The Critic

A politically conservative broadsheet in London 1934, The Daily Chronicle nonetheless employs the town’s bitchiest, barely closeted theatre critic, Jimmy Erskine (McKellen). However, when the paper’s publisher dies, his posh son David Brooke (Strong) starts tightening purse strings and booting out the boozy Old Guard. Jimmy, a midday drunk known to troll parks for men at midnight, is warned: Dial down his excesses and his poison pen, which frequently takes aim at a lovely but talent-challenged actress named Nina Land (Arteton), or risk getting the sack. That’s a threat Jimmy won’t countenance, and godspeed to anyone who gets in his way – including kind, put-upon Tom (Enoch), Jimmy’s secretary and lover, and artist Stephen (Barnes), who is besotted with Nina.

McKellen – now in his mid-Eighties, still sporting – hasn’t brought this kind of twinkling malevolence to the screen since his starring role in 1995’s Richard III, which coincidentally transposed its story of power grabbing and backstabbing to 1930s, fascists-rising England, the very same milieu of this acidic drama. Screenwriter Patrick Marber (Closer) loosely adapted the script from Anthony Quinn’s popular thriller Curtain Call (from what I gather, whole chunks of the original story have been chucked to shift the focus to the titular critic); he and director Anand Tucker (Red Riding: 1983, Hilary and Jackie) have a crafted a mostly effective thriller with a lot of meat on the bone. Certainly McKellen’s critic has earned his nickname of “the Beast” but he’s also a terrific wit and a complicated guy trying to hold fast to his own credo (“He who lives in fear dies in shame”) despite society’s efforts to demonize him. Jimmy may be a bad guy, but nobody here has clean hands, not really, the film artfully articulates, and gentility doesn’t make you any better – just more likely to get away with it.