MILE 22 **

We all know Peter Berg doesn't make 'nice' films but he does make highly watchable ones, and usually very violent ones, and "Mile 22" is one of his best. The plot is ridiculously simple and at the same time, ridiculously complex; blame that on Berg's cutting whereby if we blink we might miss reams of crucial information. All you need to know is that it's set in Indonesia and is about a group of American operatives attempting to get an Indonesian cop with a valued secret out of the country. Oh, and the Russians are also involved.

As an action flic it's close to perfect though Mark Wahlberg's nasty, chip-on-his-shoulder operative in charge is possibly the least likeable action hero in recent memory while John Malkovitch is reduced to another of his cameos as the guy directing things from HQ. As the cop Iko Uwais has little to do but look buffed and do some very nifty (and nasty) kung fu fighting. And yes, it does pay homage to "The Raid" but then we always knew it would. Slowing the pace might have helped, particularly when it comes to figuring out who is doing what to who, but lovers of appallingly violent action pictures will have a field day.

BENEATH US *

This exceedingly nasty little horror film takes a genuinely serious topic, (illegal Mexican immigrants looking for work and taking whatever job, no matter how demeaning, well-heeled Americans will dish out), and subverting it so it's the poor immigrants we pity and who are well and truly trounced by the psycho bitch and her husband who hires them. It's a kind of home invasion movie in reverse and it's in the worst possible taste.

The problem is that as it progresses both the situation and the violence becomes more cartoonish and Lynn Collins' performance as the leading nutcase isn't just nutty but positively barking mad. Also it seems unlikely that the strapping hunks they've hired couldn't have overpowered their captors from the beginning. I know there is a (satirical) point to all of this but as a picture of Trump's America it's just too crude to be really effective.

THE STAGGERING GIRL no stars

This enigmatic little memory piece may be only 37 minutes long but it still typifies the worst kind of art-house. A superb cast, (Julianne Moore, Marthe Keller, Kyle MacLachlan, KiKi Layne), mooch about in the past and in the present but none of them manage to engage us on any level other than the banal. The director is Luca Guadagnino and this must rank as nothing more than a doodle on his CV, the kind of film that established film-makers with too much power and money, but perhaps limited imagination, make simply because they can. If, like me, you admire the director's other work it's best you give this one a miss.

CLOCKERS ***

Co-written by its director, Spike Lee, and the author Richard Price from Price's novel, "Clockers" is one of Lee's finest and most underrated films. A whodunit plot provides the backbone to one of Lee's most incisive explorations of the African-American experience in America's inner cities; lives mostly defined by drugs and crime under the eyes of a mostly white police force whose idea of 'doing the right thing' is just not pulling the trigger at the slightest provocation.

It's a stunningly photograped, (Malik Hassan Sayeed was the DP), and brilliantly acted picture, (Harvey Keitel, John Turturro and Keith David are cops while Isaiah Washington, Mekhi Phifer and Delroy Lindo are among the inhabitants of the Projects), that says as much about what it's like to live in America as any movie in the nineties. What distinguishes Lee's work, of course, is the amount of heart he pumps into it. He never reverts to sentimentality but he has a deep affection for all his characters; he even makes his villains complex and human. Largely overlooked at the time of its release, this is one Spike Lee Joint that cries out for reassessment.

GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL **

Self-consciously grandiose western whose reputation far outweighs its merits. The title alone alludes to its mythic status as does the casting of Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday. Of course, we're talking about John Sturges's "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral", an even more fictional than usual account of the most famous gunfight in Western history or mythology; you choose. It's a perfectly entertaining picture but it's not much of a Western; you might even say it's a Western for people who don't like Westerns.

All the tropes are in place but when you add them up what you get is a Western in name only minus the necessary feeling. There's nothing here you would find in the films of Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher; nothing even that you might get from a Delmer Daves Western and certainly nothing you would find in the films of John Ford. In the acting stakes Douglas shamelessly steals it from Lancaster and there's a nice supporting turn from Jo Van Fleet but when the best thing in a Western is the Frankie Laine sung title song, you know something's wrong.

