The Lady in the Van

Directed by Nicholas

Hynter
By Peter Travers January 6, 2016

Maggie Smith in 'The Lady in the Van' Nicola Dove/Sony

Maggie Smith saves the day in this story of a British

vagrant living in her car
Maggie Smith can do anything even save this rickety vehicle from a case of
the terminal cutes. Now ending her memorable run as the Dowager Countess
on Downton Abbey, Smith has picked herself another juicy acting plum. She's
playing Mary Shepherd, a decidedly unsanitary and unlovable vagrant who
parked her dilapidated van in a North London driveway in 1973 and for 15
years refused to budge.
It's a "mostly true story," according to playwright Alan Bennett, who owned the
driveway in question and wrote a memoir and a play about Shepherd. Now
Bennett's written the movie. Alex Jennings plays him as an eccentric whos
exasperated by Shepherd's antics she leaves her shit in plastic bags outside
her van but can't really turn the old dearie out. That's the plot. Nicholas
Hytner, who directed the film versions of two better Bennett plays, The
Madness of King George and The History Boys, does the honors again here. But
this time his job is mostly to stay out of Dame Maggie's way. Did he have a
choice?
Look, it's fun to watch Shepherd hate on bratty children, classical music and
liberal pieties. Smith's acid tongue makes any line sound better. But the
subplot about a blackmailer (Jim Broadbent) who terrorizes Shepherd in the
dead of night adds nothing, least of all a purpose. Things stretch to the

snapping point when Bennett starts arguing with himself about what to do with
the old lady and a backstory creeps in about why Shepherd deserves our tears.
In the end, Smith's acting is not enough to make for a film that lacks surprise
and creativity.

Son of Saul

Directed by Lszl Nemes

By Peter Travers December 18, 2015

Gza Rhrig, left, in 'Son of Saul.'

This highly praised Hungarian film reimagines the

Holocaust drama as a first-person hellscape
As with every Holocaust film, Son of Saul will stir complaints that cinema is too
trivial to encompass such profound evil. But there's nothing trivial about this
Hungarian masterwork from first-time director Lszl Nemes. You don't merely
witness horror, you feel it in your bones.
Nemes keeps his camera tightly focused on Saul Auslander (Gza Rhrig), a
Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz. Saul temporarily escapes the ovens by serving
with the Sonderkommando, Jews coerced to help execute other Jews and
dispose of the bodies. We see only what Saul sees, the more heinous acts
blurred in the background, but all the more terrifying for that.
Tension surges when Saul finds a boy who has survived the gas. When the boy

dies, Saul makes it his impossible goal to provide a Jewish burial. Is the boy
Saul's own son? Or symbolic of a greater loss?
All you need to know is in the haunted eyes of Rhrig, whose raw and riveting
performance deserves superlatives. Nemes is tackling a subject of enormous

complexity. The result is, quite simply, a great film.

45 Years

Directed by Andrew Haigh

By Peter Travers January 6, 2016

Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling in '45 Years.

Charlotte Rampling delivers the performance of her career

in this quiet British stunner
What goes into making a marriage last? "Who the fuck knows" seems to be the
astute answer provided by 45 Years, a sublimely acted, ruefully funny and
quietly devastating take on the topic from the gifted British writer-director
Andrew Haigh (Greek Pete, Weekend). Geoff Mercer (Tom Courtenay) and his
wife Kate (Charlotte Rampling) are a childless couple enjoying their retirement
in the Norfolk countryside and planning a party for their 45th anniversary.
Then the bomb drops. Geoff receives word that that the body of Katia, the
German girlfriend of his youth, has been found perfectly preserved in a Swiss
glacier where she went missing a half-century ago while they were on a hiking
trip. Suddenly, the scenes of puttering, hard-won contentment that make up
Geoff and Kates marriage are jolted into an unwelcome reassessment. Geoff
starts smoking again and thinks of returning to Switzerland. And Kate, forced to
compete with an idealized dead girl, finds jealousy nagging. She digs around
trying to find out about this mystery girl and how and why Geoff transferred his

feelings from Katia to her. Everyone struggles to maintain a very British reserve
unsuccessfully.
Based on David Constantine's 2005 short story In Another Country, 45
Years moves inexorably inside the heads of these two people just as they are
forced to wear a public mask that says happy together. Good luck with that. 45
Years casts a hell of a spell. And Courtenay and Rampling reward the film with
performances of uncommon subtlety and feeling.

