Parky at the Pictures (DVD 30/5/2019)

Yet, in her quieter moments, Holofcener must wonder why she was eased out of the director's chair after having racked up such lauded and lucrative credits as Walking and Talking (1996), Lovely and Amazing (2001), Friends With Money (2006), Please Give (2010) and Enough Said (2013). As the stepdaughter of Woody Allen's producer, Charles H. Joffe, Holofcener would be well acquainted with the vagaries of the movie business. But, given the nature of Israel's experiences in the early 1990s, Holofcener must also have been struck by both the similarities in their situations and their very different responses to what potentially could have been a considerable career setback. 

Having been fired from her job for drinking at her copy-editing desk and insulting the boss, 51 year-old Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) accepts a party invitation from her agent, Marjorie (Jane Curtin), in order to goad her into discussing future projects. In the past, Lee had enjoyed success with biographies of actress Tallulah Bankhead, TV personality Dorothy Kilgallen and cosmetics tycoon Estée Lauder. However, Marjorie has no faith in her latest work on vaudeville legend Fanny Brice and Lee leaves the gathering early after snorting with derision at Tom Clancy (Kevin Corolan) insisting that writer's block is an excuse dreamt up by lazy authors.

Next day, Lee gets further sneered at by the clerk at her local New York bookshop when she goes to sell some unwanted titles and is shown a pile of unsold discounted copies of her Lauder tome. Pleading with building supervisor Andre (Gregory Korostishevsky) for more time to pay her rent and dismayed by the fact that the vet won't treat her ageing cat, Jersey, because of an unpaid balance, Lee hits a neighbourhood bar to drown her sorrows and runs into English gadfly and occasional drug pusher, Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant). She recalls him urinating in a closet filled with fur coats at a swanky literary soirée and he walks her home after spending the day getting drunk together. 

Needing cash after a heated exchange with Marjorie about her misanthropic attitude and non-existent bankability, Lee decides to part with the handwritten letter that Katharine Hepburn had sent her after they had met for an Esquire interview around the time of Spencer Tracy's death in 1967. Bookseller Anna (Dolly Wells) is touched by the missive and, as an admirer of Lee's writing, gives her a generous price and also purchases a couple of typewritten and signed letters from Fanny Brice that she had found between the pages of a book while researching in the New York Public Library. However, Anna pays much more for the one Lee doctored by adding a zinging PS and she senses that she may have hit upon a way of making money without having to go out an get a proper job. 

Acquiring an old typewriter and digging out a package of aged A4, Lee begins forging letters from the likes of Noël Coward and dupes up-market antiquarian Paul (Stephen Spinella) into taking them. She also flogs a couple more items to Anna, who suggests they go for a drink the next time she calls. As she has been alone since breaking up with a lesbian lover who had wanted her to broaden her social horizons, Lee is pleased to be asked, especially as she refuses to go to any lengths to make herself look presentable. Moreover, she takes increasing pleasure in the company of Jack, who rewards her confiding her criminous secret by taking her to a drag cabaret lounge and helping her make a crank call to the bookstore clerk who had disrespected her. He also mucks in when she is forced to clean her apartment after the cat faeces under the bed start attracting flies. 

While visiting an antique book fair, Lee and Jack learn from Nell (Shae D'lyn) which dealers are more cavalier in authenticating memorabilia and she makes a beeline for Alan Schmidt (Ben Falcone), who is willing to take anything he can sell to clients who often have more money than sense. As a consequence, Lee throws herself into churning out letters from such literary lights as Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman and Edna Ferber, as well as actresses like Marlene Dietrich, Louise Brooks and Judy Holliday. 

Over dinner, Anna asks Lee to read some of her short stories and they discuss family, ageing and achievement. When Anna reveals that she has inherited her father's shop and isn't sure she is doing him credit, Lee feels a pang of guilt at swindling her and she bids her goodnight with a cool civility that disappoints Anna, who had been hoping things would go further. Putting Anna's stories to one side, Lee throws herself into pastiching correspondence and takes to lightly baking the paper to give it an aged appearance. However, shortly after Jack comes to her apartment late one night after being beaten up by an angry rent boy, Lee gets a call from Paul, who has detected a problem with the sexual frankness of one of the Coward letters.

He tips her off that she has been blacklisted by dealers across the city and her problems mount when Alan demands $5000 to prevent him from testifying against her to the FBI. Desperate to raise the sum, Lee asks Jack to sell some letters for her, but she catches him stealing from her and she is angered by his cavalier attitude both towards her writing and the risks they are running by counterfeiting artefacts. However, he comes up with the idea of stealing genuine letters from the archives and substituting fakes in the files. So, while Lee goes to Yale to purloin an Edna Ferber item, Jack cat-sits and smuggles in his waiter lover, Kurt (Christian Navarro). 

