The God-fearing victim of a fruity 1920S TROLL
‘Unreliable memory is at the heart of this emotionally absorbing drama’
MATTHEW BOND
Wicked Little Letters
Cert: 15A, 1hr 40mins
★★★★☆
American Star
Cert: 15A, 1hr 47mins
★★★★☆
Spaceman
Cert: 15, 1hr 47mins. Also on Netflix from Friday
★★☆☆☆
Shoshana
Cert: 15, 2hrs 1min
★★★★☆
Memory
Cert: 16, 1hr 39mins
★★★★☆
Internet ‘trolling’, whereby unpleasant people hide behind online anonymity to heap foul-mouthed abuse on unsuspecting users of social media accounts, is one of the great horrors of modern life. But there’s nothing new about anonymous insults, as a thoroughly entertaining new film makes fruitily clear.
Yes, Wicked Little Letters, set in England in the 1920s, takes us back to the days of the poisonpen letter, where a freshly franked stamp and an elegantly handwritten address gave no clue of the unsigned nastiness within.
Here, the letters are addressed to Miss Edith Swan (Olivia Colman), a God-fearing yet somewhat reluctant spinster, but their ripe contents are read out with angry relish by her elderly but still domineering father (Timothy Spall).
Her appalled mother Victoria (Gemma Jones) looks on in shock as language still not acceptable in a family newspaper, but all too common in a 15A certificate film, pours forth. Ah, but who sent them?
The Swans are in no doubt – it has to be Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), the wild Irish war widow who lives next door and with whom Edith has fallen out.
The police seem convinced, too. Only copper Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) has her doubts, but no one will listen to her. She’s a woman, after all…
This is lightweight commercial fare with much of the fun coming from hearing four-letter words being tossed around in a drama that could otherwise pass muster as a Miss Marple episode. But it’s a good and largely true story, it does deepen (a little) as it goes on, and director Thea Sharrock draws well-judged performances from what is, after all, a top-notch cast.
At 81, Ian McShane, once best known for playing the roguish antiques dealer in TV’s Lovejoy but now far more famous as the owner of the hitman’s hotel in the John Wick franchise, really ought not to be able to carry an entire feature film. But he does so effortlessly in American Star, which sees him playing an ageing assassin who travels to the Canary Islands for his latest job. But as he waits for his target to arrive, he gets happily distracted, first by an attractive young woman (Nora Arnezeder), then by her equally attractive and more age-appropriate mother (Fanny Ardant) and by the rusting hulk of an old wrecked liner. Ah, that’ll be the American Star, which has washed up on a Fuerteventura beach… a bit like him.
It’s very nicely shot and perhaps a little too thoughtful for thriller purists but, thanks to McShane, it’s definitely worth catching.
Misfire of the week is Spaceman, not because it’s one of Adam Sandler’s serious films, or because he’s playing a lonely Czech astronaut who’s travelled to Jupiter to investigate a giant cloud of primordial space dust.
No, it’s more to do with the fact that while Mission Control tries to conceal the fact that his younger wife (Carey Mulligan) has left him, he is troubled by a noisy toilet and visions of a giant, talking, philosophically minded, er… spider. Too tangled a web for me.
Shoshana arrives in cinemas with tragically apposite timing. For while Gaza burns in 2024, Michael Winterbottom’s hugely moving period drama not only does an excellent job of explaining the historic role of the British in creating the mess that is Israel/ Palestine but also shows how little has changed in almost 90 years.
The Russian actress Irina Starshenbaum is terrific as the passionate young Zionist of the title and gets strong support from Douglas Booth as her British intelligence-officer lover and Harry Melling as a sadistic police officer.
In Memory, Jessica Chastain plays a nervous woman who is followed home by a man she briefly encounters at a high-school reunion. But why has Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) followed her, and does she really not know him as she initially insists?
With unreliable memory at the heart of this emotionally absorbing drama, finding out turns out to be a surprisingly tense affair.