Espionage never looked so deadly
Benedict Cumberbatch’s new film, The Courier, is set in the early 1960s, which means vast amounts of alcohol are routinely consumed during the course of the supposedly working day. There are beers at the golf club, a generous Scotch on the return home and industrial quantities of vodka on business trips to the Soviet Union.
But I came out of it in distinct need of a stiff one myself. For, as Cold War thrillers go, this is top class – tense and stressful to an almost unbearable degree. When a heart attack suddenly featured… well, I wasn’t a bit surprised. Espionage has never looked so dangerous. Or deadly.
Cumberbatch, who dipped an elegant toe into the spy game with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy a decade ago, is really good in what is essentially a stylish retelling of a true story. He plays Greville Wynne, a London-based businessman recruited by MI6 and the CIA to act as an intermediary between themselves and Oleg Penkovsky, a highranking Kremlin official. Horrified at the looming prospect of nuclear war, Penkovsky has offered to spy for the West.
Dominic Cooke, who made the excellent On Chesil Beach and worked with Cumberbatch on The Hollow Crown, structures the finely shot action impressively, shifting s l owly f r om t he comfortable familiarity of Wynne’s home life to the growing dangers of Moscow, and then on again. It’s exceptionally well cast, too, with the Georgian actor Merab Ninidze spot- on as Penkovsky, Rachel Brosnahan of TV’s The Marvelous Mrs Maisel fame as a young but ambitious CIA agent, and Angus Wright as her ‘old school’ MI6 counterpart.
Despite the familiarity of the genre and a passing resemblance to Steven Spielberg’s Bridge Of Spies, it’s highly recommended.
Free Guy sounds like The Truman Show for a new generation, in that the Guy in question isn’t a character in a reality TV show, as Truman Burbank so painfully discovered, but a so-called NPC – non-playing character – in a violent video game. Every day is essentially the same for the hyper-happy Guy, who is played by Ryan Reynolds and good at this sort of thing.
He gets up, buys his regular coffee on his way into the bank where his shift is inevitably interrupted by a violent armed robbery. Until, one day, he spots an attractive young woman wearing sunglasses – which we know indicates an active player – impulsively starts to follow her and slowly but surely begins to take a more active role in his own life. Which isn’t meant to happen to an NPC. They’re just cannon fodder.
Directed by Shawn Levy, best known for Night At The Museum and Date Night, Free Guy is a slowburner, taking its time to show that there’s more to it than brash acting, big visual effects and an obvious resemblance to the likes of Jumanji, Ready Player One and Tron. But it eventually becomes a lot of summer-holiday popcorn fun thanks to a clever script, a fine Hollywood debut from Killing Eve star Jodie Comer and some unexpected echoes of Inception.
Minamata finds Johnny Depp playing W. Eugene Smith, the US journalist who exposed the suffering of the people of the Japanese city of that name, who were poisoned for years by waste water f r om a chemical pl ant being dumped into the sea, despite toxically high levels of mercury. It’s an important story but needs a better retelling than the indulgent and confusing treatment it gets here.
Given how rude some critics have been about Dan Stevens’s acting – particularly in Downton Abbey – it’s brave of him to take on the role of a love robot in the very strange German-language romantic comedy I’m Your Man. But fair’s fair, he definitely pulls it off… and in impressive German too.