Jackie

Mica Levi's score opens Jackie with a plaintive, wailing glissando that sounds like both the world falling apart and a global reaction to it. It's the soundtrack of today, but only by coincidence; in its intended context it conveys Jackie Kennedy's state of mind as she tries to cope with life in the days after her husband's assassination. You'll struggle to find many more contemporary parallels in Pablo Larraín's film, thank Christ, but you won't have any trouble recalling Levi's music because it blasts out of the film almost constantly, as if overcompensating for something missing in Natalie Portman's almost comically Oscar-baiting performance.

Portman certainly gives it her all here: with guttural sobs wracking her body in unforgivable close up, she couldn't play more to the Academy if she was wearing a Meryl Streep mask. It's one of those gigs where the ACTING is so foregrounded - the crying, the voice, the walk - that it's impossible not to notice how hard she's working. But at no point during Jackie did I ever forget that I was watching Natalie Portman ACTING. She does a reasonable job of imitating the former First Lady's weird Long Island accent, and has clearly studied the film of her guided tour of the White House (forensically recreated here) to within an inch of its life, but the performance is so mannered that it refused to let me immerse myself in the film.

So severe was this condition that it spread like a virus to the rest of the topline cast, and before long I was marvelling at what an excellent job Greta Gerwig, Richard E Grant, Peter Sarsgaard and John Hurt were doing when all I really wanted was to find out a bit more about Jackie Kennedy. It seems crackers to complain about actors being in a film and acting, but perhaps what Jackie needed was more actors and fewer stars, because on the whole it's a reasonably compelling study of bereavement and widowhood; of a person trying to keep it together, remain dignified and honour their deceased loved one while the world hastily moves on.

The inconvenience of people doing their jobs well notwithstanding, Larraín's film is otherwise fine. It's a character study, so there's very little drama to be had, and the short timespan of events covered makes it feel like an episode of an expensive miniseries which I'd probably rather see. But it's classy, elegiac and austere, and its grainy, Instagram-filtered aesthetic (I'm thinking Valencia, possibly Sierra) lends it a nostalgic authenticity that feels obvious but works well. Refreshingly free from the shackles of Stars 'n' Stripes-waving patriotism (such stories are often best told by foreigners, it seems), it can concentrate on telling the universal story of a human being with human problems, albeit problems magnified enormously by circumstance. Or at least it could if Natalie Portman's ACTING didn't keep getting in the way.

Knight And Day

The ineptly designed posters, embarrassingly abysmal viral videos and turgid press interviews farted out to promote Knight And Day have long been a mystery, apparently cunningly crafted to keep as many people away as possible. However, having now seen the film, it's clear what they were up to.

What we have witnessed is a textbook exercise in expectation-lowering, to the point where the inevitably average end result is a considerable improvement on the craptaculous cascade of cabbages the world expected. It's a bit like being phoned up at work by someone telling you your entire house has been demolished by a meteor, only to rush home and feel relief that at least the shed's still standing.

Let's not fanny about: Knight And Day is not a great film. All the money has been spent on the stars, and director James Mangold spends so much time on lingering close-ups to prove that it really is Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz that you eventually start to realise how old Tom's looking, and ooh dear I hope he doesn't put his back out making Mission: Impossible 4. Meanwhile genuine talents like Peter Sarsgaard and Paul Dano are left twiddling their thumbs in case they overshadow the Tom 'n' Cam Show.

Early dubious claims that Knight And Day was some kind of Hitchcockian romp are flimsily backed up by the fact that there's a scene on a train, a chase across some European rooftops and a MacGuffin. Well, The A-Team has a tall building in it but that doesn't make it Vertigo.

In its defence, the unspectacular and unoriginal set-pieces are at least shot and edited so that it's possible to work out what's going on, which is a bonus these days, the score is jazzy and interesting for the first half before it descends into bog-standard lowest common denominator tuneage and Tom does at least look back at an explosion on one occasion, which as we all know is against all accepted action movie rules:

Knight And Day's problem is that it's just so ordinary, with nothing new to add to the genre and nothing to elevate it above any other summer movie from the last fifteen years. As for the title, it's almost completely meaningless. You may as well name a film blog The Incredible Suit and then make it neither incredible nor in any way sartorial. And that would just be stupid.

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