All The President's Men (1975)

Two Washington Post journalists (Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, showing everyone how it is done) are assigned to investigate a burglary, but little do they realise the story they are about to uncover will go right to the very top and result in the first resignation of a President of the United States - a riveting account of the Watergate scandal from start to...well, resignation, but not finish.

★★★★★

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The Day Of The Jackal (1973)

There is so much detail in Fred Zinnemann's riveting adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal - European filming locations; real people on the street unaware they are being filmed, an audacious plot that sweeps through multiple countries yet also manages to detail the minutiae of the characters' day-to-day - that at times the political thriller starts to feel like a documentary, lending real-time urgency as we follow Edward Fox's Jackal, an assassin for hire meticulously plotting the assassination of Charles de Gaulle while the Parisian police struggle to track him, a faceless, nameless master of disguise.

★★★★★

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Abou Leila (2019)

For a long time, this tense thriller doesn't let you in on what is going on - all you know is that two men are travelling by car across the Algerian desert in 1994 looking for someone or something called Abou Leila, and you know their plan is foolhardy, misguided, or even delusional, and it is interrupted regularly, repetitively, by one man's violent dreams - and in the end, the movie didn't make much sense to me: in the context of Algeria's civil war, something is said about cyclical violence. 

★★★☆☆

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Survivor (2015)

I like Milla Jovovich on screen but her clenched jaw and steely look here as government security specialist Kate Abbott - constantly dashing through gunfire, thrown back three times by explosions that she simply shrugs off, and appearing in new scenes by rising from behind alleyway garbage bins as if that is all we need to know since we last saw her - leaves the strong impression each scene of this wafer-thin action thriller was designed to segue into first-person shooter gameplay, a feeling amplified by Jovovich's long run as Resident Evil heroine Alice and by Survivor's superficial game logic, where action trumps story as Abbott is ludicrously accused of a bombing, hunted by a terrorist called The Watchmaker (Pierce Brosnan) and then, in a laughable end-title flourish, held up as relevant to actual post-September 11 US security concerns.

★★☆☆☆

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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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The Hunt (2020)

The Most Dangerous Game, the classic 1924 short story and its 1932 film adaptation about humans being hunted for sport, is not really embellished or improved upon or developed here, just retold with 1. more gore, 2. wet Tarantinoism, 3. modern weapons that mean the twelve victims who wake up in an elaborately constructed fake Arkansas are dispatched remotely and en masse - there's no hunt required; and, 4. weak political satire - the nebulous joke here, about increasingly partisan American politics, seems to be that the hunters are woke lefties coolly slicing and dicing Trump supporters while demonstrating an uber political correctness in conversations with each other. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Rojo (2018)

The comings and goings of people from a suburban house and an altercation in a restaurant between two men, one the calm respectable lawyer and community leader Claudio and the other an agitated stranger who briefly upsets the restaurant's convivial atmosphere, are the not quite commonplace, slightly skew-whiff scenes that launch director Benjamin Naishtat's exceptional thriller; how the scenes are connected is unclear and the disparate moments continue (a fleeting tv commercial in which a model kills rather than shares his drink, a tv detective and former cop with an easy case on his hands, and a teenager to whom the immorality of simply disappearing a rival never occurs) but the movie gradually, unexpectedly ties these threads together while in the background the military coup that commenced Argentina's Dirty War starts being felt in the day-to-day of the characters.

 

★★★★★

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Marshland (La Isla Minima) (2014)

Spain has emerged a democracy after years of Franco repression and its people are split between those excited by the prospect of freer times and those who wish things back to the way they were, a divide mirrored in the female victims of this movie's serial killer, all of whom, a police investigation reveals, dreamed of escaping a Spanish backwater but met with foul play in the remote marshlands where they felt stuck, and it is up to two cops, one a liberal campaigner and the other complicit in Franco-era secret police crimes, to work together to stop the killer.

★★★☆☆

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The Teacher (Učiteľka) (2016)

In Communist-era Bratislava, a teacher extorts favours from parents in exchange for academic favour for their children, in this movie that tells a wickedly funny, stomach-churningly unjust and supposedly true story while also commenting on authoritarian rule in pre-Velvet Revolution Czechoslovakia and making viewers wonder in the end if they themselves harbour the wicked self-interests of the comfortable and the privileged like The Teacher.

★★★★★

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The Death of Stalin (2017)

Following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, members of the dictator's Central Committee, who have names but are otherwise indistinguishable in appearance or by their garbled political motivations, gather and swear and call each other 'turd coils' for nearly two hours, in this headache-inducing and laugh-free "hilarious comedy of terrors".

★☆☆☆☆

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The Interview (2014)

I had assumed the controversy surrounding its release - because it centres on a plot to assassinate a living leader - was a marketing ploy to overshadow the fact James Franco and Seth Rogen's comedy was a laughfree bomb, but in fact, despite myself, I enjoyed this audacious - and immature and unnecessarily violent - comedy greatly boosted by the genuinely touching relationship that develops between Randall Parks' Kim Jong-un and Franco's dopey celebrity shockjock, Dave Skylark, enlisted by the FBI to kill the leader during a staged, ratings-boosting interview.

★★★★☆

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Miss Sloane (2016)

Despite its portrayal of a very unconvincing relationship with a male escort and dialogue that drops a touch too readily and smartly, 'Miss Sloane', about a ruthless lobbyist hired to campaign changes to US gun laws in the face of fierce gun lobby opposition, needs to be celebrated for being a ripping political thriller driven by a female lead performance and one that doesn't call into question the main character's sex...except perhaps for the prissy title.

★★★★☆

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