LFF 2016:Manchester By The Sea / The Ghoul /Mascots / My Life As A Courgette

Well that's that for another year. The 60th London Film Festival is over, and so is my all-encompassing coverage of 4.9% of all the films it had to offer. Join me again next year when we hope to break the magic 5% barrier!

Manchester By The Sea

Kenneth Lonergan's long-awaited follow-up to the epic Margaret lacks that film's scope and scale, hewing closer to his excellent debut You Can Count On Me by virtue of teasing more sibling-related drama out of everyday life. Casey Affleck is terrifically ordinary as "The Lee Chandler", a janitor with a tragic history that hangs over him throughout the story; permanently shuffling around Massachusetts with his hands in his pockets, unwillingly trying to take care of his horny nephew after a family bereavement, Lee's life is a series of obstacles recognisable to anyone who's ever been related to anybody.

Lonergan's skill is in making the everyday dramatic without ever tipping into melodrama, eschewing formalities like distinct acts or character arcs that might lead you to believe you're watching a movie movie. His knack for writing, directing and editing scenes of superficial tedium which are never less than compelling is uncanny, and he's aided enormously by Affleck and Michelle Williams, who - despite essentially replaying her Blue Valentine character here - is literally incapable of being unwatchable. Kyle Chandler, too, threatens to typecast himself as the go-to big brother seen in two series of Bloodline, but he's forgiven because he's exactly the big brother you'd want. On a personal note, if you're going to double-bill Manchester By The Sea with La La Land like I inadvertently did, watch this one first. The other way round is like eating dessert before the main course.

The Ghoul

Written and directed with quiet intensity by Gareth Tunley, The Ghoul is an unsettling depiction of a troubled soul, and dares to tackle a subject all too rarely examined in mainstream cinema. What begins as a modern-day Holmesian detective yarn swiftly mutates into something else entirely: a weird, woozy headscratcher that probes the darkest corners of its protagonist's psyche and presents its findings with appropriately disorientating perplexity. While it suffers from the odd casting decision that can only have helped it get made in the first place, Tunley's film is a layered, metaphor-laden, smartly-constructed puzzle which loops around on itself like the Möbius strip motif at its core. If you can, once the credits roll, watch the beginning again and see if you can spot where the story ends. Good luck.

Mascots

Christopher Guest has made his film again: a gentle mockumentary focusing on a handful of social misfits whose entire life is devoted to one activity so pathetically pointless that the only obvious way to approach it is through a mirthless sneer. The target this time is "sports mascottery" and the grand final of the "Fluffies", a global competition to find the world's greatest Person Who Dresses Up In An Oversized Suit And Does A Funny Routine. That's Guest's first mistake: whereas his previous targets have been familiar to the average audience (am-dram actors, musicians, dog lovers), few of us are as au fait with the deadly serious nature of being a sports mascot, and it's tricky to laugh at lampoonery if you know nothing about what's being lampooned.

For a high-profile proponent of the mockumentary style, Guest just can't seem to be arsed with it this time. A smattering of faux-interviews are about as mocku- as it gets, the rest of the film shot in the style of any other bland and unspectacular comedy. The only thing that's consistent is that blandness, which characterises every joke in the script: attempts to skewer political correctness are weak; a British entrant in the competition is a poor man's David Brent; Guest briefly reprises his role as Waiting For Guffman's Corky St Clair, an appalling gay stereotype who, in one shot, is seen doing needlepoint AND THAT'S THE JOKE. Every film I've seen at this year's London Film Festival has been funnier than Mascots, and that includes the one about the dying parent and the one about the suicidal newscaster.

My Life As A Courgette

A deeply lovable stop-motion animation featuring ludicrously bobble-headed kids, whose various unfortunate circumstances have landed them in Mme Papineau's Home For Peculiar Children. Icare, who goes by the name of Courgette for reasons never fully explained, is our unlikely guide to the joy of companionship and friendship via misery, bullying and loneliness. With eyes bigger than Emma Stone's, each character seems to be locked in a perpetual state of uncertainty, surprise or downright terror, yet director Claude Barras keeps them sympathetic and identifiable via believable dialogue and nuanced animation. Sweet but slight (at just over an hour there's barely time to get comfy), this is a grown-up tale for kids which balances its horrors with some hilarious nonsense about exploding willies.

