For anyone living in the UK at the time, the Dunblane massacre on 13 March 1996 was an event so seared into their minds that they can remember exactly where they were when the shocking news came through.
The city of Boston has been creeping up the charts as a hotbed of cinematic criminality in the last decade. First came Martin Scorsese's Oscar-scooping epic The Departed, then Ben Affleck chipped in with The Town, both movies driven by their portrayal of tightly-knit groups of characters immovably rooted in their native Bostonian soil.
A lot of people are going to be enraged, frustrated, or confused by Evening at The Talk House, and in the authorial world of Wallace Shawn, wasn't it ever thus? This is the playwright who gave pride of place to a softly-spoken fascist in Aunt Dan and Lemon and challenged his audience's complacency directly with The Fever, so if I say that his latest play is of a piece with his earlier ones, that is intended as high praise, indeed.
Gangland London has never really worked for British directors. The warped poetry and seedy glamour of the American Mafia were the making of Coppola and Scorsese. You don’t get a lot of that down Bethnal Green way. Just knuckle dusters and glottal stops. But what happens if an American has a go at the Krays instead?
The Bourne trilogy riffed on the idea of an undercover CIA operative who is so thoroughly brainwashed he no longer knows who he is. American Ultra mines that same scenario for laughs. Where Matt Damon looked the part, the weedy Jesse Eisenberg is very far from central casting. Indeed, nothing in his career so far has suggested that he could punch his way out of a paper bag.
That includes the film’s opening scenes, which position Mike as a geeky stoner working the till at a convenience store in the fictional Liman, West Virginia. His girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart) is the competent one who rescues the omelette from burning, owns quite a nice Subaru and fields his constant apologies. Then one night he gets mugged by two armed thugs. Without an idea how, he dispatches both in a trice and is soon banged up by the sheriff. More killers arrive and this time Mike needs a little longer to do them in.
Meanwhile at CIA headquarters a turf spat has broken out between Mike’s former handler Lasseter (Connie Britton, pictured) and her preppy younger boss Yates (Topher Grace), who has decided to flex his muscles by wiping out her sleeper agent, the only success of a programme to train up mental patients as government assassins.
The script by Max Landis has a twist or two along the way, including a nice reveal about Phoebe that gives Stewart more to do than look on admiringly as Eisenberg lays waste to all-comers. “You’re his girlfriend, his mom, his maid and now you’re his lawyer?” says the cop when she advises him under arrest. Maybe that’s not all she is.
The film crescendos into a festival of splatty, splurgy cartoon violence: director Nima Nourizadeh has been hard at study of action genre tropes. Gore has not been this glorified in a comedy since James Gunn’s Super, in which a loser cast himself as a horribly vengeful superhero.
Are the laughs good enough to keep pace with all the punctured flesh? More or less. The joke of Mike’s incomprehension holds up reasonably well (“Is that a lyric?” he asks when greeted by a bafflingly coded message from Lasseter). Before he has accepted his destiny as a ruthless killer, Mike frets neurotically that he may be a robot. The best laughs are at the expense of the CIA, though there’s nothing to match the sheer bliss of Robert de Niro outwitting the Agency in Midnight Run. Eisenberg and Stewart are likeable, and there are fun cameos for John Leguizamo as a paranoid drug dealer who thinks he’s black and Bill Pullman as a national security capo. The film seems all set to cue up a sequel, but instead compresses it into the closing minutes. By then, the joke has done its job and run its course.
Overleaf: 'Piss My Pants' – watch a clip from American Ultra
London property prices could well plummet, not to mention James Franco's ever-wayward career, if enough people see Good People, a staggeringly inept London-set gorefest that casts James Franco as an expat London property developer and Kate Hudson as his schoolteacher-wife who likes buying major appliances for friends as gifts.
