An awards cert, but oh, it’s buttock-numbing!
Killers Of The Flower Moon
Cert: 15A, 3hrs 26mins HHHHH
Foe
Cert: 15A, 1hr 50mins HHHHH
Pain Hustlers
Cert: 12, 2hrs 2mins. Available on Netflix from Friday
HHHHH
The Pigeon Tunnel Cert: 12A, 1hr 32mins Available on Netflix from Friday HHHHH
Trolls Band Together Cert: G, 1hr 32mins HHHHH
On the considerable plus side, Killers Of The Flower Moon features compelling performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, with the lesser-known Lily Gladstone quietly proving every bit their equal too. All three are certain to land award nominations, alongside director Martin Scorsese and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. This is a big, significant, spectacular-looking picture.
On the modest down side, however, it concerns a small chapter of early 20th-Century American history that will be little known to commercial audiences here and is, er, three-and-a- half buttocknumbing hours long.
Personally, I loved the additional layer of concentration that seeing it in a darkened cinema brought, not least because this is a film absolutely made for the big screen. But I will understand anyone who wants to break it down into more digestible chunks on Apple TV+.
This is a film, fundamentally, about greed and evil, and the terrible depths that human nature can descend to when vast wealth beckons. Set in Oklahoma after the end of the First World War, just as the motor car began to replace the horse, it begins with oil being struck and huge sums of money suddenly pouring into the area.
But for once it’s not the white folk growing rich, it’s the members of the Osage tribe who cannily retained control of the mineral rights when they were compelled to move onto their reservation. Suddenly it’s native Americans who have the big houses, fancy cars, even private planes, and the white folk don’t like that one bit.
Enter Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) returning home from war to join his rancher uncle, William Hale (De Niro), a man who speaks the Osage language, knows and respects their traditions and counts many of them as close friends. But from the moment he invites his nephew to call him by his nickname ‘king’, we suspect this is not a man whose friendly smile can be entirely trusted. And Scorsese, who co-wrote the screenplay, soon concedes we are right.
There are two intertwined ways for an outsider to get their hands on Osage wealth – murder and marriage, and both feature large and powerfully over the next three hours. De Niro particularly
‘Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan star in this menacing film noir’
impresses, showing that even at the age of 80 he can deliver a performance that genuinely surprises. I loved Gladstone’s performance too, the perfect quiet foil to the anger, bluster and occasional echoes of Marlon Brando that DiCaprio brings to his role. Foe, by contrast, has a more immediate kerb appeal, combining a menacing film-noir style (it’s not many films that can remind you of both Blade Runner and
The Postman Always Rings Twice at the same time), fashionable themes about artificial intelligence and two of the coolest Irish actors working in film today.
Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan play Junior and Hen, a young couple trying to make a go of it in the over-heated, rurally depopulated American mid-west of 2065. But their marriage has problems – he’s insensitive, she’s unhappy and then a mysterious stranger, played by Aaron Pierre, arrives to make a very unusual offer.
What ensues is sinister, intriguing and, at times, surprisingly sexy, and will do no harm at all to the careers of the three principals or that of Garth Davis, who co-writes the screenplay alongside Iain Reid, author of the book on which the thing is based.
Following hot on the heels of BlackBerry and Dumb Money comes another of those stories of American boom and bust with which Hollywood is currently so enamoured. But what makes Pain Hustlers stand out is that it has a terrific central female role for once, an opportunity that Emily Blunt grabs with both hands, and that director David Yates (yes, the man with four Harry Potters and three Fantastic Beasts to his name) imbues the proceedings with a trashy, highly watchable gloss.
We’re well short of The Wolf Of Wall Street territory but American Hustle certainly comes to mind as we watch Blunt playing a streetwise former pole-dancer who becomes a pharmaceutical rep almost by accident and turns out to be astonishingly good at it.
The problem is, the powerful pain-killing drug she and her company are selling is a highly addictive synthetic opioid. Uh-oh…
The veteran documentarymaker Errol Morris meets the late David Cornwell, better known as the spy thriller writer, John le Carré, in The Pigeon Tunnel and from the moment Cornwell explains the title (a system of tunnels under the lawn of a Monte Carlo casino released live pigeons into the sunshine, where they would be shot by sporting gentlemen like Cornwell’s father) we are completely hooked.
Part of the appeal is Cornwell’s intelligence and charm, and part is not knowing if the notoriously unreliable writer is telling the truth. Even when he insists he is. Highly recommended.
A voice cast led by Justin Timberlake and Anna Kendrick is back, so too the animation and soundtrack.
But it’s seven long years since the trolls had their first outing and, lapses of memory apart, the truly chaotic plot of this sequel, Trolls Band Together – in which virtually everyone seems to be seeking a lost sibling – is already the stuff of parental mid-term break nightmares. Some decent boy-band jokes provide limited comfort.
‘Truly chaotic Trolls is already the stuff of parental mid-term break nightmares’