Challengers (2024)

You’ve never seen her, man. She’s in another league. 2019: married tennis power couple former player Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) and currently injured star Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) have a young daughter Lily (AJ Lister) who likes to stay in hotels. Under Tashi’s coaching, Art has become a top pro. He is one US Open title away from a Career Grand Slam but he is struggling to regain his form after an injury. Hoping to return him to form, Tashi enters Art as a wild card in a Challenger event in New Rochelle, New York to boost his confidence by beating lower-level opponents. His former best friend Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend is now an unknown player living out of his car, scraping by on the winnings from the lower circuit and also enters the New Rochelle event. 2006: high schoolers and childhood best friends Patrick and Art win the junior doubles title at the US Open. Afterwards, they watch Tashi a highly lauded young tennis prospect make mince meat of the opposition on court. Then they meet her at a party later that night. Usually their attractions are separate but Tashi is the first person to whom Patrick and Art are both attracted. The three make out in a motel room but stop short of having sex. With the two boys playing each other the next day, Tashi says she will give her phone number to whichever of them wins. Patrick wins the match and later signals to Art that he had sex with Tashi by placing the ball in the neck of the racket prior to serving – a tic of Art’s. Tashi and Art go on to play college tennis at Stanford University, while Patrick turns professional and begins a long distance relationship with Tashi. A jealous Art questions Tashi about whether Patrick loves her, and Patrick, recognising Art’s jealously, playfully reassures him of his and Tashi’s connection. Patrick and Tashi fight when she gives him unsolicited tennis advice and he says he views her as a peer, not his coach. In the next match which Art watches without Patrick, Tashi suffers a severe knee injury. Patrick returns to comfort Tashi but she demands he leave, with Art taking her side. Art aids Tashi in her recovery but she is unsuccessful in resuming her tennis career. I want you to join my team because I want to win. A few years later Tashi reconnects with Art and becomes his coach and the two begin a romantic relationship. He reveals that he and Patrick have not talked since Tashi’s injury. In 2011, Tashi and Art are now engaged and Art’s career is on the up. Tashi and Patrick run into each other at the Atlanta Open and have a one night stand, which Art secretly notices. 2019: Starting at opposite ends of the seeding, Art and Patrick advance through the brackets at New Rochelle until they find themselves facing each other in the tournament’s final match. In a sauna the day before the match, Patrick attempts to reconnect with Art but Art rejects Patrick by saying his career is over and he, Art, will be remembered. Patrick secretly asks Tashi to be his coach and lead him to one last winning season, sensing she is unhappy with Art and that Art is tired of playing but she rejects him … Which one is which? Take three highly charismatic young actors, place them in competition with each other sexually and professionally, complicate things with a love triangle and the monotony and sacrifice of life as sportsmen and women and you have the ingredients for a cracking drama. Director Luca Guadagnino returns with a tennis story – a surprising fact particularly given that there haven’t been any good ones but the screenplay from Justin Kuritzkes is multi-faceted. Not just a sports film but a romance, a thriller and a portrait of generalised anxiety erupting from having to sustain a career, creating monetising opportunities from every win, enduring pain, dealing with catastrophic injury, burnout, a friendship contained within the rise and fall narrative that all sportspeople experience over time and driven characters playing at marriage. Using the New Rochelle Challenger event as a framing device intensifies the pressures of the relationship past and present – we see where they are now and how they got there with the catalysing event an almost-threesome that prefigures everything else in their destiny. And as Tashi explains, Tennis is a relationship. What an impressive cast. Faist is the dazzling actor who was by far the best thing about Spielberg’s West Side Story remake – awards should have come his way but the film fell foul of COVID lockdown release schedules just as this one was delayed from Fall 2023 due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. Here he’s the walking wounded and he plays tender and vulnerable so well. O’Connor is the talented Brit who has created so many great performances and powers his way through this with a life in freefall and a smirking swagger, never fully out of love with Tashi. Zendaya is finally being allowed to act nearer her age (27 at time of release) and is so famous she’s currently on the covers of both UK and US Vogue, such is her pull for advertisers and the youth audience, a combination of Euphoria and Spider-Man fans with a monster sci-fi epic under her belt following Dune 2. Watching the guys watch her on court at the 2006 US Open and later at a party, open-mouthed and lustful like heat-seeking missiles, is highly amusing and sets up the relationship’s eventual complexities with her at the fulcrum, literally calling the shots. Aren’t you everybody’s type? It also sets in motion the director’s familiar focus – young people and their romantic travails – although we know the starting point is the end point, or thereabouts, which is a little like watching Titanic and knowing the outcome but now we get to invest in the characters as they encounter each other 13 years later with everything that has gone on since that first fateful encounter. You typically fall apart in the second round. As the guys get reacquainted with their game and Tashi is turned off Art because his game is off and she lives through him, Patrick sees his chance to upset the applecart, pointing up the performative aspect of all their public lives. Thus the scene is set for Round Two in their lives, rivalries intact. It’s about winning. And I do. A lot. For a sports movie love triangle this fun and sexy we have to go back in time to 1977 and Semi-Tough with Burt and Kris and Jill. That was smart and screwball-y too but set in the world of football. How are you going to look at me if I still can’t beat Patrick Zweig? This is tense and exhilarating and wonderfully played by a cast that is exceptionally well matched and hot for each other. Love all? Not quite. But this is a smash, with a zippy score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Who wouldn’t love you? MM#4545

