That Funny Feeling (1965)

The only important thing now is to save a buck. New York City. Joan Howell (Sandra Dee) intends to be an actress but for now she’s working as a maid. On three different occasions, she and Tom Milford (Bobby Darin) – a successful publishing executive and womaniser – accidentally bump into each other. The third time, Tom asks her for a date. Embarrassed by her own modest rented apartment, which she shares with fellow aspiring-actress friend Audrey (Nita Talbot), Joan invites him to the lavish apartment of one of her clients whom she believes to be out of town for a couple of weeks pretending it’s hers. What she doesn’t know, because she and her employer have never met, is that the apartment is Tom’s. He shocked to find himself being welcomed to his own place but he plays along to see how far Joan’s prepared to go. He then moves in with his friend Harvey Granson (Donald O’Connor) who has his own concerns about Joan to do with his acrimonious divorce and property he’s ‘hiding’ from his wife at Tom’s place. As soon as Joan becomes aware of the truth, however, she figures out how she might get even, starting with getting rid of Tom’s beautiful English-tailored suits … You know I’ve got the funniest feeling somebody’s trying to tell us something. Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee were a seemingly golden couple and this was the third time they were paired together in starring roles. It’s a mild comedy and a silly premise but it’s played for all it’s worth by a nice cast. The screenplay by David R. Schwartz from a story by Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore quickly pits our lovely couple together in a meet-cute scenario that’s the conclusion of a voiced montage about how all kinds of creatures collide: the key takeaway being, Bobby and Sandra can’t miss! How they keep coming back together is the whole show. The zipper’s stuck. Leo G. Carroll plays the heavily Oirish-accented pawnbroker Mr O’Shee, which provides the start of a running gag; Reta Shaw is one of the women who find Tom half-naked in a phone booth and Don Haggerty does a Zasu Pitts as the policeman who cannot believe his eyes on more than one occasion especially when a line of extravagantly garbed prostitutes shows up on his beat. There’s more eyerolling from the reliable Robert (Stalag 17) Strauss and Ben Lessy as bartenders who observe the ups and downs of the romance with pleasantly predictable cynicism. Could be he IS an interior decorator. O’Connor is given little to do which is surprising but Larry Storch does a good job as thespian Luther, ready to give the girls advice on the acting biz. How the knotty but lovely and loved-up pair of midcentury blond gods figure out their essential problem – mutual deception – as they constantly mistake the other’s line of work is fairly fun but it’s the ensemble that really make this PG sex comedy a decent watch. Naturally the title song over the weird (astronomy) titles and credits is written and performed by the redoubtable Darin. Directed by Richard Thorpe. Have you never seen a naked man in a phone booth?

Deja Vu (2006)

