At last. Three grown up, intelligent movies with hardly, if any, trace of CGI between them. The stories are enough. The first two were showing on Senior Screen, the single Wednesday morning shows, as these had not previously been shown in Aylesbury.
Shadow Dancer is about turning a female member of the IRA into a mole. The tension mounts as she faces the suspicion of her own family. A spine chilling story set in a wonderfully shot 1980/90s gloomy Belfast. The success of the movie is down to a large part by the acting of leads Andrea Riseborough, superb as Colette McVeigh, and Clive Owen as Mac, her British intelligence handler. Their uneasy relationship is set against the twists and turns of a fragmented terrorist group. Here the performances are excellent, as is Gillian Anderson as Mac's unscrupulous boss. I'm never keen on the author of the original novel adapting it for the screenplay, but Tom Bradby just gets away with it because of the superb cast. Director James Marsh (Man on Wire) does OK, keeping the pace and tension just right. I just don't know what the crinklies would have made of it.
Much more up their street was Anna Karenina. An interesting and modern language take on Tolstoy's classic, adapted by Tom Stoppard and a sumptuous production directed by Joe Wright. So British through and through. I have to say that I expected more. More intrigue, more story. more landscape. Instead we have what I thought was a highly unsuccessful attempt to move the action backwards and forwards from being set in a grand theatre to normal live action. This cinematic device was, I guess, an attempt to distinguish this movie from a number of other previous films. But it did not work. There were times when the director seemed to get fed up with it and we were out of the theatre for a long period. But then we were back and it just seemed like a different movie spliced in. The two main characters of this romantic drama are played by Kiera Knightly as Anna and Aaron Johnson as her lover Vronsky. They are both the worst bits about the film. There is no chemistry and they both seem totally pathetic. In contrast. Mathew MacFadyen is fabulous as Anna's brother, as is Jude Law as her husband. And the subsidiary love story between Domhnall Gleeson's Levin and Alicia Vikander's Kitty is much more successful, as are the cameos from Ruth Wilson, Kelly McDonald and Olivia Williams. Could have been great, but wasn't.
Ben Affleck has done it again. I loved his first two movies as director, Gone Baby Gone and The Town, and now, for the first time away from his home of Boston, he has made a thrilling hostage rescue movie based on real life events, that have been heavily dramatised for better effect. We are in Tehran in 1979 and six people from the American Embassy have avoided being taken hostage with the sixty others, only to find themselves in more danger hiding out in the Canadian Ambassador's residence. What follows next is a dangerous mission to rescue them. Tony Mendez (Affleck) has an audacious plan to use a fake movie for their extraction. He enlists the help of a make up genius, John Goodman, and a producer, Alan Arkin. (Which of these will win best supporting actor, who knows? They are that good in what are reasonably small roles.). Affleck, with his director's hat on, really ups the tension almost to the point of gratuitous manipulation that is almost laughable at the end. But who cares.
No comments:
Post a Comment