The Lost King (2022)

Five hundred years of lies. Edinburgh, 2012. Separated mother of two boys, 45-year old Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins) is passed over for a promotion at work in favour of a less experienced better-looking younger woman. She unsuccessfully confronts her male boss that her chronic fatigue syndrome (ME) has never affected her work. Distraught at her distractedness and work absences, her estranged husband John (Steve Coogan), who lives in his own flat and helps out with their two teenage boys Max (Adam Robb) and Raife (Benjamin Scanlan), tells her to keep her job as they need the money. Philippa attends Shakespeare’s play Richard III which Max is studying at school and she identifies with Richard (Harry Lloyd) whom she feels was unfairly maligned as a hunchback, child killer and usurper. She begins to have visions of Richard who appears to her when she reads a biography that persuades her he has been unjustly treated by history. She joins the local Richard III Society who believe he was unfairly vilified by Tudor propagandists. Philippa stops going to work, manages her illness with medication and begins talking to her Richard III apparition (Harry Lloyd again). Her research shows some sources say he was buried in 1485 in the Leicester Greyfriars priory quire, while others say his body was thrown into the River Soar. After Greyfriars was demolished in the 1530s Reformation, Leicester mayor Robert Herrick around 1600 had a shrine built in his garden saying Here lies the body of Richard III, sometime king of England. Philippa attends a lecture in Leicester on Richard, lying to her ex-husband about it being a work trip and returning late forcing him to miss a date with his girlfriend. He knows she’s been skipping work and makes fun of her interest in Richard III. She meets Dr Richard Ashdown-Hill (James Fleet) who is publishing a genetic genealogy study on a Canadian direct descendant of Richard III’s sister, traced through maternal mitochondrial DNA. He tells her to look for Richard in open spaces in Leicester because people for centuries have avoided building over old abbeys. While walking around Leicester looking for the ancient site of Greyfriars, and seeing apparitions of Richard, she gets a strong feeling that an R painted on a car park is the site of Richard’s grave. Returning home, she confesses her activities to John. Philippa contacts University of Leicester archaeologist Richard Buckley (Mark Addy) who quietly dismisses her ideas but when the university cuts his funding, he gets back to her. Buckley finds a mediaeval map of Leicester marking Robert Herrick’s property, showing a possible public shrine in his garden. They overlay a modern map of Leicester and decide that the shrine may be in the middle of the car park that Philippa had felt strongly about. Philippa and Buckley team up. She pitches the project for funding to Leicester City Council. Richard Taylor (Lee Ingleby) of the University of Leicester advises that her amateur ‘feeling’ is too risky. The Council still approves her plan for the publicity it could generate but when ground-radar finds nothing, funding drops out. She turns to the Richard III Society to crowd-fund her Looking For Richard project and the money comes in from around the world to fund three trenches … I just don’t like it when people put others down for no reason. That’s Philippa’s take on Richard III’s bad rep but we know it’s a parallel with her own experience as an ME sufferer (the initials are unfortunate for an illness long rumoured to be imaginary). Plenty have tried to find him and failed. Not only does Philippa act on her feelings, she tells people about them – it takes Council funding committee chairman Sarah Locke (Amanda Abbington) to advise her not to mention them, they’re too female – but it’s her feeling when she stands above the letter R (for reserved) in the car park that she gets the greatest sensation of all. And she acts on it. Rewriting people into history isn’t just the story of Richard it’s the story of Philippa too – the amateur historian marginalised by the archaeological team at the University of Leicester whom she hired to do the dig and then finds them taking credit for her discovery in front of the world’s press. The same people who mock: It’s like someone with a home-made rocket saying they’re going to the moon. That Ealing feeling isn’t a coincidence in a tale of rehabilitation. The film reunites the Philomena team of star/co-writer Coogan with screenwriter Jeff Pope and Stephen Frears, making another mostly true