Four lions

Chris Morris has co-written, acted in and produced some of British TV's most biting satire: The Day Today (1994) and Brass Eye (1997) are classic spoofs of TV news programmes. In 2010, his first full-length feature appeared: Four Lions. The tale of a quartet of bumbling British jihadist wannabe bombers wanted to be a fiercely funny farce, a slapstick comedy that stings.

It's not as black as it could be, mainly because its characters invite comic scorn. Two of the quartet of English-dialect young men are certifiably stupid a la Marx Brothers or Stooges, as shown in their dialogue (but regrettably not in the actors' faces). A third plotter is a mentally disturbed weak bully, a nihilist Caucasian convert to Islam who cannot understand Arabic or Urdu. The fourth is a short natural leader who is portrayed as such a rational, self-aware and admirable Western-style father and husband that he's unbelievable as an eager self-sacrificial martyr-in-chief.

A fifth young rebel joins the group and would add dramatic interest if he were an undercover agent, or anything except a bad-rapping fourth thumb for the handful of amateur revolutionaries. There's great initial promise when the leader and his simpleton pal travel to a Pakistani training camp, with hilarious slapsticky results. The promise is not maintained.

Back on the home front, in Sheffield, the clever leader's smart wife and bright young son are shown to be culturally assimilated and yet, inexplicably, cheerfully supportive of his bombing ambitions, so they're not very credible characters either. Nor are any of the scenario's nicely dim token whites. The movie's comedy depends largely on silly capers, slapstick deaths and occasional black comedy moments involving incompetent policemen.

The gang's accidental assassination of bin Laden, and an expose of UK interrogation techniques (including make-believe Egyptian territory in a container truck), are among various deleted scenes that would have lent an air of contradictory mockumentary seriousness to the movie. It's clear that Morris (and/or his many producers) chickened out of making a snarling spoof, or even a smirky Airplane!, about jihadism.

During the first hour, the plot develops as an amusing inter-cultural comedy of errors and manners featuring a quartet of fools. Then Morris and his three other writers try to transform their offbeat comedy into a more traditional madcap movie pantomime with black moments. That was a comic mission impossible.

Killer inside me

It's nice when a small mainstream film gets a big break. The Killer Inside Me may, as lead actor Casey Affleck's latest chance to savour a taste of older brother Ben's bigger success in Hollywood. Casey's being touted as an outside chance for a Best Actor Oscar nomination in 2011. He has been an outsider once before, for Best Supporting Actor in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. His other major claim to fame has been three appearances in the ensemble casts for the Oceans franchise.

This time, he's an arch anti-hero in a frighteningly noir Western thriller directed with icy precision by Michael Winterbottom. The Briton's films vary wildly but are rarely easy viewing (e.g. Mighty Heart, Road to Guantanamo, Cock and Bull Story, 9 Songs). This one's far from easy; psychotic multiple killers are tricky characters to portray entertainingly. One of the few to succeed was Mary Harron's American Psycho (Christian Bale's breakthrough movie as an adult actor), and Winterbottom's movie lacks that film's air of fantasy. It helped audiences not to take the coldly brutal character of Bale's killer at face value. Instead Winterbottom and Affleck compel us to look straight into the calm smiling eyes of a baby-faced soft-voiced sadist.

This remake of a 1950s Jim Thompson pulp fiction reportedly is truer to the novelist's original story. It's a complex one, filled with socially flawed characters. Affleck is Ford, an orphan Texan policeman whose boss (Tom Bower) is an alcoholic. The death of Ford's adopted brother had been set up by the town's property kingpin (Ned Beatty), whose son (Jay Ferguson) is besotted by a local prostitute (Jessica Alba). The policeman has a girlfriend (Kate Hudson), and the scenario also involves an interfering union organiser (Elias Koteas), a suspicious outside detective (Simon Baker), a blackmailer, and a cafe owner and his teenage son. Most of them will need to die once the policeman starts arranging justice and death to suit his moods. Inevitably, amid such complexity there are squeaky plot devices, but the movie gallops past them.