n Apollo 13, director Ron Howard breathed nail-biting cinematic life into the
true story of astronauts sitting in a tin can in the vast abyss of space,
desperately trying to get home alive. Now, in this fanciful adaptation of
Nathaniel Philbricks nonfiction bestseller (screenwriter Charles Leavitt shares
story credit with Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver), he gives us sailors drifting on
an endless ocean, searching for land while being terrorised by a giant sperm
whale. Both films require a high level of visual invention to bring their
spectacular narratives to the screen, from the weightlessness of space to the
crushing burdens of the sea. But both are also films about storytelling: the
former examining how an increasingly neglected Nasa narrative reconnected
with a complacent public when potential tragedy reared its head, the latter
imaginatively revisiting the roots of a tale that became one of the defining
texts of American literature, Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick.
Howards In the Heart of the Sea casts Ben Whishaw as Melville, and sends him
to visit Brendan Gleesons shipwreck survivor Tom Nickerson in the hope that
he will provide inspiration for his forthcoming novel. Initially reluctant, but
swayed by money and stiff drink (and at the insistence of his wife), Nickerson
embarks upon an Ancient Mariner-style tale of the Essex, the Nantucket
whaleship on which he served as a cabin boy in 1820. Under the command of
George Pollard Jr (Benjamin Walker), whose relationship with his more
experienced first mate Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth) is dangerously
fractious, the Essex captures and guts a single whale a 19th-century kill
inflected by more modern overtones of cruelty and brutality. But after hearing
tales of richer harvests in an area patrolled by a giant white whale, the Essex
heads into dangerous waters where catastrophe and monstrous retribution
await.
Notwithstanding the daft dreariness of his Dan Brown adaptations (and passing
swiftly over the horrific comedy drama of The Dilemma), Ron Howard has
earned his spurs as a populist storyteller. From the sublime mermaid fantasy
of Splash, through the pre-Taken thrills of Ransom, and the controversial
hallucinations of A Beautiful Mind, he has slipped between genres with
dexterity. At first glance, In the Heart of the Sea has all the elements of a
classic Howard project, blending the maritime theme with which he has long
toyed (unrealised films include a drama about the Greenpeace ship Rainbow
Warrior and an adaptation of Jack Londons The Sea-Wolf) with the male rivalry
that fuelled hits like the Oscar-nominated Frost/Nixon, and more recently the
Formula One drama Rush. Indeed, it was while making Rush that Chris
Hemsworth first introduced Howard to a script about the Essex to which the
actor was already wedded.

On the positive side, there are some spirited performances from a talented
cast, not least Cillian Murphy whose Matthew Joy endures some of the storys
toughest breaks with a convincing sense of ragged endurance (the entire
shipwrecked ensemble waste away in convincing fashion). As the adult
Nickerson, Gleeson gets under the skin of this haunted man, conveying his
conflicted desire to unburden himself while still keeping his awful secrets
hidden. Theres an echo of Frank Marshalls Alive (and a touch of Angelina
Jolies Unbroken) in the crews determination to survive, and Leavitts script
subtly suggests that Nickersons post-traumatic guilt about his ordeal may
have turned his memories of the whale into something more fantastical than
factual. Perhaps that overwhelming sense of artificiality is deliberate after all.

