A Royal Night Out (2015)

We've seen royal daughters or the daughters of American Presidents going incognito to experience 'normal life', from Roman Holiday to Disney's Aladdin, and the twist here is that this movie tells of an actual example from history in which Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret embarked one night out of the palace to celebrate the end of the war, which may well have happened but almost certainly not as it is presented in this easy-enough-to-watch but heavily, heavily fictionalised comedy romance. 

★★★☆☆

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Sobibor (Собибор) (2018)

When James Cameron injects high spectacle, grand romance, and completely made-up characters like Billy Zane's suave, tuxedoed, gun-toting villain Caledon Hockley into a painstakingly recreated Titanic, viewers can shrug off expectations of historical accuracy and give themselves up to blockbuster spectacle - never mind the roughly 1500 real people who died in 1912 - but the same can't be said of Sobibor, Russia's odd entry for Best Foreign Language film at the 2019 Academy Awards, a high-gloss but button-pushing movie in which writer, director, and star Konstantin Khabensky presents the lead up to the uprising of the prisoners in the Jewish extermination camp, Sobibor - with a similar appetite for spectacle over accuracy, so atrocities play out in unflinching full where restraint might be more respectful, and Christopher Lambert's Karl Frenzel tips over into caricature - a mumbling, starey Dirk Dastardly whose abhorrent acts are here tied to a camp love triangle.

★★☆☆☆

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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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Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Look at online photos from the real incident at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972, and photos of the real robber John Wojtowicz - in the movie, Sonny Wortzik, played by Al Pacino - and you'll be impressed by the likenesses, but exactly why these events led to such a painstakingly recreated film treatment by Sidney Lumet is lost in time: hailed for its portrayal of desperate 1970s New York, the film in fact revels in two other things - the comic chaos of the bungled robbery turned fourteen-hour hostage situation, and the fact Wojtowicz apparently wanted the stolen money to fund a lover's gender-affirming surgery - and, though well acted, is ultimately as chaotic and unrewarding as the robbery - a dull little mess - itself.

★★★☆☆

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El Angel (2018)

"Serial killer" seems the wrong word for the murderous criminal portrayed here - is it possible to distinguish between serial killers and murderous criminals? - but extra confusingly, this murderous criminal is Rob Puch, a real-life babyfaced killer from Argentina who in the 60s, working as a brazen career thief, killed eleven people, but look him up later - because this striking and well-acted movie will garner your interest in this peculiar character - and discover someone quite different to this eccentric, possibly sociopathic babyface here - staring out from newsppaper photos and Wikipedia pages is a sneering rapist and abuser (did the movie neglect to metnion that?) and it becomes hard to reconcile fact with this, what, fiction?

★★★★☆

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Saturday Night (2024)

It was an ugly time in comedy when SNL first aired, really, when comedians were smirking smug white men being loud, woofing at women, humping legs, and plastering schoolboy notes on everything (all seen here), but SNL fans will love this behind-the-scenes look at the hours leading up to the very first episode of what is now a 50-year-old comedy institution and anyone into, say, The Muppets or 30 Rock will be interested in the madcapped goings-on behind the scenes of another live production.

★★★☆☆

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Citizen X (1995)

You have to tolerate an Irish actor (Stephen Rea) and an English one (Imelda Staunton) and a Canadian one (Donald Sutherland) and a Swedish/French one (Max von Sydow) doing Russian accents and with straight faces spouting lines that make Soviet Union bureaucrats investigating serial murders sound like petulant preschoolers more concerned about 'saving Soviet Union face' than apprehending the killer of fifty-two victims, but this grim true crime story builds to something satisfactory over time, about Andrei Chikatilo's crimes and the advent of criminal profiling in the Soviet Union.

★★★☆☆

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Woman of the Hour (2024)

The fact that in 1978 an active serial killer once appeared in real life on a dating game television show seems at first a curious car crash moment to ogle in passing, hardly worth extrapolating into a feature-length movie – not without turning real murder and real victims into sideshow spectacle – but in her directorial debut, Anna Kendrick takes that moment and almost succeeds in finding the balance between respecting its grim reality and lampooning a world – then and now – that idly indulges sick male pathology with a sympathetic "there, there", fails to vet men before, say, letting them on camera, and asks women to laugh gaily at male idiocy.

