John Lennon: The Last Interview review – Soderbergh imagines there’s no people with bland AI clipshow

Succession of pointless AI-generated snippets does nothing for film about the artist’s final interview, which took place on the day of his murder Coming just after his superb feature The Christophers , Steven Soderbergh has now made a surprisingly moderate documentary, dominated and frankly marred by uninteresting and pointless AI. It is about the inadvertently poignant final interview given by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on 8 December 1980 in New York’s Dakota apartment building, hours before his death. The interviewers were Dave Sholin, Laurie Kaye and Ron Hummel from San Francisco’s KFRC radio station. On their way out of the building with the conversation on tape, they were accosted by a creepy stalker-fan; in attempt to calm the man down, Kaye gave him a brand new copy of John and Yoko’s new album Double Fantasy. This sinister man was Lennon’s future murderer who got him to sign an album – perhaps this very album – and later shot him dead. It is a chilling, stomach-turning twist of f...

The Locksmith review – Ryan Philippe holds the key to straight-ahead noir thriller

Philippe’s newly released con faces heavy pressure not to go straight as his family grows ever more estranged and the film runs low on fresh ideas

The plot manoeuvres in this léger noir are so boilerplate and predictable that viewers are likely to find themselves expecting much bigger twists than are actually delivered. Surely that nice guy will turn out to be a double-crosser, you assume? Or you might imagine one of the vampy women will turn out to be a triple-crossing femme fatale. But no, it’s all pretty much on the level, which makes the snippets of classic Hollywood crime thrillers such as Touch of Evil, just glimpsed on a TV set, feel seriously undermining, gesturing as they do towards much more sophisticated works of cinema than we have here.

Ryan Phillippe stars as Miller, the titular locksmith, who in the opening scene has been forced into doing a heist that goes very wrong and ends up sending him to prison for 10 years. When he gets out, his now-ex-wife Beth (Kate Bosworth) is a rising police officer and his daughter Lindsay (Madeleine Guilbot) barely knows him. At least old friend Frank (Ving Rhames) offers him a job, but it’s only a matter of time before the past comes round again with Miller under pressure to atone for past crimes by committing entirely new ones. Gabriela Quezada is on hand as a battered sex worker, the surviving sister of a man whom Miller got killed years back. There are good cops and dirty cops, and shootouts at motels that puncture the eerie quiet of what looks like a barely populated desert town.

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