See you yesterday. New Orleans. A ferry carrying US Navy sailors and their families across the Mississippi River for the Mardi Gras celebrations explodes, killing 543 people. ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) Special Agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) evidence of a bomb planted by a domestic terrorist and goes to the mortuary where he examines the body of Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton) seemingly killed in the explosion but found in the river shortly before the time of the blast. Informing Claire’s father and searching her apartment, Doug learns that she called his ATF office the morning of the bombing and figures out that she was abducted and killed by the bomber hours before the explosion. Impressed with Doug’s deductive ability, FBI Special Agent Paul Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) invites him to join a new governmental unit investigating the bombing. Led by Dr. Alexander Denny (Adam Goldberg) the team uses a surveillance programme called Snow White which they claim uses previous satellite footage to form a triangulated image of events four-and-a-half days in the past. Convinced that Claire is a vital link to the unfolding bomb plot, Doug watches her footage and can track the soon-to-be-bomber when he calls about a truck she has for sale. Figuring out that Snow White is actually a time window, Doug persuades the team to send a note to his past self with the time and place the suspect will be. However it’s his partner Larry Minuti (Matt Craven) finds the note instead, and is shot attempting to arrest the suspect. By using a mobile Snow White unit, Doug is able to follow the suspect’s past movements as he flees to his hideout with the wounded Minuti and then witnesses Minuti’s murder. In the present, the bomber is taken into custody after facial recognition systems identify him as Carroll Oerstadt (Jim Caviezel) an unstable self-proclaimed patriot rejected from enlisting in the military. He confesses to killing Minuti and Claire, taking her truck to transport the bomb and staging her death as one of the ferry victims. The government closes the investigation, but Doug, convinced that Snow White can be used to alter history persuades Denny to send him back to the morning of the bombing so he can save Claire and prevent the explosion … What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world but you knew they would never believe you? The premise of this dazzling sci-fi action thriller is perfectly preposterous but is set up so persuasively it never fails to engage. It helps that this has Washington at his most movie star-ish as you’d expect in his third of five collaborations with director Tony Scott, whose command of the medium is embellished by Paul Cameron’s elegant cinematography. For once in my life I’d like to catch somebody before they do something horrible. The actual time capsule that Doug enters literally enables a race against time. What if it’s more than physics? That’s what Doug suggests to elevate rationale for the potential experience because he’s fallen head over heels for the gorgeous Claire on the mortician’s slab so he calls it spirituality but it’s good old fashioned romance – and he means to have this woman come back from the dead. Seeing her eventually spring back to life is fabulous. One man’s terrorist is another man’s patriot. As the domestic murderer paying homage to Oklahoma, Caviezel has the blankness to match his unshakeable convictions that what he is doing is righteous. Satan reasons like a man but God thinks of eternity, Doug counters with unarguable post hoc knowledge which momentarily throws his captive. Then there’s nothing for it but to enter the world as it was days earlier – and to alter one more bit of history to try change the outcome for hundreds of people: alt-history as we watch. There’s a terrific supporting cast including Kilmer and also Bruce Greenwood and the director’s wife, Donna. Super-stylish, fast-moving and an avowed homage to the great city of N’Oleans, cher. Written by Bill Marsilli & Terri Rossio. I see what’s coming

The Flash (2023)

