Big films, big stars, big blah...

The Debt (John Madden)

A worthy subject given the big superficial treatment that isn't a total loss but the disappointment is bitter - mostly when anyone opens their mouth.
Except Jesper Christensen. This really is his film. While everyone else is busy hamming it up (or, if you're Sam Worthington, just looking blank) and/or impersonating each other, while failing to convince us with hoky accents, Christensen is scaring the Hell out of us in one of the greatest pieces of cinema villiany I have ever seen.
Laurence Olivier had a drill and "is it safe?" for Dustin Hoffman in The Marathon Man - Christensen manages to be even more unnerving and terrifying with a speculum for Jessica Chastain!


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Contagion (Steven Soderbergh)

Good idea to kill off Gwynnie early on but how many of us will not be happy to spend nearly two hours wishing Jude Law would die next!

Hopefully he's forgotten the air-holes

Not bad but not really that great either. The characters were too thinly stretched and it cried out for a better script - too many lazy montages with a misplaced synth score that will date this one by the second.
It's still gripping and very watchable though and Kate Winslet was great. Special mention should go to Jennifer Ehle (an effective British actress usually relegated to bit parts in big films) who was given a lot of screen time for a change - a subtle and natural performance that seems to be getting passed over because she's not one of the A lister's.
It was also surprisingly very funny (the 'always wash your hands' warning of the coda will have you tittering into the credits). But I'm not convinced that was always the intention however.