Thompson, briefly a member of the US Communist Party, was a victim of the McCarthy era, and also one of egocentric Stanley Kubrik's credit-deprived co-writers (for Paths of Glory and The Killing). Other Thompson stories adapted later by Hollywood included Stephen Frears' The Grifters and Roger Donaldson's The Getaway, while French directors brought him belated recognition too with Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de torchon and Alain Corneau's Serie noire. Winterbottom has now highlighted the recurrent noir nastiness in Thompson's work, and many US critics fixated on what they saw as the excessive violence Affleck's character inflicts on his female victims.

Are the fast-cut scenes of facial and bodily battering necessary for a fuller understanding of the killer's mind? To me, yes, in the context of the whole killing sequence. They made the killer's fastidious footsteps, calm pause to glance at a newspaper, toying with a coffee maker and other psychotic mannerisms even more horrifyingly disconnected from his twisted sense of reality. At the end, when an audience might be expecting suicidal redemption, there's a Grand Guignol finale that will ensure the movie's fame/notoriety as a classic noir thriller.

[Meanwhile, Casey was notching up a bigger marker in 2010. His creative direction of the Joaquin Phoenix mockumentary I'm Still Here also got him noticed favourably. Phoenix, a brother-in-law and good friend of Affleck, got noticed anew too.]

Winter's bone

Why do so distributors fail to convince movie-makers that the title of a successful book will not ensure its success as a movie. The opposite, for otherwise good films such as Winter's Bone.

What a miserable title that is. It didn't deter Sundance Festival audiences from making it an award-winner, but potential cineplex movie-goers are a very different kettle of easily discouraged fish. They will only flock to see it, and only then in small schools, if the indie thriller wins an award or two. Which it should do at the 2011 Golden Globes or Oscars.

Daniel (Ride with the Devil) Woodrell's 2006 novel about Missouri backwoods folk was adapted for the screen by director Debra Granik and co-writer Anne Rossellini. They also worked together on Granik's only other feature film, another multi-award-winner entitled, by ironic coincidence, Down to the Bone (2004). Their screenplay for Winter's Bone earned them the 2010 Sundance screenwriting award, and it is a remarkably mesmerising family drama, thriller, horror movie and female coming-of-age story set in Missouri's Ozarks hills. This is the sort of territory of vicious poor-white inbreeding that movies such as Deliverance made notorious.

The central character is a 17-year-old girl, Ree Dolly, taking care of her speechless crazy mother's woodland farm and two younger siblings. Her father, a crystal meths maker, has vanished and the farm will be lost to bondsmen if he isn't found. Ree's search for him among hills populated by criminal cousins is the only storyline and its credibility and grip depend on the lead actress.

Jennifer Lawrence portrays a young woman forced to be deadly serious in an environment where men verge on madness and their women must look and act ugly outside and inside. Even her uncle (John Deadwood Hawkes) cannot help her in the paranoid, almost incestuous clan. It is all in young Ree's fearful hands and Lawrence was a fine casting choice: she'd won acting awards in 2008 (Los Angeles, for Lori Petty's The Poker House, and Venice for Guillermo Arriaga's The Burning Plain) and turned in another memorable performance for Granik.

The indie film is also well served by cinematographer Michael McDonough, who's worked with Granik since her New York student days and is also one of the film's co-producers. Much of the time, in a movie that avoids mood-setting music and employs natural rural sound effects, the calm camera work conveys the harshness, akin to daylight spookiness, of Missouri. Local-born Woodrell's writings have been called "country noir", and Granik captures that spirit. The movie's heroine wins in the end, but we fear her life is unlikely to amount to a hill of beans.

[Missouri state's film commission helped the production; it apparently bought an idea of promoting the caves in its hills as a tourist attraction. A DVD extra comprises the producers' apologetic note for their movie's only deleted scene, showing the heroine overnighting in uninteresting cave settings.]

Secret of Kells

The Secret of Kells, an Irish animated movie with multi-national European funding and creative participation, would probably have languished in obscure festivals. It still will, but will also gain bigger audiences attracted to it by its 2010 Academy Award nomination (and 9 wins and 3 other nominations elsewhere). The Oscar nod was a well-deserved recognition of its animators' use of colour, and originality of story and hand-drawn designs.