LFF 2016: Prevenge

Shift over Marge Gunderson, budge up Juno MacGuff: the small world of films with lead characters whose ovens are home to a sizeable bun just got even less roomy. In fact Prevenge straddles two subgenres like a mighty, tender-breasted colossus, and both the pregnancy comedy and the vengeance thriller are about to get a new champion in Alice Lowe's homicidal, hormonally imbalanced heroine Ruth.

Grieving and growing at an exponential rate, seven-months-pregnant Ruth is a bereaved mum-to-be on a mission. The catalyst for her waddling rampage of revenge and the connection between her victims are only gradually revealed throughout Lowe's self-directed script, lending the early sequences a shocking, jet-black streak of darkness matched only by the equally grim humour. Comparisons with Lowe's work on Sightseers are unavoidable (emotionally vulnerable woman is coerced into an incongruously funny killing spree by a malevolent accomplice), but Prevenge is a leaner, meaner experience, rougher around the edges but with added layers of insight from a fairly unique point of view in cinema: that of a woman undergoing the turbulent, life-changing effects of pregnancy.

Conceived, written and shot while Lowe was herself in the process of baby-bearing (that's her actual bump on display throughout the film), Prevenge is a remarkable achievement considering its brief gestation period, and a breath of fresh air from a specifically female perspective that still shouldn't freak out the #NotAllMen brigade. There's a touching motif about life, death and the umbilical connection between the two which marks the film out as a more thoughtful slasher movie than it initially appears, and the lasting impression is a fond hope that its mother starts work on a little brother or sister sooner rather than later.

LFF 2016: Free Fire

I realise I'm in the minority here, but I'm afraid I still don't get Ben Wheatley. I look forward to each of his films, and every one - on paper, at least - seems like it's going to be The One that grabs me and shows me that the emperor is, indeed, fully clothed. But to me, all six of his admirably original features have felt like promising debuts; calling cards that give notice of a developing talent about to burst into bloom in a massive way. The latest of those, Free Fire, takes this notion so far that it strongly resembles the first film of another independent director who really did grab cinema by the balls and tug hard: set in a disused warehouse populated by a handful of amateur crooks trading gunshots and wisecracks, Wheatley's sixth film screams Tarantino, which is the last thing you'd expect from such a distinctive, unconventional voice.

Things begin well, as a roster of immediately well-drawn characters converge on the warehouse to carry out a weapons deal: Chris (Cillian Murphy) and Frank (Michael Smiley) are IRA heavies buying guns from Sharlto Copley's unpredictable Vernon and Armie Hammer's smooth, cautious Ord; Justine (Brie Larson) is the go-between; Sam Riley, Enzo Cilenti, Noah Taylor and Jack Reynor play the grunts whose only job is to drive the guns and money into and out of the warehouse. Wheatley is now at a stage where he can command a terrific cast like this, and it's that cast that saves Free Fire from monotony at several stages throughout its brief running time. Smiley and Hammer send sparks flying with every antagonistic exchange, Larson is amusingly weary as the woman adrift in a sea of testosterone, and Copley is predictably hilarious - for the first half at least, until his schtick begins to wear a little thin.

When the deal inevitably goes south and the bullets start to zip and zing, Wheatley sets up an hour of real-time carnage punctuated by crackling dialogue and the occasional trademark moment of hilariously sickening ultraviolence: in just ninety minutes Free Fire leaps from Reservoir Dogs to a mercifully-distilled The Hateful Eight, but without the freshness of the former or the canny subtext of the latter. Wheatley deliberately portrays the shootout as scrappy - as, presumably, it would be - but in doing so loses all sense of geography inside his single location, making the experience a frustrating one to follow. And while there's a ticklish sense of fantasy that allows so many people to get shot so many times without being killed (maybe they're Death Proof?), you do begin to wonder if the apparently inexhaustible supply of ammunition will ever run out.

Undeniably stylish (the costumes are to die for) and entertainingly performed, Free Fire is a noisy blast of fun whose echo fades out even before the credits roll. The smell of cordite and the feel of polyester are stronger sensations than anything provided by the story, and in the context of Ben Wheatley's undeniably remarkable career, that seems a shame. He's absolutely still a director to watch, but at this year's London Film Festival two other, less glorified films over which he's had a clear influence - Prevenge and The Ghoul - have burned far brighter than Free Fire.

LFF 2016: Have You Seen My Movie?

