John Lithgow

The Rule of Jenny Pen

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Jenny Pen

Horror films are often about old age without being explicit about it. Think of all those shuffling zombies. The Rule of Jenny Pen cuts right to the chase to tell a story about nasty goings-on in a care home, where tangential horror occurs but the care home itself is the real concern of co-writer/director James Ashcroft. It’s a punchy and effective 100 minutes or so. Stephen King is a fan (“one of the best movies I’ve seen this year”). Maybe you should be too. Ashcroft starts with a joke. The actor Geoffrey Rush, five years absent from our screens thanks to legal wrangles, playing a judge. A New Zealand judge struck down by … Read more

Conclave

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Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence

Conclave is not so much a case of who done it as who won it, a thriller set in the Vatican as the cardinals gather to elect a new pope. Being an adaptation of a Robert Harris novel, like Enigma (which became a film of the same name) and The Ghost (which became The Ghost Writer), it’s a closely researched thing, its potentially deadening attention to detail kept spiky by the addition of some suspense, intrigue, cloak and dagger and some lively thumbnail performances by a lot of mostly old white guys as the cardinals. Following custom, when an old pope dies, the men in scarlet come together from the four corners of … Read more

The Day After

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Dr Russell Oakes (Jason Robards) on the devastated streets

So this is what “the most watched TV movie in US history” looks like – The Day After, a disaster-movie-style treatment of nuclear apocalypse from 1983. “Most watched” is one of those tags up for debate, obviously – watched on the day of transmission versus watched again and again, for example. Or watched in the olden time of big broadcasters and mass viewing versus the Netflix era, where everything is a TV movie one way or another. Less up for debate is how effective Nicholas Meyer’s film still is. And it’s become increasingly relevant all over again as Russia pushes its armies into eastern Europe, while in America a debate rages over whether the … Read more