Tomm Moore is the main credited writer-director, along with Nora Twomey (direction) and Fabrice Ziolkowski (screenplay). This was Moore's debut feature; Twomey had worked with him on previous projects; Ziolkowski is a veteran French TV series writer.

Their ambitious little (75-minute) charmer tells the tale of a medieval Irish monastery boy destined to complete an illuminated religious book during the era of Viking plunder. Rather than try and emulate the rich and exquisite details of the historical sources, the movie team appear to have found inspiration in Disney's free-wheeling and exuberant modern Fantasia.

At times, the creators' desire to draw fresh and exciting visual images is bewitchingly over-obvious, at the expense of the thinly-developed monk characters, their nervously loyal cat and the wispy wolf-fairy helping them defeat the evil Celtic spirit in the surrounding forest. Those images, however, are often enchanting representations (spiraling, screen-splitting, elaborately-framed, gleaming) of reality and myths. The Irish-accented English-speaking voices behind the characters are rightly under-emphasised.

Knight and Day

Once upon a time in Hollywood, a movie star called Tom Cruise was sacked. The box-office takings for his latest Mission Impossible action-adventure hadn't been sufficient to justify his high contractual fees, and he'd just made a very public fool of himself sofa-jumping on Oprah's TV chat show. So, maybe, Tom decided to make a movie sending up the action movie genre, and himself. It was called Knight and Day and starred him and another ageing headliner, Cameron Diaz.

She's ten years younger than Tom, but looked much older much of the time, which helped 1962-born Tom to continue twinkling his eyes like a teasing teen. His self-mockery even extended to letting himself be seen emerging from a tropical ocean a la James Bond with a big fish and a very podgy waist.

Cameron's face may have aged but her body still looked great in a bikini. Both of them could be forgiven for romping through the mildly bizarre scenario about a US secret agent and his accidental accomplice -- because they were clearly having fun performing a Mr and Mrs Smithy Brangelina act with nods in the direction of Arnie and Jamie Lee Curtis, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and other tongue-in-cheeky action pairings.

Written by Patrick O'Neill, a bit-part actor in a few 1990s movies, the Cruise vehicle features the all-suburban-American hero as a government agent framed for the theft of an inexhaustible battery newly invented by a young boffin (Paul Dano) who needs protecting from bad guys too. Bumping into mildly dizzy Diaz at an airport, en route to her sister's wedding, Cruise finds himself depending on her latent talents for action.

Her comic talents are pleasantly exploited by director James Mangold, best known for the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line, who packages the light-weight entertainment with decorative explosions, chases and close-ups of Cruise's silent chuckling. Several US critics damned the movie with faint praise: it might be more acceptable as DVD entertainment, they moaned after their big-screen sightings. Any praise is better than none, Cruise might mutter with a smirk.

Any idea that Knight and Day might become a new franchise for them can probably be abandoned. It grossed less than US$80 million in North America. More important, Tom and Mission Impossible producers are a Hollywood item again, producing a new MI.

Ocean heaven

When a debut feature is almost too tearfully good to be true, a movie-goer can only sit, watch, and cry cheerfully. Literally. Ocean Heaven is a small movie that warrants a cascade of cheers.

A simple docudrama of a single father with an autistic son, the movie would never have been made without the support of martial arts superstar Jet Li. He has invested much money and time in China for his charity, The One Foundation, and reportedly took a one-dollar fee to star in this debut project of a Beijing Film Academy teacher, Xue Xiaolu, whose only other IMDb credit is for writing the 2002 Chen Kaige movie, Together (another tale of a father's love, for a violin prodigy).

Well acquainted with the problems of autistic children herself, Xue this time wrote a documentary-style tale of an oceanarium cleaner (Li) who learns he has terminal cancer. In his last months of life, the single father must try to teach his 22-year-old autistic son how to cope with life and learn to support himself. He's supported by his bosses and workmates (at Qingdao oceanarium), and the young man's platonic girlfriend in a circus.

The potential for sloppy sentimentality is obvious, and constantly avoided. This is no US-TV weepie of the week larded with sobbing violin strings, wistful close-ups and emotic acting. It's a finely-calibrated depiction of ordinary people and a father's love. A film that opens with a failed double-suicide and ends with an allegory featuring a fake tortoise takes the great risk of not being taken seriously.

