. Jim Broadbent is very good as Denis Thatcher, although again his performance is partly a ghostly collection of mannerisms and excellent complementary acting. However the chemistry between he and Streep is magnificent and accounts for many of the film’s finest moments. Olivia Colman does sterling work under a bizarre fake nose as a no-nonsense Carol Thatcher. From the all-star cast of British actors, Roger Allam stands out as image-consultant Gordon Reece and Nicholas Farrell is superbly calm, cool and authoritative as Airey Neave. Alexandra Roach and Harry Lloyd are excellent impersonating younger Thatchers.

The Iron Lady could have been a marvellous, in-depth study of the politics of the 1980s, and a brilliant deconstruction and discussion of an era that still shapes our views of Britain today. However, it wavers instead into turning a woman defined by her public role and views into a domestic character, and brings no insight to the telling of it. By running scared of Thatcher’s politics altogether, it creates a film which makes it hard to tell why we should be making a fuss about her at all – making it neither interesting to those who know who Thatcher is, nor likely to spark interest in those who have never heard of her.

Blood Diamond (2006)

Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou excel in this self important Hollywood message film

Director: Edward Zwick

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Danny Archer), Djimon Hounsou (Solomon Vandy), Jennifer Connelly (Maddy Bowen), Arnold Vosloo (Colonel Coetzee), Michael Sheen (Rupert Simmons), David Harewood (Captain Poison), Basil Wallace (Benjamin Kapanay), Jimi Mistry (Nabil), Kagiso Kuypers (Dia Vandy)

Hollywood films set in Africa often have a difficult conundrum – they want to tell a story about that often troubled continent, but struggle to do so without feeling impossibly worthy – and often need to filter the story through the experience of white westerners in the region. Blood Diamond tries to avoid these traps very hard – but largely ends up falling into them.

In 1999, Sierra Leone is ravaged by Civil War. Fisherman Solomon Vandy’s (Djimon Hounsou) village is attacked by rebels, led by Captain Poison (David Harewood), and his son is taken as a child soldier. Captured Vandy is forced to work at the diamond mines, where he discovers a priceless “Blood Diamond”. After concealing it, Vandy is captured by government troops. Overhearing of the diamond’s existence from a confrontation between Vandy and Poison in prison, Rhodesian arms trader Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) enlists Vandy to claim the diamond – promising to help find Vandy’s lost family with the help of journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connolly).

The only thing that elevates this rather shallow film is the excellence of its two lead performers. Both DiCaprio and Hounsou give committed, energised and emotional performances way beyond the clichés and mundane predictability of the rest of the film. DiCaprio has a fairly standard redemption cycle, but invests Archer with an inner pain, a supressed sense of honour and a bitter anger at the world that acts as a shield against opening himself up to affection and friendship. Hounsou takes on the difficult task of effectively representing Africa, but makes Solomon a living, breathing man, a loving father but also a rash man, defensive but burning with emotions.

It’s a shame the rest of the actors aren’t given the time to build these sort of real human portraits out of this stodgy script. Jennifer Connolly in particular is cursed with a lousy part – every third line is either a plot device or a method of communicating facts and figures from the writer’s research. The film is bookended by tedious “G8” meeting scenes where (mostly white) politicians effectively sanctimoniously read the contents of Wikipedia’s Sierra Leone pages at each other.

The film manages to tick most of the expected boxes of African-set Hollywood films, with poverty, violence, blood diamonds, war lords and child soldiers all mixed in. It’s very clear all involved were of the opinion they were making an “important” film. It’s this “on the nose” seriousness that prevents the film from being a really effective piece of message-film making, not helped by Zwick’s careful but uninspired direction. It’s not a bad film by any stretch, but it is only a competently well-made, average one.

Throughout, messages are heavily delivered and metaphors hammered home (a metaphor about the blood in the soil is whacked over our head at a crucial dénouement). The film overeggs the pudding for its emotional moments – the final scene certainly goes too far. Many of these problems come back to the script, which is so wedded to its research and earnestness, that it keeps getting in the way of the moments when the film tries to come to life. We never really feel we are actually sharing the experience of those most affected by events (even Vandy is really a supporting actor in his what should be his own movie, his experience filtered through the impact it has on Archer).

