Mirren is ethics girl in British take on drones

Eye in the Sky (15) *** Dir: Gavin Hood With: Helen Mirren, Aaron

Paul

Runtime: 102 minutes

THOUGH tackling the same subject, the ethics of drone strikes, as the 2014 US picture Good Kill, Eye in the Sky is a very British affair.

How British? Colin Firth is a producer. Also keeping up the end for Blighty– and ensuring there is plenty of agonising over tough decisions in impossible situations – is Helen Mirren and the late Alan Rickman as military chiefs holding the hands of slippery politicians. Over in the Nevada desert, meanwhile, Aaron Paul has his finger on the trigger playing an American pilot.

Director Gavin Hood (Rendition, Tsotsi) piles in the twists and turns almost to an exasperating degree, and most of them you will see coming a mile off, but the tension is well handled and the politics are clearly laid out.

Criminal (15)

** Dir: Ariel Vromen With: Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones Runtime: 113 minutes

THE wrong ‘un of the title is convicted killer Jericho (Kevin Costner, above left), but the word could apply equally to this stonkingly daft crime drama.

Also paying the mortgage beside Costner are Ryan Reynolds and Tommy Lee Jones as a CIA agent and a doctor caught up in a memory transfer experiment.

Ridiculous hardly begins to describe it as all concerned plumb the depths of a very silly story, but there are some (unintentional) laughs to be had from the dialogue, which goes from bonkers to worse and back again.