EMMA ***

The cast are perfection, the settings sublime and the social observation is as 'Austen' as any Austen I've seen. Yes, this new version of "Emma" is really quite wonderful and I would venture to say even a step up on the 1996 Douglas McGrath version. My only real quibble is that Anya Taylor-Joy, fine as she is, can't quite match Gwyneth Paltrow. Otherwise, what's not to love; a Knightly who isn't too suave or too handsome, (Johnny Flynn, splendid), a Frank Churchill who actually is something of a charmer and nowhere near as obnoxioous as he's often painted, (an excellent Callum Turner), and a gorgeously obsequious Mr. Elton from Josh O'Connor who just about walks off with the film while director Autumn de Wilde, (love that name), keeps it very nicely in period , (none of those little post-modern nods that now seem to be common in pictures of this kind). I also loved her use of English folk song on the soundtrack but this was just the icing on a very sweet cake. This is Jane Austen the way Jane Austen should be done.

THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT **

Can a film top-heavy with jargon, computer-speak and all sorts of things I personally am not familiar with be interesting? I mean, as far the subject matter goes Kim Nguyen's "The Hummingbird Project" might as well have been in a foreign language without subtitles yet this picture about a couple of computer geeks, (Jesse Eisenberg and Alexander Skaarsgard), striking out on their own to make millions is both a lot
of fun and ultimately very moving even if you can't always make sense of it.

This is largely due to the thoroughly obnoxious and yet totally brilliant Eisenberg in his best geeky mode while the usually ultra-handsome Skaarsgard, now with bald head and glasses to up his geek level, tunrs in a lovely serio-comic performance. Unfortunately Salma Hayek is totally miscast as the high-powered executive they go up against but since almost everyone was talking double-dutch her performance didn't seem that out of place. Of course, despite the comedy-thriller element, (will they succeed? will they get caught?), and the strong human interest story this sure isn't going to pack them in on a Saturday night. However, give yourself over to its oddball charms and you may be very pleasantly surprised.

WESTWARD THE WOMEN ***

"Westward the Women" may not be the greatest western ever made but it's certainly one of the most unusual and is, indeed, very fine and I'm amazed it isn't better known. The women in question are 140 brides being brought West for for the male townsfolk in a Californian valley on a wagon-train lead by Robert Taylor. The director of the picture was William Wellman and William C. Mellor shot it in crisp black-and-white and it has a fine screenplay by Charles Schnee from a story by none other than Frank Capra.

As wagon-train movies go, it's not only unusual but remarkably robust and full of incident and it deals with the male/female dynamic with a surprising degree of honesty and if you don't think so, remember this was 1951. It's certainly not sentimental and Wellman approaches his subject with much the same documentary-like realism that John Ford brought to "Wagonmaster". In a good supporting cast Denise Darcel and Hope Emerson stand out.

MADE IN U.S.A. no stars

Godard at his most infuriating. "Made in U.S.A." is visually superb, (Raoul Coutard is once again the DP), but so enigmatic as to be virtually pointless. It's like an academic treatise on American Film Noir; in other words, how not to do a film noir. If it's meant to be politically relevant it was lost on me. Dropping words like 'Communism' and 'Hanoi' in the middle of a scatalogically surreal screenplay don't imbue them with significance anymore than naming your characters Donald Siegel, Richard Widmark, David Goodis adds up to anything other than a cheap homage. Karina is the star, in colour, and she's gorgeous and you might say that as 'pure cinema', unencumbered by logic or reason, the film actually works but I think you need to be a real Godard aficionado to appreciate it or even to get it. The best thing I can say about it is that it's quite short.

OPERATION FINALE no stars

An intelligent, if lugubrious, account of how Adolf Eichmann was captured in Buenos Aires and returned to Israel to stand trial. About the best you can say of Chris Weitz's "Operation Finale" is that it's a decent history lesson but a poor film with a miscast Ben Kingsley as Eichmann, (at the time the film was set Eichmann was 54 while Kingsley is 76 and looks it). As one of the men who did the actual capturing and who, in this film at least, is seen to form a kind of bond with his prisoner, Oscar Isaac isn't at all bad but everyone else in the cast is just some kind of pawn. What's lacking is any sense of urgency. I hate to say it but the film might have been better if it were less tasteful; it's almost as if everyone connected with the film were afraid to get their hands dirty so it's all handled with kid gloves. Material like this deserves better.

THE WHITE CROW **

While it's never likely to go down as one of the great biopics or even as one of the great dance pictures, "The White Crow" is much more enjoyable than I anticipated. The director is Ralph Fiennes who also plays the part of the dance teacher Aleksandr Pushkin and while it's not quite a thriller he does place the emphasis on Nureyev's defection to the West and he's greatly helped by the casting of the dancer Oleg Ivanko as Nureyev who dances brilliantly and proves himself more than credible as an actor.