You’re the reason this Zod character is going to destroy the earth? Gotham City. After he has helped Bruce Wayne aka Batman (Ben Affleck, uncredited) and Diana Prince aka Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot, uncredited) stop a robbery by a terrorist gang, police forensic investigator and member of the Justice League Barry Allen aka The Flash (Ezra Miller) revisits his childhood home, where he lived with his parents Nora (Maribel Verdu) and Henry (Ron Livingston) before Henry’s wrongful imprisonment for Nora’s murder. On the day of her death, Nora had sent Henry to the grocery store for a can of food that she forgot to buy, leaving her alone in the kitchen where she was killed by an unidentified assailant. Overcome by his emotions, Barry accidentally uses the Speed Force to form a ‘Chronobowl’ and ends up travelling back in time to earlier in the day. Despite Bruce’s warnings of time travel’s unintended consequences, Barry puts the can in Nora’s trolley at the store, so that his father won’t have to leave the house. As he returns to the present, Barry is knocked out of the Chronobowl by an unknown speedster and arrives in an alternative 2013 where Nora is alive. He encounters his parents and his past self, and realizes this is the day he originally obtained his powers. To ensure his past self gains superpowers, the two Barrys go to the Central City Police Department, where Barry re-enacts the event for 2013-Barry to be struck by lightning. Both end up getting struck by the lightning, giving 2013-Barry powers, but causing Barry to lose his own. As Barry struggles to train 2013-Barry on properly using his powers, they find out that General Zod (Michael Shannon) is planning to invade Earth. In an effort to fight Zod, the Barrys attempt to assemble the Justice League but are unsuccessful; in this timeline, Diana cannot be located, Victor Stone aka Cyborg (Ray Fisher) hasn’t gained his abilities yet and Arthur Curry aka Aquaman (Jason Momoa) never existed. They travel to Wayne Manor hoping to find Bruce instead finding an alternate variant who has long retired. Bruce theorises that using time travel to alter history affects events both prior to and after the alteration. They persuade Bruce to return as Batman and help them find Kal-El aka Superman (Nicolas Cage) … We’re Barry. A project decades in development, this action hero time travel comedy has its tongue planted firmly in cheek but manages to straddle the line between daftness and sentiment. It benefits from a conscious exercise in superhero identity politics as well as the travails of adolescence, bereavement and the possibilities and problems of an alternative reality through a sliding doors moment. Miller gets the chance to flex those acting muscles as past/present/future versions of Barry and has a lot of zippy fun that explores the various identities with wit and verve, assisted by a gallery of superheroes to provide an array of powers and some nice casting in the ensemble including Kiersey Clemons as Iris West, Barry’s journalist love interest. Wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts! Typical of the genre it’s long but fortunately humorous and upbeat, dealing in an interesting way with deep psychological trauma as well as the utter misrecognition of adults regarding their teenage incarnations. Even if the effects leave a lot to be desired, many of the film’s highlights are about Keaton’s performance: when he dons the Batsuit 70 minutes in and reasserts his alter ego from his whimsical trampy iteration it gives the heart a lift and pushes the action in a more interesting direction – this narrative is really about men finding the better part of themselves not to mention we’ve had this facet of Keaton before in Multiplicity not to mention the Batman and Birdman personae and he’s having a ball. Meta is where it’s at and there are some extremely good jokes including a final appearance by another Batman which really tickles the funny bone: the multiple Batman concept really gives this a lift. Screenplay by Christina Hodson from a story by John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein and Joby Harold based on DC characters. The Extended Universe is in almost rude good health. Directed by Andy Muschietti who has a cameo as a reporter. Our kids are going to want to see this

One Life (2023)

Lots of them grew up thinking the worst thing that was ever going to happen to them was piano practice. 1987, Maidenhead, England. Retired 79-year old Nicholas Winton (Anthony Hopkins) cleans up some of the clutter in his office, which his wife (Lena Olin) Grete asked him to do. He finds old documents in which he recorded his pre-war work for the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia and a scrapbook with photos and lists of the children they wanted to bring to safety. Winton still blames himself for not being able to save more. In 1938 just weeks after the signing of the Munich Agreement 29-year-old London stockbroker Nicholas (Johnny Flynn) encounters families in Prague who had fled the rise of the Nazis in Germany and Austria. They are living in bad conditions with little or no shelter or food and in fear of the invasion of the Nazis. Winton is introduced to Doreen Warriner (Romola Garai) (BCRC). Horrified by the situation in the refugee camps, Winton decides to save Jewish children himself. Actively supported by his mother Babette (Helena Bonham Carter) herself a German-Jewish migrant who has since converted to the Church of England he overcomes bureaucratic hurdles, collects donations and looks for foster families for the children brought to England. Many of them are Jews who are at imminent risk of deportation. When the Nazis invade, Doreen and Trevor Chadwick (Alex Sharp) face unimaginable danger themselves. 1987: at lunch with his old friend Martin (Jonathan Pryce) Nicholas thinks about what he should do with all the documents. He is considering donating them to a Holocaust museum but at the same time he wants to draw some attention to the current plight of refugees, so he does not do it. I started the whole thing so I have to finish it. 1938: A race against time begins as it is unclear how long the borders will remain open before the inevitable Nazi invasion. The ninth train has yet to leave the platform when the Nazis invade Poland … You have to let go for your own sake. Based upon Winton’s life story which culminated in an absurdly moving reunion on a 1988 edition of TV’s That’s Life show hosted by Esther Rantzen (played here by Samantha Spiro), this true story from a screenplay by Lucinda Coxon & Nick Drake is a timely reminder of the ongoing plight of Jewish children in an anti-semitic world and the bravery of the pre-war humanitarians who sought to save them from certain and brutal death at the hands of the Germans. Part of the drama is the underplayed revelation that Winton himself has been assimilated in the UK, pivoting his role into one of recognition of the There but for the grace of God variety. Fifty years later Winton is still raising funds for refugees, still plagued by a sense of guilt that he could have done so much more for his own Kindertransports. I’ve learned to keep my imagination in check so I can still be of use and not go raving mad. Perhaps the feel-good factor predominates as opposed to the reality of what the children experienced but this is intended as an uplifting tale, hooking into the curated balm of a startling and beloved TV event. Based on the memoir If It’s Not Impossible …The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton, written by his daughter, the late Barbara Winton, who personally requested Hopkins play her father, he offers a performance of pitch perfect emotion, decent and unfussy – a thoroughly upstanding Englishman who wanted to do the right thing and now reflects on what he perceives as his tragic failure. He said: I was only interested in getting the children to England and I didn’t mind a damn what happened to them afterwards, because the worst that would happen to them in England was better than being in the fire. Praise too for Bonham Carter who is wonderful as his super efficient no-nonsense mother Babi, rattling the doors of Whitehall. (Shall we gloss over the fact that Marthe Keller is cast as Elisabeth Maxwell?) It’s not about me. In an era of shocking narcissism this is a wonderfully sobering story of selflessness and the consequences of bearing witness when the German tanks are rolling in. Absurdly moving, in its own very quiet way. Directed by James Hawes making his feature film debut. Save one life, save the world

