SHORTCUTS

NEW RELEASES

Hail Caesar! Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, this screwball whodunit (or, perhaps more accurately, whosinit) pays homage not only to the stars who populated showbiz’s most glamorous firmament during Hollywood’s Golden Age, but also to the Coens’ own canon, from Barton Fink and O Brother, Where Art Thou? to A Serious Man and even Fargo. For Coen fans and movie-trivia mavens, Hail, Caesar! is a bracing injection straight into their pleasure centres, brimming with the brothers’ signature brio, offhand erudition and more inside jokes, as the saying once went, than there are stars in heaven. Slick, silly and often extravagantly pretty, it’s a pastiche that threads a tricky needle, conveying the dual nature of cinema as an enchanting art form and a ruthless, rationalised industrial practice. ★★★★ Trumbo: In 1947, Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) was Hollywood’s top screenwriter until he and other artists were blacklisted for their communist affiliations. The movie follows Trumbo’s path to winning two Academy Awards while blacklisted. After a somewhat tedious and overly episodic first half, in which the screenplay hops back and forth between heavy-handed political argument and plot exposition, Trumbo becomes a far more successful movie as the film settles into a fascinating groove. The logistics of how Trumbo survived, fronting a stable of other blacklisted writers and churning out his own work under various aliases, make for a great yarn. ★★★ 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi: Based on Mitchell Zuckoff’s 2014 book, director Michael Bay film chronicles the 2012 attacks on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and a nearby CIA station that left the American ambassador and three others dead. As an action film, it is intense and gripping, but as drama, it is bombastic and unsubtle. ★★★ 50 Shades of Black: Marlon Wayans takes a break from his Haunted House series to co-write and star in this spoof of Fifty Shades of Grey. Making a parody of that film should have been easy – the original book and adaptation themselves played like elaborate spoofs. But that hasn’t stopped Wayans – who’s run his horror movie spoofs into the ground with the Scary Movie and Haunted House franchises – from trying. The result is predictably dismal. ★ Happiness is a Four-Letter Word: Based on an award-winning South African novel of the same name, the film stars Khanyi Mbau, Mmabatho Montsho and Renate Stuurmanan. It tells a story of glamorous housewife Zaza (Mbau), perfectionist lawyer Nandi (Montsho) and trendy art gallery owner Princess (Stuurman) who seem to be living the dream: money, success, and loving partners. The three friends juggle life’s surprising changes as they come to learn that “happiness doesn’t come with a manual”. Not reviewed

ON CIRCUIT

Spotlight: Set in Boston in 2001, Thomas McCarthy’s film follows the journalistic investigation into the persistent abuse of children by the city’s priests. It’s a movie you could imagine Henry Fonda or James Stewart starring in as upstanding journalist heroes: old-fashioned, painstaking, absorbing and deliberately low-key. Mark Ruffalo and Michael Keaton give fine character performances in a grim film with the momentum of a well-told detective thriller. ★★★★★ The Dressmaker: Jocelyn Moorhouse’s film is lively and enjoyable enough and often gorgeous to look at, but undermined by its shifting storytelling styles. As Kate Winslet’s Tilly turns up in the two-bit 1950s Aussie town where she endured a wretched childhood, the film shapes up as a brash revenge comedy, but the comedy is combined with dark melodrama dealing with bereavement, childhood trauma and shared guilt. A film that starts off seeming satirical begins to take itself seriously. ★★★ The Hateful Eight: In keeping with most Quentin Tarantino movies, The Hateful Eight combines crudity and sophistication and acute psychological insights with cartoonish characterisation. As ever, Tarantino wrong-foots us. We expect Peckinpah, but we get Agatha Christie in this Western version of And Then There Were None. ★★★★