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****
Dir: George Clooney (15, 104 mins )
George Clooney gets a chance to direct an old Coen brothers script with this darkly comic 1950s-set thriller with a fantastic central turn from Matt Damon. He’s a resident of Suburbicon, a supposedly cookie-cutter model of American integration but with its own dark secrets and desperation. The film begins with a crime that plays oddly, the unravelling of the underlying reasons behind it, its twists and turns growing darker as Damon gets more scuzzily unhinged. Julianne Moore plays twins, the wheelchair bound saintly wife of Damon and her more sexually voracious sister, Oscar Isaac is the snazzy insurance claims investigator who starts to see what might be behind Damon’s actions, and Karimah Westbrook and Leith M. Burke play the first black people in the neighbourhood. Playing like a film noir with elements of social conscience, Suburbicon is a meticulously detailed slice of the 1950s with all its hypocrisies, from repressed sexuality to the apparent open arms of tolerance mixed with the white robes of the KKK. Holding all the elements together is Damon’s clumsy manipulator, way out of his depth and circling the plughole. A well-crafted genre piece intertwined with sly satire, Suburbicon is another success for Clooney the director.
Opens November 24