seriocomic story about a seemingly eccentric contemporary woman trying to right the wrongs of history. Of course it has a preposterous provenance – imagine finding Richard III in a car park in Leicester (and this has four characters called Richard so it must be true). Yet they did and it actually took a decade but for dramatic reasons this is telescoped into a matter of months and Richard was indeed found on the first day, in Summer 2012. Look for an open space, advises Ashdown-Hill like some kind of academic Yoda to the expressive Philippa who follows her passion with determination and empathy. Eventually she even gets her ex to move back in with the family and he comes around to her feeling about Richard, making an anonymous donation to the cause which necessitates a small sacrifice on his part. So twisted spine equals twisted personality, does it? Philippa takes everything so personally. If I can find him I can give him a voice, she says but when she finally asks the dead king’s apparition why he never speaks to her, he tells her it’s because she’s never asked him a question – content to run off at the mouth with those monologues, probably an in-joke about Shakespeare in the narrative’s constantly self-reinforcing metaverse precipitated by a hunch(back). John initially sees Richard as almost a romantic rival yet he knows why Philippa is talking to herself – he’s seeing Seafood Sarah whom he calls normal but the difference is we never encounter this real-life woman whereas a long-dead king shows up all the time, often on his horse, quietly imploring Philippa to continue on her quest. This is perhaps taking the romantic notion of history a little far yet its role in the text is what a certain playwright got away with doing, on more than one occasion. When John takes the boys to the cinema it’s to see Skyfall – a monster movie production about as far from the world of this film as it is to imagine. And yet this sidebar is about an epic episode in history and what remains. Raife asks Philippa about getting a licence to kill – and this is a narrative all about (dramatic) licence, licence to read, remember, restore, exhume and, yes, to kill and to sideline. And as it’s a story about archaeology it has its procedural structure of excavation which in this interpretation involves the straightforward light-enhanced overlaying of maps (Buckley never thought of it, it’s too simple an idea, being a woman’s), radar views and a mechanical digger. When the skull with fatal wound and curved spine are uncovered it’s strangely moving. And our reactions are written in Hawkins’ extraordinarily mobile face. Naturally everyone must acknowledge the Tudor apologists: they’re going to have a field day. That phrase of course prompts a visit to Bosworth Field, where Philippa has her final encounter with Richard III, again on his fine white steed, accompanied by his men, about to meet his maker. The film concludes with real footage of the funeral of Richard III. And so it is that the rightful king of England, the last Plantagenet ruler 1483-1485, got his long-earned decent burial and Royal honours. Underdog Langley got an MBE but Buckley got the OBE, a higher honour, consistent with the doctorate he was awarded and again metaphorically expressing the idea here – that men write history and take the credit. This has led us back to crime writer Josephine Tey’s 1951 novel The Daughter of Time, a book that served to re-ignite interest in Richard for a twentieth century readership and also questioned whether he could have killed the Princes in the Tower (who were apparently still there after the Battle of Bosworth Field by order of Henry VII). The cover features the portrait that Philippa explains here to John was doctored by the Tudors to retro-fit his image to their scurrilous version of events in which he was cast aside to make way for a new dynasty: his descendants include a cabinet-maker currently living in Clapham – no wonder QEII preferred to give a higher honour to an alleged establishment liar. This is about the real person who lies beneath the reputation and the effort it takes to read between the lines and understand the role of bias. It is about the very construction of history and how Shakespeare’s mythical play came to determine our perception of this misunderstood if controversial man whose dignity had been lost. Adapted from The King’s Grave: The Search for Richard III by Philippa Langley and Michael Jones, this is a small film about a mighty achievement. And, as the Titles inform us, it is Based on a true story. Her story

Dark Waters (2019)