If there's one thing the movies love, it's the movies. Movie maker Paul Anton Smith loves the movies' love of the movies, so he's made a movie about it from bits of movies set at the movies, and it's a real movies movie. Raiding hundreds of films from An Affair To Remember to Zodiac for their cinema-based scenes, Smith has constructed an almost-narrative built entirely from breathtakingly edited clips, and it's the perfect film to be showing at a film festival.

The whole experience of going to the flicks, as seen on screen, is represented here: there's Alvy Singer waiting in line trying not to have a stroke; there's Tyler Durden splicing frames of cocks into kids' films; there's Laura Jesson and Alec Harvey watching a trailer for Flames Of Passion. Once the main feature starts, people make out, people watch people making out, people break up and Mickey Rourke sticks his dick through the bottom of a popcorn carton. Meanwhile horror and comedy rub shoulders as Max Cady laughs too loud and Danny Zuko cops a feel of Sandy's norks.

On the one hand it's a chance to watch a seamlessly dovetailed sequence of film clips, but on the other Have You Seen My Movie? shows us that all human life is here, gathered in the darkness beneath a flickering beam of magic for a couple of hours at a time. It's a celebration of the act of moviegoing, a prompt to recall some of your own memories (that trip to the Shrewsbury Empire for a Star Wars / The Empire Strikes Back double bill in 1982 has a lot to answer for) and a surprising indicator of just how often the movies go to the movies. Its premise wears a little thin before its 139 minutes are up, but you can't deny the power of a film that teaches you to never, ever accept popcorn from Mickey Rourke.

LFF 2016: Christine

Rebecca Hall anchors Antonio Campos' refreshingly objective biopic of troubled '70s newscaster Christine Chubbuck with such understated grace and control that if this film doesn't put her on the A List, nothing will. Front and centre throughout, Hall is mesmerising as the committed, idealist newshound constantly up against the powers that be at her ratings-chasing local news station.

Campos and writer Craig Shilowich set themselves the unenviable task of believably depicting Christine's descent towards her own story's tragic climax, opting for a non-judgemental, detached approach which deliberately answers few of the questions it raises. Nevertheless, Christine's battle for her own soul is a captivating watch, and the supporting characters are richly drawn, real people, quietly fighting their own battles in the background.

"People are listening to me," Christine says, "so I need to make sure that I'm really saying something." She definitely achieved that goal; whether the film of her story does too is open to debate. But Rebecca Hall is shouting from the rooftops right now, so you'd better start listening.

LFF 2016: La La Land

Watching Damien Chazelle's La La Land in 2016 - a year which, both inside and outside the cinema, has been caked in some of the most feculent matter to spurt from the world's rancid arsehole - is like being slapped in the face with a bright yellow cartoon hand that bursts into stars on impact with your chops, showering you with music and joy and laughter and love and all the things that have so singularly failed to represent this year. It's no wonder that it isn't released in the UK until next January; 2016 simply doesn't deserve it.

Thanks to the London Film Festival though, a handful of jammy bastards (hello) got to experience it early, and an experience is exactly what it is. La La Land is not so much a film as a celebration: a vital and jubilant reminder that beautiful, colourful, widescreen magic still exists, and a declaration from its ambitious, talented and irritatingly young director that he absolutely did not come to dick about. This is the full package, the real deal; oozing with talent and crammed to the edge of every frame with heart-bursting wonderment.

Awful.

So first things first: La La Land is a musical. If you don't like musicals, you probably won't like La La Land (also, the fuck is wrong with you?). It's a nostalgic, traditional, delightful musical in which Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone play Sebastian and Mia, two charming dream-chasers who sing upbeat songs about love and togetherness. But it's also a forward-looking, modern, achingly sad musical in which Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone play Sebastian and Mia, two occasionally shitty people who sing wistful songs about failure and regret. It's both comfortably predictable and refreshingly unexpected; like the city it's named for, La La Land's dazzling sunshine casts pitch black shadows.

Announcing itself with a stupendous opening number that fizzes with primary colours and fluid camera moves (like most of the songs, it's presented as one long, unimaginably complex shot), La La Land earned its first round of applause at my screening before the title even appeared. Just one display of Chazelle's balls-out confidence occurs towards the end of that number, when someone skateboards off the bonnet of a car: why would anyone in their right mind put something so likely to go wrong at the climax of such a complicated shot? You soon realise, though, that the whole film is full of risks like that. Chazelle's chutzpah is fully justified, and there are two very good reasons why: Stone and Gosling.

Unbearable.

