You make movies about this guy and this woman and if

You make movies about this guy and this woman and if you get them right, you’ll automatically connect with a lot of people.” Quite so. The benefit of such an approach is that the characters will appear to have lives of their own, and audiences, used to formulaic behaviour, won’t ever feel sure what they’re going to do next. So when Grey tries to withdraw from the relationship – “We can’t go on like this 24 hours a day” – Lee lures him back by inserting deliberate typos into his business letters. The reappearance of his red marker pen will give Freudians plenty to chew on.As the dysfunctional duo Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader are terrific, her guileless, slightly Forties presence an appealing contrast to his uptight fantasist. (Spader’s one great moment is the sudden cocking of his head, as if he were in the hands of some invisible puppeteer. Truly, he is the Uriah Heep of modern cinema.) Secretary is absorbing and lighter in tone than one might expect, though the screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, adapting from a short story by Mary Gaitskill, makes a mistake with the ending.

Then again, perhaps a story such as this has no satisfactory ending, and we should just feel consoled that (who knows?) there is somebody out there for everyone.. Like the first instalment of the Harry Potter films or the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Matrix (1999) was big on exposition and restrained about the slam-bang action stuff. Like their sequels, The Matrix Reloaded plays down the grand design and jams its stylish boot hard on the action accelerator. The plot is full of Greek mythological echoes and Zen Buddhist waffle about fate and destiny and choice, but it makes about as much sense as our hero’s unexplained powers.Luckily, Reloaded has a first-class production designer in Owen Patterson, who creates scene after scene of jaw-dropping beauty. Rupert Everett as King Charles I? Believe me, he’s not at all bad, and nor is To Kill a King, a drama of political intrigue set in the aftermath of the English Civil War. With the Royalist forces defeated, rebel Parliamentarians want to reform the monarchy: Lord General Thomas Fairfax (Dougray Scott) advocates moderation, while his friend and deputy Oliver Cromwell (Tim Roth) believes an iron fist must punch the way forward. As written by Jenny Mayhew, the film is a study in friendship and conscience: Fairfax is torn between loyalty to his noble-born wife Anne (Olivia Williams) and to the reforming zeal of Cromwell who, as he foresees, will behave as autocratically as any royal once power is in his grasp.

The director Mike Barker does a serviceable job given his budget limitations – the battlefield weariness of the opening scenes is very impressive – while an intriguing contrast is struck between the dashing, long-haired Fairfax, the people’s favourite, and Roth’s warty oik Cromwell, w

Rupert Everett as King Charles I? Believe me, he’s not at all bad, and nor is To Kill a King , a drama of political intrigue set in the aftermath of the English Civil War. Adapted from a true story, it recounts the struggle of Fisher (Derek Luke), a young black sailor whose hair-trigger temper keeps getting him into trouble. Referred for psychiatric evaluation following his umpteenth punch-up, he finally pours out his story – abandonment by his mother, horrific abuse in a foster home – to a sympathetic naval shrink (Washington) who has private domestic hurts of his own. An awful lot of healing gets done in this picture, though how Fisher’s propensity for violence is solved by his quasi-paternal relationship with the shrink and his puppyish romance with a navy babe (Joy Bryant) remains mysterious. Washington tends to gift-wrap each emotional turning point in a neat little therapy package rather than work it through the hard graft of drama, and there’s something groan-worthy in the way the lad’s “sharing” unlocks his lyrical side: will anyone really enjoy the scene in which he thanks his mentor with a poem? “Kid,” I wanted Denzel to say, “a bottle of cognac would have been fine.”In The Truth About Charlie, Jonathan Demme tries to remake the 1963 comedy thriller Charade, only without the benefit of laughs or thrills.