Open Range (2003)

Awkward and stilted western directed by and starring Kevin Costner. 

Costner and Robert Duvall play a pair of nomadic cowboys known as “freegrazers”. 

It’s slow and the thin plot doesn’t warrant the extended 139-minute running time. Costner proves the general rule that actors cannot direct (the only exceptions being Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen). He has little sense of moving things along or building character. Instead, it’s like a fifth-rate homage to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. 

The one saving grace is Annette Bening as the doctor’s sister.

Viceroy's House (2017)

A not especially compelling historical drama, set at the time of India’s handover from Britain, and the partitioning of India and Pakistan. 

It tells that political story as well as the tale of a young couple separated along social and religious lines. 

Hugh Bonneville stars as the final Viceroy of India, Lord Dickie Mountbatten, and Gillian Anderson is excellent as his wife. 

Overall, the film disappoints. Somehow it fails to bring all of this to life. The script never sparkles and the overuse of archive footage (or at least mocked-up archive footage) has the effect of distancing you from the action. Also, it’s never clear whether the British actors are being formal and stuffy on purpose or whether they simply don’t have particularly well-written parts.

Layer Cake (2004)

Brit crime thriller starring Daniel Craig as a drug dealer who – just as he’s about to retire – becomes wrapped up in a dangerous world of gangsters. 

It’s highly stylised, but oddly unsatisfying. The twists and turns of the plot are difficult to follow. And some parts seem clichéd, such as the Scorsese-lite touch of using “Gimme Shelter” on the soundtrack. It’s violent and nasty, too. 

Michael Gambon is an impressively horrid villain, and Daniel Craig is always watchable, but there’s a shallowness that makes it hard to like. It aims for “gritty” but only achieves “depressing”.

Sylvia (2003)

Engaging biopic of Sylvia Plath, mainly focusing on her relationship with Ted Hughes and the decline of her mental health. Gwyneth Paltrow is fairly strong as the American writer in the lead role. Daniel Craig is pretty good as her famous husband except that the Yorkshire accent tends to come and go and it’s difficult to see “James Bond” as a poet. Also, both film-stars are too good-looking to seem like struggling writers.

It’s appropriately grim and grimy in its depiction of England in the early 1960s. Everything seems dimly lit and rather grubby.

I like the way the film presents poetry as such a powerful force. The scenes in which they read out their work and are urged by their friends to do it even faster help to position it as a raw and vital pursuit that’s full of life and energy.

Hughes emerges as a major contributing factor in the depression that led to Plath’s suicide. I don’t know how fair or accurate that is, but the film certainly took Sylvia’s side.

As the story leads to its inevitable conclusion you are left feeling sorry for this young woman who simply needed help (the kindly neighbour played by Michael Gambon wasn’t enough) and for the two children she left behind.