Bombshell (15)
Verdict: Not explosive, but well aimed
A Hidden Life (12A)
Verdict: Ambitious, but self-indulgent
Rating: 
This week’s Academy Award nominations have rightly recognised both Charlize Theron and Margot Robbie for their superb performances in Bombshell.
The powerful drama is ostensibly about the downfall of Roger Ailes, the U.S. TV titan who turned Fox News into one of the mightiest bulwarks of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
I say ostensibly, because director Jay Roach uses the Ailes story to shine an unforgiving light on all predatory sexual behaviour, not just on the transgressions portrayed here.
Empowered: Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie in Bombshell – a drama ostensibly about the downfall of Roger Ailes, the U.S. TV titan who turned Fox News into one of the mightiest bulwarks of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire
All the same, this picture, set during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, will help to ensure that Ailes (a tremendous John Lithgow) won’t chiefly be remembered for his many professional accomplishments, any more than Harvey Weinstein will be.
I wonder when Hollywood will chronicle Weinstein’s alleged crimes on screen?
For now, Ailes is an easier target, having died in May 2017 — less than a year after Murdoch (played here by Malcolm McDowell) forced him to resign.
Since then, and now further propelled by this feature film, his name has become synonymous with sexual harassment — and worse.
Ailes habitually used his stature to manoeuvre female journalists at Fox into granting him sexual favours in return for career advancement.
In the movie industry that squalid equation has always been known as the casting couch.
Here, it might be renamed the broadcasting couch.
The film then becomes a kind of thriller, as the network’s star female anchor, Megyn Kelly (Theron), wrestles with her conscience, which is itself at odds with her ambition
Bombshell offers him another opportunity to vent against Right-wing politics, but on the whole he does so with restraint and humour
Bombshell’s most most disturbing scene sees a go-getting young producer called Kayla (Robbie), desperate for a presenting gig, wangle a private audience with the boss.
He invites her to stand and twirl, so he can assess her physical attributes. After all, he tells her, ‘television is a visual medium’.
There’s no arguing with that, and it might even be interpreted as benign encouragement, yet for Ailes it is merely the opening salvo in his grooming strategy.
He asks Kayla to hoist her dress higher, and higher, and higher still. Horrified, embarrassed, humiliated, she obliges.
Film-makers less clever than Roach (who, in what must seem like another career altogether, directed the Austin Powers and Meet The Parents movies), might have been tempted to show more graphic sexual abuse.
But it’s been a while since I’ve sat through a scene so charged, in its sleazy, sinister way, with dramatic tension.
Unlike the other central characters, Kayla is semi-fictionalised — a composite.
She is too junior to topple Ailes, but if you picture his reputation as a pile of Jenga blocks, the first brick is removed by Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman, also brilliant), who dares to sue him after being fired from her slot on a talkshow.
The film then becomes a kind of thriller, as the network’s star female anchor, Megyn Kelly (Theron), wrestles with her conscience, which is itself at odds with her ambition.
She has already rather let presidential hopeful Donald Trump off the hook when quizzing him on his attitude towards women, in a televised interview.
The screenwriter is Charles Randolph, who wrote 2015’s The Big Short, and Bombshell has something of that film’s zest and zip
But will she stop short of accusing Ailes — who, early in her career, subjected her to his gruesome advances?
Or will she whip away the all-important brick, terminally destabilising one of the most influential men in U.S. media?
The screenwriter is Charles Randolph, who wrote 2015’s The Big Short, and Bombshell has something of that film’s zest and zip, with Theron’s character at times talking direct to camera as if fronting a documentary.
I’m also assured by those who watch Fox News that prosthetics have made both her and Kidman look eerily like the women they play, which enhances that documentary vibe.
It’s probably safe to say that Roach himself is not one of the Fox faithful.
His most recent film, his first major departure from comedy, was 2015’s Trumbo, a sympathetic biopic of Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted in the 1950s witch-hunts of well-known suspected Communists.
Bombshell offers him another opportunity to vent against Right-wing politics, but on the whole he does so with restraint and humour — another Fox producer, jauntily played by Kate McKinnon, is far more worried about her support for Hillary Clinton leaking out than she is about her closeted lesbianism.
Besides, Kelly and Carlson were very public cheerleaders for the Right. They are not obvious figureheads for today’s #MeToo movement, which is embraced most robustly on the Left.
But then, what’s so horrifying about this extremely well-told story is not that it happened at Fox News, where Trump is lionised, but that it might have happened anywhere.
Resistance to grotesque abuses of power is also the theme of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (pictured) which is based on the true story of a conscientious objector in wartime Austria
In 1939, Tyrolean farmer Franz Jagerstatter (August Diehl), a happily married father of three and devout Catholic, declines to swear an oath of allegiance to the Fuhrer
Resistance to grotesque abuses of power is also the theme of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, based on the true story of a conscientious objector in wartime Austria.
In 1939, Tyrolean farmer Franz Jagerstatter (August Diehl), a happily married father of three and devout Catholic, declines to swear an oath of allegiance to the Fuhrer.
He continues to refuse even when he is conscripted into the German army, even when he is imprisoned, beaten, degraded and finally sentenced to death.
‘Sign and you’ll go free,’ his lawyer (Matthias Schoenaerts) tells him.
‘But I am free,’ Franz replies.
Malick, now 76, has made only ten films since his remarkable 1973 debut, Badlands.