Rich and Strange (1931)

Aka East of Shanghai. The best place for us is the gas oven. London couple, Fred Hill (Henry Kendall) and his wife Emily aka Em (Joan Barry), live a mundane middle-class existence. But that changes upon receipt of a letter informing them an uncle will advance them as much money as they need to enjoy themselves now rather than after his passing. So Fred quits his job and they both travel across the  English Channel to France. I couldn’t wear this – people will think we’re not married! After sampling Paris’s hot spots, they book passage on an ocean liner bound from Marseilles to the Far East. Fred gets seasick, leaving Em alone on board. To soak up time, she becomes acquainted with Commander Gordon (Percy Marmont), a dapper, popular bachelor. Later, upon his recovery, Fred is taken with a German princess (Betty Amann). As the voyage progresses, Fred and Em each spend more and more time with their new paramours, to the virtual exclusion of each other. By the time they arrive in Singapore, Fred and Em’s marriage is in a shambles. Em prepares to leave with Gordon for his home in Kuala Lumpur. However, before boarding the train, Gordon reveals that Fred’s princess is in fact a sham – a con artist who’s using him until his money runs out. Em now realises she can’t allow Fred to fall into this trap so she abandons Gordon to warn her husband. But it is too late. Fred discovers his ‘princess’ has just left for Rangoon, with £1000 of his money. Fred and Emily have only enough left to book passage home to England on a tramp steamer. Later, the ship is abandoned after a collision in the fog … Love is a very difficult thing. It makes everything very dangerous. Adapted by director Alfred Hitchcock’s wife and collaborator Alma Reville with Val Valentine from the novel Rich and Strange by Dale Collins, who apparently wrote a series of ‘sea romances’, this belongs firmly in middle of the British phase of the legendary filmmaker’s career before he made his sound breakthrough proper. The story might owe more to the fact that the Hitchcocks travelled to Paris for ‘essential research’ and fetched up in a brothel something that has never really been probed. Roughly one quarter of this comedy of marriage has dialogue so it’s still in the transition from the silent era replete with heavily made up performers and overacting. However there are some masterful shots by cinematographers Jack E. Cox and Charles Martin, particularly at the beginning, aside from the water tank situation and the ship’s set which was constructed in studio. There’s a deal of stock footage dressing up certain sequences and along with the lurches from drama, to melodrama, to comedy and back again, this is an uneven viewing experience. The travelogue aspect which incorporates fascinating footage from the Folies Bergeres (Em thinks they’ve pulled the curtain up before the performers got their clothes on), includes Paris, Port Said, the Suez Canal, Columbo and Singapore and inspires some fruitily amusing sub-titles in the silent fashion. The score by Adolph Hallis does a lot of heavy lifting and he would work again with Hitchcock on Number Seventeen the following year. Stage star Kendall makes for an adequate hero: his seasick scenes would make any bored wife run to the arms of Marmont, a star from the earlier era who would also appear for Hitchcock in Young and Innocent and The Secret Agent. Barry is strikingly beautiful, a beestung blonde teeming with sweetness and light. She had dubbed Anny Ondra in the earlier Hitchcock film Blackmail. She would make influential train thriller Rome Express the following year and sadly retired from films after 1933’s Mrs Dane’s Defence. She is now Henrietta, Dowager Duchess of Bedford. Elsie Randolph as the ‘spinster,’ a cruise ship cliche, is a hoot, particularly in the Egyptian market scenes. A regular stage partner of Jack Buchanan, she has the distinction of having acted twice for Hitchcock, forty years apart, since he hired her to play Gladys in Frenzy, the film that marked his return to British cinema, released in 1972! Kendall as the frustrated City office worker finally out of the ‘burbs gets some good scenes with Amann, especially when he’s trying to seduce her and they’re both in fancy dress – it really is a giggle watching him try to get to the bottom of her veils. She never really understood me. I was a bit too much for her. The German-American actress is exceptionally well cast as the femme fatale. The conclusion of course owes a lot to the play that inspired the title – The Tempest. Students of Hitchcock will have a hard time detecting the signature here as he grapples with the form of sound directing but the difficulties illustrate the issues arising from a setbound production (despite some clever production design) and the gap between those limitation and the freer comedy thriller which would become his metier in just a short while with his breakthrough, The Man Who Knew Too Much. The material and the performers for a great screwball comedy were here but it’s just not in the writing. Fascinating not least because it is judged Hitchcock’s great failure and marked the end of his dealings with British International Pictures. There’s only ever been you