Credit goes not only to Li and Xue, but to TV actor Wen Zhang as the autistic man-child. His detailed mannerisms are thoroughly convincing, from one hand's fluttery fingers to his gait and barely-focused limpid eyes. The leading behind-the-scenes character was Hong Kong producer Bill Kong. His support helped recruit a stellar crew of creative talents (cinematographer Chris Doyle, composer Joe Hisaishi, editor William Chang, production designer Yee Cheung-man, Taiwanese singer/songwriter Jay Chou).

Their movie should win a handful of awards, a big handful.

Animal kingdom

Melbourne, the capital city of Australia's Victoria state, long had a middle-class image. Although it held the world's biggest Greek community outside Athens, it was often perceived by outsiders as a pseudo-English arty-farty place, if not quite so pretentious as Adelaide, the capital city that prided itself as being the only one in Oz not settled by convicts. Sydney, by comparison, was Irish, rougher and more fun.

Animal Kingdom is a sharply edgy reminder that Melbourne experienced one of modern Australia's toughest and most vicious gangland wars, for a decade from the mid-1990s to 2004. Events from its Carlton gang's bloodbath are portrayed loosely as the biography of the criminal Cody family.

The ever-smiling matriarch loves her three sons (bank robbers, drug dealer) effusively, addicted to French-kissing them. When her estranged single-mother daughter dies of a heroin overdose, she takes in 17-year-old grandson J. His uncles introduce him to the family business and their best friend and partner.

A good script, ensemble acting, pace and editing, but this version of reality feels sanitised. The inter-gang viciousness is understated, as is the local police corruption. In this scenario there's a good cop (Guy Pearce) trying to extricate the family's new boy. For once, a TV version of the same material (Underbelly) was reportedly a more disturbing portrait of a sick family and society. It was banned in Victoria (supposedly for legal reasons); the movie wasn't.

Exit through the gift shop

Why is a person who paints graffiti ever called an "artist"? He (rarely a she) is just a self-absorbed mischief-maker, lacking even the political single-mindedness of the 1960s' "Ban the Bomb" wall-daubers. Maybe graffiti artists such as Britain's Banksy will eventually be a comical footnote in future histories of the excesses of the 20th-century capitalist system. The anonymous self-publicist has himself provided economic researchers with a case study.

His pseudo-documentary movie, Exit Through the Gift Shop (using the words daubed on one of Banksy's better-known art gallery send-ups) is marketed as "a Banksy film". It has given the self-confessed vandal an air of comic gravitas, nicely expressed by its voice-over narrator, Rhys Ifans.

Banksy, whoever he is (reportedly known only to be a Bristol-born man), has apparently made enough money from his stunts and can now afford to send up himself, his artistic genre, his fans and buyers in a pastiche of hand-held camera antics acting out a devilishly cute, complex and very nearly compelling set of tales about a Frenchman obsessed with so-called street art.

Banksy is a Borat of the art world, and has earned an additional fortune from this clever showcasing of a silly fad followed by fools with too much cash and too little taste subsidising Warhol wannabees.

The faux documentary's anti-hero is Thierry Gueta, a previously unknown French-born Los Angeles used-clothes shopkeeper who supposedly amassed more than a decade of amateur film recording the exploits and works of graffiti street artists. His video collection's one missing master artist was Banksy, whom he befriends by accident through mutual contacts. By the end of the film, affable Thierry has been transformed into megalomaniac pop artist Mr Brainwash (MBW) and disowned by Banksy and his graffiti pals. Mr Brainwash's self-produced first exhibition of stenciled art, prints and installations sells a million dollars' worth of mass-produced art, and the movie's audience has witnessed what appears to be an ultimate American dream of successful ambition, creativity and marketing.

The docudrama flows very well, the French character is delightfully egocentric and his works of street-style art are often amusing comments on modern society and contemporary art, its practitioners and purchasers. I was close to taking it seriously until Mr Brainwash breaks a foot bone prior to his exhibition's opening and gets carried around in a wheel barrow. Prior to that, I'd already had my doubts when the scale of MBW's cash investment in his project and staff became obvious. His previous ability to film notoriously secretive Banksy and the artist's nervous installation team at work, and to fly around the world with them, had already raised suspicious eyebrows.

