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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Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

It used to be that dinosaurs belonged in the Jurassic period, humans in the modern era, and if dinosaurs appeared in the modern era, humans needed to get away from them, but like a living breathing example of Darwinian theory itself, the Jurassic Park series is trying to self-perpetuate and has evolved so that now there are unlikely relationships between some of the humans and dinosaurs, like between Chris Pratt's theme park trainer and Blue, the velociraptor in his care, and "dinosaurs-have-rights-too" groups have sprung up, and arguments abound on the money-making value of dinosaurs, their sentience, their feelings, and it is funny because all this effort to give the series some Planet of the Apes meat on its bones ends up just a lot of noise in this movie which hides within it the movie people actually want to see featuring podcars lodged in the jaws of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, second dinosaur attacks at just the right moment, and lots of running and screaming.

★★☆☆☆

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The Snowman (2017)

Ice-cold and grisly Norwegian thrillers are popular among readers but this Jo Nesbø adaptation plays out on screen like it has been hacked to pieces and put back together again by a crazed killer with a piano wire, with scenes appearing out-of-order and side storylines, particularly the ones involving Chloë Sevigny as identical twins, Val Kilmer as a drunk detective, and J K Simmons as the leader of a Winter Olympics Host City bid, built-up elaborately like the serial killer's snowmen only to melt away without consequence.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Witness For The Prosecution (2016)

Fans of the 1957 film starring Charles Laughton, which was thrilling and funny, will be wary of the changes made to Agatha Christie's plot in this grim 2016 BBC TV miniseries (for example the inclusion of two grubby sex scenes, the absence of Laughton's cantakerous, cigar-chomping Sir Wilfrid Robarts who is replaced by Toby Jones's poor, unhappily married solicitor with a tragic backstory, not to mention a very unexpected second trial for the murder of Kim Cattral's Emily French), but as things proceed it becomes clear these deviations are not simply changes for the sake of change - this is not an update but a tv miniseries adaptation and purists will come to appreciate and will be kept on their toes by the clever embellishments.

★★★★☆

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Red Lights (2012)

Occam's Razor is the philosophical principle which states the simplest explanation is often correct, but the most banal and laughable explanations can also be correct as demonstrated in this precursor to Now You See Me that swaps the Four Horsemen's magic tricks for the paranormal feats of Robert De Niro's spoon-bending Simon Silver, a Uri Geller type who commands large sums of money for tickets to his arena spectaculars and Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy's duo of Occam's Razor-spouting CSI: Supernatural investigators are the ones getting super worked up about his feats.

★☆☆☆☆

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Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

The point of this intriguing psychological drama seems to be that film sound engineers are overlooked and should wave their fists and get violent and be heard and appreciated for their input into films such as the giallo horror that Toby Jones' sound engineer, Gilderoy, is helping to make here - we never see a single frame but everything about it, thanks to his watermelon, cabbage, and radish mashing, is visceral and real and when the movie-within-a-movie experiences a setback, we see how sound magic can alter everything.

★★★☆☆

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