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Reviews

Miss Sloane | Review

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★★★

From the very first to the final frame, Jessica Chastain sells Miss Sloane – John Madden’s thriller about a lobbyist who takes on the masterminds of Capitol Hill to manipulate the pushing through of strengthened gun restrictions in America. Hers is, with delicious irony, an all guns blazing performance of addictive watchability, which proves essential in holding together the film’s increasingly contrived plot. So good is Chastain here that she very nearly manages to lobby you into an assumption that the film is a political masterpiece. It’s not that, but it is good fun.

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Reviews

A Dog’s Purpose | Review

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★★

If you’re among the masses who remain totally convinced that 20th Century Fox missed a trick by not recruiting Werner Herzog to direct Marley and Me back in 2008, Lasse Hallström’s latest, A Dog’s Purpose (aka Nietzsche and Me), is probably the closest thing you’re ever likely to get to consolation.

This may look like cute, canine fun for all the family, but don’t be fooled – that’s what it wants you to think – the reality is a bleak, so-called adventure in which the film’s ‘Marley’ is euthanised within the first five minutes, before being promptly reborn as a Golden Retriever called Bailey, whose later death leads to a further two incarnations. Also tackled here are: the Cuban Missile Crises, domestic abuse, depression and animal neglect; not forgetting, of course, the philosophical question of ‘being’ that drives the plot.

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Reviews

Rules Don’t Apply | Review

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★★★★

When it comes to directing, Warren Beatty is no frequent flyer. By contrast, the muse of the Hollywood legend’s first feature since 1998’s Bulworth, Rules Don’t Apply, is none other than the aero-obsessive, billionaire-businessman, investor and occasional filmmaker, Howard Hughes.

Though the film’s production didn’t kick-start until early 2014, it was Beatty’s 1973 encounter with Hughes, at a hotel in which the tycoon had booked six rooms and four bungalows for ‘the girls’, that initially inspired its forty-four year process from concept to release. Though Rules Don’t Apply is no swan-song masterpiece, within it are swathing tides of perfection which ooze pure pleasure as they flow in and leave debris in their moments of recession. A quite remarkable obsession as produced a generally remarkable film.

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