THE LOVELY BONES

2009, Peter Jackson, 135 mins.

A young girl is murdered and tells her story from the afterlife.

Peter Jackson’s best film since Heavenly Creatures, this is an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel which is distinctive for quite sensational visuals from cinematographer Andrew Lesnie and an astonishing performance from Stanley Tucci as the banal but deviant neighbour who murders the fourteen year old narrator of the film, played with immense confidence by young Saoirse Ronan. Tucci captures a sense of evil which is genuinely disturbing and allows Jackson to be relatively discreet in the portrayal of the murder. In fact, the film underplays both the potential for both horror and sentimentality, and the result is something very unusual and distinctive. A slight misstep is Susan Sarandon’s quirky performance as the lush of a grandmother but this is compensated for by the fine, understated work by  Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz as Ronan’s parents trying to cope with grief. 

VILLAIN

1971, Michael Tuchner, 94 mins. 

A mother-fixated gangster is involved in a disastrous robbery. 

Although ostensibly a gangster movie, Villain is actually most interesting as a state of the nation film which portrays Britain in the early seventies as a country going rapidly down the drain. Nothing works properly, the system is corrupt, sex is degrading and you can’t even pull off a decent payroll robbery because the unions are going out on strike. Richard Burton is pretty good as Vic Dakin, the villain of the title - clearly based on a combination of Reggie Kray and Cagney in White Heat – and Nigel Davenport is splendid as his nemesis, the only honest copper in the Met. The location filming is fantastic, especially a botched heist on a Bracknell factory, and the cast is packed with familiar faces, ranging from  Donald Sinden to James Cossins. Not quite on a par with Get Carter but close.