Capricorn One (1978)

A funny thing happened on the way to Mars. Three astronauts Charles Brubaker (James Brolin), Peter Willis (Sam Waterston) and John Walker (O.J. Simpson) are about to launch into space on the first mission to Mars. But when a mechanical failure surfaces that would kill the three men, NASA chief Dr James Kelloway (Hal Holbrook) removes them from the Capricorn One capsule otherwise their funding will be pulled by Washington. To prevent a public outcry, NASA secretly launches the capsule unmanned and requires the astronauts to film fake mission footage in a studio in the middle of the desert. They do so under fear of their families being killed on a plane bringing them back home. However, the plan is compromised when ambitious TV journalist Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould) starts reading deeply into a message Brubaker has broadcast to his wife Kay (Brenda Vaccaro) after his friend at NASA Elliot Whitter (Robert Walden) suddenly disappears when he detected the TV signals ahead of the capsule transmissions. When Caulfield’s brakes are tampered with he visits Mrs Brubaker at home to watch some innocuous home movies which confirm his suspicions that the mission is faked then finds the FBI in his apartment framing him for drug possession … With that kind of technology you can convince people of almost anything. Conspiracy theories ahoy! Director Peter Hyams’ screenplay exploits the story that won’t go away about the televised Apollo moon landing and extrapolates a juicy suspenser with an amiable cast. Not in the same league as the major paranoid thrillers of the era, it’s still bright and breezy and pretty plausible given the deniability factors and the political mood. Of cult value for the (non-)performance of Simpson with Karen Black along to help the wonderfully ironic Gould (whose dialogue is superior to the rest of the cast’s) get his man. And then there’s a crop dusting scene that of course recalls North by Northwest – in reverse! With Kojak at the helm! Godalmighty this is a lot of fun but there’s one horrifying scene in the noonday sun that will make you weep. It’ll keep something alive that shouldn’t die

