trailer break: ‘Last Chance Harvey’

Doh! I wanna say that this is, annoyingly, one of those trailers that gives away more than it should, except that it doesn’t matter, because pretty much from the opening moments of the movie, you know almost everything that’s going to happen anyway. Still, that’s no reason to reveal nearly the whole plot in the trailer, and the trailer maker shoud be a little bit ashamed of herself.

And yet, even that doesn’t really matter, because this is one of those movies that’s all about watching two wonderful actors do their thing. That label that we see all the time on trailers -- “Academy Award winner” -- has come to be almost meaningless, but even in the trailer alone, you can tell that Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman will here remind us why that tag works: because there is an enormous pleasure to be had in being told a story by actors who can make you believe it’s real.

But I’ll write a proper review soon...

Last Chance Harvey opens limited in the U.S. on December 25 and wide on January 16, 2009; no U.K. release date has been announced yet.