★★★☆☆

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No Man of God (2021)

It's the American criminal justice system, one in the 1980s with a newly established criminal profiling department, that is the star of this oft-told, awful true crime story, approached from a peculiar angle - somehow Elijah Wood as real-life founding criminal profiler Bill Hagmaier and Luke Kirby's idiosyncratic and distracting Ted "Surely he sat up straight and spoke without a hand in front of his face, once?" Bundy disappear into the beige 1980s backgrounds, achieving little in their conversations about the infamous killer's crimes, and it is the access rules, prison protocols, and government bureaucracy that step forward and gently but insistently drive the interest here.  

★★★☆☆

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عنکبوت مقدس ('Holy Spider') (2022)

This unflinching look at the serial murders of Saeed Hanaei, an Iranian family man who (at least after he was caught) claimed his murders of sixteen prostitutes were religiously motivated (but, let's face it, war trauma, mummy boyness, male entitlement, and psychopathy came first, right?) is extremely hard to watch but utterly compelling given its basis in truth, given its electric performance from Zahra Amin Ebrahimi as the deep undercover journalist who dared bring Saeed Hanaei down, and given its jaw-dropping final scenes in which director Ali Abbasi reveals just how far Iran's corrupt masculinity will go to perpetuate itself.

★★★★☆

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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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The Blind Side (2009)

In this adaptation of Michael (Moneyball, The Big Short) Lewis' based-on-fact book, a woman (Sandra Bullock) takes in a homeless student, real-life Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), and helps him carve out an education and a future in sport, but while the first half pulls at heartstrings with its Christian saviour story and the second half occasionally amuses with its cameo-laden comedic look at the NFL college draft, what you realise by the end is that Oher himself is missing - a physical presence in the film but little more than a mere shape, a centrepiece for a whole lot of other people's busy-ness and noise around the table.

★★☆☆☆

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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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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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I Am Elizabeth Smart (2017)

Competently acted with Skeet Ulrich in the role of Brian David Mitchell (the man who kidnapped 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 and who over nine months subjected her to rape and torture in the Utah wilderness), this made-for-tv movie is essentially a survivor impact statement with Smart herself appearing between scenes to narrate her oft-revisited real life crime story but this time from her now adult perspective as a mother, wife and activist against predatory crimes. 

★★☆☆☆

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Compulsion (1959)

Surely Ttuman Capote, often touted as the pioneer of the true crime novel, was in fact influenced either by journalist Meyer Levin's 1955 novel, Compulsion - a fiction based on the infamous Leopold-Loeb murder case - or by this movie adaptation of it which turns the disturbing subject matter (the 1924 murder in Chicago of a schoolkid at the hands of two Nietzsche-spouting teens) into an utterly compelling thriller, one that keeps so close to fact it really isn't a fiction at all - consider for example the fact that Orson Welles adopts prosthetics to look like real-life lawyer Clarence Darrow.

★★★★★

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The Clan (El Clan) (2015)

This true crime drama about the Puccio family, an outwardly respectable Buenos Aires family revealed soon after the end of Argentina's Dirty War in the mid-80s to be responsible for a series of shocking kidnappings and murders, ends with intertitles that tell the fate of each family member and reading them I found I still had no idea who was who, suggesting I should have paid more attention or that the movie, full of shots that linger unhelpfully over sex or offer clinical detail about who was doing what where and when, was made to revel in the horrific details, not to provide insights about the perpetrators and their motives, and was made primarily for viewers already familiar with the story.

★★★☆☆

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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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The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle) (1974)

Werner Herzog doesn't entertain the possibility that Kaspar Hauser - the short-statured 17 year-old foundling discovered one day in a Nuremberg street - was a fraud exploiting a fantastic life story for the public attention, instead opening his film with Kaspar Hauser's captivity, his first venture outside, and his public discovery exactly as the cause célèbre himself described them, and with Herzog's mesmerising ways and a terrific disconcerting central performance from Boris S., a 41 year-old non-actor with mental health issues, the film allows viewers to discover for themselves, with the wonder of Nuremberg locals in 1828, the enigma of Kaspar Hauser suddenly in the world, clutching his letters on the street, the subject of a story Herzog presents as a matter of plain fact, leaving it to viewers to turn everything in on itself and let the possibilities of a fraud or a conspiracy or a personality disorder twist in their brains like a double- or even a triple- negative. 

★★★★★

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