You’re flushing your career down the toilet for a cowhand. Corporate defence lawyer Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) is approached by his grandmother’s farmer neighbour Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp) to investigate the deaths of hundreds of his cattle in Parkersburg, West Virginia, probably due to a poisoning incident by manufacturer DuPont. The company’s lawyer Phil Donnelly (Victor Garber) promises to help Robert but stalls so Robert files suit to get discovery and with nothing useful in an Environmental Protection Agency report he finds information about an unregulated chemical called PFOA which turns out to be Teflon – and it’s on and in everything including the water supply, poisoning with a substance the body cannot tolerate or absorb and causing six cancers and facial deformities. It transpires that DuPont carried out tests and did not make the findings public. The case drives Robert’s behaviour to cause his former lawyer wife Sarah (Anne Hathaway) to worry for him and he eventually collapses from ill-health as the years wind on, with Wilbur and his wife Sandra (Denise Dal Vera) getting cancer from the infected water they’ve been consuming. They refuse DuPont’s offer of settlement – they want justice. Robert finds that Medical Monitoring is permitted in West Virginia and undertakes a class action lawsuit with the biggest sample of epidemiological data in history but after seven years there are still no results, his marriage is in difficulty and he’s taking yet another paycut  … Better living through chemistry. Adapted by Mario Correa and Matthew Michael  Carnahan from three articles in The New York Times and The Intercept, this is a grimy looking drama about corporate malfeasance that’s paced as slowly and deliberately as Bilott’s lawsuits, with some touches of conventional genre paranoia in one thriller sequence (in a car park, surprise surprise).  It unfurls chronologically, a decade-and-a-half-long story of terrible, destructive deceit – a toxic pollution arrangement covertly blessed by Government agencies, yet another searing indictment of structural inequality and the impunity with which big companies abuse power and kill people, no questions asked. It’s a David and Goliath procedural tale that has global ramifications and despite its desperately dull appearance and some flawed and oddly impersonal directing choices there are some great moments especially for Tim Robbins as Ruffalo’s boss; and Bill Camp, who exudes his usual authenticity beneath some truly eccentric eyebrows. Hathaway’s stay-at-home wife gradually gets a better arc than at first appears; while Ruffalo is shuffling and in pain, dressed in too-big clothes in a whistleblowing role that clearly is a labour of love, a wannabe Hulk gravitationally pulled to earth, feeling the hurt of all his sick, suffering and dying clients as he does his due diligence with dignity and perseverance. Stick with it. Like the Teflon on your frying pan that’s killing you every day. Directed by Todd Haynes. The system is rigged

Little Monsters (2019)

We’re all gonna die! Dave Anderson (Alexander England) is a foul-mouthed, washed-up musician who breaks up with his girlfriend and is forced to stay with his sister Tess (Kat Stewart) a single mother and her five-year old son, Felix (Diesel La Torraca) whom he introduces to violent video games and inadvertently has him see his ex and her new boyfriend have sex. While dropping Felix off at school, Dave meets Miss Caroline (Lupita NYong’o), Felix’s kindergarten teacher, and is attracted to her. After a parent drops out from an upcoming field trip to a farm, Dave volunteers to chaperone, mostly to be near Miss Caroline. Dave is upset to learn that children’s television personality, Teddy McGiggle (Josh Gad) is filming his show at the farm and that Miss Caroline is engaged to someone else. However zombies break out of a U.S. testing facility nearby and head straight for the farm. During a tractor ride, the class is attacked by zombies and tries to escape only to find the place is overrun with zombies… You realise that you’re only doing it because you’re dead inside. And it’s the only thing that keeps you from killing yourself. A zippy soundtrack, nudity, sex and a bunch of small children playing a game devised by designated adults to keep them from being eaten by zombies – textbook zomromcom! – but not for the kids. Hardly. The men are vile with Gad a sociopath in Pee Wee Herman’s clothing (one gets a shot at redemption, the other gets eaten – you choose), there are references both to Star Wars and Children of the Corn while Nyong’o gets to be the happy clappy teach trying to avoid predatory dads. There’s a funny bus chase – slow, obviously – and a siege situation in the farm shop and all the while the kiddywinks are kept safe by virtue of those silly songs and mantras the do-gooding teacher trained them to learn, proving very helpful in a zombie attack as it turns out. Ingenious, in its own way. Written and directed by Abe Forsythe. I can’t kill kids – again

The Goldfinch (2019)

