The Stranger's Hand (1954)

The story behind Graham Greene's story is interesting (the author entered a competition to see if he could win second prize parodying Graham Greene's style) but this adaptation, unfortunately, a "noone believes her" thriller about a young boy who investigates when his father fails to show up to a family reunion in Venice, is dull despite some interesting locations and the post-war kidnapping plot.

★★☆☆☆

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The Quiet American (2002)

The Quiet American

"They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived," says the central character of Graham Greene's book, played here by Michael Caine, Thomas Fowler, an English reporter in Vietnam whom it is very hard not to think of as Graham Greene himself because like Fowler, Graham Greene sat at The Continental Hotel in Saigon overlooking Lam Son Square writing articles for The Times about the breakdown of French colonialism in the north of Vietnam, and the fact this adaptation, one more loyal to the book's political angle than the 1959 original adaptation, is able to seamlessly blend Greene's fiction (a love story and political thriller) into actual world history shows just how acute an eye for human nature and world politics Greene developed as he lived his Vietnam experience.

★★★★☆

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Wind River (2017)

Don't be turned off by the utter bleakness of the two previous Taylor Sheridan-penned movies (Sicario and Hell Or High Water, both also set on the American frontier) because this third suspense thriller of the loosely held together trilogy while bleak has a heart and a social conscience, telling a mystery of a woman's body found in the snow on a Native American reserve, and the only dissatisfaction you'll have as you come out of the cinema is that the suspense and the social commentary isn't sustained for longer beyond a ludicrous Reservoir Dogs finale that surely doesn't solve anyone's problems.

★★★★☆

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Ministry of Fear (1944)

Graham Greene's novel The Ministry of Fear is an 'entertainment' rather than one of his more literary thrillers (like his novels heavy with Catholicism and imbued with authentic world detail from the author's real-life as a wartime spy) and Fritz Lang delivers his adaptation as just that - a shallow and quite ridiculous - but fun - film noir entertainment like a John Buchan thriller, with spies operating country fair fortune-teller booths and with forces for good and bad both chasing a cake that survives despite being wrested from the arms of multiple owners, partially eaten, involved in a bombing, and despite spending time in a bird's nest!

★★★★☆

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