The Sundance Kid lives again
THE OLD MAN & THE GUN
(12, 93 mins)
David Lowery
Robert Redford, Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tom Waits
Director: Stars: BIRD BOX
(15, 117 mins)
Susanne Bier
Sandra Bullock, John Malkovich, Trevante Rhodes, Jacki Weaver
Director: Stars: SORRY TO BOTHER YOU
(15, 112 mins)
Boots Riley
Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Terry Crews
Director: Stars:
ACTORS are slippery creatures. Their job is, after all, to maintain a lie and great performances often come from actors deceiving themselves. So I’m not entirely convinced by Robert Redford’s claim that his performance in
will be his last. But if the 82-year-old never steps in front of another camera then this gentle crime drama will be a good way to bow out.
The film is based on a 2003 New Yorker article about Forrest Tucker, a career criminal who broke out of San Quentin prison at the age of 70 and went on a bank-robbing spree across America. The story is set in 1981 but there’s a whiff of the Old West about this freewheeling outlaw. And it is impossible to watch the movie without recalling its star’s long career. Tucker could almost be the Sundance Kid who has mellowed in old age.
There’s also something of the actor about Tucker. We see him knock off a fair few banks but we never see him brandish his gun. His main weapons are a silver tongue, a warm voice and a pair of twinkly baby blues. If his victims see him as paragon of chivalry, you suspect it’s because Tucker believes it himself.
For director David Lowery, who worked with Redford on his charming remake of Pete’s Dragon, his big guns are his cast.
This is a rare crime movie that is powered by understated performances rather than suspense, shoot-outs, car chases and violence.
While making his escape from the film’s opening robbery, Tucker calmly pulls over to the side of the freeway to help an elderly damsel in distress.
The recently widowed Jewel (Sissy Spacek) has broken down. She thinks this nattily attired old gentleman is her knight in shining armour but we know otherwise.
What looks like a hearing aid is actually attached to a police scanner. And the last thing the police are looking for is an elderly couple staring under the bonnet of a broken-down car.
It turns out that Tucker knows nothing about engines. So he gives Jewel a lift to a diner where the couple drink coffee and share a slice of pie.
When he tells her how he earns his living, Jewel thinks it is just part of his patter. But something begins to spark. Spacek and Redford have a great chemistry, too. Both are old-fashioned film actors who know how to work the close-up. There is something magical about the way the years slowly drop away from Spacek in this diner scene. She begins as a mistrustful older lady and ends as a coquettish teenager.
Tucker keeps popping in on Jewel, as the bank-robbing spree crosses state borders.
When Casey Affleck’s detective John Hunt joins the dots, the papers dub him and his two elderly accomplices (Tom Waits and Danny Glover) the “Over The Hill Gang”.
& The Gun The Old Man
Towards the end of the film, Lowery reveals the extent of Tucker’s long criminal career with a montage that recycles footage from Redford’s earlier films. It is the kind of thing you see when an actor accepts a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars. Judging by this accomplished performance, Redford might win his second and possibly final Academy Award in February.
NETFLIX desperately wants an Oscar to apply a respectable veneer to the business of home streaming. So it has invested in award-friendly directors, given them free rein and persuaded cinemas to give the films limited releases.
I suspect the apocalyptic horror
isn’t a script that many film studios would hand to the 2011 winner of the Foreign Language Academy Award. The premise of Susanne Bier’s film, taken from Josh Malerman’s novel, is pretty scary. Sandra Bullock, who won her Oscar in 2010, plays a pregnant woman trying to survive in a world where invisible creatures are inducing visions that cause people to commit suicide.
“You look, you die,” she explains to two blindfolded children in the opening scene. This could double up as the movie’s tagline. We never find out what the victims are seeing but we know the visions play on deep-seated fears and repressed desires.
Here, the primal urge to look overturns our need to survive and our desire to protect
Bird Box
our children. So Bullock’s predicament should scare the living daylights out of us. However Bier seems more interested in making a classy, character-based drama than a pulpy chiller.
After most of humanity has committed suicide, Bullock’s Malorie holes up in a suburban home with a diverse group of survivors played by John Malkovich, Trevante Rhodes, Sarah Paulson, Jacki Weaver, and Lil Rel Howery.
Divisions come to the fore as this mismatched group devise ways to protect the house and organise blindfolded trips to the supermarket.
Bier also keeps cutting to future scenes of Malorie and two children trying to navigate a boat down a river. As they are all wearing blindfolds, this is more difficult than it sounds.
Bullock is excellent and there are a couple of tense moments but Bier can’t summon up enough scares. I suspect the acclaimed director has just learnt that horror is a lot more difficult than it looks.
from rapper-turneddirector Boots Riley is funny, clever and stylish, set in an alternate-reality version of Oakland, California, where a young black man called Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) has taken a soul-crushing job in telesales.
An old hand played by Danny Glover offers some advice: “Use your white voice”. And when Cassius starts speaking in a nasal drone, his voice dubbed by a white actor, his sales skyrocket.
As his co-workers go on strike, he is beckoned into a golden lift to join the “power sellers” flogging slave labour to evil multinationals.
Cassius takes the pay cheque, falls in with Armie Hammer’s insane billionaire and falls out with his artist girlfriend
(Tessa Thompson).
Before everything goes completely off the rails in the final act, Cassius appears on a bizarre reality TV show, attends a surreal art gallery opening and performs a toecurling rap. Not all of it works but Riley keeps digging until he strikes comedy gold. I can’t wait to see what he unearths next.
Sorry To Bother You