Distraught on returning to find Jersey dead under the couch, Lee orders Jack to leave. But she needs to sell her merchandise and sends him to Paul with the Ferber. The FBI are waiting for him, however, and he readily squeals to save his own skin. Meanwhile, Lee meets up with her ex, Elaine (Anna Deavere Smith), and admits that she regrets losing her. However, Elaine no longer has the desire to talk Lee off the ledge and she is left to face the music alone after being served with a subpoena by agents Solanas (Erik LeRay Harvey) and Doyle (Pun Bandhu) in her favourite bar. 

Lawyer Lloyd (Marc Evan Jackson) urges her to get a job, join Alcoholic Anonymous and enroll in a community service scheme to show penitence. Before sentence is passed, Lee admits that she feels no remorse, as she was proud of her forgeries. But she accepts she has done wrong in cheating the booksellers and she receives a five-year probationary sentence, along with six months of house arrest. 

She breaks curfew to meet Jack (who has been diagnosed with HIV) and ask for his consent to write a book about their exploits. As he had rather enjoyed their liaison, he cheerfully agrees and they exchange tearful insults be he hobbles off on his cane. Working on a computer and tickling the tummy of her new black-and-white kitten, Lee writes her book and feels better about herself because she is writing with her own voice at last. 

While strolling, she sees one of her Dorothy Parker letters in the window of a high-class bookshop and makes inquiries about its authenticity. Having been assured it's genuine, she fires off a rejoinder in Parker's style, but the owner opts to leave the item on sale. Closing captions reveal that Lee Israel produced over 400 fake letters, two of which were quoted in a 2007 biography of Noël Coward, while the New York Times called her memoir sordid but fabulous. 

When writing to explain that she was ineligible for jury duty because she was a convicted felon, Israel had joked that crime pays after all and something of that spirit suffuses this engaging and empathetic biopic. Magnificently played by Oscar-nominated Melissa McCarthy, Lee comes across as a self-loathing curmudgeon who sought refuge in a past more respectful of literary endeavour on discovering that she was living out of her own time. Her dinner scene with Dolly Wells hints at the softer side of her personality, while the carousing sessions with the excellent Richard E. Grant (who also thoroughly merits his Oscar nod) expose the extent of her loneliness and her readiness to open up to someone willing to accept her for her flawed self. But, as was the case with Lasse Hallström's account of Clifford Irving's Howard Hughes scam in The Hoax (2006), Holofcener and Whitty are less critical of the perpetrator than they are of the book trade that was prepared to profit from her duplicity. 

Despite being set in the early 90s, this is very much a comment on post-millennial attitudes to women of a certain age and physical aspect. It's also a lament for a time when the content of a book mattered more than the profile of its author and a celebration of the lost age of elegance and wit that Israel chose to mine. The fact she can out-zing Dorothy Parker speaks volumes for Israel's talent. But Heller resists the temptation to make Israel a victim of a chauvinist system, as she brings the majority of her problems down on herself, with her refusal to brush up her social skills or play the publishing fame game. Yet, despite opting for a warts and all depiction, Heller manages to humanise Israel without patronising her or the audience by over-egging the story's comic caperness. 

Lovingly photographed by Brandon Trost to capture the melancholic magic of the Manhattan skyline and its grimmer realities at ground level, the action refuses to fetishise the 1990s tropes. However, Stephen Carter's production design, Arjun Basin's costumes and the hair and make-up looks conceived by Sarah Stamp and Ma Kalaadevi Ananda are all spot on. In our age of instant information and communication, it seems infeasible that Israel should have managed to get away with her ruse so easily and for so long. But the focus here is on character rather than crime and, thanks to McCarthy's masterclass in depicting self-doubt, solitude, redundancy and despair, this affectionate and accepting profile proves as riveting as it is revealing.

Released so soon after Under the Wire, Christopher Martin's excellent documentary adaptation of photographer Paul Conroy's book about his partnership with Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin, Matthew Heineman's A Private War, was always going to feel like a dramatised afterthought. Having presented a thoughtful insight into the ongoing Syrian crisis in City of Ghosts, Heineman was certainly the right man for the job and Wadham alumna Rosamund Pike is a fine choice to play the indomitable Colvin. But, while this well-meaning tribute is vastly superior to Eva Husson's Girls of the Sun (in which Emmanuelle Bercot played an à clef version of Colvin), it shows how difficult it is to make complex conflicts accessible to mainstream audiences without trivialising them or demonising fighters on either side of the struggle. 

