John David Washington

Amsterdam

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Christian Bale as Burt Berendsen

That looks like Taylor Swift, I thought to myself, watching the opening moments of David O Russell’s promising looking Amsterdam, his first film since 2015’s Joy. It actually is Taylor Swift, just one of a galaxy of stars in a cast list so luminous that the likes of Anya Taylor-Joy, Andrea Riseborough and Zoe Saldana could almost be safely removed without harming the texture of the movie. No, maybe not Taylor-Joy, one of the important components, it turns out, when Amsterdam finally gets round to revealing its nature – an angry political drama, and a good thriller, hidden inside a meringue of deflection, pastiche, jokes, songs, historical factoids, good performances and all the … Read more

Tenet

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Elizabeth Debicki and John David Washington

After pausing for Dunkirk, a (for him) human-scale drama, Christopher Nolan is back on Inception/Interstellar territory with Tenet, a grandiose exercise in hi-tech bogglement that doesn’t shortchange the fans. It’s spectacular like Operation Desert Storm was. Designed to shock and awe, it’s a technological marvel that would almost rather there were no human involvement at all. Can’t we just get drones to do the acting? Actually, drones have done a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the plot, because rather than come up with anything too new, Nolan has taken a whole load of James Bond bits and pieces and then given a quick wipe over with a massive spend … Read more