Tom Burke

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

Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

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Fuiosa in silhouette apart from her eyes

If it does nothing else then Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga reminds us what a bolt from the blue Mad Max: Fury Road was. How, after a string of Mad Maxes offering diminishing thrills (I mean Beyond the Thunderdome), writer director George Miller turned to gentler pursuits – Babe, Happy Feet – before blistering back in 2015 with a sensational action movie that was almost operatic in ambition. Mad Max to the max. Now he’s back again, nine years on from Fury Road, having another go at the same thing, telling the origin story of Furiosa, the one-armed badass then played by Charlize Theron and now played by Alyla Browne (as a wee … Read more

Living

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A bowler-hatted Mr Williams checks his watch

Everyone loves Bill Nighy but he’d never really looked like Oscar material – unjustly – until Living came along. Too diffident. Too stylised. Too often wearing that same blue suit. What Nighy did was so effortless that it hardly seemed like acting at all, or at least the sort of acting that Oscar likes (snot and disability, with a heartwarming character arc and a chastening moral). Living was his big shot. It ended in valiant defeat, as we now know, with Brendan Fraser winning out against a tough shortlist that also included Austin Butler for Elvis, Colin Farrell for The Banshees of Inisherin and Paul Mescal for Aftersun. It was a case of … Read more

True Things

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Kate and Blond

True Things is only the second feature from Harry Wootliff, a writer-director fascinated with relationships. And after the slow-burning torture of Only You, she follows up with another rocky road leading to who knows where. Again it’s a two-hander, again the performances are sensational. In Only You Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor were the couple negotiating parenthood (adulthood, actually). Here, it’s Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke at a much earlier stage of a relationship. That’s if this is a relationship at all, which is kind of what the film is about. Wilson plays Kate Perkin, a young woman with a shaky work situation, not much in the way of a social life, a … Read more