There's also a good deal of background information of Nureyev's childhood and his early career in Russia while his homosexuality is given its due but fundamentally its main focus is on his eventual escape while authenticity is established by Fiennes' use of Russian almost throughout. It was adapted by David Hare from Julie Kavanagh's biography of the dancer and it does have a fine literary bent to it. Fiennes may not be the most imaginative of directors but he does know a good yarn when he sees one and "The White Crow" is definitely a good yarn.

THE FUGITIVE ***

If you have to make a big screen film version of a long-running television series then "The Fugitive" is the way to go. The original series ran for four years from 1963 to 1967 and is now regarded as something of a television classic. What writers Jeb Stuart and David Twohy and director Andrew Davis have done is to break almost one hundred hours of television down to a very crisp two and they have done it superbly.

By now I'm sure almost everyone knows the story of how Dr. Richard Kimble, accused of the brutal murder of his wife, though innocent, escaped from custody and is pursued by a dogged US Marshall. On TV these roles were played by David Janssen and Barry Morse and are now played by Harrison Ford and a terrific Tommy Lee Jones, who won the Oscar for his performance. The real killer, of course, is the famous, or infamous, one-armed man and Kimble is out to find him.

This is the chase film par excellence and is one of the greatest thrillers of the nineties. Ford and Jones may carry the picture but there isn't a bad performance in sight and Davis handles the virtually non-stop action superbly; it's almost one set-piece after another. An almost obscenely entertaining picture.

THE FROZEN GROUND no stars

"The Frozen Ground" is an Alaska-set serial killer movie that might have been a lot better if director Scott Walker hadn't gone overboard with a roving camera that never sits still together with some very flashy editing. This is kinetic movie-making of the worst kind. It's also not that easy to follow as Walker never keeps his camera in the one place long enough for us to get a handle on what's happening and his use of flashbacks only adds to the confusion.

John Cusack is the serial killer and Nicolas Cage, the cop who is tracking him and it's based on fact. Cage is less mannered than usual and Cusack seems to be building up something of a profile playing murderous scumbags. Since we know who the killer is from the start there is no real suspense and the performances are largely unconvincing. Only the chilly locations prove to be a point of interest.

CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS ***

I've seen "Capturing the Friedmans" three times now and I think it's a great piece of documentary film-making but I question my motives for watching it just as I question Andrew Jarecki's motivation in making it. The Friedmans were a fairly typical middle-class Jewish American family; father, mother, three sons, close-knit and living much the way so many families like this do but at the heart of this all-American family lay a dark secret. Father Arnold was a paedophile with a taste for young boys. At first, it seemed that this might just be a case of a man who liked to look at pictures of young boys in sexual situations until the police discovered that Arnold and his youngest son Jesse taught boys computer classes in their home and that during these classes sexual abuse of the boys might be taking place.

What distinguishes "Capturing the Friedmans" from other pieces of 'gutter' investigative journalism are the Friedmans themselves. As Jarecki's film shows they were far from typical. They were not just 'close' but almost pathologically narcissistic. They, and by 'they' I mean the father and the sons, (the mother was mostly left out), loved making home movies, being photographed, putting on shows. In other words, they liked to 'perform'.  There was, therefore, a lot of home-movie footage for Jarecki to draw on while the surviving Friedmans, (the oldest and youngest son, the mother, Arnold's brother) were more than happy to talk to Jarecki and 'perform' for him for the purposes of this film. Arnold was already dead and the middle son refused to be interviewed.

But why did Jarecki make it and why should we want to see it? Is this film 'in the public interest'? It's certainly prurient and the descriptions of what was alleged to have happened are certainly explicit but 'alleged' is the key word here. When Jarecki made his film the case had already been tried but maybe Jarecki felt the outcome wasn't entirely satisfactory. Could the Friedmans have been innocent of the charges brought against them and edited the way it is, "Capturing the Friedmans" becomes something of a real-life thriller; a private nightmare played out, seemingly willingly, in the public gaze. Yes, it's brilliant 'cinema' but deeply depressing. Ultimately it asks more questions than it answers and perhaps it says as much about us as it does about the Friedmans or Jarecki. I can't imagine anyone watching this without feeling a little sick and if we can watch it without being moved, shocked and upset then I think we really need to take a serious look at ourselves. See it and make up your own mind.

