PAIN HUSTLERS 15

Lacks substance…

★★★★★ OUT 27 OCTOBER NETFLIX

Take your hands out of your pockets, guys! You’re in Total Film!

Helming his first non-Wizarding World film in seven years, director David Yates has the opioid crisis – which recently was also the subject of Netflix miniseries Painkiller – in his sights with this fictionalised adap of a New York Times Magazine article.

It opens in 2011: the dangers of opioids are well known, but unscrupulous pharma types continue to peddle them regardless. Our guide to this world is Emily Blunt’s Liza Drake, a single mum scraping a living at a lap-dancing club, where she gets a job offer from Pete Brenner (Chris Evans, fun if one-note), a sleazy sales rep for a pharma start-up. Liza’s gift of the gab makes her a natural fit for the company, whose stock is soon soaring.

So begins a familiar trajectory. But despite a typically strong performance from Blunt, neither the rise nor the inevitable fall ever feels all that compelling. There are no great revelations, and the fictionalised sheen makes it feel a bit toothless. True, Liza’s wrongdoings aren’t entirely glossed over. But Blunt’s sympathetic turn and the presence of a sick daughter who desperately needs expensive medical treatment do go a considerable way to absolving Liza of her involvement in a heinous situation, muting the movie’s overall message.

Featuring support from Catherine O’Hara and Andy Garcia, Pain Hustlers is competently put together - but there’s surely a more vital, more electrifying version of this story that could be told. MATT MAYTUM

THE VERDICT Blunt is the main selling point in a largely ineffectual satire that does more pharm than good.

TYPIST ARTIST PIRATE KING 12A

Two for the road…

★★★★★ OUT 27 OCTOBER CINEMAS

Iused to be in the kitchen-sink school of realism,’ says the heroine of writer/director Carol Morley’s latest. ‘But now I’m avant-garde and misunderstood!’ Instead of presenting a straight biographical portrait of neglected artist Audrey Amiss (played here by Monica Dolan), however, the Out of Blue director aims at something more kindred with her neglected subject’s oeuvre: an expressionistic, heavily fictionalised road movie that uses an impromptu journey from London to Sunderland to explore Audrey’s troubled personal history.

Both behind the wheel and along for the ride is Sandra Panza (Kelly Macdonald), a psychiatric nurse who, as her name suggests, becomes Audrey’s accomplice on her quixotic quest to have her pieces exhibited in her Wearside hometown. The episodic odyssey that follows takes many a detour as strangers take on the form, in Audrey’s mind at least, of figures from her past: one that encompasses years in care, a traumatic childhood and a painful estrangement from sister Dorothy (Gina McKee).

As Audrey, Dolan is indefatigably chatty and high-spirited – a performance some may eventually find exasperating. But with humour and compassion, Typist Artist Pirate King (the occupation Audrey gave herself in her passport) makes a plausible case for affording her the respect in death she was denied while living.

THE VERDICT Dolan’s outsized performance may prove divisive, but this remains a tender-hearted eulogy.