They have come relatively thick and fast in recent years, but a new Malick film is still a cinematic event, albeit rather in the way that the first day of the sales is an event — some people might want to run in the opposite direction.
A Hidden Life — its title taken from a passage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, about goodness being defined by ‘unhistoric acts’ — showcases much of Malick’s stylishness, but also plenty of what makes some of his films so maddening.
It exquisitely evokes an era before rural life was mechanised. We see lots of drawing water from wells and scything in the fields. But the near three-hour running time needs scything, too.
Ultimately, this film feels as much an exercise in self-indulgence as storytelling.
Noble, yes, but it’s an open-and-shut case of trial by cliche
Just Mercy (12A)
Verdict: Cheesy legal procedural
Rating:
Waves (15)
Verdict: Forensic family study
Rating: 
Just Mercy tells a true story — that of an idealistic young lawyer called Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan), who at the start of the film, set in the late 1980s, is a humble intern working towards his Harvard law degree.
Rather like a legal version of Sidney Poitier’s detective in In The Heat Of The Night, Bryan is an African-American from the North who is shocked by the institutionalised racism of the South.
In Monroeville, Alabama — the very town which partly inspired Harper Lee, who grew up there, to write To Kill A Mockingbird — he finds a flagrant miscarriage of justice.
Miscarriage of justice: Michael B. Jordan (left) and Jamie Foxx (right) in Just Mercy
A black man, Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx) is on death row, having been convicted of murdering an 18-year-old white woman.
The evidence that nailed him is flimsy to say the least, and the police and district attorney know it, but the district attorney (Rafe Spall, dishing up some great Southern-fried vowels) is adamant that Walter, nicknamed Johnny D, deserves the electric chair.
Destin Daniel Cretton’s film follows Bryan’s attempts to prove otherwise, hinging largely on him persuading another convict (Tim Blake Nelson, in wonderful sleazebag mode) to admit that he lied about Johnny D in court.
It’s a shocking tale that deserves to be widely known, but Cretton undermines it himself by effectively portraying Bryan, who in real life has gone on to save many other prisoners sentenced to the death penalty, as a secular saint.
There are lots of movies about racist wrongdoings in the American South, but the best of them simply tell the story, without trying to correct the injustices themselves.
That’s where this film goes wrong. Even death row is presented as a citadel of nobility, with every police station and courtroom a moral vacuum, while the narrative overflows with cliches and gossamer-thin characterisation.
Just because Bryan’s colleague is played by Brie Larson, doesn’t mean her lines have to be quite so cheesy.
It is a shocking tale that deserves to be widely known, but Cretton undermines it himself by effectively portraying Bryan, who in real life has gone on to save many other prisoners sentenced to the death penalty, as a secular saint
Waves, another African-American story, is a smaller release but a much better bet, and a bravura piece of film-making by Trey Edward Shults.
His last movie was the terrific 2017 horror-thriller It Comes At Night, but this is very different — a forensic portrayal of a decent family in emotional meltdown.
Kelvin Harrison Jr is excellent as Tyler Williams, a talented teenage athlete with a pretty girlfriend whose world begins to cave in after he sustains a career-threatening injury.
His life continues to spiral out of control in ways I shouldn’t disclose here, but what it means is that Shults hands the second half of the film to Tyler’s sister Emily (a similarly fine performance by Taylor Russell).
Lucas Hedges is splendid, too, as Emily’s boyfriend, a young man with troubles of his own (I sometimes wonder whether U.S. directors have to sign a pledge to cast only Hedges, or possibly Timothee Chalamet, as tormented young adults). And so is Sterling K. Brown as Tyler and Emily’s well-meaning but domineering father.
It’s a compelling film and, I might add, a safer investment of time and money than A Hidden Life (see above), which is worth noting because Shults is a protege of Terrence Malick, who in this week’s releases is comprehensively mastered by his apprentice.
Academy misses may see me eat Rocketman’s hat
The Oscar nominations have shamed the BAFTA shortlists by making a best actress contender of Britain’s Cynthia Erivo, for her fantastic performance as a 19th-century abolitionist in Harriet.
What Erivo has to do to nudge her own countryfolk into recognising her talent, heaven only knows.
But that doesn’t mean the American Academy voters aren’t guilty of some oversights.
The Oscar nominations have shamed the BAFTA shortlists by making a best actress contender of Britain’s Cynthia Erivo, for her fantastic performance as a 19th-century abolitionist in Harriet
Making Little Women a nominee for best adapted screenplay and two acting awards, but not recognising Greta Gerwig as a potential best director, is mystifying.
I hate tokenism, but nobody could have been accused of posturing by including Gerwig — she made a glorious film.
As it is, the anomaly remains that only five female directors have ever been nominated in the entire history of the Oscars, with only one winner (Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker in 2010).
If you think that’s because just five women have deserved it, I’m afraid you’re wrong.
As for other quirks of this year’s nominations, the best supporting actor category either venerates experience, or shows that voters have precious little imagination.
The average age of the five world-famous contenders is 71, with Brad Pitt the relative greenhorn at 56.
I’ll have more to say about both sets of awards.
But for now let me add one more lament: that Julian Day, the British designer of all those extraordinary costumes in Rocketman, didn’t receive an Oscar nod.
I wrote last year if he didn’t get a nomination, I’d eat his hat.
If he’d like to send me one, I’ll have a go.