Shining light: "Cover-Up"

The documentarist Laura Poitras has developed a neat line in biographical profiles that also function as loaded commentary on American social and political life. 2014's Citizenfour tracked down the exiled Edward Snowden at the moment he'd become public enemy number one and thereby started to tackle the paranoia and skewed priorities of 21st century American doctrine; 2022's All the Beauty and the Bloodshed paid fulsome visual tribute to photographer Nan Goldin before turning the camera on the Sackler affair. The form is probably too elegant to be described as turduckenish - one meaty story slipped inside another, offering viewers something extra to chew over - but that's also what's going on within Poitras's latest Cover-Up. Here, the filmmaker uses a series of sitdowns with Seymour Hersh - veteran New York Times and New Yorker correspondent, prickly thorn in the side of US governments since Vietnam - to reflect upon the mounting issue of trust in the media. "It's complicated to know who to trust," states Hersh early on, effectively establishing the film's agenda before he turns a sharp eye on those filming him: "I don't even trust you guys." A certain tension persists between subject and observer(s). Poitras had been attempting to pin Hersh down on film for twenty years; ever-wily, the journo only agreed on the condition Poitras was accompanied behind the camera by Mark Obenhaus, the seasoned producer with whom Hersh had previously collaborated on several TV projects. In the interviews that followed, Hersh sometimes snipes at the filmmakers or himself - critical is what he is, speaking out what he does - but he reserves his most ferocious opprobrium for a wider press corps he regards as constitutionally incurious, cowed into writing what they're given and told rather than digging around or following up. Not once does Cover-Up invoke the name of the current inhabitant of the White House; the interviews were likely wrapped well before November 2024. Nevertheless, you may be getting some feel for how Poitras and Obenhaus's film speaks to the present moment.

For much of its 117 minutes, Cover-Up straddles two time periods simultaneously. The bulk of it concerns the past, in as much as the past can ever truly be considered the past: though blessed by a reporter's 20:20 recall, Hersh's war stories and field reports otherwise run a sorry gamut, from the My Lai massacre to the indignities of Abu Ghraib. As pristine and evocative as Goldin's photography, the archive footage lays all the brutality and the bloodshed out before us once more; the history is interpolated with Hersh's scribbled or typed notes and finished articles, the most damning quotes he ever took. The maxim that has sustained him over these fifty-odd years is "get out of the way of the story" - let your sources speak for themselves - a technique most potently borne out in the immediate wake of My Lai, in the words of mother lamenting what the U.S. Army had done to her child: "I gave them a good boy, and they made him a murderer." To the cinema, Hersh's recollections bring multiple elements: the inbuilt momentum involved in making a case against the murderous, whether at ground or state level, and the horror of the things he learnt, heard and saw on his travels ("Every day was another thirty years on my shoulders"). Just below that wearied surface, however, there is also a certain glee at pissing off the powers-that-be, in refusing to let them have everything entirely their way: "Every book I did got people mad." Here is a man who plainly relishes a challenge - who, indeed, sees the challenge good journalism represents as fundamental to Western democratic life.

Which returns us to the present, where Poitras found Hersh - now a silver-haired elder statesman - still asking questions and filing copy. (He's interrupted in the middle of one interview by a phone call from an editor, checking a phrase or two.) With the initial introductions made, an especially trenchant cut around the forty-minute mark reveals the area Hersh is focusing on today: Gaza, a process that involves fielding calls from anonymous sources with reports of Israeli bullets in Palestinian children's bodies. Hersh is Jewish himself: if he has anything like an origin story, it's the regret he feels for not asking his father, a Lithuanian Jew, about the murder of the latter's brethren by Soviet troops. The work is ongoing, because it's hardly as if there's been any let up in atrocities; the difference is that Hersh now mostly operates outside of conventional media structures. (At the time of filming, he has a Substack.) A certain amount of journo-fetishism remains visible in the film: the scribbled-over legal pads Hersh uses, footage of the NYT newsroom in its Watergate-era heyday, its reporters caught with sleeves rolled up and pipes in mouths. As with Poitras's Goldin doc, however, any hero worship is kept in check. The Hersh we meet here is stubborn and short-fused, often caught openly furious at the state of things; it's left to the viewer to realise these really aren't bad reasons to get into reporting, especially when combined with intelligence, rigour, an ability to admit (and learn from) your own mistakes and shortcomings - honesty, in brief - and a code of ethics that hasn't been bought out or otherwise compromised. Cover-Up was only ever going to get glowing reviews, stressing the importance of a robust and fearless press at a time when those in positions of corporate and political power would rather we be replaced by some combination of PR and AI. That shouldn't discount what the film's saying, though. Asked why he's repeatedly circled back to exposing state violence, Hersh remains typically resolute: "Because you can't have a country that does that. You just can't."

