ALSO SHOWING
The Post (12A)
Functioning as an unofficial prequel to All The President’s Men, director Steven Spielberg’s new movie about the publication of the Pentagon Papers is a timely dramatisation of the media’s determination to hold Richard Nixon’s duplicitous, dangerous and paranoid administration to account in the face of intense pressure to bury a damaging story.
Contemporary parallels barely need to be spelled out, but they’re present throughout the film, which also functions as both an origins story of the Washington Post’s emergence as a nationally important media organisation and, rather more significantly, a portrait of its proprietor, Katharine Graham, played by Meryl Streep, who risked all to get the story out. Indeed the film is as much about Graham’s struggle to negotiate the patriarchal minefield of her own company as it is about the machinations of the newsroom, which was presided over by her editor and ally Ben Bradlee (played by Tom Hanks).
Streep and Hanks are in pure moviestar mode here, sparking off each other as Graham and Bradlee figure out the implications of publishing details of the classified government report detailing America’s disastrous involvement in Vietnam.
Though Spielberg doesn’t shy away from embracing the story’s oldfashioned, virtuous appeal – it’s very earnest and at times a little corny – it’s also terrifically entertaining and he keeps the story moving at a rapid clip, emulating the constant deadline pressure of a newspaper in a race against time to get an important story out there. The film does rather skip over the origins of the Pentagon Papers themselves, but in illuminating a lesser-known story about their publication he may just have zeroed in on the right story for the current moment.
The Final Year (12A)
There’s no escaping the dramatic irony inherent in Greg Barker’s Obama documentary. Following three of the president’s top advisers – Secretary of State John Kerry, UN Ambassador Samantha Power and Press Secretary Ben Rhodes – over Obama’s last 12 months in office, what might have been an interesting look at the realities of working in the West Wing in a relatively scandal-free administration is transformed by the looming spectre of Trump into a horror movie in slow motion. It’s compelling in ways you wish it wasn’t.
Coco (PG)
The latest from Pixar starts off as a conventional follow-your-dreams narrative. Set against the backdrop of Mexico’s Day of the Dead cerebrations, it’s about a young boy called Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) who just wants to sing and play guitar. This being a Pixar film, though, there’s an intriguing twist, one that upends those initial expectations via an elaborate magical loophole that traps Miguel in the spirit world. A substantial improvement on recent misfires like The Good Dinosaur and last year’s barrel-scraping Cars 3.
The Commuter (15)
Until the action literally comes off the rails in a badly rendered Cgi-heavy finale, there’s some enjoyment to be had in this train-bound thriller. Cast as a cop-turned-insurance salesman, Liam Neeson finds himself presented with a moral quandary on the day he loses his job: help a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) identify a passenger named Prynne on his train home and he’ll receive $100,000. The catch? Prynne might not live that much longer. It’s preposterous, but Neeson’s hollowed-out everyman is surprisingly compelling. ■