Film digest
SIX MINUTES TO MIDNIGHT (12)
A real-life finishing school in East Sussex, which polished German girls between 1932 and 1939, provides an intriguing setting for director Andy Goddard’s slow-burning espionage thriller.
Based on a script co-written by Goddard and actors Eddie Izzard and Celyn Jones, Six Minutes To Midnight is an entertaining if occasionally farfetched yarn cast in the mould of The 39 Steps, which goes on the run with a man wrongly accused of murder as the threat of war looms across Europe.
It’s an old-fashioned tale of skulduggery and deception, which engineers dramatic tension by introducing an arbitrary 24-hour countdown to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war on Germany.
That invisible ticking clock, replicated in the score of composer Marc Streitenfeld, creates sufficient narrative thrust to carry the plot through some of its least plausible twists such as one laughable example of covert surveillance in front of an open doorway, where the spy can be easily spotted by his targets.
A colourful if entirely superfluous supporting performance from Jim Broadbent as a rosy-cheeked bus driver invigorates a chase sequence in the briskly paced second half.
MADE IN ITALY (12)
More than a decade after Liam Neeson privately mourned the death of actress wife Natasha Richardson in a skiing accident, art mimics heartbreaking life in Made In Italy.
The directorial debut of actor James D’Arcy casts the towering County Antrim-born action man as a taciturn widower crippled by grief opposite his real-life eldest son Micheal.
Any ghoulish fascination derived from watching a proud patriarch sift through the tangled emotional wreckage of an accident decades after the fact with his child – “You can’t remember and I can’t forget” – is quickly supplanted by crushing disappointment.
D’Arcy’s script trades in ramshackle cliches rather than piercing psychological insight and a rundown Italian villa is employed as a heavy-handed metaphor for the men’s disintegrating relationship.
Lindsay Duncan’s fleeting appearances as a purse-lipped estate agent add welcome dashes of acidity and spice to an otherwise bland stew.
THE BANISHING (15)
A haunted house in wartime England unleashes predictable jolts in director Christopher Smith’s supernatural horror.
Inspired by real-life tales of paranormal activity at Borley Rectory in Essex, The Banishing exhumes a coffin crammed to bursting with hoary tropes: a family home in the grip of a malevolent force, a cherubic child lured away by a vengeful spirit, torchlit processions down dark corridors, defaced religious texts and nightmarish visions of impending doom.
Screenwriters David Beton, Ray Bogdanovich and Dean Lines fail to jangle nerves or tingle spines with their tangled tale of isolation and religious fervour, which becomes increasingly convoluted as they unravel the history of a shadowy brotherhood that has spilt the blood of innocents.
There are no skin-crawling shocks to match Smith’s impressive directorial debut Creep set in the labyrinthine tunnels of the London Underground.
The spectres of The Turn Of The Screw and The Woman In Black loom large, which achieved far more in similar settings.
SILK ROAD (15)
Playfully billed as a “product of journalistic research and wild flights of fiction”, Silk Road dramatises the hunt for an authority-flouting entrepreneur, who established an illegal underground marketplace dubbed Amazon for drugs.
David Kushner’s 2014 magazine article Dead End On Silk Road: Internet Crime Kingpin Ross Ulbricht’s Big Fall, gives writerdirector Tiller Russell plentiful food for thought as he zig zags between the twentysomething target (Nick Robinson), who claims to be using “the internet as an instrument of liberty”, and a morally flawed DEA agent (Jason Clarke) on his trail.
This game of cat and mouse in the digital space has the makings of a gripping thriller and the opening scene of Silk Road – a covert operation to take down Ulbricht and seize his laptop – establishes a nerve-jangling, brisk pace.
Unfortunately, those initial droplets of tension evaporate as Russell struggles to chart a clear, concise path through the twists and turns in the case, dividing time between hunter and naive prey.