With The Laundromat Steven Soderbergh is trying to do for the Panama Papers what The Big Short did for the 2008 financial crash, namely offer an entertaining mix of explanation, exposé, black comedy and righteous anger. Sadly, it doesn’t come close.
When the first series of Sky Atlantic's Big Little Lies paraded across our screens in 2017, its shocking but satisfying ending looked like the perfect conclusion to a superb self-contained drama. Doh! Of course it wasn’t – it was just the first season out of who knows how many.
It beggars belief that, from the moment Steven Spielberg took delivery of the script by first-timer Liz Hannah, it took a mere 10 months to get The Post in the can. Its subject being the race to publish, that's a fitting rate of production. Introducing the film at its London premiere, Spielberg stressed the urgency of a story about the media under renewed attack. For Richard Nixon, who tried to suppress the bad news about Vietnam, read Donald Trump’s confected concept of fake news.
The Post has since acquired an extra timeliness. There’s an indelible image towards the end of Katharine "Kay" Graham, the proprietor of the Washington Post (Meryl Streep), walking down the steps of the Supreme Court through a Red Sea of young women. Yes, it's unlikely such a crowd would be gender-segregated, but as well as a clarion call about press freedom, The Post trumpets female heroism in a mainly male world. Boswell’s Life of Johnson is quoted on the matter: “a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
This is a film of two halves. We open in Vietnam, the whump of choppers evoking the first strains of Apocalypse Now. US grunts are taking a pounding in the jungle under the all-seeing eye of reporter Daniel Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys). On the flight home Ellsberg catches wind of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s (Bruce Greenwood) view that the facts of an unwinnable conflict are being kept from the American public. He embarks on a covert operation to smuggle toxic evidence out of the Pentagon that successive administrations – including JFK's – have suppressed the truth about American bellicosity in Vietnam.
The race is on to publish: the New York Times make a start, despite the efforts of the Washington Post, rambunctiously edited by Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) to muscle in on their top Nam reporter Neil Sheehan. (Sheehan, a star witness in the recent series The Vietnam War, is actually unseen here.) Then the White House slaps an injunction on the Times, leaving the field open to the Post if it has the audacity to defy Tricky Dicky, whom we see yakking on the phone, through a window as if under the surveillance of posterity.
Up to this point the slow-burn narrative is a thicket of pernickety groundwork, featuring much dashing in and out of rooms and up and across busy streets. There’s some fun stuff about circumventing Nixon’s ban on the Post reporting his daughter's wedding. Then Spielberg turns up the heat and the second half blooms into a gripping disquisition on the First Amendment.
It is vastly enhanced by the authority of Streep and Hanks, the king and queen of Hollywood ideally cast as two titans of all-American integrity. To see them together for the first time – an encounter on a par with De Niro and Pacino in Heat – is one of the film’s richest pleasures. Hanks is all fizzing energy and ornery moral sense. Streep’s is a quieter performance as a woman finding her voice; when the camera, having hovered godlike above her, zooms in on her face as she makes the fateful decision, her masterclass display of uncertainty wrestling with courage merits a standing ovation. Hers is a physical journey too: when we first meet the woman who will later glide like a swan through crowds, she's either dropping things or bumping into them.
The battle isn’t solely between the Post and the White House. During the window of opportunity presented by the temporary silencing of the Times, the Post’s board is forcing through the flotation of the family-owned company. But investors can withhold much-needed funds if prompted by “a catastrophic event”. The imprisonment of the proprietor and the editor would answer to that description. The internal skirmish between pragmatists and idealists adds to the sense of jeopardy, though it also feels packed in to up the stakes, and therefore oddly disingenuous in a story about upholding the truth.
