Marlowe (2022)

Tricky dicky dialogue at the start that has characters answering questions with questions in a fast prattle and repetitive circle ("What would you say, Mr Marlowe, if I said you said I said...?" sort of talk) makes Neil Jordan's adaptation of John Banville's book start out feeling like a spoof of the hard-boiled detective novel, but it's not and is in fact, eventually, a beautiful-to-look-at period crime story featuring Raymond Chandler's flatfoot Philip Marlowe, played by a perfectly hangdog, trenchcoated, fedora-ed Liam Neeson, investigating a case of a missing Lothario in 1920s Los Angeles, but some problems along the way take you out of the drama - Alan Cunmmings' overacting, for one, and a nebulous mystery that keeps going around and around on the spot, much like that fast Neil Jordan prattle.

★★★★☆

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Disorder ('Maryland') (2015)

It's The Bodyguard but Whitney Houston's songstress is Diane Kruger playing the wife of a shady arms dealer, her bodyguard is an ex-soldier who shows signs of post-traumatic stress, and this is muted, French, and sophisticated, not a crowdpleasing Hollywood blockbuster - and it is engaging for the most part except that it ends up not having much to say about Matthais Schoenaert's security guard whose vigilance and over-suspicion seem warranted in his line of work, leaving him a sufferer of mere dizzy spells and sweats, perhaps just in need of a hug?

★★★☆☆

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In The Fade (Aus dem Nichts) (2017)

Diane Kruger is terrific as a woman whose husband and son are killed in a bomb explosion, her performance easily the best thing in this drama which, after an intense start, features a not-very-likely court hearing of charges against the culprits before moving into a brief will-she-or-won't-she revenge thriller final act, ending on a titlecard that tries to relate what has happened to actual world events but leaving you feeling this is an all-too-late attempt at relevance and leaving you wondering why this connection wasn't made more explicit all the way through.

★★★☆☆

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Anything For Her (Pour Elle) (2008)

The husband of a woman wrongly imprisoned for murder takes law into his own hands to break her out of jail in this 2008 French movie (remade in the US in 2010 as The Next Three Days with Russell Crowe), a rivetting thriller but abit light on the details around the husband's impossible task.

★★★☆☆

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