gerry pike

Colourful, fun take on the ubiquituous rumour, probably propagated by the Russians, that the live footage of the Moon landing in 1969 was faked. Scarlett Johanssen and Channing Tatum are the attractive leads while Woody Harellson scoops up all the arch lines as usual. The visuals are good, there are some genuinely comic moments and plenty to enjoy.The irony, on advertising and the Space Race, is light and frisky. Ultimately, it’s a souffle of a film but it has enough air whipped into it and general bonhomie to keep you interested.

Lumpen, over-long poltical satire, perhaps made for the critics rather than audiences. It reminded me of worthy anti-establishment films of the Sixties which drove home the message rather graphically that (rich) people were unpleasant and exploitative. We sat through it hoping it might improve and reach some sort of resolution. It did’t.

This is a deeply moving and intense film. Ultimately a very sad one, too. Andrew Scott is on screen for virtually the entire film and his emotional pain and yearning are evident throughout. Mescal is mesmerising: beautiful and physically magnetic. The camera work is almost claustrophobic, the lens seeming to be right in the their faces or tracking the entwined bodies of both men. The blurring of Scott’s reality with his fastasies is bewildering, beguiling and even disturbing at the end. You are left with a huge sense of melancholy. The meaning of all this is elusive: do we all yearn fo a love we can’t have? Are we doomed to be alone, living alone in our own minds? I am still trying to,process it.

Precise, meticulous thoughtful reconstruction of this revisited murder case, just like Luke Evans leading detective character. Obviously not as apocalyptic as last year’s “The Salisbury Poisonings” but the same aithentic narrative approach and territic acting, which eschewed the need to be wilfully eccentric to be interesting which characterises many detective setries.