Film review: The Critic is a poison-pen love letter to the Golden Age of London’s West End
Ian McKellen stars as Jimmy Erskine and Gemma Arterton as Nina Land in The Critic. Picture: Fearless Minds / BKS
- The Critic
- ★★★★☆
- Cinematic release
(15A) stars Ian McKellen as Jimmy Erskine, a veteran theatre reviewer for the Daily Chronicle in 1930s London. Renowned for his vitriolic pen, Erskine has the power to make or break actors’ careers, and is particularly
vicious when writing about Nina Land (Gemma Arterton). When the Chronicle’s new owner Viscount Brooke (Mark Strong) advises Erskine to tone down his brutal style and his penchant for flaunting his ‘proclivities’ (ie, homosexuality) in public, the scene is set for a titanic battle of wills.
Adapted by Patrick Marber from Anthony Quinn’s play Curtain Call and directed by Anand Tucker, is a poison-pen love letter to the Golden Age of London’s West End. With John Webster’s Jacobean tragedies casting a long shadow over proceedings, it blends blackmail into a timeless, blood-spattered tale of a power struggle fuelled by ambition and lust.
The darkly twisting machinations slacken in the second half, but McKellen is resolutely anti-heroic as the scheming, sybaritic Erskine, and he gets very strong support from Strong and Arterton — both playing hapless pawns in the tangled web Erskine weaves.