The movie appears to be an intricately plotted PR stunt for Banksy and his new Mr Brainwash brand image, a second-tier product range designed to cater to less affluent art collectors who cannot afford real Banksys. The script provides enough clues (as in its characters' meaninglessly vague cross-references to each other) to its pretences, and more than enough hints that Banksy scorns the pretensions of folks who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

No writer is credited for the movie, or for the 13-minute "real" documentary about Banksy that's a DVD extra worth viewing. Look too at the Mr Brainwash website, and sense that Banksy hasn't finished having his last laugh at the expense of the art trade.

The expendables

Apart from its high-octane special effects and countless gruesome killings, the main interest in watching The Expendables is observing how its aged action-movie actors have aged.

Quite clearly, actors should not go into politics: Arnold Schwarzenegger (born 1947, in Austria) makes a brief guest appearance and looks haggard. He's done a favour for his pal, lead actor Sylvester Stallone. Although he's a year older, he appears remarkably trim and bright-eyed. Perhaps, as he also co-wrote and directed the movie, he had the opportunity to get his technicians to make him look and sound good.

He's a good role model for the few younger actors, of whom the baby is dagger-flinging Jason Statham (1972). The short British hunk has developed an appealing comic stylishness, akin to that of Bruce Willis (1952) who also provides Stallone with a cameo. Mickey Rourke (1952) obviously wanted a juicier role and is given a confessional monologue to rasp, during which the director (Stallone) cuts away to his pensive self a few times.

Jet Li's dialogue allows him to tease his own high-kicking smallness, but his plumpness is a growing problem for a martial artist of his age (1963). Dolph Lundgren (1957), another imported movie hunk (from Sweden), is still an extra-large commanding presence. One senses that the supporting younger talents tried to act older than their true ages, or maybe they were just trying to act: former pro-wrestler Steve Austin (1964), kick-boxing champion Gary Daniels (1963, London) and Randy Couture (also of the 63 vintage), a former UFC title champion at two weights.

There had to be a black actor? That's former pro-footballer Terry Crews (1968); his character's name sports a cutely classical name (Hale Caesar). He's one of the band of mercenary rough-diamond good-guys in a team amassed by Stallone. A few of the above actors play bad guys on a South American island nation whose dictator is controlled by a US drug dealer (type-casting for Eric Roberts, 1956). The dictator's rebellious daughter is the band's contact and the movie's only female interest (Giselle Itie, a Mexico-born Brazilian TV star). There are several subtitled Spanish-language scenes to let Latino movie-goers feel the producers also care about them.

Technically, the movie is admirable for its tongue-in-cheek formulaic writing, quick-paced editing, blasting background music and gloriously gory blood-spurting body-part-losing special effects. "Sly" Stallone has created his third winning franchise: Rambo, Rocky and now (Barney) Ross. A sequel is in the works, planned to include even more action stars. Its main challenge will be to invent myriad new and teen-appealing wide-screen surround-sound ways of mercenary slaughter and mayhem. Old-timers like that stuff too.

Please give

Some actresses who lack a popular form of beauty become famous and relatively rich for being above-average players of supporting, character and cameo parts. Some still make it to the starry heights, as did Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton. Others await a juicy role of a lifetime, like Kathy Bates' Oscar-winning star turn in Misery. A few, such as Kristin Scott-Thomas, age gracefully and successfully in individual ways. One of her American cousins is Catherine Keener, whose Please Give is her fourth movie made with indie writer-director Nicole Holofcener.

Holofcener, whose stepfather was movie producer Charles Joffe, has only made four films, which suggests she and Keener collaborate well artistically. The rest of the ensemble cast is also effective in a sequence of sweet and sour set pieces built around New York flats, furniture and families.