Le mepris
I first saw Le Mpris many years ago in a print so faded that everything was
pale pink; it felt like gazing at an artefact from an immeasurably distant past.
Watching the film now, with its reds and Mediterranean blues restored to their
full intensity, the film is still redolent of a lost antiquity, not least because JeanLuc Godards 1963 feature is so steeped in melancholy and a sense of
mourning.
Ostensibly adapted from Alberto Moravias novel Contempt, the film stars
Michel Piccoli as writer Paul, selling his soul to work for US producer Prokosch,
played by a magnificently overbearing Jack Palance. This tycoon is a philistine
so monstrous that he dares rage at no less a deity than the great Fritz Lang
(playing himself), whom hes hired to direct a movie of The Odyssey.
Brigitte Bardot, meanwhile, is Pauls wife Camille, the Penelope to Pauls
modern-day Ulysses but shes also Bardot. The stars explosive physical
appeal is analysed in an opening nude scene that was at once Godards sop to
his producers, and a self-reflexively overt exercise in sex-symbol objectification.
Its a Godard film, after all: BB, the film reminds us, stands for both Brigitte
Bardot and Bertolt Brecht.
Le Mpris features some of the most imposing exteriors in 60s cinema, shot by
Raoul Coutard around the extraordinary Villa Malaparte on Capri not so much
a house, more a landscape installation. The centrepiece of the BFI Southbanks
new Godard season, Le Mpris is arguably the directors only film that could
bring tears to your eyes not least because of Georges Delerues sublime
score. Its also a peerless source of style tips watch Piccoli and learn how to

wear your trilby comme Dean Martin.

Chic! review flat French comedy with

nothing to exclaim about.
The Devil Wears Prada understood the fashion milieu it was satirising,
but this film, with its outdated think pink stereotypes, does not .
However tempting it may be to salute any film audacious enough to punctuate
its title, it must be conceded that Chic! doesnt deserve that punctuation mark.
Although pleasant in its way, thanks mostly to its engaging cast, theres not a
lot in this flat French comedy to exclaim about.
The unconvincingly contrived high concept here is that Fanny Ardant is a
capricious top fashion designer who must have a male muse to inspire her. This
means uptight company executive Marina Hands must persuade her earthy
Breton gardener Eric Elmosnino to hang out with (but not actually shag) Ardant,
providing inspiration, until the new collection is completed.
The setting would suggest that The Devil Wears Prada is a particular
touchstone, but that latter film actually understood and appreciated the milieu
it was satirising, whereas its obvious that hack director Jrme Cornuau and
screenwriter Jean-Paul Bathany take all their swipes at stereotypes that went
out of date in the 1950s.

Bolshoi Babylon review offstage war zone of Russias

secret weapon
The Bolshoi may look beautiful from the stalls, but this documentary
reveals it as a tinderbox of broiling personal and political rivalries
The opening voice tells us that Bolshoi is one of two brand names that
represent Russia, the other being Kalashnikov. Theres certainly something of
the war zone about this portrayal of the behind-the-scenes battles that
climaxed in a shocking acid attack on the Bolshois ballet director, Sergei
Filin, in January 2013. As thefilm unpicks broiling internecine struggles among
performers and management, we learn of the uncomfortably close relationship
(physical and political) between the theatre and the Kremlin. Prime
minister Dmitry Medvedev calls the Bolshoi Russias secret weapon,

dispatched to foreign countries to achieve our goals like some quasi-military

intervention. When new general director Vladimir Urin is installed to restore
order to the theatre, its clear that his appointment comes from the highest
office. Despite demands of independence, he must attend meetings with Putin,
who clearly takes a very personal interest in this national treasure.
Elsewhere, we hear from the performers, for whom life in the Bolshoi is a
constant struggle between the contorted whims of favouritism, the perceived
horrors of ageing (when an older woman appears on stage, its ugly), and
the terror of snapping a tendon in front of 2,000 people and never being able to
return to the stage. Like the ballet itself, the Bolshoi may look beautiful from
the stalls, but behind the scenes its blood, sweat and tears a tinderbox of
combustible elements to which personal and political rivalries lend a dangerous
spark. As one interviewee ominously observes: If the Bolshoi is sick, its
because Russia is sick.

Welcome to RTs 17th Annual Golden Tomato Awards, in which we honor the
best-reviewed movies and TV shows of 2015. From the biggest Hollywood hits
to the most provocative indies, weve got the films that won the critics hearts
and probably inspired you as well.