The Fabelmans (2023)

The poster says, "Capture every moment," but a more appropriate line would be "capture just a series of moments from mostly one formative year in the life of a young schoolboy who dreams of making movies, and really wallow for most of the time in the uncomfortable matter of the boy's involvement in his mother's love, sex, and fidelity, while only treating very cursorily the much more interesting ideas of the camera's fidelity - its equal ability to tell truth and lie - leaving bemused viewers wondering why, if this is Steven Spielberg's deeply personal life story, the lead is Sam, not Steven, and why the life story abruptly ends with a shrug (and a playful wink) in the middle of Sam's teens - perhaps this was to be a Wonder Years-style TV show gone wrong; perhaps seventy other years' worth of cinematic genius are on the cutting room floor.

★★☆☆☆

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Weird: The Al Jankovich Story (2022)

I wasn't terribly interested to know more about the 80s pop song parodist Weird Al Jankovich, but one minute with this droll comedy with its hilarious cliched approach to the music biopic and tongue-in-cheek exaggeration and I was hooked, laughing and snorting all the way through as Weird Al's life and times is, well, expertly parodied.

★★★★☆

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Elvis (2022)

It garnered the lead, Austin Butler, BAFTA and Golden Globe awards but he never has a chance to act given the relentless strobe of Baz Luhrmann's three-hour docudrama: the camera flicks, spins, and sweeps, never resting for a second on anything - Butler included - and we unnecessarily spin and enter Graceland upside-down several times, so, while interesting, this is an exhausting look at Elvis's life, his upbringing, dizzying rise to stardom, financial exploitation, and premature death. 

★★★☆☆

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The Blind Side (2009)

In this adaptation of Michael (Moneyball, The Big Short) Lewis' based-on-fact book, a woman (Sandra Bullock) takes in a homeless student, real-life Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), and helps him carve out an education and a future in sport, but while the first half pulls at heartstrings with its Christian saviour story and the second half occasionally amuses with its cameo-laden comedic look at the NFL college draft, what you realise by the end is that Oher himself is missing - a physical presence in the film but little more than a mere shape, a centrepiece for a whole lot of other people's busy-ness and noise around the table.

★★☆☆☆

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Rocketman (2019)

Fans will relish the chance to rediscover Elton John's music in this new form with clips of his songs strung together Mamma Mia-style into a kind of motion picture photo album, while others will hopefully find something to be interested in over the  course of the singer's very familiar trajectory to worldwide celebrity, although like Elton John himself, they will find it hard to find anything in the singer's adopted persona to emotionally connect with - an abandoned childhood identity, for instance.

★★★☆☆

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Shirley (2020)

Does it say more about me or this drama that the movie, a choppily edited, goal-diffuse and, regarding the characters and their behaviours, a largely psychologically incoherent one (who knows scene-to-scene, for example, if Shirley and her husband love each other or not, are co-conspirators in mischief or not, are each other's bitterest enemy or most devoted supporter or not) ended without me knowing Shirley, the title character, is Shirley Jackson, the famous US horror novellist I've since had to learn about on Wikipedia?

★★☆☆☆

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Capote (2005)

This isn't In Cold Blood but Truman Capote writing 'In Cold Blood', and it is painterly and utterly captivating in its evocation of the 1960s and in the way it contrasts the cocktail parties, soirees of New York with the bleak landscapes of rural Kansas, its scene of the now infamous Clutter family murders and its penitentiary stretched out across the flat, but the biopic remains frustratingly superficial about its subject, more snapshot than character study, touching upon - for a Capote Devotee maybe - but not wholly taking up - for anyone else - myriad points of interest including Capote's addictions (we just see him with a glass in hand, a mere signal for those in the know), his self-centredness (he cries, but we wonder why; he says he's done all he can (after a holiday in Spain) but we wonder if he actually believes it); the veracity of his journalism (we hear him repeatedly proclaim his near-perfect recall but wonder if it might be because he feels his credibility is/would be challenged); his deteriorating relationship with Harper Lee (she cools but we wonder what affect this has on him), and the freedom he had in his relationship with Jack Dunphy (there are hints at dalliances, and possibly even one with one of the killers, Perry Smith (according to some sources but not this film), but we are left wondering if he feels duplicitous...or anything at all).

★★★☆☆

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Just Mercy (2019)

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of the book upon which this movie is based, is depicted here (by Michael B Jordan) setting up the EJI and working to free from death row a first client, Alabama prison inmate 'Johnny D' (Jamie Foxx) and if there are moments you wish this long and only very plainly told 5-star story were over, you'll sit through it in any case given the case Stevenson makes against capital punishment is unequivocal and uncomfortable, and incontrovertible is his presentation of the justice system, its courts, police, and jails as a flawed (but held up as sacrosanct) temple of white privilege - a theatre not furnished with iluminated exit signs for the benefit of the beset inside.