We don’t say fake. It’s reproduction. Theodore Decker (Oakes Fegley/ Ansel Elgort) was 13 years old when his mother Audrey (Hailey Wist) was killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He is taken in by the Upper East Side Barbour family whose mother Samantha (Nicole Kidman) understands his fragility while his estranged friendship with her younger son Andy (Ryan Houst) is rekindled.  She discovers an engraved ring in Theo’s possession and he returns it to Hobie (Jeffrey Wright) at the antiques and restoration store Hobart & Blackwell where he recognises the lovely redheaded girl Pippa (Aimee Laurence/Ashleigh Cummings) who was standing beside him just before the bomb exploded and they become fast friends. She is the niece of Welty Blackwell (Robert Joy) whose dying words to Theo were to take his mom’s favourite painting the 1654 masterpiece The Goldfinch from the bomb site and a dazed Theo puts it in his backpack and stores it at his home.  All seems on an even keel until his freshly detoxed loser father Larry (Luke Wilson) reappears and abruptly takes him to Nevada to set up house with live-in cocktail waitress girlfriend Xandra (Sarah Paulson). Life in the desert has an alien quality and he is befriended by sun-hating Ukrainian Goth Boris (Finn Wolfhard/Aneurian Barnard) who introduces him to a supply of mind-numbing drugs and alcohol while he himself has to deal with a violent father. Theo realises his own father is trying to rip him off and use his private school funds to gamble so escapes back to NYC where we find him as a young man working for Hobie selling upscaled faux antiques and reunited with the Barbour family:  Andy and Mr Barbour (Boyd Gaines) have died in a sailing accident and Samantha is unhinged by depression but delighted to see him again.  He gets engaged to her daughter Kitsey (Willa Fitzgerald) but before long finds out he is not her true love, while Pippa remains out of reach.  After a bad sale to vicious art collector Lucius Reeve (Denis O’Hare) Theo discovers that The Goldfinch has been used as collateral in a criminal deal in Miami. When he runs into the grownup Boris in a bar he finds the beloved painting is not in the safe place where he stored it after all… In Amsterdam I dreamt I saw my mother again.  Adapted by Peter Straughan from Donna Tartt’s bestselling Bildungsroman, I arrive unburdened by reading the 880-page behemoth, an overlength only deserving of Tolstoy or someone of that order. Even without that experience, this has clear affinities with Dickens and allusions to Salinger, carrying with it an understanding of the difficulties of childhood and the intensity of friendship in a narrative dominated by the symbolic qualities of guilt. This is the opposite of a fast-moving art heist movie. It has an endearing shaggy dog style only broken by the fragmented nature of the storytelling and a late slackening in pace followed by the sudden violence of the ending in Amsterdam where the titular painting is eventually located and subject of a wild shootout. Much of the pleasure is in the juxtaposing of alienating landscapes of arid desert and rinky dink city locales. Kidman and Wolfhard are rivetting, Fegley is quite impenetrable but that’s not a bad thing given the story and how it is revealed, while Elgort is rather problematic as usual. Some of these performances might have been more effective had the story been told in sequence. There’s a wonderful, sonorous score by Trevor Gureckis and, if you allow it, much of this film will bring you into a world of childhood and loss rarely portrayed on screen. This, after all, is about the look of love and the love of looking and their complementary rewards and the only mystery is why this particular painting elicits such desire.

The Driver (1978)

You know I don’t like guns. The laconic and enigmatic Driver (Ryan O’Neal) excels at manoeuvering getaway vehicles through the tightest of spots following robberies, making him quite in demand in the criminal underworld. His skill and notoriety, however, infuriate the corrupt Detective (Bruce Dern), who becomes obsessed with taking the Driver down and has issues convincing his cohorts (Matt Clark and Felice Orlandi) on the best way to entrap him. He decides to use Teeth (Joseph Walsh) and his trigger-happy gang, and offers them a deal in a set up robbery. Luckily for the speed-loving anti-hero, the Player (Isabelle Adjani), a gorgeous and resourceful woman, is around to help him elude the Detective… I’ll tell you something, I’m very good at what I do. Who says American cinema doesn’t do existential? Channeling Melville (Jean-Pierre) and Camus this boils the film noir down to essentials and provides a sustained picture of Los Angeles at night often challenged, rarely equalled. From the country and western music played on his Craig electronic notebook (I want one) to his moniker of Cowboy, the western allusions play out with an unexpected shootout involving a man who doesn’t usually carry a gun. The irony of course is in the casting:  Dern once killed John Wayne on screen, so brings that genre baggage to this tapestry of tropes. Writer Walter Hill was making his sophomore directing outing following Hard Times and you can tell he watched a lot of Raoul Walsh movies.  The generic character names are proper archetypes that take flight in this most meticulously conceived actioner, the car chases reminding us of his work as AD on Bullitt (he wrote this for Steve McQueen). There’s astonishing camerawork and shot design by Philip H. Lathrop, who did Shadow of a Doubt and Saboteur with Hitchcock and the opening tracking shot on Touch of Evil, as well as doing a great job on Blake Edwards’ astonishing LA movie Experiment in Terror and The Pink Panther. There are other titles on his resumé, but those are impressive enough credentials for one DoP. The limpid lighting and great cutting make this muscular thriller a visually haunting experience. The scene when the Driver teaches Teeth and his gang how to really drive a Merc in an underground car park is stunning and you know, when you think about it, they’re just driving around a car park.  That’s all. But it’s how they do it that matters. There is a winning simplicity and modernity that bespeaks careful construction to achieve this finessed cinematic affect. And there’s the significance of the cars in the culture and what this is about symbolically, a western scenario unfolding in a lawless town where Dern fancies his chances as omnipotent sheriff irritated by his constantly questioning sidekicks. There’s the usual hilariously inexpressive performing by Adjani, a great supporting role for Ronee Blakley as the Connection and a very satisfying ending. This is why Walter Hill is one of the geniuses of cinema and why O’Neal was a major star, perfect for the era. He looks great, he says little and he does it with surgical exactitude. He and Dern have utterly asymmetrical acting styles and make remarkably memorable complementary foes. One of the great Seventies movies.  How do we know you’re that good?