Cover-Up is now playing in selected cinemas, before streaming on Netflix from December 26.

Break on through (to the other screen): "When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors"

Before Todd Haynes on The Velvet Underground, there was Tom DiCillo on The Doors, in the form of 2009's newly revived When You're Strange. It comes as something of a surprise to discover that the indie spirit behind 1995's no-bullshit Living in Oblivion was this into a group like The Doors (man), but it's nothing compared to the disappointment this viewer felt upon witnessing a filmmaker proceeding to guzzle down several quarts of Morrison-brand Kool Aid. To quote Johnny Depp's low-energy, too-cool-slash-hungover-for-school narration: "Morrison is both innocent and profane... a rock 'n' roll poet... dangerous and yet highly intelligent. No-one has had this exact combination before." Well. Tempted as one is to blow immediate and deafeningly loud raspberries at all of the above, let me instead be generous and concede that Strange is probably the best film that anybody could make about a band that would otherwise only have endured in the form of student-dorm posters and a mockable Oliver Stone movie. Set against the documentaries of many hours made about The Beatles, Dylan, even Status Quo, these 85 minutes really do tell you all you need to know about The Doors. Between all the grainy archive footage you could ever hope to see of the band noodling away in concert, DiCillo makes a few choices of his own. These are mostly montages of Seventies nipples and bushes, and a framing device recreation of beardy hitchhikers racing into the desert upon hearing of Morrison's passing; the (hardly watertight) idea is that this narrative was always speeding this way, that Morrison's career trajectory was only ever a death drive. Not for the last time here, we run up against a fundamentally po-faced, humourless, late-adolescent idea of pop, and there's only so much a motion picture can do with it.

A litmus test is provided early on, with a snapshot of the Billboard chart that saw "Light My Fire" (6'30" in its original cut!) installed at #1 when The Association's in every sense preferable "Windy" (2'54", ironically) was at #3. Come out on the wrong side of that juxtaposition, and you can only snort at such soundbites as drummer John Densmore's claim that The Doors were exactly the right band to combine rock 'n' roll with jazz (as if rock 'n' roll wasn't enough in itself), and the revelation that Morrison's Lizard King poem was originally going to occupy the entire first side of an album, until the label bosses intervened. (The Doors: a band so awful they have you siding with management.) Mostly, it's the usual goggle-eyed tripe about Morrison being a poet-messiah-Lizard King-godhead, barely stopping to examine the copious hints he might also have been a grotesquely indulged, barely sober bore with a most Sixties tendency to treat women offhandedly at best. (A reminder: your narrator for the evening is Mr. Johnny Depp.) The performative controversies are duly noted, inviting interpretation as either proof of anti-establishment credentials or the kind of shock tactics bands resort to so as to distract from the tedium of the songs: the F-word that got them fired as Whisky A Go Go's houseband, the singing of the word "higher" on primetime TV, Jim getting his winky out to stick it to The Man. I feel obliged to point out there were bands from around this time and place - the Beach Boys and the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas and the Monkees, Thunderclap Newman and The Lovin' Spoonful - who were unabashedly pop, devoid of comparable pretension, and who would be a whole lot more fun to listen to and learn about. Move on, boomers. Move on.

When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors is now showing in selected cinemas.

