The Aviator

A complicated biopic of Howard Hughes, here presented as a crackpot genius. Scorsese's movie covers Hughes' (Leonardo DiCaprio) life from the troubled production of Hell's Angels through affairs with Katherine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett, firing on all cylinders) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale) to his decline into paranoia and obsessive compulsive behaviour.

The tone of the movie changes constantly. When we first meet Howard he's the underdog entrepeneur who's laughed at by his contemporaries. After whipping through his feisty relationship with Hepburn, Scorsese touches briefly on the more infamous aspects of Hughes' life (locking himself away with bottles of his own piss) before allowing his hero one last moment of glory in the courtroom, before leaving us on an ambiguous note.

As biopics go this is much more complicated and unconventional than, say, Walk The Line. This doesn't necessarily mean that this is a better film than James Mangolds', but it acts as a real return to form from Scorsese after the disappointing Gangs Of New York. DiCaprio gives a layered performance and does well not to be outshone by the starry supporting cast that also includes Alan Alda, Jude Law, John C. Reilly and Alec Baldwin. There are also a couple of spectacularly mounted airplane sequences and beautiful set designs that make up for the lack of narrative drive during the film's mid-section.

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button

Adapted from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, David Fincher's latest is about a man, Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt), who ages backwards. His mother dies in childhood and his father, repulsed by his haggard baby boy, leaves him on the steps of an old people's home where Benjamin is brought up by Queenie (Taraji P. Hensen). There he meets a young girl, Daisy, who later grows up to be Cate Blanchett, a ballet dancer who is later crippled in an accident and who becomes the love of Benjamin's life. Twee, sentimental, maybe even a little condescending at times, Fincher's film works in fits and starts. The stunning cinematography, set design and special effects are captivating, although the latter become distracting by the time Benjamin hits his early 20s and the audience is left staring at Brad Pitt's eerily unlined face. There are definitely some longeurs, in particular an unneeded story involving Benjamin witnessing Pearl Harbour. The acting is erratic also. Benjamin is little more than a cypher, leaving Pitt little to work with and Blanchett is surprisingly uninvolving but Tilda Swinton and Julia Ormond, as Benjamin's lover and daughter respectively, bring a bit of emotional heft to the material. The movie ends by offering up a message that we must try new things, that it's never too late to become someone new. It's trite (and hardly unexpected from the writer of Forrest Gump), but delivered with enough sincerity to ensure that when we witness the elderly Daisy caring for Benjamin through his infancy and up to his death as a baby in her arms, that I was left with a few sniffles. As a follow-up to Fincher's marvellous Zodiac, this is a disappointment, but it's not entirely without its charms.