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

No, I am not finished. Look, I’m gettin’ old, you hear? Ageing low-level Boston gunrunner Eddie ‘Fingers’ Coyle (Robert Mitchum) is looking at several years of jail for a hold-up if he doesn’t funnel information to treasury agent Dave Foley (Richard Jordan) so he has to decide whether to turn stoolie. He buys guns from another gunrunner, Jackie Brown (Steven Keats), then gives him up to Foley, but it’s not enough. Conflicted, Eddie decides to also give up the gang of bank robbers he’s been supplying, only to find Foley already knows about them, and the mob believes Eddie snitched. The real permanent cop fink, barkeep Dillon (Peter Boyle) is called upon to render a service .. I wished I had a nickel for every name I got that was all right.  It could only be Robert Mitchum, couldn’t it, in this great gangster flick, one of the best films of the Seventies. Adapted from George V. Higgins’ classic novel, a gripping iteration of the Irish-American underworld given a stately interpretation by producer Paul Monash who knows just how to put the boot into that old saw about honour among thieves and how you really shouldn’t trust cops cos they’re just another gang.  There is nothing wrong with this film. It’s a snapshot of an anti-romantic world which we believe to be utterly true, and no higher compliment can you give a film. Mitchum is so good and gives such a committed performance as this determinedly anti-heroic loser that you cannot think of anyone else in the role. You believe a guy would shut a drawer on this bozo’s hand. The tone is just right, the danger palpable, the parameters real, the tension total. We’re looking at the world of Whitey Bulger and his gang in reality (Peter Boyle is Dillon, the avatar for Bulger, although Higgins denied the connection). Mitchum wanted to meet some of the real crims but was cautiously directed elsewhere although cast member Alex Rocco (he plays bank robber Jimmy Scalise) who had been associated with the Winter Hill gang and served a prison term during the Boston Irish Gang Wars in the Sixties prior to his name change and a Hollywood career may have made some introductions to the man who actually killed the prototype for Coyle. Let’s talk about screenwriter Monash who was a producer and TV scriptwriter (Peyton Place, among others) but really wanted to write a great novel. He was so good that Orson Welles tapped him to do rewrite work on Touch of Evil but for those of us who grew up in the Eighties he’s the guy who brought Salem’s Lot to the screen putting me at least behind a cushion and a couch to bridge the distance from the screen in order to somehow stop the fear (it didn’t); as well as a fantastic TVM remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, the series V and a very memorable film about Huey Long, Kingfish. Let’s not forget the wonderful British director Peter Yates who brings all his considerable weight and lightness of touch to this incredibly atmospheric production.  He’s made some of my favourite movies including Bullitt and Breaking Away, The Hot Rock, Eyewitness and this. He directed my friend Shane Connaughton’s quasi-autobiographical Irish production The Run of the Country and was responsible for a fantastic mini-series of Don Quixote starring John Lithgow. Not only that, he managed the legendary racer Stirling Moss in his heyday. Good grief I love the man! This is great, resonant filmmaking, desperate, downbeat and convincing with an incredible cast, including my beloved Joe Santos, Margaret Ladd and Helena Carroll. Listen to that dialogue:  it’s rare, raw and relentless. With friends like these, well, you know.  I shoulda known better than to trust a cop. My own goddamn mother coulda told me that

All the President’s Men (1976)

