Movie Reviews: Diana

Set during the last two years of the life of the former Princess of Wales, Diana (12A) stars Naomi Watts in the eponymous role, playing a woman who is struggling to define her post-royal family position, maintain a relationship with her sons, and find the love that has eluded her.

The film opens with Diana watching a TV programme in which Prince Charles is grilled about his alleged infidelity during their marriage, although Diana’s own alleged infidelities are glaringly noticeable in their absence.

Pottering about Kensington Palace, making baked beans on toast for tea, Diana is a lonely, beautiful princess who has been terribly wronged. When she meets heart surgeon Dr Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews), Diana believes she has found true love at last — but will the world at large, and the paparazzi press in particular, leave her in peace to live her life? A very fine actress, Naomi Watts is given very little character to play with in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s hagiography. The story here cleaves very firmly to the perception that Diana was flawed only in terms of her inability to play the part expected of her by the Windsors, and that she was undone only by her passion for life and love. That theory is undermined by surprisingly muted performances from Watts and Andrews, the cheesy, well-worn dialogue, and the stilted retelling of a tale we all know only too well from a thousand tabloid headlines.

Cold Comes the Night (15A) is a crime flick with an interesting twist. Chloe (Alice Eve) runs a seedy motel, doing her best to keep her young daughter, Sophia (Ursula Parker), out of the hands of social services. When a gang member is murdered in her motel, Chloe finds herself at the mercy of an eastern European criminal Topo (Bryan Cranston), who — being almost blind — needs Chloe’s eyes to help him find the money that local policeman Billy (Logan Marshall-Green) has stolen. The fact that Billy is Chloe’s lover complicates matters further, and sets us up for a deliciously twisty noir thriller. Alice Eve is in excellent form as the desperate Chloe, a woman forced to make difficult choices as her life falls apart. Unfortunately, writer-director Tze Chun also allows his story to spiral out of control, as the twists and turns become increasingly preposterous and eventually laughable. Cranston, hidden away behind a large pair of dark glasses for the film’s entirety, has little to offer other than a guttural, monosyllabic menace, while Marshall-Green, who is entertainingly creepy at first, is very poorly served by the implausibility of his character’s descent into madness.

Kelly + Victor (16s) stars Antonia Campbell-Hughes as Kelly, a sleepy-eyed angel who turns brutally dominant when sexually aroused. The object of her desire, Victor (Julian Morris), is conflicted: he falls heavily for Kelly, but suffers badly as a result of her masochistic behaviour. Can the young lovers find a middle ground between pain and pleasure? Adapted from Niall Griffiths’ novel by director Kieran Evans, Kelly + Victor has the potential for a compelling amour fou but the story is let down by its execution. There’s a neat juxtaposition, certainly, between Kelly and Victor’s shy wooing of one another outside of the bedroom and the appalling intensity of their sex-life within, but there’s also a lot of bland dialogue that serves little purpose other than to confirm what we’re seeing, or what we already know about the characters.

Set in the badlands of the Donegal-Leitrim border with Northern Ireland, Black Ice (15A) follows teenager Alice (Jane McGrath) as she falls for local bad boy Jimmy Devlin (Killian Scott) and finds herself caught up in a criminal underworld. It’s a world of boy racers, diesel smuggling and car theft, and director Johnny Gogan, who co-writes with Brian Leyden, gives his Springsteen-esque tale of romantic outlaws kicking against recession ostracisation an impressively seedy glamour. Gogan makes a virtue of what appears to be a tiny budget, as the bleached tones and claustrophobic close-ups convey the characters’ increasingly desperate attempts to escape their fate. The performances lack polish for the most part, although Killian Scott offers a compelling presence as the anti-hero Jimmy.