The flotation subplot helps to establish Kay Graham – who has inherited her role from, successively, her late father and husband, dead from suicide – as a lone woman standing her ground in a phallocracy. At the American Stock Exchange she passes through all the wives waiting subserviently outside the boardroom. There are plenty of meaty supporting roles for actors – Jesse Plemons catches the eye as a preppy lawyer, Bradley Whitford as Graham's main opponent on the board. Of the other women, the role of both Alison Brie as Graham’s daughter and Sarah Paulson as Bradlee’s wife is to stiffen spines. In the bustling newsroom, Carrie Coon is a society reporter who ballsily steps up to the plate, while Jessie Mueller enjoys a spotlight at the climax when, listening on the phone, she passes on the judgement of the Supreme Court to the rest of the newsroom.
In such tearjerking moments does Spielberg deposit his unmistakable pawprints. There are splendid flourishes that could only come from him: the pages of a newspaper blowing from a man’s hands in the street; Bradlee’s kid making a mint selling lemonade as the paper’s top brass set up camp in the editor's home; the thundering of the presses, causing the newsroom to shake like monsters from some other corner of the director's imagination. This is Spielberg’s Vietnam movie (unless you count Jaws), an impeccable throwback to the 1970s in tone and look. Where his dauntless contemporaries Michael Cimino and Francis Coppola ventured into the heart of darkness, he has stayed at home to explore a war on the home front, an assault on truth whose notorious sequel is evoked in a coda as a security guard at the Watergate building spots a break-in. This welcome paean to print is glorious broadsheet filmmaking.
Overleaf: TO THE RESCUE: TOM HANKS SAVES THE WORLD (AND SOME IFFY MOVIES)
The Florence Foster Jenkins industry reaches newly giddy heights with Stephen Frears's film of the same name, which cleverly casts a great talent - who else but Meryl Streep? - as the cheerfully self-deluded American soprano. The subject already of separate Broadway and West End plays (both in 2005) and a French film (Marguerite) that has only just been released, Jenkins's extraordinary story here stands apart by virtue of that rare leading lady who can make a character's misguided belief in her gifts seem a form of bliss.
Was it a blessing of sorts that Jenkins's head was somewhere in the clouds? Perhaps, or so the film suggests from its first glimpse of Streep dressed as an angel and kept airborne during a 1944 entertainment at New York's Verdi Club that happens to have been founded by this self-same philanthropist.
A culture doyenne with a particular avidity for potato salad - bathtubs of the stuff, in fact - Jenkins dreams of bringing her coloratura soprano to the tony confines of Carnegie Hall. That goal finds a ready enabler in her ever-droll common-law husband St Clair Bayfield (Hugh Grant, pictured with Streep above), who makes up in support and kindness toward his beloved "bunny" what he may fail to provide sexually. On that front, Bayfield has a mistress (Rebecca Ferguson), about whom Jenkins remains seemingly as oblivious as she is when it comes to recognising her limited talent.
Determined yet dithery, her sweetness amended by a gently perceptible sorrow at her syphilitic past (Jenkins contracted the disease at 18), our heroine completes a triptych of sorts for Frears of singular women from entirely divergent backgrounds that includes Helen Mirren's Oscar-winning turn in The Queen and Judi Dench's Oscar-nominated Philomena.
If Streep gets a nomination for this, as surely she will, that will mark her 20th Oscar nod, and there's something lovely about seeing so consummate a talent play this blithely self-absorbed squawker - the enjoyment amplified for those who caught Streep's two most recent films, Into the Woods and Ricki and the Flash, in both of which she demonstrated her well-known singing skills.
And while a more churlish view of the material might glory in Jenkins's comeuppance, Frears and screenwriter Nicholas Martin remind us that here was a performer who sold out faster than Sinatra and who could make fans out of even the frostiest observer. The Tony-winning Broadway actress Nina Arianda illustrates as much with her scene-stealing bit as a ditzy Brooklynite who shifts from jeers to cheers, while a quorum of drunken soldiers in attendance at Jenkins's eventual Carnegie Hall appearance might as well be us in their about-face from sceptical disinterest to fervent ovation. (Frears isn't above employing some familiar showbiz clichés.)