People who live in glass houses should be careful who they antagonise. That's the superficial starting point of The Gift, the directorial debut of actor Joel Edgerton, who takes the cuckoo-in-the-nest thriller template – which became ubiquitous in the early '90s with films like Pacific Heights, Unlawful Entry, Single White Female and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle – and, by introducing psychological depth and a streak of social conscience, fashions an intriguing morality tale.
Jason Bateman (pictured below right) and Rebecca Hall play Simon and Robyn; prompted by his fancy new information security sales job, they move from Chicago to an exposed modernist house high atop the California hills. She's a successful designer emerging from a depression brought about by a failed pregnancy, trying to build her business back up from home. When they bump into one of Simon's old schoolmates, Gordo (Edgerton himself), this awkward man takes a rather overzealous shine to them and starts showing up uninvited and leaving gifts on their doorstep.
Operating with a keen sense of the couple's vulnerability from the outset, both in terms of their easily penetrated abode and Robyn's fragile mental state, Edgerton skilfully ratchets up the tension and, along with cinematographer Eduard Grau – who did such beautiful work on A Single Man – crafts a cool, unnerving thriller, which contains a handful of decent jump-scares before it evolves into something more emotionally rich.
This first-time helmer (who has also penned the screenplay) fleshes things out admirably, showing an eye for incidental background action (a husband is chided by his wife after belittling her at a work party; we notice Gordo clock Simon in the street long before he makes his initial approach) and this care stretches to the casting, characterisations and performances. Allison Tolman (TV's Fargo) and Wendell Pierce (The Wire) are amongst the skilfully selected supporting players, while Edgerton the chameleon-like actor plays Gordo as an atypical, enigmatic psycho; still and subtly strange, he's the anti-Ray Liotta, right down to his dark, inscrutable eyes. He's difficult to read and interesting to ponder, with the audience invited to pick and puzzle over him as we size up the threat.
He's well matched by seasoned comedian Bateman, in a rare serious role, whose easy charm is shrewdly employed and who proves he has the dramatic chops to slip into the skin of a man whose slick facade is gradually peeled away to reveal something substantially more ugly. And Hall is compellingly sensitive in the film's most sympathetic role, bringing a welcome note of sweetness to the abounding cynicism and increasing aggression, and going from passive to active as her investigations lead her to uncover the uncomfortable truth about the state of her relationship. We also view events through her compassionate eyes, adding further complexity to our perception of Gordo.
The Gift is ostensibly about the power of an idea, but this thoughtful film encourages us to look afresh at our own behaviour and relationships, and it has plenty to say about the way in which women (or indeed anyone) can become victims of, or be diminished by, a domineering personality, about our failure to see what's right in front of us, about the far-reaching consequences of our actions, and about the take-no-prisoners world of big business where bullies and psychopaths rise to the top. This gift might be wrapped up in the paper and ribbon of a generic thriller, but what's inside will pleasantly surprise.
Finally reaching its concluding 22nd episode, delayed further by the "mid-season break" fashionable with American shows, Gotham [****] stands tall as a distinctive contribution to the seemingly inexhaustible superhero universe. Instead of relying on gargantuan cartoon characters and a hurricane of computerised effects in Marvel Avengers style, Gotham has used the scope afforded by a prolonged TV series to develop a specific world populated by rounded characters which evolve and move convincingly through time.
Boasting one of the most appealingly eclectic casts in recent memory, The Salvation – from Dogme 95 director Kristian Levring – might have hoped to emulate the success of Sergio Leone's Italian-infused approach by bringing a Danish flavour to traditional western proceedings. But by relying too heavily on the tried and tested it fails to distinguish itself, meaning that the "smørrebrød" western seems unlikely to replace its spaghetti cousin in audience affections any time soon.
This shrewdly assembled, often near-monochrome actioner injects pathos from the off and mirrors the melancholic outlook of its grief-ravaged protagonist, played by Keanu Reeves, who dials down the befuddlement and proves rather endearing. Directed by stuntmen Chad Stahelski and (an uncredited) David Leitch, it's a lovingly crafted, pleasingly characterful effort that delivers impactful, imaginatively executed thrills.