My Salinger Year (aka 'My New York Year') (2020)

In this uneven The Devil Wears Prada set in the publishing, not the fashion, industry of the 1990s, wannabe writer Joanna Ratkoff (a real person upon whose experiences her book - and then this adapatation - are based) scores a dream entry-level job at the Harold Orr publishing agency in New York, which is the agency that really did count notoriously reclusive writer J D Salinger among its author-clients, and it is there that Ratkoff develops a working relationship with Salinger while labouring under Sigourney Weaver's Phyllis Westberg, not a savage Anna Wintour powerhouse but a more falliable Luddite whose wariness towards the office's first computer provides good humour throughout the movie.

★★★☆☆

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The Mystery of Henri Pick (Le Mystère Henri Pick) (2019)

In this jaunty comedy-mystery, like an Agatha Christie but without the murder, a book critic, smarting after losing his job and marriage, sets out like a detective to prove that a deceased pizza maker in Brittany was not the author of a bestselling novel.

★★★☆☆

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Mary Shelley (2017)

Haifaa al-Mansour's story of how Mary Shelley came to write Frankenstein is like two hours of Laugh In's Joke Wall - a highlight reel from the Shelleys' lives punctuated by door - with Clara, Mary's sister, most often the one to throw open the door to come in and Mary's husband, Percy, most often the one to grab his coat and hat and head out, slamming the door behind him, and when the door is next thrown open, there's no telling which of the extreme ends of the human emotional spectrum these characters will be on - will they have lurched forward in time to the next most dramatic episode of the Shelleys' lives or will they still be responding to the last? - making the movie feel like a 19th Century Clueless - petulant, door, immature, door, self-pitying, door, sassy, door, morose, door - but right at the end, in reply to a publisher's question about her age, Elle Fanning's Mary Shelley, at last an author, answers, "Eighteen," and suddenly the glib nature of it all, the sore lack of monstrous creation, makes some small sense.

★★☆☆☆

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