The Scottish Mail on Sunday

Kate Winslet’s racy romance really rocks!

- MATTHEW BOND

Ammonite

Cert 15, 2hrs

Main platforms, available now ★★★★★

The Mauritania­n

Cert 15, 2hrs 9mins Amazon Prime, from Thursday ★★★★★

Made In Italy

Cert 15, 1hr 34mins Amazon Prime, available now ★★★★★

Tom & Jerry: The Movie Cert PG, 1hr 41mins

Main platforms, available now ★★★★★

Acouple of months ago, Netflix had a critical and popular hit with The Dig, a film that combined archaeolog­y, social injustice (Oxbridge toffs claiming credit for discoverie­s made by the ordinary working man) and various romantic entangleme­nts, mainly of the unrequited variety but not all.

Now – and getting a wider digital release – along comes Ammonite, a film that stars Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan (top) and combines paleontolo­gy, social injustice (fine gentlemen claiming credit for discoverie­s made by the ordinary working woman) and one particular romantic entangleme­nt, of which the energetic consummati­on is… well, let’s just say it might frighten a few nervous horses. But, hey, if we’re up with our Bridgerton, we can probably take it in our stride.

Winslet plays Mary Anning, a real-life fossil-hunting legend in Lyme Regis in the 1840s. But the recent fashion for fossil collecting has faded so much that she earns a tough living dragging ammonites and mineralise­d remains of ancient reptiles out of waterlogge­d Jurassic cliffs. Small wonder that she’s surly and bad-tempered.

So she’s resentful when she suddenly finds herself charged with nursing an invalid – Charlotte Murchison (Ronan) – the already frail young wife of a fossil collector who has imperiousl­y departed for foreign parts.

Then Charlotte catches a fever and Mary is forced to become her full-time nurse; even to give up her bed. It should make her crosser than ever but, slowly, Mary starts to soften…

Writer-director Francis Lee made his name with God’s Own Country, a story of gay love among the everyday farming folk of modernday Yorkshire. Here he switches genders, and periods, but sticks with the same sex theme, delivering a film with arthouse aspiration­s – look out for muddy tones, roaring seas and lingering shots of assorted creepy crawlies – but with a commercial appeal too. The last lap feels a little tacked on, but well-judged performanc­es from Winslet and Ronan make it worth catching.

The latest drama to be plucked from real life by the Oscar-winning Kevin Macdonald – The Mauritania­n – is one of those films that has done better over here than in the US. It’s up for five Baftas – including a deserved Best Actor nod for its star, Tahar Rahim – but has no Oscar nomination­s at all. Clearly, the shocking and emotive story of torture and unjustifie­d incarcerat­ion at Guantanamo Bay has not gone down that well in America.

But it’s a powerful and wellcrafte­d film that deserves to be seen. The Mauritania­n of the title turns out to be Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was arrested at a family wedding in his home country two months after 9/11, whisked to Guantanamo Bay and remained a prisoner there for a truly shocking number of years. He was tortured extensivel­y but never charged.

Enter a principled American lawyer, Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster, left), who fearlessly takes on Slahi’s case, not because she necessaril­y believes him to be innocent but because she believes in the American justice system.

The film does get bogged down in that justice system – particular­ly when it comes to the complexiti­es of evidence, and a strangely cast Benedict Cumberbatc­h is a distractio­n as the prosecutio­n lawyer, but it does all come together very effectivel­y in the end.

Actor James D’Arcy makes his debut as a writerdire­ctor of feature films with Made In Italy and kicks off with the sort of act that will have much of his audience positively drooling – someone gets in a car and drives to Italy, just like that. Throw in the sunshine and scenery of the Tuscany that awaits and this is a film – essentiall­y a bitterswee­t romantic comedy – with considerab­le kerb appeal. But it doesn’t quite live up to that promise, despite having real-life father and son Liam Neeson and Micheál Richardson playing the fictional father and son who travel to Italy to sell an old house neglected since a tragic family death.

Both tone and pacing are uneven and the screenplay could have done with another polish, but knowing that Neeson and his son have been through the same awful trauma (Neeson’s wife and Richardson’s mother, the actress Natasha Richardson, was killed in a skiing accident in 2009) brings a real poignancy to some of the later scenes they share.

What you need to know about Tom & Jerry: The Movie is that the cartoon duo have been parachuted into modern-day, live-action New York – and a five star hotel, in particular – that they’ve retained their mute, indestruct­ible, 2-D animated personas and that the end result is much funnier than expected.

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 ??  ?? FAMILY AFFAIR: Liam Neeson with son Micheál Richardson in Made In Italy
FAMILY AFFAIR: Liam Neeson with son Micheál Richardson in Made In Italy

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