Movie Reviews: Argo

January, 1980. Argo (15A) opens in the wake of the Shah’s overthrow in Iran, when six diplomats escape from the American embassy in Tehran to hide out at the residence of the Canadian ambassador. CIA exfiltration expert Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) is commissioned to get the diplomats out of the country before they are discovered, but the clock is ticking. A tense thriller based on real events, Argo occasionally has the feel of a comedy farce, as Mendez, movie director Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) and special effects guru John Chambers (John Goodman) invent a Hollywood sci-fi fantasy movie — the titular Argo — as cover for extricating the six diplomats.

Affleck’s third film as director after Gone, Baby, Gone (2007) and The Town (2010) is his most ambitious project yet, being in part a film about the creative process, albeit one which never loses sight of its thriller roots.

Cutting back and forth between Mendez on the ground in Tehran and the CIA base where Mendez’s boss Jack O’Donnell (Bryan Cranston) battles with bureaucracy to ensure Mendez isn’t left twisting in the wind, the story is a pulsating one that milks its narrative potential almost to the final frame. Affleck’s taut direction, a strong script, superb performances and occasional moments of bleakly black humour all contribute to a powerful tale well told.

Disowned and discriminated against at home in Australia, four Aboriginal singers head for Vietnam in 1968 to entertain American troops, in the process becoming The Sapphires (PG).

Chris O’Dowd stars as boozy Irish svengali Dave in director Wayne Blair’s feature debut, marshalling the talents of Gail (Deborah Mailman), Julie (Jessica Mauboy), Kay (Shari Sebbens) and Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell). Given that the girls prefer to sing country & western, and are coached by Dave in the art of blues and soul, it’s all very reminiscent of The Commitments (1991), although the backdrop — that of Aboriginal segregation and apartheid — is a poisonously real parallel to Jimmy Rabbitte’s assertion in The Commitments that “The Irish are the blacks of Europe”. Much of the story’s appeal is bound up in the Sapphires’ struggle to be taken seriously on their own terms, rather than dismissed due to their skin colour, but once the movie switches to the tour of Vietnam and focuses on the group’s internal squabbling, it loses much of its narrative heft. O’Dowd is in likeable form here, even if his performance is a riff on the stereotypically feckless, drunken Irishman, and there’s strong support from the Sapphires themselves, particularly Deborah Mailman as the movie’s spiky conscience. The soundtrack, which is largely composed of 1960s Motown, is to die for.

People Like Us (12A) opens with struggling salesman Sam (Chris Pine) reluctantly travelling home for the funeral his father, a music producer who had never really bonded with his son. When Sam opens a parcel left to him by his father, he is shocked to discover it contains $150,000, along with instructions to find Frankie (Elizabeth Banks) and give the money to her and her young son Josh (Michael Hall D’Addario). Will Sam do the right thing? Alex Kurtzman co-writes and directs a tale that could well have been a schmaltz-fest, but Pine and Banks are given two very strong characters to work with, both of them full of contempt and self-loathing for the father who abandoned them. Strong support performances from Michelle Pfeiffer and Olivia Wilde flesh out the minor characters as the tale moves towards a predictable but satisfyingly poignant conclusion.

Set in Seattle in 2001, Grassroots (15A) stars Jason Biggs as a disillusioned reporter who takes on the job of managing his friend’s campaign to get elected to the city council, their fratboy guerrilla tactics giving way to a more measured appreciation of adult politics in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy. A heartfelt plea for, as the title suggests, more grassroots involvement in the political process in the US, Stephen Gyllenhaal’s film wears its heart on its sleeve, and is none the worse for it.