Parky at the Pictures (DVD 25/4/2019)

Fiftysomething slacker Kevin Costner is too busy to cast his vote, so 12 year-old daugher Madeline Carroll does it for him. But while the polling machine acknowledges his vote, it fails to register which candidate was actually selected and when the entire contest between Republican incumbent Kelsey Grammer and Democratic challenger Dennis Hopper comes down to Costner's verdict, the entire political circus descends upon Texico, New Mexico to sway his opinion. 

With Nathan Lane and Stanley Tucci stealing scenes as the rival spin doctors, this is a wry satire that's as much interested in Costner's relationship with the precocious Carroll as it is in exposing the perfidy of the American system of government. However, the swipes at Washington and the media are mostly well-directed and the underrated Costner once again succeeds in showing why he was such an affable superstar some two decades ago. 

Contrasting starkly with Stern's gentle wit is the abrasive parodic approach employed by Armando Iannucci for In the Loop, in which he suggests how easily cynical careerists could turn a potential global crisis to their advantage simply to curry favour with their masters. Yet in seeking to expose the extent to which a democracy depends on decisions made by non-elected officials, the film overplays its hand. Many in high office are driven by vanity and venality, and Iannucci is right to castigate their corruption and connivance. But he also ridicules principle and seems to deny the existence of conviction and, thus, he errs more towards Whitehall farce than Spitting Image. 

Nevertheless, this is still a coruscating comedy, whose narrative has a terrifying logic, while the one-liners zing with obscene ferocity - although the throwaway remarks often amuse more than the more obviously handcrafted tantrums and insults. The same is true of the performances, with lower key turns like Tom Hollander's hapless minister and Gina McKee's detached wonk feeling less caricatured than Chris Addison's overwhelmed underling and Peter Capaldi's gloriously grandstanding PR pitbull. Similarly, the American cast is all the more effective for adopting the tone of a Christopher Guest mockumentary rather than something more savagely Chris Morris. James Gandolfini lacks conviction as the deskbound general keen to avoid conflict, but Mimi Kennedy impresses as the diplomatic dove countering hawkish senator David Rasche, whose climactic alliance with Capaldi sees aide Anna Chlumsky's pacifist position paper transformed into a justification for invasion. 

The ease with which ideas can be misappropriated is also the subject of Marc Abraham's Flash of Genius, a biopic of Robert Kearns, who invented the intermittent windscreen wiper in the 1960s and then had his patent stolen by America's automotive giants. With Greg Kinnear investing the role with the same corrupted sense of everyman decency he brought to Paul Schrader's Auto Focus (2002), this aims to be as momentous as Francis Ford  Coppola's Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988), but winds up feeling like an upmarket teleplay.

Unable to convince anyone that Detroit has pilfered his concept, Kinnear risks his happy marriage to Lauren Graham to secure justice. But it's only when smooth-operating lawyer Alan Alda offers to represent him that he begins to make any headway. However, Kinnear is not interested in out of court settlements and he battles on into the 1990s, eventually acting as his own counsel, to make Ford and Chrysler pay their dues. 

Kinnear works hard to make us care about his cause. But he's no Gary Cooper or James Stewart. Moreover, Abraham is no Frank Capra and in seeking to make his underdog saga as heart-warming and tear-jerking as possible, he too often strays from the facts, particularly where Kearns's relationship with his wife Phyllis and his six children is concerned. 

Dennis Lee stumbles over similar hurdles in making his semi-autobiographical debut, Fireflies in the Garden. Flashing back and forth between time frames, Lee quickly loses control of his maudlin material, whose title derives from a poem by Robert Frost. Despite a stellar cast, this again feels like something made for television rather than the big screen, with Robert Pearson's production design and Danny Moder's cinematography being particularly lacklustre.

Returning to the Midwest to celebrate mother Julia Roberts's mature graduation from college, failing novelist Ryan Reynolds arrives to find that she has been killed in a car crash and the celebration is instantly transformed into a wake. Already dreading a confrontation with short-fused father Willem Dafoe, Reynolds seeks solace in younger sister Shannon Lucio and favourite aunt, Emily Watson. But his mind keeps drifting back to the endless dysfunction that scarred his childhood. 

With Caydon Boyd and Hayden Panetierre bearing little resemblance to the Reynolds and Watson in the flashback sequences, this is as visually imprecise as it's structurally cumbersome. The tonal lurches between Ordinary People (1980) and The Big Chill (1983) are also hugely unconvincing. But the real weakness here is the characterisation that allows Dafoe to gorge on the scenery as an identikit monstrous father, Carrie-Anne Moss to wallow in self-pity as Reynolds's recovering alchoholic wife and Reynolds to play the tortured artist whose break away from romantic pulp depends upon the publication of his latest opus, a memoir of parental abuse.

