Spielberg’s prequel to All the President’s Men was filmed at speed, and aimed squarely at the press-hating Trump, not the late Tricky Dick. This contemporary intent is already fading.
Two fast-rising actors, Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn, lend genuine flair to a thriller that needs its mesmerising star turns to rise above the murk. Densely plotted, if sometimes suffocatingly so, TV director Michael Pearce's feature film debut keeps you guessing on matters of culpability right through to the closing exchange. But one can't help but feel in places that less would be more, however pleased one is to clock the continued career ascent of its leading players.
The near-ubiquitous Buckley plays the novelistically-named Moll, who has a job as a tour guide that she loathes and a mum, Hilary (Geraldine James, pictured below), who doesn't exactly offer much by way of succour. First glimpsed at a choir rehearsal presided over by the (literally) barking Hilary, Moll is shadowed by traumatic events from her past and is about to fall under the sway of a shadowy figure very much from her present. That, in turn, would be the rifle-toting Pascal (Flynn), an apparently sensitive soul whose own feelings of maternal abandoment surely help to propel him into Moll's arms.
While Moll's family (two none-too-accommodating siblings included) fret and cluck and condescend in her direction, she drifts towards the drifter that is Pascal. Are the newfound lovers in fact Janus-faced sides of the same damaged coin, or might one have something curative to offer the other?
Pearce's probing camera forsakes the theatrics promised by his film's title to concentrate on the Jamesian beast that exists within us all. Murderous goings-on are seen meanwhile to be overtaking the island of Jersey, the film's unusual setting, and may implicate Pascal, or not. The soundscape at times goes into overdrive, and clouds are put to both metaphoric as well as literal use, but not before Pascal remarks of the couple, "We're the same". Which, in context, may not be quite what Moll needs to hear.
Arguably in undue thrall to its own ambiguity, Beast feels like it isn't entirely sure just how arty or atmospheric it wants to be. Buckley, interestingly, can adjust her face into the sort of purposeful lockdown that will surely serve her well if she wants to go the action heroine route, while Flynn long ago proved himself a dab hand at "sensitive souls" who may be hiding a less beneficent side. (His breakout stage performance in Martin McDonagh's Hangmen kept you shifting perspectives by the second.) The film ends with an encounter that challenges the audience to make of it what they will, but when it comes to the charisma evidenced by its sterling cast, on that topic there can be no doubt.
Eight months have passed since the Russians invaded Norway in the first season of Jo Nesbo’s neo-Cold War thriller. Real-life events have only made Occupied seem more relevant.
The story behind the making of first-time director Mitu Misra’s Lies We Tell is often easier to make sense of than what happens in the film: Misra realised the project with money from his double-glazing business and plenty of bull-headed persistence. Its various disparate elements don’t all co-exist happily, notably a phoned-in cameo from Harvey Keitel as ageing businessman Demi.
Ros and Ray are old hippies made good. She’s a hard-bitten, hard-working teacher in an inner-city Pennsylvania school where her pupils rob 7-Elevens on Fridays and the staff have a betting pool on how many times she gets called "white bitch". He’s a member of the one percent, a corporate heavyweight who’s always trying to see “the bigger picture” but who drives a Merc and – by his own admission – pulled himself out of poverty to become a wealthy financier.
You could call it an absence of yellow. Until very recently British theatre has been pretty poor at representing the stories of Chinese and East Asian people, and even of British East Asians. In 2016, Andrew Lloyd Webber called British theatre “hideously white” and, despite the sterling work of groups such as Yellow Earth theatre company, there have been several casting controversies where white actors have played Chinese and East Asian characters.
As it turns out, the slashed-to-the-hip Versace dress with which Jennifer Lawrence provoked controversy (synthetic or otherwise) on a freezing London rooftop was an accurate barometer of what to expect from Red Sparrow.
When I was 23 I had a job selling butterflies in glass cases in America. I worked for a guy who, as well as being a butterfly salesman, had ambitions to be America’s first Pope (an ambition he ditched on account of him wanting to marry). I drove all over the US and sold in 32 states. It was 1987 and was pre-internet and pre-mobile phone, which increased the sensation of having an adventure in a land far, far away.