The Critic assessment: It’s Agatha Christie on steroids
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The Critic (111 mins)
Speak No Evil (110 mins)
Like all great actors, Sir Ian McKellen has been on the receiving end of some waspish theatre reviews down the years, but as a poacher-turns-gamekeeper exercise and for quite a few reasons besides, The Critic is a joy.
McKellen plays Jimmy Erskine, formidably influential drama critic for The Daily Chronicle.
The period is the 1930s, when folk wear dinner dress to go to the West End theatre, although there is another sartorial code in the East End, where Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts are on the prowl.
Erskine is a potential target for them, a promiscuous gay man not averse to fleeting sexual encounters in the park with ‘rough trade’, who also walks through the streets arm in arm with his mixed-race secretary, Tom (Alfred Enoch).
Erskine’s ‘proclivities’ are an embarrassment to his boss, Viscount Brooke (Mark Strong), who has just succeeded his late father as the Chronicle’s proprietor and is eager to eat into the market dominance of the all-conquering Daily Mail.
Like all great actors, Sir Ian McKellen (pictured) has been on the receiving end of some waspish theatre reviews down the years, but as a poacher-turns-gamekeeper exercise and for quite a few reasons besides, The Critic is a joy
By contrast, everyone in the ensemble cast of Speak No Evil, a slick remake of the 2022 Danish thriller of the same title, deserves equal plaudits along with writer-director James Watkins (pictured leading star James McAvoy)
That is the background. In the foreground, a new production of the Jacobean play The White Devil has opened, starring Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), whose sensual beauty does not remotely move Erskine.
He thinks she’s a ham and duly gives her a stinker of a review. She confronts him in the street one night, and a relationship of sorts is kindled, with him confessing that he was briefly an actor himself – ‘my zenith was Laertes, in Dundee’ – and each spotting ways in which their careers might benefit.
Erskine has rarely had to worry about his career. Yet he has failed to conduct his sex life with discretion, and Brooke, a thoroughly decent cove but already keen to clear out the old guard, has handed him his notice.
From there, the drama is cranked up to embrace snobbery, infidelity, unrequited love, blackmail, suicide and murder, becoming the sort of rather overwrought story that one could easily imagine a black-tied Erskine going to see on stage.
Except that we know full well ‘whodunnit’ and how, it’s Agatha Christie on steroids.
In fact, The Critic was (loosely) adapted by Patrick Marber from Anthony Quinn’s excellent 2015 novel Curtain Call.
Marber is very good at spite (he also wrote the brilliant 2006 film Notes on a Scandal) and some of the dialogue is cherishably catty. But most cherishable of all is McKellen’s lead performance.
Every huff and puff, every snort and harrumph, every tic and grimace, feeds his pitch-perfect depiction of this unscrupulous old man, desperate to cling on to his social and professional status no matter who suffers the collateral damage.
McKellen plays Jimmy Erskine, formidably influential drama critic for The Daily Chronicle, a promiscuous gay man not averse to fleeting sexual encounters in the park with ‘rough trade’, who also walks through the streets arm in arm with his mixed-race secretary, Tom (Alfred Enoch, pictured)
In the foreground, a new production of the Jacobean play The White Devil has opened, starring Nina Land (Gemma Arterton, pictured), whose sensual beauty does not remotely move Erskine
Anand Tucker directs very adroitly, the period detail is meticulous and a fabulous supporting cast also includes Lesley Manville as Nina’s interfering mother and Romola Garai as Brooke’s imperious daughter. But the movie belongs to McKellen.
By contrast, everyone in the ensemble cast of Speak No Evil, a slick remake of the 2022 Danish thriller of the same title, deserves equal plaudits along with writer-director James Watkins.
We begin in Tuscany, where in an upmarket hotel a buttoned-up American family – Ben (Scoot McNairy), Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and 11-year-old daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) – are befriended by extrovert, souped-up Englishman Paddy (James McAvoy), his wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and their son Ant (Dan Hough).
Ant has communication ‘issues’ apparently on account of being born with a short tongue, although this is one of those movies in which nothing is at it seems and we know it from the start, yet still it whisks us along on an increasingly exhilarating ride.
The Americans live in London, and when they’re all back in England they visit their new-found pals at their home in the West Country, where by increments their hosts seem a little eccentric, if not downright weird, if not full-on deranged.
There’s a faint hiss of comedy throughout, like gas escaping from somewhere although you’re not quite sure where, as well as some unmistakeably wry lines – ‘our normal is not their normal!’ – about the perceived differences between Americans and Brits.
There’s also a gentle moral to what, by the end, is a pretty unhinged story: much like the green liqueur that tasted so good with a suntan, holiday friendships don’t always travel well.
From there, the drama is cranked up to embrace snobbery, infidelity, unrequited love, blackmail, suicide and murder, becoming the sort of rather overwrought story that one could easily imagine a black-tied Erskine going to see on stage