With this, the third film in which they have not only starred together but also played lovers, Ry & Em have truly reached peak adorable. These two could play Donald Trump and Theresa May in a romantic comedy right now and the world would fall in love with them. Stone, already a proven comedic performer, employs every muscle in her face - not least those around her enormous, irresistible eyes - to render us submissive to her naturally devastating humour, while Gosling, who somehow rarely gets the chance to unleash his obvious streak of innate comedy, lets rip here. A scene in which his vaguely pretentious jazz pianist is forced to play keytar in an '80s tribute band (complete with outfit that qualifies as a fire hazard) is already inherently funny, but Gosling's humiliated expression lifts the gag into orbit.

For a cynical noughties audience, it takes actors of this calibre to sell something as potentially disastrous as a song-and-dance routine. But sell it they do: they're no Fred and Ginger (Gosling in particular is occasionally less than light on his feet), but they throw themselves into each number with spirit, Chazelle's inventive direction and Linus Sandgren's sensational cinematography helping to conceal any missteps. And in celebrating the movies (Stone's aspiring actress / writer works as a barista on the Warner Bros lot), the set-pieces recall the likes of Top Hat, Singin' In The Rain and The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg with just the right amount of deference.

Intolerable.

Despite all the joy-soaked fantasy on offer, La La Land - like Chazelle's Whiplash before it - smuggles a dark and unexpectedly realistic message about the true cost of success (albeit a far more relatable one than in Whiplash), and the film's final act skulks out from beneath the glossy veneer of its preceding ninety minutes with subversive intent, even as it unleashes a breathless, wordless and peerless finale. Chazelle makes some bold choices that might not go down well with everyone, but they breathe fresh air into what could have been a classily-executed but one-note ode to the golden age of musicals.

Of course if you're a terrible nitpicker you might find yourself lamenting the cursory appearance of a handful of first-act characters: Sebastian's sister pops up for a single expository scene and is summarily forgotten; Mia's housemates get one song before suffering a similar fate; JK Simmons is cruelly teased in a hilarious but all-too-brief cameo. But if those guys are sacrificed then it's on the altar of the film's incandescent leads, and given that they're probably the two people with whom most of us would want to be trapped on a desert island, the absence of a few minor characters is hardly felt. It's almost as if La La Land has nothing else wrong with it whatsoever.

LFF 2016: Arrival

Denis Villeneuve's second film to hover menacingly over cinema audiences in the space of twelve months is light years away from the grounded, nail-troubling thrills of 2015's Sicario, just as that film was nothing like his Enemy, or Prisoners, or Incendies before it. If Villeneuve - master of the one-word title - has spent his career thus far on an eclectic jaunt through a selection of genres, then Arrival might just signify his, uh, arrival at his natural home: intelligent, thematically grand sci-fi.

Plunging us into an apparent alien invasion, pausing briefly to introduce Amy Adams' introspective linguist Louise Banks, Villeneuve dangles potential, familiar threads which may or may not have red herrings attached. The mysterious appearance of a dozen extraterrestrial crafts around the globe suggests all-out Independence Day-style war might be on the horizon, while the recruitment of experts in their field (including a maths boffin called Ian) to assist with the kind of scientific breakthrough that only happens in the movies recalls Jurassic Park with tentacles. On the flipside, Banks' melancholy - and Villeneuve's deliberate, measured pacing - evokes Tarkovsky's Solaris. But Arrival is none of these things; sitting somewhere between arthouse and popcorn, it's refreshingly and joyously original, though it takes its sweet time explaining how.

"I speak aylien very wail, I lairn eet from ay boook"

Banks - one of the world's foremost experts in language - is tasked with establishing communication with the visitors, and it's not a quick or easy process. Her methods are complex and hampered by only sporadic contact with her subject, and her apparent lack of progress leads to nervousness around the world, especially high up in the Chinese and Russian military (it feels a little uncomfortable that Eric Heisserer's otherwise classy script has to fall back on racial stereotyping here, especially in a story about trying to understand a foreign culture, but the payoff warrants it). In all honesty, the pace may also incite restlessness in audience buttocks: as beautiful as Arrival's visuals are, and as terrifically weird as it sounds (it's often impossible to tell where Jóhann Jóhannsson's score ends and the sound effects begin), after ninety minutes you might find yourself itching to be amazed, rather than merely impressed. But then the last act drops, the rug you've been comfortably standing on is whipped away, and all is forgiven.