Misbehaviour (2020)

So this is the eye of the revolution – up close it sure is revolting. As the 1970 Miss World competition looms, divorced mother of a little daughter Sally Alexander (Keira Knightley) encounters sexism as she is interviewed for a place as a mature History student at University College London. She encounters Women’s Liberation activist Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley) painting slogans on a poster and warns her about bobbies patrolling the street. She joins her group which lives as a commune and advises them to engage with the media – they’re so shabby and disorganised and they don’t even have TV but another group in Peckham disagrees with their tactics. Meanwhile Eric Morley (Rhys Ifans) and his wife Julia (Keeley Hawes) are busy trying to secure Bob Hope (Greg Kinnear) as host of Miss World against his wife Dolores’ (Lesley Manville) wishes because when he last did it in 1961 he took the winner home. Pressured by London-based South African apartheid activist Peter Hain (Luke Thompson), Eric Morley decides to parachute in an extra contestant, black Pearl Jansen (Loreece Harrison) who along with Miss Grenada Jennifer Hosten (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is one of the few coloured contestants in the beauty contest. Then a wilder element of Libbers blows up a BBC van on the eve of the competition and the Grosvenor Road commune has to go through with a proper protest under cover of normal clothing during the live show … You think you can have the same freedoms as a man but you can’t. The screenplay by Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe from Frayn’s story is rooted in reality: this is a group biography but done as a comedy drama in the style of a heist story. It’s a conscientious and entertaining if mild intervention into the evolution of women’s rights. A touch more of zany might have helped this become a genre entry which it’s straining to do but respect for the (still living) heroines obviously hampers wilder moments. And perhaps the truth. It’s a political tale of unbelievable misogyny and inequality. The display of the beauty queens’ behinds for rating is truly shocking: how on earth did this outrageous cattle mart go on as long as it did?! However the lovely irony, that the protest (which occurs in the midst of infamous philanderer Hope’s outrageously sexist monologue) engenders a feminist movement is well played and the meeting between arrested Sally and newly-crowned winner Hosten nicely encapsulates the complex theme and issues which today’s feminists would call intersectional. Fun fact: Sally’s daughter Abigail (Maya Kelly) was the daughter from her marriage to legendary actor John Thaw. Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe. Turns out my seat at the table is actually a high chair

The Office Christmas Party (1960)

As bad as it gets … the masterful The Apartment (1960). Best Christmas movie? Probably.

Red Joan (2019)

Socialists can have glamour. Joan Stanley (Judi Dench) is a widow living out a quiet retirement in the suburbs when, shockingly, the British Secret Service places her under arrest. The charge: providing classified scientific information – including details on the building of the atomic bomb – to the Soviet government for decades. As the interrogation gets underway, Joan relives the dramatic events that shaped her life and her beliefs. As a physics student at Cambridge in the Thirties, young Joan (Sophie Cookson) is befriended by beautiful Sonya (Tereza Srbova) and her cousin Leo Galich (Tom Hughes) who grew up together after Sonya was orphaned and their relationship is more like that of a brother and a sister than cousins. Joan falls in love with the intense intellectual Leo. He goes to Russia in 1939 and is stuck there when war breaks out. Joan takes a job as assistant to married scientist Prof. Max Davis (Stephen Campbell Moore) at the wartime Tube Alloys project planning an atomic bomb for Britain. Leo returns from the Soviet Union and asks her to pass information but she refuses. She starts sleeping with Max on a trip to Canada where an encounter with Leo (now based in Montreal) sees her refusing once again to be a spy. Back in England she watches horrified the newsreel footage of the bombing of Hiroshima and finds herself sympathetic to the Soviet cause. But she accuses Leo of using her and then finds him dead, an apparent suicide. She tries to make contact with Sonya again … We’re not on the same side any more. Adapted from Jennie Rooney’s titular novel (based on the life of Melita Norwood) by Lindsay Shapero, this spy drama is meticulously made and attractively played by a talented cast. (If Tom Hughes isn’t the next James Bond I’ll eat one of the extravagant hats on display here). However some crucial plot points and revelations are played down in a badly mismanaged script which effectively diffuses any suspense into two near-identical scenes of the police staging a search of the Alloys department to find evidence about the supply of information to the Soviets. The flashback structure doesn’t always come off, the passage of time isn’t demarcated well and the relationship between Dench and her barrister son Nick (Ben Miles) doesn’t hit the dramatic point required: in fact his father’s identity isn’t clear in a parallel plot with Sonya’s pregnancy in the 1930s. The real culprit recruiting people to the Russian side is far too obvious, the tension is flat and it’s paced poorly. Not what you expect from a director of the calibre of Trevor Nunn but the story is intriguing nonetheless and Cookson does well with the role. Beautifully shot by Zac Nicholson. Is anything you ever told me actually true?

