ALSO SHOWING
All the Money in the World (15)
You’d never know Kevin Spacey was once cast in this true life story about oil baron J Paul Getty and the kidnapping of his grandson and heir John Paul Getty III. Ridley Scott’s 11th hour decision to cut the disgraced star from the finished film just six weeks before its Christmas Day release in the US may be one of the more extraordinary Hollywood production stories of recent years, but in recasting the role of Getty Snr with 88-year-old Oscar-winner Christopher Plummer, the veteran director’s technical bravado ensures it’s practically impossible to see the joins. It might even be to the film’s advantage. Playing the “richest man in the history of the world”, Plummer – who’s also the right age so doesn’t require layers of distracting prosthetics – brings an authentic sense of patrician worldliness to Getty and ends up dominating the film as he cold-heartedly refuses to pay his grandson’s ransom when he’s snatched by Italian radicals in Rome in 1973. What follows is both a tense kidnapping thriller and a dark family drama as young Paul Getty (played by Charlie Plummer – no relation) loses body parts while his mother (Michelle Williams) is forced to negotiate with the terrorists and with her former father-in-law, finding to her horror that the latter is more ruthless. Mark Wahlberg co-stars as Getty’s Cia-trained fixer, but it’s Plummer Snr and Scott’s visual panache that are the stars of the show.
Molly’s Game (15)
As charged-up, ridiculous and self-parodic as Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut can occasionally seem, the West Wing creator knows how to deliver something hugely entertaining. Based on the true story of former US Olympic skiing prospect turned high-stakes poker entrepreneur Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain), it’s a full-throttle ride through the murkiness of the entertainment industry and the inequities of the justice system. Though current events have overtaken its exploration of gender politics, Chastain’s great, as are Idris Elba as her straight-shooting lawyer and Kevin Costner as her therapist father.
Hostiles (15)
Crazy Heart/black Mass director Scott Cooper turns his earnest, studious gaze on the western with a revisionist movie that seeks to reconcile the genre’s classic iconography with its troubling racial politics. Christian Bale takes the lead as an army captain, about to retire, who is ordered to transport a dying Cheyenne prisoner (Wes Studi) and his family to their ancestral lands so he can die in peace. Encountering a young homesteader (Rosamund Pike) enroute, whose family has been slaughtered by a tribe of Comanches, their mutual contempt for each other is softened in the face of many more external threats – something that enables the film to symbolically explore the complexities underlying the birth of modern America just as the frontier is closing. It’s an unashamedly slow-burning, meditative film, jolted to life by moments of extreme but considered violence. It may not have the force of a modern classic like The Revenant ,but it’s a respectable addition to the genre all the same.
Brad’s Status (15)
Ben Stiller’s penchant for playing sad-sack neurotics reaches breaking point in this charmless indie-by-numbers comedy/drama about a selfrighteous egomaniac who suffers a crisis of confidence when his son’s imminent departure for college causes him to reassess his own life choices. Writer/director Mike White squanders a good cast on a fairly generic story that fails to offer much in the way of profundity. ■