Where’s the goddamn story? There’s a break in at the Watergate building and a laidback and very green Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) is suspicious when the Cuban-American burglars appear in court with high-level representation. Boss Harry Rosenfeld (Jack Warden) teams him up with chippy Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) to help out  – Bernstein writes better copy. Editor Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards) is not convinced that there’s much there but reluctantly gives the go-ahead.  With the help of a mysterious source, code-named Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), the two reporters make a connection between the burglars and a White House staffer. They encounter dirty tricks, ‘rat-fucking’ and an organisation known as CREEP. Follow the money Despite dire warnings about their safety, the duo follows the money all the way to the top… Part conspiracy thriller, part detective story, part newspaper flick, this only errs on the forgivably smug side that you’d expect if you’d been one of the hacks who’d (mistakenly) stumbled on an Oval Office-level conspiracy in the early 1970s. Part of director Alan J. Pakula’s unofficial paranoid trilogy (along with Klute and The Parallax View) this was adapted from Woodward and Bernstein’s book by William Goldman in the first instance – or actually four – before it was rewritten by Bernstein and Nora Ephron and then by Pakula and Redford, albeit those claims have been debunked. It’s a film that shows you the process of how to get and write the story – the sheer drudgery of sitting at desks, making phonecalls, being fobbed off, meeting strange men in car parks, going to libraries to borrow books, boredom, fear, anticipation, surveillance, and typing, typing, typing, the whole kit and caboodle. But when it’s played by two of the world’s biggest film stars at the time and they make calling someone on the phone so unbearably tense, you know you’re in good hands. As Redford’s biographer Michael Feeney Callan clarifies, Redford’s mind was already elsewhere during production despite the project being his and he was permanently distracted, yet we are carried on this tidal wave of information that started as a local story and became a national scandal – despite knowing the rather fabled outcome. What a way to make your name. Katharine Graham’s role was excised entirely from the action, to be resurrected in the preceding scandal of the Pentagon Papers dramatised in the recent The Post. Remarkable on every level, with the characters becoming at times functionaries of a cannily authentic production design by George Jenkins and a shooting style by Gordon Willis that emphasises light – its presence and absence, its curtailment and its blazing power – amid an ensemble of brilliant players in roles large and small, thrillingly brought to life. Classic.

 

 

Arlington Road (1999)

What are you doing? How many people are you going to kill? Reston, Virginia. Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges) is a history professor at George Washington University where he specialises in terrorism. His late  wife Leah (Laura Poe) was an FBI agent who died in the line of duty in a Ruby-Ridge-type standoff, and Michael now lives with his 9-year-old son Grant (Spencer Treat Clark). He is still friends with Leah’s partner Whit Carver (Robert Gossett) and dates his former graduate student Brooke Wolfe (Hope Davis). Upon finding a severely injured boy named Brady (Mason Gamble) stumbling in his neighborhood, Michael rushes him to the hospital, where the wounds are determined to be caused by fireworks. Michael meets Brady’s parents, structural engineer Oliver Lang (Tim Robbins) and his wife Cheryl (Joan Cusack) discovering they are his new neighbours. They become friends and their sons join the Discoverers, a Boy Scouts-style group. In casual conversation, Oliver expresses his sympathy for Leah’s death by displaying potentially violent anti-Government beliefs. This, and the cause of Brady’s injuries, make Michael suspicious about him. He finds blueprints in Oliver’s possession that are not for his purported building project, and receives misdirected mail suggesting Oliver lied about his college years. Brooke and Whit dismiss his concerns as paranoia. Michael takes his class on a field trip to the site where Leah was killed, excoriating the FBI for igniting the standoff after failing to probe the besieged family. His students appear uneasy. Michael reluctantly lets Grant go to a Discoverers camp with Brady. His research reveals that Oliver was born ‘William Fenimore’ and tried to blow up a post office in Kansas when he was 16. Oliver discovers Michael’s interest and confronts him, stating that his immature act (in revenge for the government’s role in his father’s suicide) cost him imprisonment and a new identity to hide his past from his children, which he regrets. Michael appears to let the matter drop but Brooke spots Oliver swapping cars and exchanging metal boxes with strangers. From a payphone, she leaves Michael a message lending validity to his suspicions, but is discovered by Cheryl. Michael learns of Brooke’s (off-screen) death on the news where it’s presented as a car accident. After discovering that messages had been erased from his answering machine, Michael asks Whit to check FBI records about Oliver and recent calls to his home. He also visits the father of the late Dean Archer Scobee (Stanley Anderson), accused of blowing up a federal building 14 months earlier in St. Louis, from where the Langs had moved … You can’t ask Government to be infallible but you can ask it to be accountable. You know you’re watching a terrific thriller when Joan Cusack’s sudden appearance at a phone booth makes you jump out of your seat in fright. The screenplay by the gifted Ehren Kruger is concerned with homegrown terrorism, a notion that has never gone away but had particular currency in the era of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh. Jeff Bridges is immensely sympathetic as the recently widowed history lecturer finds his new neighbours Oliver Lang might be plotting a very nasty spectacular  along the lines of McVeigh and realises too late that his young son is spending way too much time in their company. This is a brilliantly sustained tense piece of work about domestic terrorism which never drops the ball and is tonally pretty perfect. An underrated achievement. Directed by Mark Pellington. I’m a messenger Michael, I’m a messenger! There’s millions of us, waiting to take up arms, ready to spread the word… millions of us!

