Something to watch tonight: Thursday 27 March

Duplicity (Gilroy, 2009)

After being a bit mean about Clive Owen yesterday, I thought I should recall a performance of his in a film that I’m genuinely fond of.

You’ll often find me railing against the Hollywood machine in these pages – the lifeless and cynical, the focus-grouped and beta-tested, the bandwagon jumping and the shark jumping – so it makes a pleasant change to loudly praise a film whose strengths are a pure expression of old-fashioned Hollywood virtues.

Duplicity is a star-driven caper movie, featuring terrific easy-going performances by Julia Roberts and Clive Owen – playing two former spies now in the corporate security business. They team up to play their two clients off against each other for a secret formula that will change the world, and discover that big business plays for keeps.

It’s true that no one ever leaves the theatre humming the structure, but I must give credit to writer-director Tony Gilroy’s elegantly constructed screenplay and his (literal) ACE in the hole, editor brother John Gilroy. Duplicity is sharp, witty and very easy on the eye: great old-fashioned entertainment.

Tony Gilroy’s current project is the superb Star Wars thriller Andor and season two of that is due next month.

Also reviewed in that March 2009 Capital Times column: Atom Egoyan’s disappointing Adoration (“… it isn’t the first time that a great director has tried to tackle the post 9–11 world and failed to find the appropriate vocabulary or tone”); athletics documentary The Spirit of the Marathon; Al Pacino as Shylock in Michael Radford’s “gripping” version of The Merchant of Venice; and Hugh Dancy cosplaying Hugh Grant in the “shallow” romcom Confessions of a Shopaholic.