Keener's perplexed socially-aware character and her laid-back husband (Oliver Platt) operate an above-average second-hand furniture store. They have a precocious teenage daughter (Sarah Spanglish Steele) with zits and an attitude problem that ranges from bitchiness to sentimentality, and they'd bought the next-door flat. It's occupied by an irritable old woman (Ann Guilbert, a TV series veteran from the sublime Dick Van Dyke Show to the ridiculous Nanny) and reverts to their ownership only when she does .

Her two grand-daughters run her errands and get involved with the neighbours. Amanda Peet (Whole Nine Yards) plays a sleek beautician who, inexplicably, lets Platt's podgy character start an affair with her, while her homely radiologist sister is a total contrast. The very busy British actress Rebecca Hall (Sir Peter's daughter) is another tall but wispy character (as in Dorian Gray and Vicky Cristina Barcelona) waiting for some scenery to chew.

This is another angst-edged character study of metropolitan family life , a bitter-sweet drawing-room comedy of manners, a world where many of American indie film-makers obviously feel at home in and need to criticise. Holofcener's latest review of middle-class mores is a small gem, but one that's been too meticulously worded, polished and honed. Its surface glistens while its essence feels coolly artificial.

American: the Bill Hicks story

Bill Hicks, one of America's professionally "angry" stand-up comedians followed paths cut by Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and, less acerbically, Woody Allen and Robin Williams. The first documentary-cum-biography of Hicks has been made made by Brits; their American: the Bill Hicks Story clearly admires a hard-working heavy-smoking comic who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of only 32 in 1994.

The British connection may explain the willingness of Hicks' family members to cooperate with TV documentary-makers Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas.

After his first overseas appearance (at Montreal's annual comedy festival), Hicks toured Britain during 1991-2, gaining big theatre audiences, TV specials and an international reputation for provocative comic monologues. The Georgia-born Texan returned to the USA with renewed self-confidence both personally and in his stage routines.

Working with family movies, photographs and paste-on backdrops and illustrations, the documentary-makers created a fairly original South Park-style animated biography. The "commentary" and biographical data are provided through off-screen reminiscences by family members and friends. Maybe their cooperation was counter-productive, as the Hicks presented to us looks and sounds sanitised and hollow, an unformed character lacking a sexual life, financial problems and professional conflicts.

There's no clear evidence how and why Hicks switched from family jokes to sharp social and political commentaries, leading a viewer to suspect that he was mainly following market trends in his chosen career. He and his best school friend, both from strict Protestant families, decided to become stand-up comics at 13 and later developed their musical talents too in bands and song-writing. Hicks was a veteran comedy club performer in Los Angeles by the age of 19 and his passage to the top of the stand-up ranks appears almost too easy to be true.

The story of the censorship of his 12th and final David Letterman routine is noted, without amplifying that its mildly anti-religious jokes were the cause. One running battle is ignored completely: the plagiarism of Hicks' style and material by Denis Leary.

This bio fails to clarify why it entitled itself "American". Maybe Hicks was thought to be a typical non-university white non-Jewish comic from the suburbs, which is where most of his appreciative home-country audiences lived, but no conclusions are led to or drawn. Most disappointing, though, is the selection of extracts from Hicks' taped performances.

They show the comic's superb timing and audience control, but the material doesn't amuse or shock enough to be memorable. The Hicks we're shown lacks the reputed black humour and satire. Without them, he looks as average as this bio of him.

Brooklyn's finest

Take three tales of flawed New York cops, add black gangsters, Catholicism, urban poverty, suicidal tendencies and a prostitute, then garnish with lots of blood, mood music and deadly serious star faces. That's what novice screenwriter Michael C Martin and director Antoine Fuqua did, and Brooklyn's Finest is a pot-boiler saved from mediocrity by the four top actors Fuqua attracted to the project.

The cliched cop characters are played effectively, and almost credibly, by Richard Gere (drunk failure, a week away from retirement), Ethan Hawke (cash-hungry family man stealing only from bad guys) and Don Cheadle (undercover narc who wants out). Wesley Snipes is Cheadle's drug-gang-boss best pal.

Director Fuqua is an American black who came up from the music video and MTV ranks. His biggest hit to date was Training Day, for which Denzel Washington won the Best Actor Oscar and Ethan Hawke was nominated as Best Supporting Actor.