Heaven can wait: "Eternity"

If you find yourself onside with Eternity from an early stage, it's because this is a project all but engineered to trigger something positive in the cinephile lizard brain: an American movie making the kind of imaginative leap that American movies once made on a regular basis. (A sign of how far those movies have deviated from the path of righteousness over recent decades: this particular flight of fancy has had to be backed by the boutique studio A24, as if romantic endeavours were a marginal or niche concern.) Co-writer/director David Freyne (who did 2020's Dating Amber) has taken notes from Hirokazu Kore-eda's After Life and the mighty A Matter of Life and Death in envisioning a vast limbo where the recently deceased, preserved in their happiest human form, are sent while they work out which eternity is the right one for them. These various afterlives are advertised like theme parks are to you and I: Capitalist World, Marxist World, Jewish World, Man-Free World, Smoker's World ("because cancer can't kill you twice"), possibly even World of Leather (for fans of either sofas or the 2025 motion picture Pillion) and the man-heavy World of Sport, presided over by benevolent deity Dickie Davies. You might want to choose quickly, given this supposed purgatory's resemblance to an airport terminal: hell on earth, in short, a place you long to escape at the earliest possible juncture. It is, however, a promising backdrop for a romcom, because these spectral commuters are obliged to make... well, not life-or-death choices, because that's a moot point up here, but choices nevertheless. They get more urgent still once Larry (Miles Teller) and his late, long-time wife Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) realise they're occupying the exact same astral plane as Joan's first love and husband Luke (Callum Turner). Decisions, decisions.

It's a movie with one big and very welcome surprise: how adept Teller is at playing the Cusacky underdog. Larry died as a cranky old man, which explains his wardrobe and weary demeanour, but Teller, liberated from a run of try-hard dramatic roles, makes him a charming contender for anyone's affections. It's both cosmically cruel and supremely funny that he should be notably shorter than his love rival, though I think we should say Larry's immediate verdict on Luke - "he looks like Montgomery Clift" - is some way wide of the mark. (Is this Larry also stuck with his older self's cataracts?) Turner actually looks, as so many of our male stars now do, like someone who got famous on an E4 show - and at least five years too young for the fully grown woman he's wooing. Spiritually, Luke is the younger man, his death in the Korean War cuing one of this script's best and cheekiest jokes, but Turner can't give the character any inner life - he's just tall - which makes the central choice easier and more predictable than perhaps we'd hoped. (Oddly, the Chris Evans of Materialists might have worked in this role.) It's a problem Freyne cannot solve. Whenever Teller is front and centre, we spy the abundant possibilities of a film like this; whenever Olsen's with Turner, you spot only the limitations of this particular film, a movie like they used to make, just not quite operating at its predecessors' level. The writing's not as sharp, the production design neither as imaginative nor as well-funded, the resolution laboriously arrived at rather than decisively and stirringly claimed. We get all the literature and trailers for those other worlds, but barely a glimpse of the real thing; when the characters enter a building called the Archives, they watch themselves acting out scenes from their pasts in front of painted backcloths. (It has the look of provincial dinner theatre, where the Fox or Warner Bros. version of Eternity would have resulted in something closer to cinema. Dare I suggest this isn't the kind of movie A24 should be making, whether because they don't quite have the money or because Celine Song used up all the money?) It'll do, as a functional date movie, a singleton's Friday-night wallow or down the line as a timekiller on a longhaul flight - and your attendance and attention may yet encourage the suits to make more of these with stronger material besides. But it's also further proof of the way American movies now routinely ask us to settle for the so-so, for minor, fleeting, short-term pleasures, where once creatives armed with a similar idea would have pushed for something truly worthy of Eternity as a title.

Eternity opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.

Into the weeds: "Anemone"

The headline story with Anemone is that Daniel Day-Lewis has been coaxed back into the limelight, albeit by someone close to home: his own son Ronan, the film's writer-director. (Cinephiles with long memories will recall that DDL warmed up for There Will Be Blood by appearing in 2005's The Ballad of Jack and Rose, written and directed by his wife - and RDL's mother - Rebecca Miller.) An intriguing subplot is that Anemone pairs DDL, widely regarded as the greatest actor of his generation, with Sean Bean, a sometimes mocked, much-imitated small-screen regular who in recent years has come to assume a craggy gravitas via such heavyweight projects as Jimmy McGovern's Time. It's a sign of the place Bean now occupies in the thespian landscape that he should have been cast as DDL's onscreen equal, the Abel to his Cain, in a film that imagines a distinctly unusual reunion between brothers: deep in the woods, after many long years apart. In Anemone's opening scenes, we may struggle to see the forest for the trees: RDL is very deliberate in setting up the mystery of why these two men are reuniting, why here and why now. But the specifics are compelling enough. Bean's Jem leaves a family behind him to go on this hike, his Biblical tattoos indicating this is a man who's known both struggle and God in his time. We intuit that DDL's Ray has become a hermit of sorts long before he cues up Black Sabbath's "Solitude" - the world is a lonely place/you're on your own - to reaffirm his lifestyle choices. Ray is fiercely protective of this self-imposed isolation, picking up an axe when he hears footsteps approaching. Almost as eloquent, though, is his very next gesture: upon realising the intruder is his own kin, Ray mutely sets the axe down and puts the kettle on.

