The Interpreter (2005)

The Interpreter has the distinction of being the first movie ever granted permission to be filmed inside the United Nations Headquarters but why Director Sidney Pollack thought such authenticity was needed is hard to fathom when so much else of what goes on in this political Sorry, Wrong Number (an UN interpreter overhears an assassination plot) stretches belief, like the earnestly expounded politics of made-up African nation Matobo; like the All-Access passes that supposedly allow interpreters to wander around UNHQ whenever and wherever they like, day or night; like the Dignitary Protection agents who fail to sweep bins for weapons...but Pollack ratchets up tension nicely and fits in some interesting ideas about words translated, whispered, and uttered in grief.

★★★☆☆

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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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A United Kingdom (2016)

This biopic does a pretty good job of condensing into a serviceable two-hour history lesson the main details of not just one but two lives during an embarrassing period of British history: the life of Seretse Khama, the first democratically-elected President of Botswana who led the country to independence from British colonisation in 1965, and the life of his English wife who defied the sensibilities of her family and her country by marrying Khama and moving to and having a baby in Bechuanaland.

★★★☆☆

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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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