State of Play (2009)

What you have to do is build a plausible alternative story. Washington D.C. Fleeing thief Deshaun Stagg (LaDell Preston) is shot dead by a man carrying a metal briefcase. A passing witness is also shot and left in a coma. The next morning, Congressional aide Sonia Baker is killed by a Metro train. Reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) of the Washington Globe newspaper investigates the shootings while his junior colleague Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) probes Baker’s death. Baker was chief researcher for Congressman Stephen Collins’ (Ben Affleck) investigation into private defence contractor PointCorp. Collins tells McAffrey, his friend and college roommate, that he had been having an affair with Baker and does not believe hat t was suicidal. Frye questions McAffrey about Collins’ relationship with Baker; McAffrey suggests she review the Metro CCTV footage, which proves fruitless. McAffrey finds Baker’s number in Stagg’s phone. A homeless girl named Mandi (Sarah Lord) seeks out McAffrey to sell him items from a bag stolen by Stagg; they include covert photographs of Baker meeting a well-dressed man and a gun with handmade hollow point bullets. McAffrey sends Frye to the hospital, where the witness is coming out of his coma, while he visits Collins’ wife Anne (Robin Wright Penn) with whom he had previously had an affair. Before Frye can talk to the witness, he is killed by a sniper (Michael Berresse). She realises she saw the same man at the hospital and in the metro footage. Collins confirms to McAffrey that PointCorp is secretly the power behind other contractors, thus seeking a virtual monopoly on foreign and domestic government defense and security contracts. If McAffrey can prove that PointCorp had Baker killed, Collins will go public with his findings. A PointCorp insider gives McAffrey an address, where McAffrey encounters the assassin, who shoots at him before fleeing. Detective Donald Bell informs McAffrey that Mandi has been found murdered. Baker’s flatmate Rhonda Silver identifies the well-dressed man as Dominic Foy (Jason Bateman), a public relations executive at a subsidiary of PointCorp. Silver also says she had a threesome with Baker and Collins and that Collins paid off a $40,000 debt of Baker’s. McAffrey resists Frye’s urge to publish (believing Silver to be lying), and Globe editor Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren) is furious when the story is published elsewhere instead. McAffrey convinces Foy that he is in danger and can best protect himself by talking on the record. Foy reveals that Baker was being paid $26,000 a month to spy on Collins for PointCorp, but had fallen in love and was pregnant with Collins’ baby. She was killed when she refused to continue spying. McAffrey plays the tape of the interview to Collins, who lashes out at McAffrey for not telling him in person about the pregnancy. He accuses McAffrey of caring about his story above their friendship and storms off. That evening, McAffrey confronts Congressman George Fergus (Jeff Danieles) the chief whip who had mentored Collins and recommended Baker to him. He informs Fergus he plans to run a story about Fergus’ link with PointCorp and his undermining of Collins’s investigation … Is your wife speaking to you? Paul Abbott’s 2003 BBC series was a little bit legendary and it gets a nice big screen interpretation here as a cracking conspiracy thriller set in the world of Washington DC and newspapers, you know, those old-fashioned bits of paper that report facts and not ‘alternative facts’. Adapted by Tony Gilroy, Matthew Michael Carnahan and Billy Ray, Russell Crowe is the old school Saab-driving longhair who likes Irish rebel songs and whiskey when his old college roomie Congressman Ben Affleck (when his forehead still moved) gets mired in scandal as an assistant dies in front of a subway train. She’s widely rumoured to have been his romantic interest. When he approaches Crowe for help as the body count mounts, his committee looking into the doings of a security organisation with huge government contracts hoves into view. Meanwhile, Crowe takes on his blogging counterpart at the newspaper, McAdams, as his co-investigator, while tough editor Mirren is under pressure from the new owners. All of these relationships are plausible, beautifully performed and well scripted. This is a taut, pacy, tense workout with everyone at the top of their game and the issues of Homeland Security, reporting and the threat to newspapers from the worldwide web interlaced into nice character studies, as Affleck’s estranged wife, Penn, who has had an adulterous relationship with Crowe, complicates and diverts his attention from the bigger picture. An astonishingly timely piece of work and nice to spot both Viola Davis and David Harbour in small but pivotal roles. Terrific direction by Kevin Macdonald, this is intelligent cinematic storytelling with great characterisation, tangible suspense and fantastic action. The real story is the sinking of this bloody newspaper