So this is a flawed film, but it still sort of works – and most of that praise needs to go to the leads, who deserved a far better film. It’s predictable and sanctimonious, keen to be a landmark piece of cinema, but really it’s just another Hollywood “message” piece. DiCaprio and Hounsou sell the hell out of the predictable story and stodgy script, and make it one that keeps your interest throughout, even if it never really hits you with the impact it desired.

The Butler (2013)

Forest Whitaker takes on a lifetime of service, as the Civil Rights movement meets Downton Abbey

Director: Lee Daniels

Cast: Forest Whitaker (Cecil Gaines), Oprah Winfrey (Gloria Gaines), David Oyelowo (Louis Gaines), Cuba Gooding Jnr (Carter Wilson), Lenny Kravitz (James Holloway), Colman Domingo (Freddie Fallows), Yaya DeCosta (Carol Hammie), Terrence Howard (Howard), Adriane Lenox (Gina), Elijah Kelley (Charlie Gaines), Clarence Williams III (Maynard), John Cusack (Richard Nixon), Jane Fonda (Nancy Reagan), James Marsden (John F. Kennedy), Vanessa Redgrave (Annabeth Westfall), Alan Rickman (Ronald Reagan), Liev Schreiber (Lyndon B. Johnson), Robin Williams (Dwight D Eisenhower)

Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) grows up on a plantation in the South; after his mother is raped and his father killed by the son of the house, the family matriarch (Vanessa Redgrave) takes him on as a house servant as a token gesture of regret. His training here sets him on the path to working in a succession of increasingly wealthy hotels and, finally, the White House. Over 30 years, he serves the Presidents in office, never involving himself or commenting on policy, proud of his service to his country. This often puts him in conflict with his Civil Rights activist son Louis (David Oyelowo), with his wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) stuck in the middle.

This is the sort of film that feels designed to win awards. It’s based on a vague true story (it changes nearly all the events of course) and it’s about a big subject. It’s got big name actors doing acting. It aims at big themes. What it actually is, is a film that misses its marks. It’s a film that spends time with big themes but has nothing to say about them, or in fact anything interesting to say full stop. It assumes that the historical context will do the work, and leaves it at that. Instead, it settles for trite sentimentality and cliché, personal stories played on a stage that makes those stories seem slight and inconsequential rather than giving them reflective depth.

The biggest problem about the film, leaving aside its heavy-handed sentimentality and mundane predictable storytelling, is that all the way through it feels like we are following the wrong story. It’s such a vibrant and exciting period of history, so full of events, passion and struggle: and instead we follow the story of Cecil, essentially a bland passive character who achieves very little and influences even less. There are vague references to leading “the regular life” and how working in domestic service is like some sort of subversive act to demonstrate the education and hard-working possibilities of the minority, but to be honest it never really convinces.

The film promises that Cecil was a man who had a profound impact on the people he served – but this doesn’t come across at all. Instead, the parade of star turns playing US Presidents are there it seems for little more than box office: we see them speaking about Civil Rights issues or planning policy, but we get very little sense of Cecil having any bond with them. The cameos instead become a rather distracting parade, as if the film was worried (perhaps rightly) that Cecil’s story was so slight and bland that they needed the historical all-stars to drum up any interest in it. It doesn’t help that the cameos are mixed – Rickman, Schreiber and Marsden do okay with cardboard cut-out expressions, but Cusack in particular seems horribly miscast. A braver film would have kept these pointless camoes in the background and focused the narrative on Cecil and his colleagues below stairs, and their struggles to gain equal payment with their white colleagues. This film is seduced by the famous events and names it spends the rest of the time backing away from.

The performance at the centre is also difficult to engage with. Forest Whitaker is such an extreme, grand guignol actor that it’s almost sad to see him squeeze himself into a dull jobsworth such as Cecil. Whitaker seems so determined to play it down that he mumbles inaudibly at great length (it’s genuinely really difficult to understand what he is saying half the time), slouching and buttoning himself into Cecil’s character. It doesn’t come across as a great piece of character creation, more a case of miscasting. Oprah Winfrey does well as his wife, although her character is utterly inconsistent: at times a drunk depressive, at others level-headed and calm. The link of either of these characters to the hardships of life as a Black American or their role in racial politics is murkily unclear.