NEVER GROW OLD no stars

This dark Western, although set deep in the heart of the Old West, was actually filmed in Connemara by the Irish director Ivan Kavanagh and the rain-soaked Irish terrain is perfectly suited to "Never Grow Old"'s theme of violence and revenge. Emile Hirsch, whose Irish accent keeps slipping, is badly cast as the weak-willed undertaker whose business picks up after creepy John Cusack arrives in the town of Garlow with his gang and begins terrorising the community.

It strives for the same kind of grim realism that distinguished the revisionist Westerns of the seventies but falls far short and at times it looks and feels more like a horror film and there are so many night shots it is often impossible to tell what's actually happening. Kavanagh may know his movies but this is just a pale imitation of Altman's masterpiece "McCabe and Mrs Miller". He could also do with upping the pace. Ultimately, it's watchable but also very unpleasant.

CROMWELL **

A seriously solid, if not very imaginative, piece of historical pageantry, (Oscar winning costume design for starters), about the English Civil War and in particular, Oliver Cromwell's role in it. Ironically, in view of Cromwell's association with Ireland, he is played, and very well, by the Irish actor Richard Harris. The King is a very well cast Alec Guinness, (looking just like the many portraits of the time), and a host of acting royalty, (Dorothy Tutin, Robert Morley, Patrick Wymark, Patrick Magee, Frank Finlay, Nigel Stock), provide staunch support. Ultimately it works best as a beautifully photographed history lesson, (Geoffrey Unsworth is the DP). The director, Ken Hughes, who also wrote the verbose screenplay, does little to make it lively, though the battle scenes are spectacular and it's both handsome and intelligent. Worth seeing.

BROKEN CITY *

An entertaining, if overly complicated, thriller about murder and corruption involving City Hall. It aims for the same kind of labyrinth, noirish feel that distinguished "Chinatown" but falls far short. Mark Wahlberg is the ex-cop who is being set up, Russell Crowe, (very good), is the corrupt mayor and Catherine Zeta-Jones is the mayor's wife and others in a good supporting cast include Kyle Chandler, Jeffrey Wright, Barry Pepper and Griffin Dunne. The problem is there's just too much plot, most of it shrouded in mystery, with what I percieved to be a gay subplot getting lost in the mix. On the plus side, director Allen Hughes never pauses for breath and it looks great, (Ben Seresin was the DP), but it wasn't much of a success and has largely been forgotten.

THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE no stars

You might not guess it from the title or from the content or the lact of content or indeed anything else but this little-seen movie is an adaptation of a Henry James novella that begins in a contemporary setting before moving back in time to a more typically Jamesian era and then forward again. Co-written and directed by Clara van Gool, "The Beast in the Jungle" is a strange, slow mix of dance, theatre and film unlikely to trouble the mulitplex crowd of a Saturday night. This Netherlands produced, English-language picture is Art House with a capital A and is hugely pretentious. It's little wonder it came and went without anyone noticing. Nobody acts in the film; they just say their lines and move around each other and while it's less than 90 minutes long it feels as if it's going on forever.

HARRIET *

It would be sad if "Harriet" is remembered for being the only 2019 movie to feature an Oscar-nominated performance from a Black artist. Of course, my problem with the diversity issue isn't so much that Black artists aren't nominated but that Black artists aren't getting the roles that would get them nominated. "Harriet" is the story of Harriet Tubman, the American slave who practically waged a revolution against slavery from the inside. It's just the kind of meaty, real-life role Oscar loves and newcomer Cynthia Erivo is very good in the part but there is something sanitised and inspirational about the film itself, (lots of gospel singing in the face of adversity).

Tubman has become an American legend and while director and co-writer Kassi Lemmons, (she made "Eve's Bayou"), have tried to add a degree of complexity to her character, (using spells to bring about the death of her white master), the film's trajectory is still conventional, not to mention factually dubious. It's a story worth telling and it's a well-made movie but it lacks imagination; this is the Reader's Digest view of history and no-one other than Harriet herself stands out. It's just a pity the movie doesn't measure up to her.