Hoping to rekindle her marriage to academic David Irens (Greg Wise), American Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin (Rosamund Pike) suggests having a child. Instead, she goes to Vanni in Sri Lanka in 2001 to interview Tamil Tiger leader SP Thamilselvan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) and loses her left eye in an ambush. Friends Rita Williams (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and Amy Bentham (Amanda Drew) rally round and insist she would look good with an eye patch. Editor Sean Ryan (Tom Hollander) agrees to keep her on the foreign desk, where she befriends newcomer, Kate Richardson (Faye Marsay). However, she breaks up with Irens because of his womanising and heads to the Iraqi border in 2003. 

Here, Colvin renews ties with translator Mourad (Fady Elsayed) and defies the US Army's insistence on embedding reporters to hook up with freelance photographer Paul Conroy (Jamie Doran), who is happy to travel with her to Fallujah, in spite of the warnings of veteran shutterbug, Norm Coburn (Corey Johnson). She poses as a nurse to get past a checkpoint and faces hostility from some male villagers, as she waits for a digger to excavate a mass grave of Kuwaiti POWs executed by Saddam Hussein. As the skeletons begin to emerge from the dust, Colvin smokes angrily as Conroy takes pictures and she explains to Richardson back at the press billet that her job is to find stories that the public will identify with in order to ascertain the truth for a rough draft of history. 

Back home, however, Colvin has recurring nightmares about a dead Palestinian girl lying on her bed and has panic attacks that she seeks to assuage with cigarettes and alcohol (just as she has cathartic sex on mission with one of her fellow scribes). But, while she confides her fears over the phone to Williams, she hides them from Ryan, who keeps championing her stories so that they make the front page of the paper. Reluctantly, she accepts she is suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and checks into a clinic, where she pours out her worries and contradictions to the sympathetic Conroy, who has had his own brush with PTSD while in the army. 

Ryan also comes to see her and assures Colvin that her place on the foreign team is secure and, in 2009, she finds herself in Marjah in Afghanistan. She covers the aftermath of a roadside mine and commends the courage of civilians who manage to endure much more than she ever could in trying to get on with lives blighted by carnage on a daily basis. Once again, she gives her minder the slip to join Coburn and Conroy in covering a story the authorities are trying to cover up. But we see nothing of this mission, as we are whisked back to London for a party being thrown by Tony Shaw (Stanley Tucci) to celebrate the end of Dry January. As she leaves, Williams implores Colvin to own up to the fact she's an alcoholic and wishes she would slow down and deal with her own health rather than keep dashing off to war zones to prick the conscience of her complacent readers. 

Having tumbled into bed with Shaw, who hopes to see her again because he enjoys sexual adventures, Colvin sees a news bulletin about the declining situation in Libya and she speeds off to Misrata in 2011 to cover the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi (Raad Rawi). She hooks up with French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik (Jérémie Laheurte) to meet with rebel leaders and Conroy has to chide her for a reckless dash through a fire fight. But the danger comes home to her when Coburn is killed and she sees his shredded body when it's brought back to the press centre. For a moment, the clamour in her brain falls silent, as she perches on the edge of a hotel parapet. However, the chance to conduct a combative interview with Gadaffi (who claims she is the woman he most likes spending time with) proves irresistible and she also takes the opportunity to survey his battered corpse after he is murdered by the people he had oppressed for so long. 

Returning to London. Colvin settles into a relationship with Shaw. But Ryan is concerned that she has stopped reporting and tells her that he could offer her a gardening brief, only that would mean she has lost her conviction. She has always told him that she goes to war zones so that he doesn't have to and he fears that the stories won't get covered if she walks away. Suitably nettled, Colvin goes to Homs in Syria in 2012 and she braves another dash through flak to meet FSA leader Abu Zaida (Wissam Tobaileh), who takes her to meet some of the women and children shelerting in crumbling buildings under siege from air strikes ordered by President Bashar al-Assad. One woman urges Colvin to make her story more than print on a page and she promises to do what she can after seeing a child die at a makeshift medical centre. 

As the bombardment intensifies and drones pick up on mobile phone signals, Colvin manages to get a Skype call to Ryan to offer a broadcast to counter Assad's claims that he is only targeting terrorists. He pleads with her to get out as soon as she can, but she feels she has a duty to the helpless civilians who have no voice unless she speaks for them. As she speaks to CNN on 22 February, Ryan, Shaw and Richardson listen with tears in their eyes and Conroy gulps down his emotions, as the news anchor hopes she stays safe. However, the building is targeted by rockets and Colvin and Ochlik are killed as they flee, leaving Conroy to grieve as a drone shot pulls away through the ruins of the city and we cut to a shot of the real Marie Colvin declaring that she has no time for fear while she's on the frontline and will only come to realise what she has been through when her time is over. 

