Everybody Digs Bill Evans review – absorbing delve into the tumultuous world of the great jazz man

Grant Gee’s film thoroughly inhabits the creative and personal torment experienced by the American pianist – with a terrific supporting Bill Pullman turn This elusive, ruminative and very absorbing movie presents its successive scenes like a sequence of unresolved chords carrying the listener on a journey without a destination – and is, incidentally, one of those rare films featuring a wonderful supporting turn that does not undermine or upstage the rest. It’s a film about music. Particularly, about what remains when a musician cannot play and is left to consider the terrible sacrifices made, without conscious consent, to this all-consuming vocation that creates family pain and jealousy almost as a toxic byproduct. It’s a drama to put you in mind of Glenn Gould and Hilary du Pré, sister of Jacqueline. Screenwriter Mark O’Halloran has adapted the 2013 novel Intermission by Owen Martell about renowned jazz pianist Bill Evans. It focuses on a period of emotional devastation for Evans, ...

Renegades review – veteran musclemen team up for ‘geri-action’ caper

Nick Moran and Lee ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ Majors are the star names in this UK thriller, but they are let down by inept action sequences and stilted banter

Cheap as undercooked chips, this British thriller about elderly ex-soldiers avenging a friend’s death belatedly cashes in on the 2010s trend for “geri-action” films, to borrow a term coined by Vulture’s Matt Patches. Though less slick, it resembles those American fisticuff- and gunfire-packed thrillers (the Red and Expendables franchises, for example) built around former big-name actors supplementing their pension schemes.

Directed by Daniel Zirilli, the film features Nick Moran (still best known for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) as the low-profile protagonist, Burton, a former SAS man suffering from PTSD. He gets scooped up on the street by an old acquaintance, American veteran Carver (former Six Million Dollar Man Lee Majors), who has a beef with some gangsters in his London neighbourhood who are trafficking women, selling drugs and, given the age of everyone here, possibly dealing in black market ration cards.

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