Tuner

Ruthie and Niki face to face

Tuner looks like it’s going to be a cracking drama but it hits a bum note early on, ironic in a film about a guy whose job it is to make pianos ring true. Dustin Hoffman is prominently billed, seems to be prominent dramatically too, but has been all but retired from the movie after about 15 minutes. What was shaping up to be enjoyable display of give-and-take, catch-and-release, tag-team acting between Hoffman and co-star Leo Woodall becomes something else. Hoffman plays the old master teaching his skills to Woodall’s callow youth, Niki, a kid with gifts – perfect pitch and hearing so acute he wears headphones to protect his ears. Niki’s true … Read more

Power Ballad

Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas back to back

By the end of Power Ballad I felt like I had been emotionally manipulated all the way up a very familiar garden path. In case I’m giving the wrong impression, I also cried. On balance I’d summarise it as “John Carney does it again”, the writer/director who does other things but regularly returns to the street-musical genre that made his name with 2006’s Once (wow, 20 years ago), and then proved he wasn’t a one-trick pony with Begin Again, Sing Street and Flora and Son. Do we all like Paul Rudd? Is Rudd the everyman du jour, more handsome, funnier and nicer than we are but adjacent enough that we buy in to … Read more

Lurker

Matthew close up

A knuckle-chewing debut by Alex Russell, Lurker updates All About Eve for the Instagram era, looking on with a raised eyebrow as a nobody gets whisked up into the entourage of a big music star, finds he likes it and then hangs on for grim life when the beast tries to spit him out. It’s a brilliant portrait both of needy, paranoid fan worship and of needy, paranoid stardom – both parties require constant reinforcement, though only one of them can be open about it. Théodore Pellerin plays the nobody, a guy working in a clothes shop in LA when big star Oliver (Archie Madekwe) and crew bowl in one day to browse. … Read more