It's hard not to be drawn in. Here are two men from very different places, played by actors from utterly distinct worlds, who've reached a point in their lives and careers where they're comfortable to sit with and in silence; over these two hours, their task will be to make the internal external and return the past to the present-day. Anemone proceeds to monitor a growing tension between inside and out: the cabin in the woods, at one point presented as the kind of bisected cutaway one might see in a picturebook a father might well have gifted his son; polite society versus its wild-and-woollier fringes. It's very much there in a violently scatological anecdote Ray tells Jem about the vengeance he wrought on the priest who abused him during his care-home childhood. To reach for a summary the God-fearing Jem might appreciate, RDL is needling away at that fine line that separates that done to us from that we do unto others. So it's male violence, then, and male trauma: Ray, one of the recent cinema's few properly convincing hardmen, proves to be as affected - and as damaged - by his upbringing as he is by his time as a British squaddie in the Troubles. Cue one more moment to add to the long rollcall of onscreen DDL genius: after Jem asks what happened over there, Ray at first responds with an unnervingly long glare, either to suggest his brother knows full well what happened, or that he can't or doesn't feel the need to put his experiences into words. The film isn't exclusively about male suffering, though. From time to time, RDL cuts back to the homefront, less loaded with bristling testosterone, but in many ways every bit as fraught. Here, we meet Jem's wife Nessa (Samantha Morton, unravelling as only Sam Morton can), who has a complicated relationship of her own with the brothers, and her teenage son Brian (Samuel Bottomley, from Ladhood and How to Have Sex) who has himself started to drift off the rails, as his scraped knuckles and frequent crying jags testify.

For an hour or so, I marvelled at RDL's efforts to connect everything, to repair even the most irreparably broken bond: we may even wonder whether the aggrieved biker who yells at Nessa on a pelican crossing is the subject of the 999 call she's later heard taking in her control-room day job. (The first and final images similarly synch.) Somewhere out there, there's a version of Anemone that is all empty posturing: I say this with some certainty, having sat through several variants over the past few decades. As the version we've got proceeds, we get glimpses of this bizarro-world Anemone: a living-room sitdown between mother and son that - hampered by clunky crosscutting - never catches fire and seems to go on for a small eternity, Ray using words and phrases ("concussive", "full measure of suffering") this actor and director might well reach for, but this character almost certainly wouldn't. The second half exposes the extent to which RDL deploys the monologue as a tactic, either to attract actors or to bring the audience up to speed. The overcast skies, vivid though they are, seem to leach into the drama - suddenly it's all brooding, all of the time - and it hardly helps that the coup de cinéma that intervenes has been half-inched from another film (a modern classic, indeed) on more or less the same theme. The Anemone we have peaks around its midpoint, with a scene that finds Ray and Jem making a rare excursion to civilisation in the form of a quiet pub: no strain, no wobbles, no fuss, just two taciturn men in their natural environment, going back-and-forth over a bag of cheese-and-onion crisps. Here, as elsewhere, RDL finds expressive and surprising ways to flesh out and fill these spaces and silences. It must be a heck of a thing to be able to get your much-laurelled dad to appear in your film about fathers and sons - that's a privilege, yes. But the sincerity with which this filmmaker sets about his own task, the risks he takes, and his eye for the natural world (no Brooklyn Beckham, this) all bode well for the future.