Another all-star cast finds itself even further out to sea in Rowan Woods's Fragments, in which the crash of Paul Haggis's 2004 Oscar winner reverberates much more loudly than the gunshot that shatters the lives of the customers and staff at a Los Angeles diner. Working from his own novel, Winged Creatures, screenwriter Roy Freirich seems more intent on producing an academic thesis than an emotive drama. Consequently, this quickly collapses beneath the weight of the creators' expectations and the triteness of the meaningful utterances foistered upon actors who strive harder at making this seem significant than it deserves. 

Clearly witnessing a random shooting is a harrowing experience. But seemingly everybody involved in this slaying seems to react as though they had been reading a psychology textbook. Driving instructor Forrest Whitaker takes his survival as a sign that his luck is in and he heads for the local casino, much to the chagrin of concerned daughter Jennifer Hudson. Waitress Kate Beckinsale behaves just as capriciously, as she uses her infant to snag the attention of doctor Guy Pearce, who held the door open for the lone gunman and is now taking out his guilt on wife Embeth Davidtz. Meanwhile, teenager Dakota Fanning responds to the loss of her father by embracing a religious fanaticism that mystifies mother Jeanne Tripplehorn as much as Josh Hutcherson's post-traumatic stress disorder befuddles parents Robin Wiegert and Jackie Earle Haley.

There's nothing wrong with appealing for gun control. But the context has to be more sophisticated than this aggregation of fortune cookie philosophising and clumsy symbolism (much of which seems to be related to a post-9/11 fear of flying). Moreover, the flashbacking structure is unnecessarily cumbersome and leaves each resolution feeling like the lachrymose climax of a saccharine teleplay. 

The trip home undertaken by Tim Robbins, Rachel McAdams and Michael Peña in Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones is infinitely more credible and, consequently, it's possible to overlook its more to egregious narrative contrivances. However, it's the acting rather than the scripting that makes this formulaic road movie so appealing. 

On furlough from Iraq, Robbins's career sergeant is hoping that his back injury is going to keep him Stateside for good. But he's forced to rethink his future when Molly Hagan reveals that she's had enough of being an army wife and wants a divorce. Despite already having already travelled cross country in a hire car with Sergeant Peña and Private McAdams, Robbins agrees to join them on their last leg to Las Vegas, where Peña is hoping a hooker can repair the damage done by some shrapnel before he meets up with his fiancé and McAdams wants to return a fallen buddy's guitar to his grieving parents.

Frequently feeling like a throwback to the coming home movies set in the immediate aftermath of both the Second World War and Vietnam, this is essentially a plea for audiences to show some gratitude to America's service personnel for the dirty job being done in their name. It's not the subtlest of messages and the bonding-bickering-reconciling format occasionally becomes wearisome, especially as none of the backstories is particularly interesting. But, even though the denouement drags cornball to a new low, the magnetism of the performances makes it impossible not to root for the hapless trio, as they stumble towards a new purpose that is evident from the outset. 

Steve Zahn's route to a new start is even more circuitous in Stephen Belber's directorial bow, Management. Stuck doing odd jobs in parents Fred Ward and Margo Martindale's Arizona motel, Zahn falls head over heels on spotting corporate art rep Jennifer Aniston at the check-in desk. But when his attempt to woo her with a stolen bottle of champagne misfires, he pursues her to Maryland, where he enlists the help of stoner James Liao to prove to Aniston that he's much better for her than short-fused, ex-punk rocking yoghurt mogul, Woody Harrelson. 

Zahn has always done a nice line in needy nerdiness, but his inarticulate bashfulness mutates into stalkerish obsession in this resolutely unfunny romcom. He sparks amiably with Aniston, but that's largely because they're both decent actors rather than because Belber has crafted credible or compatible characters. Indeed, all he seems to have done is recycle the prickly vulnerability that Aniston exhibited as Rachel in Friends and shoe-horned it into a far-fetched odd couple scenario that carries creepy undertones of Psycho (1960).

Michael Caine and Bill Milner play another mismatched couple in John Crowley's equally bleak comedy, Is Anybody There? Set in the Yorkshire coastal backwater of Hornsea in the 1980s, the story revolves around Caine's widowed magician being forced to take up residence in the old people's home run by Milner's parents, David Morrissey and Anne-Marie Duff. Happy to have an audience, the seventysomething initially teaches the 10 year-old some tricks. But, as dementia sets in, the emphasis is placed more inexorably on Caine's bitterness at a wasted life.

With Caine edging grumpily towards death and Milner being so fascinated with ghosts and the afterlife that he smuggles a tape recorder into one room to capture a fading pensioner's last rattle, this clearly sought to be a British variation on Harold and Maude (1971). But there's something desperate about an enterprise that relies for its laughs on having estimable veterans like Sylvia Syms, Leslie Phillips, Peter Vaughan, Rosemary Harris and Elizabeth Spriggs curse and complain about their bodily functions. Moreover, there's nothing particularly appealing about Morrissey seeking a cure for his mid-life crisis in the pursuit of teenage assistant Linzey Cocker. Caine courageously allows Rob Hardy's camera to pry into his melancholic decrepitude, but this is woefully unworthy of his still considerable talents.