Fugitive Margot can’t outrun Bonnie and Clyde
DREAMLAND ( ★★★II) is a glossy crime thriller set in rural Texas in 1935.
English actor Finn Cole (from Peaky Blinders) plays Eugene, a teenager devoted to detective comics, who finds fact beguilingly merging with fiction when he discovers a fugitive female bankrobber hiding out in the family barn.
This is Allison Wells (Margot Robbie), who has a $10,000 reward on her head after her latest smalltown armed robbery, carried out with her lover, ended in several fatalities. Oddly, nobody mentions a certain Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, but it’ s impossible for the audience to ignore them — and Arthur Penn’s classic 1967 film — even if the characters seem cheerfully unaware.
Dreamland is certainly no Bonnie and Clyde, with director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte seemingly not entirely sure whether to concentrate on style or substance, but it has a striking Depression- era chic as Eugene goes on the run with Allison, after deciding that the huge bounty is not nearly as alluring as she is.
THERE is a similar theme in I’m Your Woman ( ★★III), this time set in the 1970s, with Rachel Brosnahan (from the u.S. House Of Cards) as Jean, whose criminal husband Eddie goes missing after a gangland escapade backfires.
Since the rival gang thinks she knows Eddie’s whereabouts, she must scarper too, in the dead of night, with the help of hi s mysterious associate, Cal (Arinze Kene).
The complication in what would otherwise be a straightforward hide-and-seek thriller is that Jean has a baby with her — she was unable to have children, so Eddie just brought one home one day.
Despite a sparsity of dialogue that gets a little wearing, Brosnahan gives a fine central performance. But director Julia Hart’s film promises quite a bit more than it delivers, leaving us to make sense of too much that just doesn’t add up — not least Jean’s own sudden skill as a killer after an hour or more of floundering wildly out of her depth.
DREAMLAND is in cinemas from today. I’m Your Woman is available now on amazon Prime Video.