Movie reviews

JOHNNY DEPP played an extravagant version of the controversial author Hunter S Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).

He is more subdued in The Rum Diary (15A), playing one of Thompson’s literary avatars, Kemp, a frustrated novelist who takes a job as a journalist at an English-language newspaper in Puerto Rico.

Set in 1960, against a backdrop of growing Puerto Rican unrest at the corruption that has become endemic under their American overlords, the story has a number of contemporary resonances, including the consequences of American cultural imperialism and the ongoing decline of the printed newspaper.