Anniversary

Paul and Ellen Taylor celebrate their anniversary

Barely promoted by a studio wary of its political content, Anniversary has a Stepford Wives – reality-adjacent – quality that stops it being really incendiary. It is chilly and chilling enough, though its big message is so emollient it almost undoes all the good work director and co-writer Jan Komasa has put in to stir things up. It’s the story of a big, noisy and mostly successful family – liberal as you like – brought low by a regime change precipitated by a book the girlfriend of one of them has written. When we first meet girlfriend Elizabeth Nettles (Phoebe Dynevor) she is nervously prepping herself for the meeting with the parents of her guy … Read more

Hollywoodland

Ben Affleck and Diane Lane in Hollywoodland

Looking on paper like something better than it actually turns out, Hollywoodland is one of those films purporting to lift the lid on Hollywood, LA Confidential style. It tells the lightly fictionalised story of George Reeves (Ben Affleck) the man who played Superman on 1950s US TV, and asks the simple question – who done him in? The answer is, at least partly, he did it to himself, this being a tale of an actor who’d appeared in Gone with the Wind and yet by the mid-50s was in a TV serial aimed at kids. The ignominy. If you need a lesson in counting your blessings rather than dwelling on what might have … Read more