David Koepp

Disclosure Day

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Emily Blunt hangs off a car, with Josh O'Connor trying to save her

There’s nothing lean about Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi epic Disclosure Day. Even the title has a portentous ring to it. What is it exactly that is to be disclosed? Is it a secret of the universe by any chance? Of course it is. Grandiosity to one side, Spielberg delivers an entirely enjoyable 145 minutes, in a set-the-controls-to-Spielberg kind of way. We’re here to be awed not enlightened. Every character has a backstory and an arc, as if Spielberg and co-writer David Koepp were organising a children’s birthday party rather than making a big-bucks movie, and are determined that no one is to go home empty handed. There Dr Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a black … Read more

Cold Storage

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Travis and Naomi investigate

Cold Storage is lo-fi sci-fi done on a decent budget, it’s written by David Koepp, who did the original Jurassic Park the first Mission: Impossible. And it is stacked with actors of the calibre of Lesley Manville, Vanessa Redgrave and Liam Neeson, though none of them is the star. Smartly made, well acted, it’s entirely enjoyable and not very demanding and is the sort of film you might once upon a time have brought home on VHS from the local video shop. In fact Redgrave is in it so little that I wondered if her presence was some kind of joke. Neeson and Manville get more of a shake, especially in the opening … Read more

Black Bag

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George Woodhouse in his kitchen

What does all that spying do to spies? That’s Black Bag in a neat explicatory parcel, a Steven Soderbergh movie that mixes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with the Michael Caine Harry Palmer films – or so say Soderbergh and writer David Koepp. But there’s John Le Carré in there as well. And as this densely packed, forensic examination of the spy psyche eases onto its queasy final straight, the comparisons with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy become unavoidable. Soderbergh opens with a long, glam tracking shot following Michael Fassbender’s George Woodhouse into a bar and then down and back up some stairs where, in wham-bam plotting, Koepp lays out the whole film in … Read more

Kimi

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Angela at work

When did Zoë Kravitz get so good? In Kimi she’s not only the star of the film but almost the only person in it, and she has a grip like a tractor beam on the attention. It helps that she’s beautiful, of course, but there’s more going on here than that. She plays Angela, a shut-in with a string of emotional conditions, among them germophobia, ADHD, paranoia, neurosis, which suits her job as a human hired to tweak the algorithm of a Siri-like virtual assistant. When someone shouts, “Kimi, you’re a peckerwood,” she’s the one who later adds definitions for “peckerwood” in Kimi’s onboard dictionary – Kimi is always listening. And the covid pandemic, … Read more

Stir of Echoes

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Kevin Bacon in Stir of Echoes

Somewhere around 1984 it seemed that Kevin Bacon might become a matinee idol, a prettyboy star. But he had a few things going against him. The name Kevin, for instance. Not to mention Bacon. After starring in Footloose, he went through film after film pitching his voice low, his face looking like the site of some vague plastic surgery mishap. He had the odd hit, such as Tremors, but for the most part he became a support player in bigger films, JFK and The River Wild and Apollo 13, in which he played the benighted astronaut not played by Tom Hanks or Bill Paxton. Bacon became, in fact, a perennial “nearly” man, the … Read more