How #Metoo broke the news... and the big boss
BOMBSHELL
★★★✩✩
(15, 109 minutes)
Director: Jay Roach
Stars: Margot Robbie, Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, John Lithgow, Kate Mckinnon
JUST MERCY
★★★★✩
(12A, 137 minutes)
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton Stars: Michael B Jordan, Jamie Foxx, Brie Larson, Rafe Spall
WAVES
★★★✩✩
(15, 136 minutes)
Director: Trey Edward Shults
Stars: Kelvin Harrison Jr, Taylor Russell, Alexa Demie
IT’S PROBABLY “too soon” for Harvey Weinstein: The Movie. After all, the poor, misunderstood mogul is still dragging himself into a Manhattan courtroom on a Zimmer frame to face charges of rape and predatory sexual assault. But Hollywood seems to have decided this is the perfect time for the first #Metoo drama.
Instead of asking uncomfortable questions about the movie business, Bombshell takes aim at an easier target – the too-dead-to-sue chairman of TV’S Fox News, Roger Ailes.
The Ailes sexual harassment scandal didn’t make much of an impact over here and neither did his dreadful news channel, which was quietly pulled from the UK in 2017. But director Jay Roach and The Big Short writer Charles Randolph provide enough background details to make it watchable.
We begin in 2016 as anchorwoman Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron, unrecognisable in prosthetics) talks directly to the camera while giving us a tour of the newsroom. She’s riding high at the channel, so Ailes gives her the job of interviewing runaway Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
It doesn’t go well.after she gets under his now famously thin skin by quoting his dodgy comments about women, the statesman-like future president responds by trolling her on Twitter and, without a hint of irony, making misogynistic comments about her on rival channel CNN.
Ailes is supportive, ordering her to take a break to avoid becoming “the story” while praising her for making “great TV”.
However, as “evangelical millennial”, newcomer Katya Pospisil (a fictional character played by Margot Robbie) discovers, Ailes’s support comes with a price.
In a queasy scene, he orders her to hitch up her skirt in his office.
“It’s a visual medium,” Ailes salivates before reminding her of the value of “loyalty”.
Gretchen Carlson’s days of doing “favours” for Ailes are coming to an end. The veteran presenter (Nicole Kidman) has been shunted from primetime to the graveyard slot, and when she presents a “no cosmetics” show Ailes erupts, telling her that no one wants to watch a middleaged woman sweat.
The three strands come together when Carlson blows the whistle after being sacked. For years, Kelly has put her ambition first, but now she has to decide if it’s time to make a stand.
The film works better as a behind-thescenes exposé, showing how women can become complicit in their own oppression.an excellenttheron makes us feel the weight of Kelly’s dilemma but her powercrazed hack is very difficult to root for.
The film even includes a clip of her arguing that only white men should be allowed to dress up as Santa. Theron probably earned her Oscar nomination, but this is a very challenging heroine.
I wasn’t looking forward to Just Mercy, a fact-based drama about a horrible miscarriage of justice. True crime podcasts and documentaries have built a growing audience for these stories but I couldn’t even handle it when Eastenders writers diddled Arthur Fowler over the Christmas Club money.
Yet although I spent most of the two-hour running time digging my fingernails into the arm rest and cursing Alabama’s knuckle-dragging cops and lawyers, I did find plenty to admire.
Jamie Foxx puts in his best performance since his Ray Charles biopic as Walter “Johnny D” Mcmillian, who in 1987 was sent to death row for the murder of teenage white girl who was killed while the entire congregation of his local church watched him enjoying a fundraising fish-fry.
The reliable Michael B Jordan delivers a soulful turn as Bryan Stevenson, the fearless, Harvard-educated attorney who took up his case.with such a powerful story, director Destin Daniel Cretton had the good sense to disappear into the background. He delivers a conventional crime procedural that lets the outrageous facts do the talking.
Mcmillian’s case seems straightforward, but corrupt district attorney Tommy Chapman (Rafe Spall) and Ralph Myers (Tim Blake Nelson) – the key witness who seems to have been coerced into fitting him up – prove sizeable obstacles. After a while, I just wanted the poor soul’s nightmare to end but, thankfully, the heroic Stevenson had the stomach for the fight. Someone build this man a statue!
Waves is a finely-acted US drama of two halves. For the opening hour, we’re watching a slow-burning thriller about a young man with the world at his feet.
Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr) is 18. He has a fancy car, an impressive six-pack, an adoring girlfriend (Alexa Demie) and a spot at a fancy university for being good at that unwatchable wrestling they do at the Olympics.then he gets two bits of life-changing news and begins to fall apart.
If you’ve seen the Irish filmwhat Richard Did, this may seem familiar. But halfway through, the film pulls the rug from under our feet by switching focus to Tyler’s sister (Taylor Russell) and her gawky boyfriend (Lucas Hedges).
The first half is unbearably tense, the second is thoughtful but forgettable.