Anemone is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of November 21-23, 2025):

1 (new) Wicked: For Good (PG)

2 (1) Now You See Me: Now You Don't (12A)

3 (2) The Running Man (15) **

4 (4) Nuremberg (15) ***

5 (3) Predator: Badlands (12A) **

6 (6) The Choral (12A)

7 (7) Christmas Karma (12A)

8 (9) A Paw Patrol Christmas (U)

9 (5) Jujutsu Kaisen: Execution (15)

10 (10) Bugonia (15) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Sisu: Road to Revenge

2. Wake Up Dead Man

3. Keeper

4. Nuremberg

5. Die My Love

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

2 (4) Nobody 2 (15)

3 (6) The Grinch (U)

4 (3) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12) **

5 (2) F1 The Movie (12) ***

6 (8) One Battle After Another (15) ****

7 (12) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15) **

8 (31) The Roses (15)

9 (5) Superman (12)

10 (10) Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. The Curse of Frankenstein

2. The Ballad of Wallis Island

3. F1: The Movie

4. The Naked Gun

5. Bring Her Back

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Graduate [above] (Friday, Channel 4, 11pm)

2. Gladiator (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)

3. Proxima (Saturday, Channel 4, 1.15am)

4. Mission: Impossible III (Friday, ITV1, 11.20pm)

5. The Ipcress File (Saturday, BBC Two, 2.45pm)

In memoriam: Udo Kier (Telegraph 27/11/25)

Udo Kier, who has died aged 81, was a singular German character actor who became a fringe hero and a bizarro-world megastar over the course of his sixty-year film career; emerging from the Andy Warhol scene, he enlivened cult indies, Hollywood productions and arthouse hits alike with a signature blend of impish mischief and implied malevolence.

His life, however, almost ended before it began. He was born Udo Kierspe in Cologne on October 14, 1944, in a hospital that was bombed by the Allies hours later; both the newborn and his mother Thekla had to be pulled from the rubble. (Kier never met his father.) After modelling in his teens, Kier moved to London to study English; there, his limpid blue eyes were spotted by the director Mike Sarne, who cast Kier as a gigolo in his short Road to Saint Tropez (1966).

His international breakthrough came with a pair of films made under the Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey aegis. As the crazed scientist in the knowingly garish, 3D-enhanced Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), Kier ventured one of cinema’s most forceful line readings (“To know death, Otto, you have to f**k life in the gallbladder!”); he pushed harder still for Blood for Dracula (1974), losing ten pounds in a week to play the prissy Count. On the first day of shooting, Kier was too weak to stand; he elected to play his scenes in a wheelchair.

Hopes of a serious acting career were partially dashed when the production shot under the poetic title Love is a River in Russia arrived in Cannes heavily recut and retitled Spermula (1976), but Kier was soon adopted by directors with vision and some idea of how best to deploy the bug-eyed madness he embodied: he played an ominous psychologist in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and became a go-to for Rainer Werner Fassbinder between The Third Generation (1979) and Lola (1981).

The actor had befriended Fassbinder as a teenager; the pair even briefly cohabited, although Kier soon retreated from the director’s speedfreak lifestyle and punishing work ethic: “I moved out because he was burning himself up in such a destructive way. I didn’t want to be part of it. He threw my suitcases down the stairs because he wanted to say that he’d thrown me out. He died two months later.”

He worked steadily in Germany through the 1980s, attempting a pop career with the 1985 single “Der Adler” and playing Hitler in the queasily comic The Fuhrer’s Last Hour (1989). By then, however, he’d encountered the ambitious young Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, who asked Kier to retell his origin story in Epidemic (1987), then cast the actor in his made-for-TV Medea (1988) and Europa (1991).

Relocating to California in 1991, Kier revived an American career that was as curious as anything else in his filmography. He leered in photos for Madonna’s scandalous 1992 book Sex and raved in the singer’s “Deeper and Deeper” promo; he played an eccentric billionaire opposite Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1993); he was unwigged by Pamela Anderson in Barb Wire (1996) and played a NASA psychologist in the Bruce Willis blockbuster Armageddon (1998).

Von Trier remained a fan, casting the actor in his career-making provocations: the visual highlight was the outsized baby Kier played in the surreal soap The Kingdom (Riget, 1994-2022), though he was also memorable as the wedding planner undone by the Apocalypse in Melancholia (2011). (The two became firm friends: Kier was also the godfather of Von Trier’s daughter Agnes.)

In the new millennium, he cropped up in films by Argento (Mother of Tears, 2007), Werner Herzog (Invincible, 2001 and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, 2009) and Guy Maddin (Keyhole, 2011); after voicing the scheming parrot Professor Pericles in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated (2010-13), he extracted a love rival’s eyeballs with a spoon in the grim WW2 drama The Painted Bird (2019).