THE COW ****

Sometimes the great masterpieces of world cinema sneak in and then out of our field of vision and indeed our consciousness before we have time to recognise them. This was certainly true of Dariush Mehrjui's Iranian film "The Cow" which he made in 1969. A lot of people know it by reputation yet few have seen it. (It was initially banned by the Iranian government and had to be smuggled out of the country). It's a folk-tale, primitive not just in its setting but in its style of telling which will be familiar, nevertheless, to those who know Italian neo-realist cinema or perhaps the early films of Michael Cacoyannis.

The thin plot involves the death of a beloved cow belonging to Mash Hassan and of the villagers initial attempts to hide the death from him and, while an intensely visual work, was originally based on a play. The world it presents is, of course, alien to those of us in the West; a world that is simplistic, at times savage and even surreal. This is truly a world apart. In some respects this is a great tragic-comedy, the story of a man, magnificently played by the great Iranian actor Ezzatolah Entezami, so devoted to his beloved cow that he not only refuses to believe she's dead but that he himself has become the animal. In fact, this could easily have come from the pen of Kafka or Ionesco and its neglect these past 50 years is positively shameful.

THE THIRD SECRET *

The director was Charles Crichton, the starry cast included Stephen Boyd, Richard Attenborough, Jack Hawkins, (terrific and walking off with the movie), Diane Cilento, Paul Rogers, a fourteen year old Pamela Franklin and a certain Judi Dench in her film debut while Douglas Slocombe did the superb cinematography in black and white Cinemascope so why was "The Third Secret" such a load of old codswallop for most of its length. Easy; the script by Producer Robert L Joseph was a stinker.

It's a whodunit but given the material it's hard to care which of psychiatrist Peter Copley's patients bumped him off. The police have it down as suicide but his daughter, (a precocious Miss Franklin), believes it was murder and asks television journalist Boyd, (himself a patient), to play sleuth. Given the funereal pace of his investigation, (and the movie), it's difficult to see what audience the producers thought they might have. Perhaps they felt the cast alone would bring them in but the film has largely disappeared and is now of interest only for its use of London locations and for Judi Dench completists. Otherwise, something of a folly.

UNRELATED ****

Joanna Hogg's most recent film "The Souvenir" has been hailed as a masterpiece although personally I think it's a little too precious for masterpiece status. For me, her real masterpiece is her debut film "Unrelated" in which a group of truly appalling people, (an extended family and their friend, Anna), spend a summer together in Tuscany. The film is scripted and the people on screen are, mostly, actors but it could be a documentary or even an autopsy as Hogg dissects their lives in close-up. Seldom have people I despised as much on film proved to be so fascinating and it's entirely down to Hogg's superlative direction and the extraordinary performances of the cast.

A young, and as then totally unknown, Tom Hiddleston is utterly brilliant as the oldest of the children and the one the guest, Anna, (an equally brilliant Kathryn Worth), takes a fancy to only to be rejected. As a director Hogg couldn't cut these people anymore deeply than if she used a scalpel instead of a camera.(Presumably she doesn't like them any more than I do but it's clear she knows them intimately). This is 'proper' cinema; this is cinema used for a purpose. You may find the characters and even the film itself reprehensible but I defy anyone to deny its brilliance.

BUY ME A GUN ****

A horror movie but not in the way you might think. "Buy Me a Gun" could just as easily be called 'Field of Nightmares', set as it is around a deserted baseball camp used by Mexican drug cartels and looked after by Rogelio and his young daughter Huck who has to wear a mask to hide her identity. It's a terrifying film about simple, everyday violence from which no-one, particularly children, is safe. At the beginning we hear the voice of little Huck telling us that everything in the film is real and it certainly feels that way. Huck's dad is a drug addict and it's in drugs, not money, that the cartel pay him for looking after the field but as Huck observes, he's also lucky and that's why he's survived.

As you can imagine, Julio Hernandez Cordon's film is not an easy watch. As Huck has said, the horrors it shows are indeed real. Children are chained up in cages, tortured and mutilated and it's only the film's almost surreal nature and Cordon's use of colour that allows us to keep watching; a more realistic treatment would be unbearable. This is a remarkable film by a remarkable talent.

RIVER OF GRASS *

Kelly Reichardt's "River of Grass" may borrow more than liberally from early Terrence Malick but is none the worse for it. It's a shaggy dog story told with some humour and is certainly a lot less sonorous than the films that followed. It may be a fairly minor work, (we're not talking "Badlands" here, even with the Sissy Spacek like narration), but it has a goofy charm despite the ropey, amateurish performances and at 76 minutes is pleasantly short. It also makes good use of its depressingly bland Florida locations. If it doesn't mark Reichardt out as a major talent it shows that she was at least worth watching.