Writer Martin's only previous produced work was as a staff writer for the TV series Sleeper Cell, and the influence of such multi-character multi-plot dramas (such as TV's The Wire and cinema's Crash) is obvious. In his first solo screenplay, the trio of police stories overlap and blend well enough, but needed more character development and less reliance on the lead actors' facial expressions of tiredness and pessimism.

Smart editing, attractive photography and the musical soundtrack's varying moods all help too, but cannot compensate for the movie's lack of depth.

The special relationship

Michael Sheen has impersonated Tony Blair in three films written by Peter Morgan: The Deal and The Queen led to The Special Relationship, a 2010 HBO/BBC TV movie. In between, Sheen portrayed David Frost in Morgan's Frost/Nixon, on stage and film, and egocentric football manager Brian Clough in Morgan's The Damned United.

Morgan has mined a rich vein in modern British history, also writing a biopic about Lord Longford, an outstanding showcase for Jim Broadbent and Samantha Morton (as Myra Hindley). His screenplay for The Last King of Scotland brought an Oscar to Forest Whitaker and a breakthrough role for James McAvoy.

Digging further back in British history, Morgan transformed a Philippa Gregory novel into The Other Boleyn Girl, starring Eric Bana, Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johannson. A few years earlier, his two-part TV drama about Henry VIII featured Ray Winstone, Joss Ackland and a crack ensemble of top British actors. His 4-hour TV drama Colditz (2005) featured many young actors who've shone in later films (Damien Lewis, Tom Hardy, Jason Priestley)

The Leeds Uni graduate Londoner has also been well served by his directors, including Stephen Frears (twice, for Deal and Queen), Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon), Tom Hooper (also twice, for Damned and Longford), Kevin Macdonald (Last King). His latest screenplay, Hereafter (2010) is executive-produced by Spielberg, directed by Eastwood and stars Matt Damon. Morgan is on a roll, and has landed in Hollywood with his first screenplay not based on major historical news-makers.

If The Special Relationship fails to grip as TV drama or political docudrama, one of its weak links may be director Richard Loncraine: his track record is lightweight (most recently, My One and Only, Firewall and Wimbledon). Morgan's less-than-90-minute coverage of the shared time in power of Blair and Bill Clinton is inevitably episodic, and Kosovo and Ulster appear to be parts of a soap opera alongside the Lewinsky scandal. They might have made a richer pageant -- and parable -- of modern political friendship if the screenplay hadn't lost much time in scenes of the characters' transportation, newscast-watching and standing around.

Ironically, the most revelatory scene is a news clip at the end, with the real Bush and Blair holding a press conference at Camp David. As the screenplay's Clinton had forecast earlier, the body language spoke volumes, and I'm sure Morgan intended his audience to suspect mischievously that the US-UK "special relationship" had unexpressed homoerotic tinges recently.

The opening and closing song choices ("Friends" for Clinton, "Trouble" for Bush) illustrated Morgan's viewpoint, but he couldn't depict their Clinton-Blair relationship as simply. The interplay was complex, with Blair being supportive over Lewinsky and sneaky in rousing US support for Kosovo, and Clinton emerged the finer character in terms of political and personal integrity.

Dennis Quaid gives Clinton a sombre, pensive and nuanced character; but he didn't catch the man's impish vibrancy in the way that John Travolta nailed him brilliantly in Primary Colors. In that drama of a Clintonesque politician's campaigning triumph, Emma Thompson presented a convincing image of a younger Hillary. In Morgan's version, Hope Davis delivers a steelier and even more admirable impersonation. As Cherie Blair, Helen McCrory re-captures the convincing image of the self-confident wife and working mother displayed in The Queen.

This fourth time assuming his Blair persona should be Sheen's last. The naivety, characterless smiling, charm and modesty created a physical presence that had a distinct Blairite haziness, but never conveyed the man's political skills, theatrical flair and piercing eyes. However, I suspect Morgan will want to extend his franchise into a Blair-Bush study, and then a Blair-Brown showdown, with a possible Hutton Inquiry installment, etc. By then, Sheen may lose his youthful twinkle and turn into a true Blair lookalike better able to express a more complex, truly Blairite, personality.