Knives Out - 2019 film review

Knives Out has attracted a lot of attention as a high profile film which is also in the vein of the traditional mystery. The cast is superb, led by Daniel Craig (sporting an unlikely American accent) and including such famous names as Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Frank Oz, and Christopher Plummer. Reviews and audiences have been very positive, and there is talk of a sequel being made.

Plummer plays Harlan Thrombey, a crime novelist who is cared for by a nurse, Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas) has made a fortune from his books (well, it is fiction..) and who invites members of his family, in classic fashion, to his great mansion to celebrate his 85th birthday. Needless to say, there is a lot of jockeying for position among the greedy and undeserving, and again in traditional manner the contents of Harlan's will play a central part in the story.

We know from the start that Thrombey is dead, but a good deal of mystery surrounds the precise circumstances. The police are willing to treat the case as one of suicide, but an unknown person hires the great private detective Benoit Blanc (Craig) to investigate. Craig has a lot of fun in this part. He's an actor I really like, although I did struggle to get accustomed to that accent.

The film is written and directed by Rian Johnson and his screenplay manages to keep you interested in the plot while making points about greed, power, and entitlement. I find it very interesting that, many years after Alfred Hitchcock highlighted the difficulties inherent in filming whodunits, a young film-maker has shown that it's possible to entertain twenty-first century filmgoers with a puzzle mystery. 

   

Cold in July - film review

Cold in July is a film from last year which is based on a novel by Joe R. Lansdale. At first, it seems that the plot will follow fairly conventional lines, but soon it diverges from the predictable, and becomes increasingly intriguing and unorthodox. The result is a film that I found very watchable indeed.

Michael C. Hall plays Richard Dane, an ordinary guy who runs a picture framing business. One night he is woken by his wife, who has heard an intruder prowling around their home. Richard grabs his gun and shoots the man. The police tell him that the dead man was Frederick Russell, a wanted man whose father was also a career criminal. Richard is haunted by what he has done, and when he visits Russell's grave, he encounters the father, Ben, played with taciturn menace by Sam Shephard.

Richard is afraid that Ben intends to exact revenge by doing harm to his own son, and after initial scepticism, the local police are supportive. Ben enters the Danes' house, but escapes without harming the Danes' son, and Richard is told that he has left the area. But then Richard sees a picture of Frederick Russell - and his face is different from that of the man he shot. What on earth is going on?

The plot rapidly thickens, and the story takes a fresh turn when a private eye played by Don Johnson turns up on the scene. To say much more would be a spoiler, but I thought that Shephard and Johnson were terrific, and the story zips along in a satisfying, if quirky, way. I have a Lansdale novel on my shelves that I have yet to read, and this enjoyable film has encouraged me to promote it up the TBR list.

Guilty as Sin

Guilty as Sin is a 1993 movie directed by Sidney Lumet, whose CV includes such notable ‘legal world’ films as 12 Angry Men and The Verdict. Guilty as Sin is not in the same league, but even so, I thought it was pretty effective entertainment.

The stars are both very good-looking – Rebecca De Mornay and Don Johnson. De Mornay plays a hot-shot criminal defence lawyer, while Johnson is a manipulative womaniser accused of throwing his rich wife out of a window. De Mornay unwisely succumbs to his pleading that she represent him, and spends the rest of the film regretting it.

I’m not a trial lawyer, and in particular I’m not familiar with the American legal system, but with this movie, as with many others, there were aspects of the story that stretched my credulity. Would a judge really have forced De Mornay to continue representing Johnson when she wanted to back out – and wouldn’t her bosses have fielded some other advocate when Johnson suggested that the two of them were having an affair?

But once disbelief was suspended, I enjoyed the twists and turns of the plot, even if the finale was rather abrupt. It’s certainly never a hardship to watch a film starring Rebecca De Mornay, and although this wasn’t one of Lumet’s masterpieces, it demonstrated his ability to tell an entertaining story.