The star turn of the film – and virtually all its interesting content – is from David Oyelowo, who ages convincingly through the film from idealist to activist to elder statesman. His story also intersects with the actual historical events that are taking place in America and he is an active participant – unlike Cecil the passive viewer, just as likely to switch the TV off as follow the news. Often I found myself wishing the film could follow his character rather than Whitaker’s.

That’s the problem with the film: what point is it trying to make? The film seems to want to honour Cecil’s service in the White house – but the film is a slow journey towards Cecil’s sudden revelation that maybe his son’s campaigning for Civil Rights was the right thing to do. This flies in the face of the film’s tribute to Cecil’s decades of quiet, unjudging service: the film can’t make up its mind whether it wants to salute Cecil for being an unjudging, dedicated servant to a long line of Presidents, or for having the courage to take a political stance towards the end. It’s having its cake and eating it. It’s this shallow lack of stance that finally makes it an empty and rather dull viewing experience.

The Ides of March (2011)

George Clooney is a Presidential candidate with feet of clay in this bitter indictment of American politics

Director: George Clooney

Cast: Ryan Gosling (Stephen Meyers), George Clooney (Governor Mike Morris), Evan Rachel Wood (Molly Stearns), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Paul Zara), Paul Giamatti (Tom Duffy), Marisa Tomei (Ida Horowicz), Jeffrey Wright (Senator Franklin Thompson), Jennifer Ehle (Cindy Morris), Gregory Itzin (Jack Stearns), Max Minghella (Ben Harpen)

Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) is an ambitious young political advisor on the presidential campaign of Governor Mike Morris (George Clooney). However, scandal bubbles under the surface of the campaign and Meyers finds himself a pawn in the power struggles between his boss Paul (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the rival campaign manager Tom (Paul GIamatti), as well as increasingly drawn to a young intern Molly (Evan Rachel Wood) with a secret.

Like some of the work of the current crop of actor-directors (Clooney and Affleck being the prime examples) this feels like a thematic remake of classic (better) films from the 1970s, in this case Robert Redford’s classic The Candidate. Like that film, this one explores a politician whose dynamism, photogenic appeal and liberalism hide feet of clay. The film takes a supremely cynical view of modern politics, presenting a world where even idealists will (when push comes to shove) do anything to assure their position because they believe that only they can deliver the change the country needs. As Rich Hall said in the build-up to the most recent election, it takes a special kind of ego to say “I’ve looked at this countries problems and what you need to solve them is me”.

To get this idea across a bit more, it probably would have helped to get more sense of what Morris (and his rival Pullman) stands for. The film tries to get round this with the shorthand of casting Clooney as Morris: we all know Gorgeous George is a Good Thing (although I’d also add that Clooney’s smoothly groomed, almost too-perfect good looks give him plausibility as a character drenched in hypocrisy behind his charismatic smirk). Instead we have to take it for granted, from his appearance and few phrases about green politics and job creation, that Morris is a Kennedy-like force for change. The film rather weights the decks by presenting no-one in this political game as being truly idealistic or in it for any other reason than personal gain or the thrill of the game – even Morris, a force for the film argues good, is shown to be totally hypocritical and devoid of personal empathy, believing that any means are justified by the end.

Gosling’s Stephen Meyers is the heart of the film, and it’s his growing corruption the film charts. Meyers starts as a slightly uneasy mix of professional politician, cynical about the media and the public, and idealist eager to change the country for the better. Gosling’s performance is the embodiment of the struggle between these good and bad angels, and Gosling has the right balance of naivety and ruthless careerism in his looks to capture this. Having seen this film once before, I actually found it more rewarding this time: Meyers is a cynic who wants to be an idealist.

Slightly less clear, however, is Evan Rachel Wood’s role as an intern. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say her role is largely a tragic one – but the film never quite shapes her as a real person. She’s a model of the intelligent, sexy young woman, more of a collection of beats than a real person (however winningly Wood plays her). Her eventual tragedy is something that happens rather than something that feels like it happens to her – and the story is about the effect this has on the male characters around her rather than what it might have meant for her. She’s a well designed plot device rather than a person.

The film does have an interesting stance on politics – even if it already feels outdated in our new Trumpian, post-truth days. Hoffman and Giamatti do good work as contrasting political fixers at opposite ends of the idealist and cynic spectrum. The vision of politics has something designed to support news cycles rather than to serve the people feels like it has more than some truth behind it. It’s not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s well made and has some brains behind it. And it does actually grow better on a second viewing.

