
"No movie with Imelda Staunton and Bill Nighy can be entirely without interest and they're heading up a mighty cast here under the direction of the great Argentinian film-maker Pablo Trapero, making his English-language debut. He has co-written the screenplay with another A-lister: Canadian actor and director Sarah Polley. And yet the resulting picture, adapted from the 2013 novel by David Gilbert, feels nebulous and laborious."
"It is dependent on a giant twist-reveal, which is bafflingly implausible and strangely uncompelling even if taken at face value, and which tends to undermine the emotional reality of the whole film and its big confrontation scenes though there is one riveting showdown between Staunton and Nighy, two black-belts each at the top of their game. Nighy is Andrew Dyer, a cantankerous old literary lion revered throughout the world for the brilliant novels of his youth,"
"He lives with his longsuffering Czech housekeeper Gerde (Anna Geislerova) and high-schooler Andy (Noah Jupe), the product of an affair that destroyed his marriage to Isabel (Imelda Staunton). Andy is (possibly) like Smerdyakov in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: the non-canonical brother to his other, older siblings, would-be documentary film-maker Jamie (George MacKay) and recovering alcoholic screenwriter Richard (Johnny Flynn). The entire family is imperiously summoned to the mansion by Dyer."
Pablo Trapero makes his English-language debut directing a film starring Imelda Staunton and Bill Nighy, with a screenplay co-written by Sarah Polley and adapted from David Gilbert's 2013 novel. Bill Nighy plays Andrew Dyer, a cantankerous literary icon living as a drunken hermit in his Oxfordshire mansion with his housekeeper Gerde and high-schooler Andy, the product of an affair that ruined his marriage to Isabel (Staunton). The story gathers Dyer's estranged sons, Jamie and Richard, whose mixed resentment and dependency on Dyer fuel family tensions. A central twist-reveal strains plausibility and weakens the film's emotional reality, though a standout showdown between Staunton and Nighy remains riveting.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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