Scripted by Arash Amel from Marie Brenner's Vanity Fair article. `Marie Colvin's Private War', this is a noble attempt to convey Colvin's idealism, cynicism and fortitude, as well as the psychological effects of the horrors she witnessed during a remarkable career in which she was spurred on by the hope that enough people cared to respond to the stories she brought them. Yet, while Rosamund Pike delivers a performance of touching trenchancy and vulnerability, Heineman and Amel fail to find a way to turn her endeavours into a relatable narrative. 

Each new mission is treated with the utmost gravitas, as Colvin peers through the window of a vehicle speeding through a parched landscape filled with untold dangers. But no context is offered for any of the conflicts she is covering, and, consequently, Colvin comes across less as a compassionate communicator with a compunction to alert the world to the harsh truths it would rather not contemplate than as an adrenaline junkie who needs to place herself in peril in order to feel alive. Moreover, the script reduces a complex individual to a few graspable character traits, while Colvin's colleagues (some of whom are composites, while her lovers are fictional stand-ins for Patrick Bishop and Richard Flaye) are reduced to ciphers and those she reports upon are presented in a way to provoke pity rather than revulsion for the geopolitical forces that blithely disregarded their basic humanity.

Given that most people will know in advance that Colvin perished in Homs in 2012, it's difficult to generate any sense of dramatic tension. But the episode captions ticking down to doomsday hardly help matters, nor does H. Scott Salinas's bombastically manipulative score. Robert Richardson's grainy handheld imagery and Nick Fenton's jagged editing reinforce the chaotic jeopardy in which Colvin often found herself, although the montage in which a vigorous one-night stand is juxtaposed with combat footage is clumsy in the extreme and rather typifies Amel's scenario, which opts for a `greatest hits' approach and yet still manages to omit Colvin's crucial work in East Timor. Tunisia and Egypt.

For all his commitment to the cause, Heinemen - who is no stranger to risk having investigated the drug war on the US-Mexican border in the Oscar-nominated Cartel Land (2015) - struggles to convey what's at stake in each situation and how reporters process the atrocities they have witnessed. Moreover, he fails to emerge from the shadow of Conroy's own harrowing cine-memoir. Thus, while Pike thoroughly merited her Golden Globe nomination - and Annie Lennox most certainly did not for the sentimental ditty, `Requiem for a Private War', which plays over the closing credits - this is flawed tribute that confirms that this kind of subject matter is best left to actuality.

According to a caption at the end of Joel Edgerton's Boy Erased, 700.000 LGBTQ Americans have been subjected to gay conversion programmes in the United States. Adapted by the director from Garrard Conley's memoir, Boy Erased: A Memoir of Identity, Faith and Family, this Arkansas-set saga comes hard on the heels of Desiree Akhavan's The Miseducation of Cameron Post, prior to which the topic of correctional therapy had been confined to a couple of episodes of South Park and Family Guy and such features as Jamie Babbitt's But I'm a Cheerleader (1999) and Justin Kelly's I Am Michael (2015), With American Vice President Mike Pence vocally backing such Christian initiatives, the release of Akhavan and Edgerton's films could not be more timely. Yet, for all their good intentions, neither drama compels or provokes as it should. 

The son of a Baptist preacher and his home-making wife, Jared Eamons (Lucas Hedges) is sent to Love in Action to cure himself of his homosexuality. Father Marshall (Russell Crowe) stays behind, while mother Nancy (Nicole Kidman) travels to the big city and checks into a hotel while Jared registers at the centre run by Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton), who uses a dollar bill during his introductory address to show how a damaged human being can be repaired through the intercession of the Lord. During the first session, Jared and his fellow newcomers are required to fill out genogram charts denoting family members whose tendencies might have provided a bad example and, when he asks Nancy about any family flaws he should know about, she mentions an uncle who was sent away for being effeminate. 

Jared notes that he is staying in the same hotel as Sarah (Jesse Latourette), who is one of the few girls on the course alongside Gary (Troye Sivan), Cameron (Britton Sear) and Jon (Xavier Dolan), who is attending the course for a second time and has taken to saluting to avoid the contact involved in shaking hands. He also tells Jared about the residential block and that they are merely being assessed on a 12-day induction by Victor and assistants like Michael (David Joseph Craig) to see what therapies would be useful to them. 

