The Sense of an Ending (2017)

This movie adaptation of Julian Barnes' Man Booker prize-winning The Sense Of An Ending is as enjoyable a watch as the book is a read but with both, after you've shrugged at the end, you're left with the distinct Sense that the story was kept deliberately ambiguous because to have stated things outright would have been to reveal it to be a mere sordid sex drama...and anyway, the source of the ambiguity, ostensibly the heart of the story - that self-interested men are unreliable narrators - really only extends to main character Tony Webster's postcard- and/or letter-writing because after that, the story shifts to poor scapegoat Adrian and his life story far too closely mirroring too many others' (that of an unfortunate classmate, for one, and Tony Webster's own life, similar in far too many respects).

★★★★☆

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Harry Brown (2009)

When housing estate thugs murder his friend, former marine Harry Brown (played by Michael Caine), an elderly gent grown weary of the gangbangers' reign of terror and frustrated by the ineffectual response of police, takes the law into his own hands and his campaign of retribution makes this a captivating revenge thriller, like Get Carter on a pension, with harrowing scenes of drug den depravity and wanton youth violence helping to keep audiences angry and sympathetic to Harry Brown's vigilantism.

★★★☆☆

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Our Idiot Brother (2011)

Prince Myshkin is The Idiot, Dostoevsky's model of the ideal Christian whose plain, guileless approach to life riles the people around him and raises questions about how it is possible to be pure and good in a base, self-interested corrupt society, so perhaps this utterly inane, uneven comedy drama starring Paul Rudd as a simpleton with Jesus looks and a plain, unthinking approach to life that causes upheaval in his sisters' lives, is a pointless refashioning of Dostoevsky's novel?

★☆☆☆☆

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Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

A uncommunicative young man forms an unhealthy dependency upon a mail-order Russian Build-A-Woman only to do away with her when he is ready to upgrade to something better, and true to real life, his small-town community rallies behind the murderer, is what I wanted this comedy to realise it was saying.

 

★★★☆☆

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Hugo (2011)

Watch this, a precious, highly stylised and drama-free whimsy about an orphan boy who discovers the magic of cinema, or simply recall instead that part of each Oscar award ceremony where the presenters heavyhandedly expound film's curative properties. 

★★☆☆☆ 

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Match Point (2005)

A young man is offered financial security and social standing by one woman, passion and excitement by another, in a fairly conventional story of an affair that Woody Allen turns into a measured, mesmerising thriller that references Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.

★★★★☆

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