Arrival has so much to recommend it - Adams is restrained yet captivating; her character's story is as vital as the global crisis at the centre of which she finds herself; aliens are well cool - but its USP is the kind of narrative chicanery that blows away even the most deep-rooted cynicism of audiences who think they can't be surprised any more. It's reminiscent of Christopher Nolan's faux-Kubrickian efforts in Inception and Interstellar, but benefits from not being as wildly overambitious or unnecessarily complex. More than that, though, Villeneuve and Heisserer take a century of established cinematic storytelling and use it against you to create something so ballsy, it's almost as if you've been introduced to an entirely new language. Look very carefully and you can see what they've done there.

Probably worth mentioning that Jeremy Renner's in it too

A second viewing should be included with the sale of each cinema ticket, so that all of Arrival's sly genius can be appreciated in full. With hindsight, seemingly innocuous lines of dialogue take on new meaning, scenes that initially seemed irrelevant become crucial, and those red herrings can be fished out at an early stage. What's more, you can wallow in the respect afforded to you by a director who assumes you're smart enough to work with him in decoding the film's mysteries while simultaneously schooling you in linguistic theory and cinematic audacity.

Were it not for that somewhat protracted mid-section, Arrival would easily perch atop any sensible cinemagoer's (i.e. mine) top ten of the year so far. It's rescued by its dazzling finale, but there's still plenty to love about its freshness, its elegance and its refusal to cram in a car chase or ten. Almost certainly Denis Villeneuve's best film, the success of this sci-fi lullaby bodes extremely well for his next film: 2017's tantalising Harrison Ford / Ryan Gosling-starring Blade Runner sequel. Here's hoping to see more things you people wouldn't believe.

LFF 2016:A Monster Calls / The Handmaiden /The Red Turtle

Well bugger me with a candlestick and call me Karen if it isn't that time of year again: it's the London Film Festival, a whole entire festival of films about London Records, the label that was home to such stellar talent as The Rolling Stones, ZZ Top and Gay Dad. What's that? Oh, right. Ignore me. Here are some film reviews!

A Monster Calls

Juan Antonio Bayona's fantasy-drama is heavy on the fantasy and light on the drama, suggesting he might be the ideal choice for an FX-heavy blockbuster like, say, the next instalment in the increasingly dull Jurassic Park series. Not that A Monster Calls is dull at all; in fact the scenes in which young Lewis MacDougall's tormented protagonist summons Liam Neeson's stunningly-rendered giant tree man (think a really fucked-off Ent) are some of the most entertaining in cinemas this year. But Bayona, working from a script by Patrick Ness (working from his own novel, working from an idea by Siobhan Dowd), sets up a promise early on about the healing power of storytelling which never quite delivers.

There's much to love here, not least some eye-ripplingly gorgeous animated sequences and a pivotal performance from Felicity Jones, but while Bayona is busy tugging on your heartstrings in the final act he's letting the opportunity for a truly thought-provoking fable slip through his fingers. Also, just a thought: when writing the lonely, awkward schoolboy with problems at home requiring a supernatural solution these days, I'm fairly sure writers aren't legally obliged to include the three antagonistic bullies, the leader of whom is clearly destined for a nasty comeuppance. And yet here we are.

The Handmaiden

Park Chan-wook is back in vengeance territory, thank God, although he's also in his fifties now, which means that as an arthouse director he is required to spend miles of footage (or, more likely, petabytes of memory) shooting young girls having it off with each other in the most graphic scenes you can get away with in a mainstream movie. And so The Handmaiden gets the Blue Is The Warmest Colour award at this year's LFF for the most comically extended scenes of fanny-on-fanny action which do more to titillate than advance the plot, although at least Abdellatif Kechiche's 2013 sapphic slurpathon had a believable and tender love story behind it.

Park's film, based on Sarah Waters' novel Fingersmith, is a tale of con artists, double-crosses and heavy scissoring which starts off slowly, finds its rhythm in the middle and reaches a satisfying climax, but goes on so long your buttocks eventually get sore. Completely rewriting the novel's third act, Park stretches the story into a flabby revenge tale that lacks the lean, mean spark of his celebrated Vengeance trilogy. As expected, it's sumptuously shot and has a healthy seam of black humour running through it, but Park's shock tactics have lurched from smartly-crafted stomach-churning violence and brain-spinning plot wrinkles to adolescent lesbian fantasies. That's all well and good if you just fancy a wank, but less so if you came to the cinema for a different kind of stimulation.

