Movie reviews
When Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) finds himself owing a debt to a loan shark in Smallsville, Texas, he decides to bump off his mother for the insurance. Killer-for-hire Joe Cooper (McConaughey) is his hitman of choice, not least because Joe is a cop who can cover up his own murders. Unfortunately, sociopath Joe takes a shine to Chris’s teenage sister, Dottie (Juno Temple), and complications ensue. William Friedkin’s first film since Bug (2006) is a riveting neo-noir, crackling with tension and bleakly comic immorality. McConaughey’s performance is utterly compelling. Its intensity is such that it should blow every other actor off the screen, but co-stars Hirsch, Gina Gershon and Thomas Haden Church more than hold their own, while Juno Temple’s turn as a naïve teen is the most powerful performance by a young actress since Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone (2009). The plot does hit a couple of speed-bumps, and the confined spaces betray the film’s theatrical roots (Tracy Letts adapting her own play for the screenplay), but even that adds considerably to the claustrophobic, noirish sense of fatalism that draws us inexorably onwards to a stunning climax.
Fuelled by 30-something angst, Friends With Kids (16s) opens with a group of friends who are ‘living the dream’ of Manhattan life but gradually succumbing to the inevitability of marriage and family, in the process discovering that there is more to life than trendy restaurants and shallow sex. The story centres on Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt, who also writes and directs) and Jason (Adam Scott), life-long friends who decide to make a go of platonic parenthood, this on the basis that their other friends — Leslie (Maya Rudolph) and Alex (Chris O’Dowd), and Missy (Kristen Wiig) and Ben (Jon Hamm) — have drained their relationships of magic by combining romance and children. If that all sounds like an episode of Sex in the City, you wouldn’t be far wrong, but it’s an episode from the early days, when Sex in the City still had interesting things to say about relationships, commitment, and the difference between romance and love. Westfeldt and Scott make for an affecting leading couple, both of them plausible as individuals and generating a believable chemistry when together, while their co-stars provide solid support, with Chris O’Dowd overshadowing Jon Hamm. On the downside, the movie is nowhere as edgy and provocative as it clearly believes itself to be, and the ending can be pretty much guessed at after 10 minutes. Overall, it’s an enjoyable meditation on the nature of modern relationships.