In his final years, Kier earned an Independent Spirit nomination for his turn as a devoted hairdresser in Swan Song (2021); he played Hitler again in the short-lived streaming series Hunters (2023); for the Brazilian critic-turned-director Kleber Mendonça Filho, he appeared in the latter-day Western Bacurau (2019) and the upcoming The Secret Agent (2025). In recent months, he’d been voicing a character for Hideo Kojima’s much-anticipated videogame O.D. (2026 tbc). 

“I’m an aesthetic person who loves beauty,” Kier told The Guardian in 2002. “When I’m in London, I go to Leicester Square and visit the French church [Notre Dame de France] to see Jean Cocteau’s beautiful altar. I buy two candles, one for my dead friends and one for my living friends, and I go out in a good mood. Then I go and play the Antichrist.”

He is survived by his long-time partner, the artist Delbert McBride.

Udo Kier, born October 14, 1944, died November 23, 2025.

Angels with dirty faces: "Wake Up Dead Man"

The third of Rian Johnson's Knives Out murder-mysteries is at the very least a step up from 2022's Glass Onion. Where that immediate predecessor proved as moneyed, slick and antiseptically surfacey as its chosen tech-bro milieu (and, indeed, the series' new Netflix platform), Wake Up Dead Man digs a little deeper and shows a willingness to get its hands dirty every so often. The theme this time is the stories we tell, and those we allow to proliferate; the first half benches Daniel Craig's wafty sleuth Benoit Blanc to trade in theological debate and religious schism. Mildly disgraced Catholic cleric Josh O'Connor is sent to a leafy new diocese to serve as second-in-command - and, it's hoped, liberal counterbalance - to fire-and-brimstone-preaching Monsignor Josh Brolin, busy bonding his dwindling congregation (devout organist Glenn Close, sottish doctor Jeremy Renner, cranky author Andrew Scott, disabled cellist Callie Spaeny, aloof lawyer Kerry Washington, right-wing vlogger Daryl McCormack) by inflaming their blood. This localised radicalisation project is halted one Good Friday when Brolin is discovered in a sealed side chapel with a blade in his back. Re-enter Blanc - his rationalism strong as ever, his travel bag loaded with locked-room whodunnits - so as to reaffirm the junior priest's faith and break up an apparently murderous personality cult. Any resemblances to real-world American politics in 2025 are for legal reasons coincidental, but you wouldn't be alone in spotting them.

The four words that lodged in my head early on - Jonathan Creek Christmas special - thereafter refused to budge. After three instalments, it's become clear the Knives Outs have become ultra-expensive TV movies, constructed in the manner of the longer Columbo specials or a half-season of Johnson's own, just-cancelled cable project Poker Face. Certain of this season's Netflix productions - del Toro's Frankenstein, Clint Bentley's Train Dreams - will lose a lot from being watched on an app. Despite the odd little touch that reminds you of Johnson's once-thriving theatrical career - some well-choreographed light changes in the chapel, say - Wake Up Dead Man won't. The money's gone on actors' fees and production design: the chapel's interplay of light and dark, a marble mausoleum that proves central to the mystery, a domestic basement roughly the size of a small warehouse. The idea with this series has always been to make more space for the pleasures of the ensemble: some of those pleasures endure here, but Johnson's never been able to match the fractious dynamism of his original cast. (This troupe does what's asked of them on a scene-by-scene basis, but the one player you really want to hang out with is church handyman Thomas Haden Church, and he's largely sidelined, watching baseball in his shed with a Coke in hand.) Even as telly, Wake Up Dead Man relies upon viewer indulgence: golden-age detective drama could tie up cases twice as tangled inside half of these 144 minutes. Much as Blanc comes over as a passive presence this time, bumbling around in the background while the energised O'Connor takes up the ecclesiastical and investigative slack, Johnson is himself cutting loose, stretching his legs and taking things easy with the Knives Out series. That's fine when the approach generates the entertaining fluff it does here, but there's no particular need to race to the cinema for it; you'll be able to watch it at home over the holidays - for free - with a big tub of chocolates on the sofa next to you.

Wake Up Dead Man is now playing in selected cinemas, and will be available to stream on Netflix from December 12.