★★★☆☆

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Denial (2016)

I remember Holocaust denier David Irving being barred entry to Australia when I was in primary school and I was visiting Auschwitz last year when I learned denying the Holocaust is illegal in Poland (and many other countries, apparently), so I was interested to catch this dramatisation of the 1996 courtcase that Irving brought against writer Deborah Esther Lipstadt, whom Irving claimed defamed him, to think more about matters of historical truth, historical revisionism, historical denial and freedom of speech and to see how these issues are handled legally, but the movie presents such stuff in only a very minor, not very gripping small-screen way and like Wilkinson's defence lawyer, resists giving Timothy Spall's Irving time or even a look in the face, instead focusing on the go-nowhere character foibles and dull personal details of the defence team as a means of padding out the story, when in fact far more fascinating would have been finally letting Irving in, finally letting him speak, and finally allowing viewers like me to stare hard at him to understand how he came to be such a vexatious denier and why Wilkinson's defence lawyer, the Australian Government, and the world censors his patently obvious lies.

★★☆☆☆

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Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

There is nothing objectionable in watching people catapault from one success to another as Freddie Mercury and his band Queen do in this bandopic, but there is nothing much unique about the trajectory traced by this particular movie, either - the band experiences the crazy heights and then the abject lows experienced by all winners of The Voice and all musicians in movies - have you seen A Star Is Born? - and all you are left with in the end as you watch a painstakingly recreated 20-minute set at a rock concert is doubt regarding the reality of Queen's longevity and questions - because I just don't know - about the accuracy of Rami Malek's impersonation.

★★★☆☆

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First Man (2018)

This story of Neil Armstrong's career, always interesting but sometimes as dry as a NASA rocketship user manual starts with a family trauma that might, in an account less clinical than this, be used to illuminate the astronaut's drive to overcome insane physical and mental challenges to become the first man on the moon.

★★★☆☆

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Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool (2017)

This biopic makes very cursory work of the early stages of the relationship between 40s Hollywood starlet Gloria Grahame, apparently once an actual person, and her much younger Liverpoolian lover Peter Turner, then wants viewers to invest themselves in that relationship's protracted death throes as Grahame, sick with breast cancer, returns to Liverpool an ailing Norma Desmond type - but quite sympathetic - seeking to convalesce in a room upstairs in Peter's family's home.

★★☆☆☆

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A Quiet Passion (2016)

IBS sufferers, heavy breathers, and fans of the Fast and Furious franchise be warned: Quiet is the operative word in the title of this biopic which unfolds with the urgency of a poetry recital, with not a word wasted as Emily Dickinson, the posthumously celebrated American poet, grows up in the 19th century, distinguishes herself as unique in early adulthood, and then grows steadily more insular and cantankerous as she gets older and loses, one by one, those she loves to death or, equally devastating, marriage.

★★★★☆

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Neruda (2016)

In 1948, Communist Party of Chile Senator, the poet Pablo Neruda and his wife went on the run after the Chilean Government issued an order for his arrest; this movie injects into the history a Government-hired detective whose success or failure in turning up Neruda means the difference between him being forgotten - a failed everyman antagonist - or remembered for eternity - a hero protagonist - an analogy that allows the movie to demonstrate the rousing nature of Neruda's poetry and politics in (a beautifully realised) Chile of the times, but sadly the movie tries for epic and ends up feeling fleeting with its split narrative.

★★★☆☆

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J. Edgar (2011)

Like the film's montage depicting J Edgar Hoover crime-busting, bursting in on organised crime gangs and making arrests, director Clint Eastwood jumps in and machineguns through the details of the life and controversial career of the founder and long-term director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, creating an interesting but hollow highlight reel that slows only occasionally to exaggerate theories of what motivated the man: a Norman Bates-style homelife, apparently, and - an aspect of the man's life not all historians agree upon - his homosexuality.

★★★☆☆

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The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

I read Jordan Belfort's revolting book at the insistence of an enthusiastic friend; watching this Scorsese adaptation was my own decision to see if the appeal of the book that eluded me was something discernable in the film and it turns out the extravagant rise and fall of the Wolf ("Wolfie"), a small-time Bernie Madoff, makes for a loud, looong, obnoxious film, all kinds of non-PC and hard-to-believe, but minus the book's self-adulating tone and despite the pitiful man on display and the devastating crimes just out of sight, the movie, particularly the last half, is engaging and often very funny.

★★★☆☆

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Steve Jobs (2015)

Biopics often feel like narrative-free highlight reels but Danny Boyle's cleverly constructed one about the co-founder and CEO of Apple tells a fascinating story with great heart, humour, emotion, and is full of character, about the flawed genius, his vision for Apple, his family and key professional relationships.

★★★★★

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Hitchcock (2012)

I am a huge Hitchcock fan but found very little of interest in this wafer-thin movie-length impersonation and can only assume obsessed fanboys somewhere get off on the minutiae of the making of controversial Psycho which (*spoiler alert*) did end up getting made.

★★☆☆☆

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Behind the Candelabra (2013)

Starring Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as Liberace's long-term partner Scotty, this biopic tells a fabulous, blackly funny, fascinating, but when it comes to Liberace's motivations, a frustratingly ambiguous life story, never really getting behind anything.

★★★☆☆

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