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

I’m not in love with you any more. Ex-litigator Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) leaves his three gifted children in their adolescent years and winds up in prison for fraud then returns to them after they have grown, falsely claiming he has a terminal illness when he’s thrown out of the hotel whose bills he cannot meet. He insinuates himself back into the family home where his archaeologist wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston) is dating accountant Henry Sherman (Danny Glover). Maths whiz and business genius Chas (Ben Stiller) is a widower who survived the plane crash that killed his wife the previous year and moves his sons Ari (Grant Rosenmeyer) and Uzi (Jonah Meyerson) back to the family home convinced their apartment is too dangerous. Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) is a depressive playwright who hasn’t had a play produced in seven years. She is married to older neurologist Raleigh St Clair (Bill Murray) who doesn’t know any of her secrets. Formerly successful tennis player Richie (Luke Wilson) is on a neverending world cruise following a disaster on court. When he realises he’s in love with Margot, his adopted sister he contacts their neighbour Eli Cash (Owen Wilson) a lecturer and popular novelist who himself starts romancing Margot but dabbles in drugs. Royal’s arrival coincides with each family member enduring a crisis that seems insurmountable and living together again brings things to a head …  This illness, this closeness to death… it’s had a profound affect on me. I feel like a different person, I really do. Flat symmetrical compositions with intricate production design and little camera movement. Ironic soundtracks. Blunt wit. At first glance Wes Anderson’s films might feel too contrived:  highly stylised yet with an inimitable tone, destined forever for the shelf labelled Quirk. This is reminiscent of Salinger with its NYC setting, big brownstones, a dysfunctional family full of supposed eccentrics and is openly influenced by Le feu follet and The Magnificent Ambersons. At first glance it’s rambling and lacking construction. But at the centre of it is a performance of paternal dysfunction by Gene Hackman that’s genuinely great – but even that appears to deflect from the roles played by his children.  They are a prism by which this deceitful man’s life is viewed. Hence the title.  It was written for him against his wishes, says Anderson. There is an undertow of sadness reflected by the repetition of Vince Guaraldi’s theme from TV’s Charlie Brown series (and what an extraordinary soundtrack underpins this bittersweet comic drama, with everyone from The Clash to Elliott Smith busy expressing those sentiments the characters refuse). It’s a determinedly literary experience with Alec Baldwin’s voiceover ensuring that even if we miss the beautiful Chapter Titles (because this is based on a non-existent book…) we are always anchored in a sprawling narrative with its endearing cast of characters. In truth these are people who are unsuccessful adults, mired in grief, lost in unrequited love (inspiring two suicide attempts), depression and psychological problems, constantly beset by memories of childhood achievements they cannot reproduce in the real world.  Faking it. It is a work of profound sadness and understanding. Just look at the pictures. Written by Anderson and Owen Wilson. I wish you’d’ve done this for me when I was a kid