Selma (2014)

Martin Luther King fights the good fight

Director: Ava DuVernay
Cast: David Oyelowo (Martin Luther King), Tom Wilkinson (President Lyndon B. Johnson), Carmen Ejogo (Coretta Scott King), Andre Holland (Andrew Young), Tessa Thompson (Diane Nash), Giovanni Ribisi (Lee C. White), Lorraine Toussaint (Amelia Boynton Robinson), Stephan James (John Lewis), Wendell Pierce (Hosea Williams), Common (James Bevel), Alessandro Nivola (John Doar), Tim Roth (George Wallace), Oprah Winfrey (Annie Lee Cooper)

Tragically, for a while this film seemed to be most famous for being the poster child for “Oscar-Gate” or hashtag oscarssowhite (sorry hashtags are not my thing). Selma was the film that should have been littered with nominations. Instead it got just two – one for Picture, one for Best Song. Of the many, many snubs the most shocking were Ava DuVernay and David Oyelowo, particularly as other contenders up for the awards had certainly done inferior work that year . This film, however, categorically demands to be remembered in its own right – it is a fine, very moving piece of work, a dynamic history lesson that avoids preaching from a pulpit.

A lot of this comes down to the breathtaking work from David Oyelowo, who delivers one of those performances where the actor seems to transcend his skin, not just imitating Martin Luther King but inhabiting him, exploring and expressing every depth and shade. It’s a performance that stands comparison with Daniel Day-Lewis’ Abraham Lincoln. Oyelowo’s King is a big hearted, patient man but also a shrewd political player, a family man who betrays his wife, a political campaigner who holds the big picture and the small in his mind. It’s a totally committed performance that is intensely respectful without ever feeling hagiographic.

Oyelowo’s performance also immeasurably helps the film’s structure, as this is a biography that focuses on one single key moment in its subject’s life, rather than attempting to cover the whole lot in one 2-3 hour sitting. I rather like this, as the important thing about these biopics is to understand the person at the centre, not just to tick off events in their life. Anyway this film focuses on three months in 1965: King is campaigning for equal voting rights, and planning a high-profile march across Alabama from Selma and Montgomery to pressure President Lyndon B Johnson to promote the Voting Rights Act.

This is a very powerful film, humming with a constant sense of the deep rooted injustice and oppression in America at this time. It makes no compromises in showing the violence meted out to Black Americans, but it’s the day-to-day injustice that DuVernay shows particularly well: in the opening scene, Annie Lee Cooper (played by producer Oprah Winfrey) has her carefully prepared application to vote cruelly dismissed by a smalltown clerk, gleefully and casually exploiting a succession of legal loopholes to thwart her. It’s a simple scene but amazingly powerful in its casual (unspoken) racism, and it brings to life in a few strokes the day-to-day experience of millions of people at this time.

It’s also a beautifully shot film, that uses the real-life location of the Selma bridge spectacularly. An assault on the first attempted march by mounted policeman, shrouded in tear gas, is deeply moving in its simplicity, the camera catching the brutal overreaction of the police with a journalistic eye (Wendell Pierce as Hosea Williams is particularly impressive in the build-up to, and aftermath of, this sequence). Other moments of violence are equally shocking, but DuVernay never over-eggs the moment, allowing the events and the story to speak for themselves. We know how terrible some of these events are, and how disgusting the treatment of Black Americans was – the film never uses music or editing to hammer it home to us.

The film ends on the kind of high note you can only feel when injustice has been overcome and decent people triumph (punctured, DuVernay acknowledges, by the fates of some of the characters, revealed at the end of the film. More than one of these is a gut punch – not least the death of King himself three years later). But it’s never twee, preachy or a history lesson. Instead it’s a living, breathing expression of a moment in history that wraps you up in its story. Oyelowo is of course outstanding, but there is some excellent support, not least from Carmen Ejogo as his wife Coretta (overlooked at the time, but outstanding), Andre Holland, Stephen James, Lorraine Toussaint and Common as King’s fellow Civil Rights leaders. Tom Wilkinson adds a lot of depth to a sometimes thinly written Johnson, while Tim Roth translates his contempt for George Wallace in a performance of slappable vileness. A beautiful and marvellous film.