THAT SUMMER no stars

Narcissism run riot and for collectors of celebrity gossip and curios only. "That Summer" is something of a companion piece to "Grey Gardens" featuring some of the same characters, (the Beales, mostly), but it's really nothing more than the home-movies of Peter Beard, whose friends included Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy-Onassis, Truman Capote. Andy Warhol etc. and it's full of the indolent doodling of the super-rich. These people are so cut off from the real world they may as well be living on Mars. What's more, the cheap home-movie look of the picture is positively headache-inducing at times and like "Grey Gardens", there's something ghoulish about it but at least "Grey Gardens" felt like a real film, despite being highly intrusive. This is more like a vanity project gone wrong; a road-kill of a movie if there ever was one.

AD ASTRA ***

Sometimes it helps if you don't know too much about a movie before actually seeing it so what follows isn't so much a 'spoiler alert' as just a bit of a giveaway. All I knew about "Ad Astra" before seeing it was that it was about an astronaut, (Brad Pitt), travelling to the far reaches of the universe in search of his father; so far so pretentious. Having been massively disappointed by Claire Denis' highly praised and highflautin "High Life", I was in no mood for philosophical soul-searching in the deepest recesses of space so I was very pleasantly surprised to find that "Ad Astra" is really "Apocalypse Now" in Outer Space with Brad Pitt as the Willard character and Tommy Lee Jones as his Kurtz; the main difference being the man he's sent to stop 'with extreme prejudice' is his father.

"Ad Astra" is a smart, intelligent and actually very exciting Space Opera and it's as good as they come. It wastes no time in getting down to business, treats its space travel with a certain degree of realism, never short-changes on the action and actually succeeds in delivering the big father/son pay-off without seeming either pretentious or mawkish. If it has a fault it's that it's all over too quickly and with less drama than we might have hoped for.

Pitt, who is hardly ever off the screen, is superb. This could be a career-best role for him and Tommy Lee Jones is suitably world-weary, or space-weary, as his father. Unfortunately, no-one else is given very much to do; the likes of Donald Sutherland and Ruth Negga come and go without adding very much to the proceedings. The director is James Gray and this should prove to be his big breakthrough film. Well worth seeing.

A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD *

I like Tom Hanks; in fact, I like Tom Hanks a lot. I even think that, at his best, he can be a great actor but I wanted to kill Forrest Gump and now, all these years later, I want to kill Fred Rogers, the character, indeed the real-life character, Hanks plays in Marielle Heller's "A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood". Mr Rogers, as he is known on American television, is one of those 'inspirational' TV hosts who teaches life lessons to children and shows them how to be 'nice' and apparently he's very good at it. In fact, he's something of a legend on American television. However, Heller's film isn't a biopic of Fred Rogers anymore than her "Can You Ever Forgive Me" was a biopic of Lee Israel. Rather it's the story of the friendship that developed between Rogers and the journalist Tom Junod, here renamed Lloyd Vogel and played by  Matthew Rhys and the film is as twee as I imagined it was going to be.

That said, Hanks is superb. He's Mr. Rogers down to the marrow but I still wanted to kill him, (not literally, I might add). Maybe I'm not that nice a person but I have an aversion to 'sweetness and light'. Now don't get me wrong; that's not to say I have an aversion to children and I think it's great when 'grown-ups' can put themselves into children's shoes and relate them on their level but as Jesus himself said, when I became a man I put away childish things and the last thing I want is to be talked down to by an adult like Fred Rogers. I am sure he is 'the nicest man on the planet' but I'm glad I don't know him.

Of course, Heller's movie isn't all 'sweetness and light'. Rhys' journalist certainly isn't the nicest man on the planet. He's ordinary and angry and cynical and he gets into fights and maybe he's someone I wouldn't like to know either but I bet I could get drunk with him and have an adult conversation with him and Rhys is very good in the role as is Chris Cooper as the father he doesn't get along with. These characters add a very welcome touch of bitter to the sweet and give the film a much-needed edge. But in the end, this is Hanks' movie; love him or hate him, there is just no getting away from him. Even when he's not on screen you can feel his presence and that's Hanks' gift. I don't think he will win the Oscar for this but if he does, I won't complain.