Film Review: Sully (2016)

As a recreation of an historical event and the man at its centre, Clint Eastwood's Sully is perfectly molded to its subject matter. It's a workmanlike, professional exercise in storytelling that is upended by a single event; the fateful day in January, 2009 when the engine of Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger's (Tom Hanks) plane was taken out by a bird strike, requiring him to make an emergency landing on the Hudson River, which he achieved without losing any of the one hundred and fifty-five lives on board.

Film Review: Bridge of Spies (2015)

In addition to being a court room drama-slash-Cold War thriller, Bridge of Spies acts as a sampler of the various shades of Steven Spielberg's oeuvre. It opens with a showcase of his skill as a visual storyteller, transitions into a lively, wryly funny slice of crowd pleasing entertainment, before ultimately ending with an assured, minor-key genre exercise with strong political overtones. In short, it's the Neapolitan ice cream of Steven Spielberg's career. If you like all three flavours on offer, then it's a thoroughly enjoyable few hours. If you only like one or two, then stretches of the film are going to fall very flat, although ice cream is still ice cream.

Film Review: Captain Phillips (2013)

Considering that it's a Hollywood film centred around an American merchant vessel being hijacked by Somali pirates, and the efforts of its captain (Tom Hanks) to keep his ship and his crew safe, it's gratifying to see that Captain Phillips isn't purely an exercise in American exceptionalism. There are elements of that inherent to the story, and they only become more pronounced once the Navy are brought in to resolve the situation by whatever means necessary, but there's little triumphalism in Paul Greengrass' (The Bourne Ultimatum) film. Though it has some geo-political resonance, it's primarily an examination of a clash between two captains, Philips and Muse (newcomer Barkhad Abdi) that is firmly grounded - or, perhaps more appropriately, anchored - in their shared humanity.

Film Review: Saving Mr. Banks (2013)

For over twenty years, P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) denied Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) the rights to her most famous character, Mary Poppins, despite the huge monetary reward she would receive for allowing him to adapt her work into a film. Early on in Saving Mr. Banks, the story of how Disney finally managed to convince Travers to let him make that movie, Travers explains to her agent, for what must be the thousandth time, the reason why she has persisted in her refusal for so long. (Or, at the very least, she provides a reason why she has resisted.) She's afraid that if she signs the rights to Disney, and if he in turn makes a film out of her books, that he will turn Mary Poppins into a cartoon, a creature that is all sparkle and whimsy, with all the rough edges sanded off and darkness removed. While watching John Lee Hancock's film, it's easy to imagine the real Travers tutting ruefully as the corporation that bears Disney's name does to her own life what she feared Walt himself would do to Mary Poppins.

Film Review: Cloud Atlas (2012)

Ask anyone familiar with David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas about whether it can be turned into a film and they will tell you that it's "unadaptable." Not because of the story, which is actually quite linear, but because of the structure. Consisting of six separate yet subtly interconnected stories that span hundreds of years, from a nineteenth-century merchant ship to a far-flung futuristic wasteland, Mitchell cuts all but one story in half, then shifts from one story to the next as each reaches a cliffhanger, then returns to tell the second half of each story as the novel moves towards its end. (Or, to put it into numerical terms, the stories progress thusly: 1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1.) It's a Russian doll of a novel in which each story contains the next, and as such would be dramatically frustrating in any medium.