Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool
In the fact-based drama Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, Annette Bening shines as the forgotten Oscar-winning silver-screen star Gloria Grahame, who by the late 1970s was trying her luck in English regional theater; Jamie Bell plays the earnest young actor who falls under her spell in this May-December romance, backed by Vanessa Redgrave and a uniformly strong supporting cast.
Crooked House
A cavalcade of stars—Christina Hendricks, Julian Sands, Gillian Anderson, and Glenn Close, for starters—carry on with high-mannered good humor in Crooked House, yet another Agatha Christie whodunit, this one adapted by Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park, Downton Abbey). Max Irons stars as a 1940s PI puzzling out the demise of an eccentric clan’s patriarch in the family’s country manor.
Small Town Crime
The inimitably scruffy John Hawkes lifts Small Town Crime from a 1970s noir genre exercise into a transfixing character study about an ex-cop with a drinking problem whose redemption story involves solving a young local woman’s murder—while unintentionally endangering the lives of his adoptive sister (Octavia Spencer, also a producer on the film) and her family.
This article originally appears in the January 2018 issue of ELLE.
