Infamous (2006)

Toby Jones' impersonation of Truman Capote is the more uncanny one and this movie provides more interesting context about Capote's trip to and interactions with locals in Holcomb, Kansas, but unlike the Philip Seymour Hoffman movie released a year earlier, which rivetted, this unfortunately timed "other movie" dealing with Capote's authorship of In Cold Blood flags by the end with the scenes between Daniel Craig's Perry and Toby Jones' Capote repetitive and the direct-to-camera commentary of friends Harper Lee and Jack Dunphy and others, particularly towards the end of the movie, a distraction.

★★★☆☆

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Contagion (2011)

In Deep Impact, another global panic disaster movie with an all-star cast, it is a meteor hurtling towards Earth that, threatening human extinction, leads the world's population to act in extraordinary ways (including holding a lottery for a limited number of life-preserving prizes), but here in Contagion, it is a new strain of virus - something like the coronavirus - that wipes out millions, starts a global panic, and launches the scientific race to find a vaccine, and even though we've seen it all before in Deep Impact and Outbreak and others, it is gripping stuff ripped from today's newspaper headlines.

★★★★☆

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Hush (1998)

This soapy Southern family melodrama has been shamelessly, laughably packaged up as a psychosexual thriller with a sinister title, 'Husssssh' (say it with real menace) and a negative imperative byline on the poster, 'Don't breathe a word' suggesting life-or-death secrets that never eventuate, but what you actually get is Gwyneth Paltrow in a Worzel Gummidge wig appearing as Helen, a New York newlywed who insists on running around Kilronan, her husband's horse ranch, naked and having sex where of course her mother-in-law will encounter her, so really it shouldn't surprise her when the mother-in-law, whom we know to be a rank nutter on account of her collection of wind-up carousel music boxes, starts to engineer Helen's marriage and pregnancy.

★☆☆☆☆

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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

Shot in a style that recalls cold war propaganda, graphic novels, and 50s science fiction, this odd movie, both grandly staged and obscure, tells of a pilot, Sky Captain, a kind of Biggles in a steam-punk alternate reality, and a reporter, Polly Perkins, who team up to investigate an intrigue involving miniature elephants, metal war birds, disappearing scientists, giant robots that descend upon the world in The Day The Earth Stood Still style, and an inexplicable The Wizard of Oz tie-in, and it is always visually arresting if not always such an interesting narrative.

★★★☆☆

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The Talented Mr Ripley (1999)

Despite the anticlimax of its fudged final scene, this is a terrific adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's 1955 book that succeeds as a classy thriller, a glamorous European travelogue, and a deeply disturbing psychological character study of a young chameleon whose talents as a voice artist and tendency to be in the right place at the right time assist him in keeping up a series of wickedly simple but deadly deceptions.

★★★★☆

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A Perfect Murder (1998)

A husband's plot to murder his wife by hiring his wife's lover as a hitman comes unstuck in a number of heavily signposted ways and from there this suspense thriller low on suspense and thrills, apparently inspired by Dial M For Murder but really only similar in two ways (Gwyneth Paltrow and Grace Kelly's blonde hair and a logic problem involving apartment door keys) goes on in rudderless, convoluted ways, desperately trying to find a way to wrap up the leaden acting and plodding events.

★★☆☆☆

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