On the second day, Brandon (Flea) speaks to the group about reclaiming his life from the brink. He also teaches the guys about adopting triangular body shapes because they radiate masculinity and has Sarah rank them in order of physical stature. She gets hit on the head during a baseball pitching exercise. But, while the others show a lack of hand-eye co-ordination, Jared clubs a home run. Sarah is also made to go first when the group comes to confess to past misdemeanours and Jared feels uncomfortable on her behalf, as she stands before them (and a video camera) to testify.

In compiling his own moral inventory, Jared thinks back to when he started college and was befriended by Henry (Joe Alwyn), who rapes him on a creaking bunk bed when his roommate is off campus. Shocked by the betrayal, Jared goes home for the weekend and is appalled when Henry calls Nancy and outs him. After consulting with senior members of his church. Marshall informs Jared that he will be asked to leave unless he agrees to seek help for his perversion and he signs up for Love in Action, even though Dr Muldoon (Cherry Jones) assures him that his sexuality is his own business and cannot be deprogrammed by do-gooding Christians. 

Back at the centre, Jared is summoned by Sykes, who quizzes him about some stories he has written for an English assignment. He refuses to accept that they are works of fiction and suggests that Jared should drop out of college and spend a year on the programme to cure himself of wayward thoughts. This convinces Jared that Sykes is a charlatan, as he insists that students hide the nature of the sessions from their parents. while the course material is strewn with spelling mistakes. When Nancy asks to read his welcome pack, he hands it over and she is appalled to see a reference to `Dog's design' in one of the leaflets. 

Wrestling with what to say during his testimony, Jared thinks back on his chaste relationship with Xavier (Théodore Pellerin). He also takes note of Gary's disclosure that the entire enterprise is a money-making scam and that he will be trapped unless he tells Sykes what he wants to hear. A mock funeral for Cameron, in which his family and friends beat him with a bible to drive out the demon that is possessing him, further convinces Jared that he is dealing with zealous bigots rather than trained counsellors. So, when Sykes tries to goad him into discussing his activities with Henry, Jared rebels and storms out of the hall and calls Nancy to collect him. When Sykes and Brandon attempt to coerce him, Cameron pushes them aside and Jared is dismayed when he gets home (after Nancy withdraws him from the course) to learn that his friend has committed suicide. 

Four years later, Jared publishes an article on Love in Action and the practices that are still permitted in 36 US states. Nancy is proud of him, but Marshall continues to avoid a frank discussion. He has always hoped that his son would take over his car dealership and produce grandchildren, but he makes an effort to connect by offering Jared the pen with which he writes his sermons and accepts that he is going to have to be the one who changes because Jared is gay and proud of who he is. As he drives to the airport to fly back to New York, he dangles his hand out of the car window - which his mother is always warning him about because it's potentially dangerous. 

Closing with pictures of Garrard Conley and his parents and a caption revealing that the real-life Sykes now has a husband of his own. this is a well-intentioned, carefully made, but emotionally calculating picture that essentially preaches to the choir. Frequently making gauche use of slow-motion for dramatic emphasis and close-ups that leave the viewer with little room for emotional or intellectual manoeuvre, Edgerton writes and directs with the same lack of nuance that colours his performance as the despicable Sykes. This is a shame, as he had made such a promising start to life behind the camera with the deeply unsettling chiller, The Gift (2015).

The Golden Globe-nominated Lucas Hedges also deserves better, as he conveys a palpable sense of confusion and forsakenness in realising that Love in Action is a sham and that his father has entrusted him to Sykes to protect his own reputation rather than help him. That said, he hardly goes through the psychological wringer and this lack of insight into his plight proves debilitating. Growling paunchily, Russell Crowe creditably slips between revulsion and sadness, while Nicole Kidman is deftly effective as the homebody who slowly ceases simpering to stand up to her spouse and support her son. But Xavier Dolan, Troye Sivan and Britton Sear struggle to make anything of their sketchily drawn ciphers, while Jess Latourette fails to make Sarah anything other than a tokenist lesbian afterthought. 

The action is proficiently photographed by Eduard Grau, but production designer Chad Keith places too much emphasis on the ordinariness of the LIA premises for them to seem as oppressive as, say, the cult camp in Sean Durkin's cult exposé Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011). Consequently, the setting serves to reinforce the deliberate nature of Edgerton's approach, which is so intent on respecting Jared's sensibilities that it fails to generate either righteous fury or the kind of mocking intensity that made The Miseducation of Cameron Post so discomfiting. The solutions offered by institutions like LIA are rooted in a detestable homophobia that is itself a by-product of pernicious socio-spirito-political beliefs that Edgerton opts to ignore in both his screenplay and in his portrayal of an opportunistic hypocrite, whose lack of qualifications and unconventional methods are only really called into question when Cameron kills himself off camera.