Serpico (1973)

Sidney Lumet's biographical film, based on the book by Peter Maas, is the always interesting story of Frank Serpico and eleven years of his career as an undercover policeman, a period in which he took a stand against police corruption - against both the grass eaters and the meat eaters -  and he is an impressive man, thanks to Pacino's great performance, but the film never manages to convey the sense of danger he no doubt faced.

★★★★☆

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The Fabelmans (2023)

The poster says, "Capture every moment," but a more appropriate line would be "capture just a series of moments from mostly one formative year in the life of a young schoolboy who dreams of making movies, and really wallow for most of the time in the uncomfortable matter of the boy's involvement in his mother's love, sex, and fidelity, while only treating very cursorily the much more interesting ideas of the camera's fidelity - its equal ability to tell truth and lie - leaving bemused viewers wondering why, if this is Steven Spielberg's deeply personal life story, the lead is Sam, not Steven, and why the life story abruptly ends with a shrug (and a playful wink) in the middle of Sam's teens - perhaps this was to be a Wonder Years-style TV show gone wrong; perhaps seventy other years' worth of cinematic genius are on the cutting room floor.

★★☆☆☆

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Judy (2021)

If your impression of Judy Garland is that she was a kooky pill-popping drunk and terrible mum who abandoned her kids to chase money, then you are not wrong but this biopic contextualises that image, revealing the terrible effect upon Judy of her showbiz mum as well as the Weinsteinian influence upon her of numerous entertainment industry men, and really, how could anyone stay sober and on the rails standing each night in front of the theatre audiences of London, depicted in this movie as a schizophrenic group that laugh, laud and worship Judy one night, pepper her with tomatoes and boos the next before mawkishly serenading her the one after that!

★★★☆☆

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What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015)

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Molly's Game (2017)

This film adaptation of Molly's Game, author Molly Bloom's autobiographical account of her rise to fame as a high-stakes poker-game madam, is Aaron Sorkin's directorial debut and is a fast-paced, funny and interesting character study featuring Jessica Chastain in the title role, Idris Elba as her reluctant lawyer, and a whole lot of fast prattle just like in that other Jessica Chastain movie, Ms Sloane.

★★★★☆

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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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Shirley (2020)

Does it say more about me or this drama that the movie, a choppily edited, goal-diffuse and, regarding the characters and their behaviours, a largely psychologically incoherent one (who knows scene-to-scene, for example, if Shirley and her husband love each other or not, are co-conspirators in mischief or not, are each other's bitterest enemy or most devoted supporter or not) ended without me knowing Shirley, the title character, is Shirley Jackson, the famous US horror novellist I've since had to learn about on Wikipedia?

★★☆☆☆

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Out Of Africa (1985)

Based on Karen Blixen's 1937 memoir of her time spent in British East Africa, Sydney Pollack's unhurried romance stars Meryl Streep, her porcelain skin, Robert Redford, and his blue eyes, and tells a sweeping, poetic, heartbreaking love story - no, not between Streep's Blixen and Redford's Denys but between Blixen and the object of her profoundest love: verdant, spectacular Kenya.

★★★★★

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