Midnight in Paris (2011)

Charming Woody Allen comedy-drama about an American screenwriter and would-be novelist named Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) on holiday in Paris with his rather superficial fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her insensitive parents. 

While Gil begins to feel distant from Inez, with whom he evidently has little in common, he finds himself transported to the Paris of the 1920s that he idealises so much. Indeed, every night he travels back in time and begins to mingle with notable Bohemians and artists including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dalí and so on. Should he stay in the past, or is it just a nostalgic distraction from what’s really important in the present?

It’s remarkable how much Owen Wilson takes on the “Woody Allen-type character”. Even his speech patterns and mannerisms are Allen-esque.

If you can accept the fantasy/time travel premise, there’s plenty to enjoy. The film asks some interesting philosophical questions but never becomes too serious or ponderous. There are roles for Carla Bruni and Lea Seydoux as well as Michael Sheen, Kathy Bates and others.

State of Play (2009)

Thriller adapted from a BBC TV series. 

Russell Crowe plays a Washington Globe journalist investigating a series of deaths that are linked to his friend, a congressman (Ben Affleck). 

It’s an exciting drama that touches on a lot of themes. There’s political and corporate corruption. There’s also a celebration of old-school news reporting, with a nice platonic relationship between the experienced journalist and the young recruit (Rachel McAdams), who represents the world of blogs and digital news. 

Crowe is as good as ever, but all of the main actors are excellent. Helen Mirren is the tough newspaper boss who is to Crowe what Judi Dench’s M was to Daniel Craig’s James Bond. Jeff Daniels is a Congressman with secrets. Robin Wright plays the politician’s wife, who has a “history” with Crowe. 

Director Kevin Macdonald had previously made films about mountaineering disaster, Mick Jagger and the 1972 Munich Olympics, and you can see a certain documentary style applied to this fiction too. 

Only the generic, interchangeable title lets it down.

The Notebook (2004)

Summer 1940: a young couple meet at a South Carolina carnival and begin an intense relationship. She’s from a wealthy family and her parents don’t want her associating with “trash” in the form of this poor lumberyard worker. 

Present day: an old man reads a romance story to an old woman with Alzheimer’s in a nursing home. Inevitably, we soon twig that they are the same couple and that the notebook he reads from is her journal. 

There are quite a few problems with this flashback device:

• despite being asked to accept this contrivance, I never once believed it was the same couple.

• more troublingly, the Alzheimer’s plot simply doesn’t work. It’s never explained how Allie can remember the story Noah is telling her, nor who she thinks he is for the majority of the time (i.e., when she’s forgotten he’s her husband). 

• the “miracle” ending is, frankly, ludicrous. 

The highly watchable scenes with the younger version of the couple seem to have greater emotional intelligence, almost as if two different films have been bolted together. Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams have a degree of chemistry together, and they exchange some good lines about the complexity of relationships that confirm this isn’t merely a dumb script. Plus, Joan Allen and Sam Shepard convince as Allie’s mother and Noah’s father. 

There’s a sweetness to the summer romance and you do find yourself rooting for the young couple. But it could have been a far better film if we’d left them in the past.