The Red Turtle

Written and directed by Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit and co-produced by Studio Ghibli, The Red Turtle is a seamless marriage of European and Asian sensibilities: hopelessly romantic and dreamily inscrutable, it's a dialogue-free fairytale that leaves you baffled, but in a warm and glowing kind of way, like that's just the way things are. Dudok de Wit's designs are simple but gorgeously animated, and while the premise (man is washed up on desert island) necessitates vast, empty backgrounds, it also allows the animation to breathe, pulling you into its carefully-crafted world. A triumph of originality and unpredictability, with solid support from some comedy crabs.

The Girl On The Train

If the number of girls on trains reading The Girl On The Train over the last couple of years is anything to go by, then the film of the book of the girl on the train is already on the fast track to box office success. Which is a shame really, because despite a first class performance from Emily Blunt, it really is a load of derivative, mediocre and frequently lazy old rubbish; if Southern Rail made movies instead of pretending to operate a train service, this would be the result.

The Girl On The Train

Full disclaimer: I haven't read Paula Hawkins' book. I don't know anything about it bar its Da Vinci Code / Girl With The Dragon Tattoo / Gone Girl-esque ubiquity among commuters, although that fact in itself should have alerted me to the film's distinct averageness. So whether its flaws are inherited from the source material or are entirely down to Erin Cressida Wilson's script, I don't know. But even if you were to approach it with the blissful ignorance of the novel's very existence, you'd know it was a literary adaptation before it's barely pulled out of the station.

Much of the first act is smothered in Emily Blunt's voiceover, explaining who her character is and what she's looking at from her vantage point on her daily slog to and from Manhattan, and it's a fair indication that the film is destined to go off the rails. It might be an old-fashioned point of view but I like films to show, not tell, and lengthy voiceovers are almost always a signal that somebody, somewhere, doesn't have the artistic chops to craft a truly cinematic experience. The fact that the voiceovers disappear once they've set the scene, returning only for a cringe-inducing sign-off, just drives the point home.

The Girl On The Balcony

Before too long then, we know that Rachel (Blunt) is an obsessive alcoholic who thrives on twice-daily gawps at the house she used to share with her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux), who's now married to Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). A couple of doors down live Megan (Haley Bennett) and Scott (Luke Evans), an initially anonymous couple who Rachel envies for their apparently perfect life. All these characters' stories are presented to us in a relentless tumble of flashbacks and captions, some of which are polite enough to let you know when you're back in the present day, if director Tate Taylor can be arsed.

Flashbacks - along with voiceovers - are another dangerous filmmaking tool, and Taylor wields them like a child with a chainsaw, hacking his story to bits and leaving you to piece together the tattered remains. Now I don't mind the odd bit of deliberate misdirection and cinematic sleight-of-hand that flashbacks can provide (Christopher Nolan's Memento and The Prestige took the device to new and thus-far unparalleled heights), but here they just come across as unnecessary. One notably egregious example occurs during The Girl On The Train's climax, pointlessly depicting at length (and in dubious taste) events we've already had explained to us. There's a high-profile film out soon that uses flashbacks with startling ingenuity, and it shunts Wilson and Taylor's film into the sidings; one can only hope that they watch it and think long and hard about what they've done.

The Girl On The Front Lawn

Eventually, as you can imagine (or know full well having read the book), there's an unpleasant turn of events for the characters, and the whole shebang becomes a '90s psychological thriller riddled with plot holes. Not least of these is a staggeringly inept police investigation headed up by the usually-formidable Alison Janney, wasted here as a detective who - in any other similarly-themed movie - would have had the case wrapped up by the hour mark, instead of doing dumb things like conducting half an interview with a prime suspect before inexplicably breaking off because an underling shook his head at her. I too found myself shaking my head, and not for the last time.

Tate Taylor's approach and visuals suggest a man who's watched Gone Girl quite a lot and thought, well, that worked, let's do that. But in attempting to mimic David Fincher, he's merely highlighted the difference between a director who truly understands the potential of cinema and a journeyman lumbered with a creaky script. Roughly ten percent of The Girl On The Train is made up of things happening, while the remaining ninety percent consists of people telling other people about things that happened, and frankly it's a waste of film. If you want someone to relay the story's events to you just read the book, because on this evidence, cinema is entirely the wrong platform.