Amid inevitable and deserved praise for Streep, one must pay very real tribute to Grant, who seems to have found a humanity not evidenced from him in years. While an endearing Simon Helberg gets ready laughs as the pianist Cosme McMoon, who regards his newfound employer with a mixture of admiration and alarm, Grant tempers his sometimes curdled urbanity with a depth of feeling that meets Streep head on.
Can it be that, faced with a first-rate scene partner, Grant decided to up his game? "No one can say I didn't sing," Jenkins tells a teary Bayfield near the end. Nor can anyone say in Florence Foster Jenkins that Hugh Grant didn't act.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to Florence Foster Jenkins
Suffragette is exemplary in its attempt to depict the harrowing experiences of the British women who risked their lives to win the vote. It depicts the awakening of a reluctant recruit who becomes a militant, and graphically depicts the violence meted out to the protestors and hunger strikers in the critical years of 1912-13, potently drawing parallels with the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike and the 1981 Irish Republican hunger strikes.
“You're plain as an old tin pail and you're bossy.” Tommy Lee Jones’s George Briggs doesn’t mince his words while sitting across the table from Hilary Swank’s Mary Bee Cuddy. She’s just told him that “if you lied to me and intend on abandoning your responsibility, then you are a man of low character, more disgusting pig than honourable man.” This undeniably funny exchange shines like a gold nugget in mud when set against the overall tone of the formidable The Homesman, a western which Jones describes, in one of the DVD’s on-set extras, as “minimal.”
The Homesman also focuses on women in the west – Cuddy, unmarried and running her own farm, has taken on a job that no man will do. It’s the 1850s. After a terrible winter in Loup City, Nebraska, three wives have serious mental health problems. Life is grim, and seen unflinchingly on camera to be exceedingly grim. It is decided that the trio will be taken back east to Iowa and the care of a minister’s wife (Meryl Streep, in a cameo). No one will volunteer to make the journey so Cuddy says she will. This is man’s work – the work of the titular homesman. She comes across Briggs and engages him to accompany her. He’s no good and about to be hung, but the promise of $300 is enough inducement for him. The pairing is a classic odd couple.
Along the way, they repeatedly encounter hindrances: poor weather, an abductor and Native Americans. One hindrance is so unpredictable, it is impossible not to gasp when it comes.
Although bleak and unsentimental, The Homesman is shot through with humanity. And it's beautifully composed. Open spaces are captured with an austere magnificence. The music is fantastic too. After watching this powerful film, it’s a jolt to watch the extras and see Jones and Swank at Cannes in modern-day clothing – the world conjured by The Homeman is so persuasive that both actors seem indivisible from the parts they play.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Homesman
The Brits are back in the Oscar race big-time, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, and Rosamund Pike among the first-time Academy Award hopefuls who will be duking it out in the leading categories.
Woods and forests were given a fresh impetus as a psychic terrain for the cinema by Lothlórien, Fangorn, and the other sylvan spaces so ethereally or threateningly rendered in The Lord of the Rings films and, to a lesser extent, by the Mirkwood of the second Hobbit movie. All distorted black boles, labyrinths of tangled branches, knobbly roots, and conically sun-strafed clearings, they were movie woods to rival the great Gothic forest of Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924) and the magical Athenian wood Warner Bros.
Taking inspiration from classic westerns even as it vigorously sets itself apart, The Homesman combines the taciturn and muscular with a feminist bent, and manages to be stirring and sweeping while also embracing the odd. It's a gorgeous, painfully sad tale of a man who's been nothing but a disappointment to himself and a woman constantly disappointed by others who, together, shepherd three lost souls on a desperately treacherous journey.
Blood is thicker than water. Or is it? For anyone who’s struggled with this proverb, August: Osage County is a fascinating exploration of the ties that bind us. Examining an extended, quintessentially American family in the sticky summer heat of small town Oklahoma, Meryl Streep leads the film as Violet, a volatile matriarch addicted to pills, suffering from “a touch of” mouth cancer and awaiting news of her alcoholic husband’s disappearance.