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I like the return of slow paced drama to television. I like series unafraid to take time over revealing each twist and turn. But what works for ‘Mad Men’ doesn’t work for ‘Mildred Pierce’. In ‘Mad Men’, the long reveal is that every character is unhappy beneath their perfectly dressed images.

In ‘Mildred Pierce’ the long reveal is focused on the main character’s suffering. And nothing else. The camera lingers on it, it refracts it through glass darkly and it takes 336 agonisingly long minutes over it.

I’ve also watched a lot of post-war Hollywood melodrama, although not as much as Haynes. You know what those ‘women’s pictures’ were? Short. The Curtiz ‘Mildred Pierce’ was 111 minutes with an extra plot thrown in. Such films also offered the target audience images of women’s lives as difficult, tough and able to reduce even the basilisk-eyed Joan Crawford to tears.

I don’t have a problem with a new adaptation of Cain’s novel, or Winslet as a new Crawford. She may be one of the few mainstream film stars willing to play unlikeable women, and to have a realistic body shape, and she is undeniably excellent in this. But I do have a problem with a camera lingering on a woman’s suffering so voyeuristically.

The design detail is astonishing, and the overall mise-en-scene has been colour-graded to the perfect retro palette. Yet, again, this doesn’t work for me as well as it should. As with ‘Far From Heaven’ (my favourite Haynes), there’s been such an effort to create an image of perfection that the emotions behind the image have been burnt away.

The best example that sums up my response to all this is towards the end of episode two. Mildred has been off having her first ever orgasms with the Clark Gable-ish Monty Beragon. No sooner does she get home than she’s told her youngest daughter is dangerously ill in hospital (subtle subtext there). The images are stunning and Winslet’s expressions are wretched, but the poor exposition and prolonged lingering on pain left me cold. And this is before we get to the other daughter’s various attacks on her mother…

There’s a whole other article to be written about the dubious messages being sent here. The Great Depression is clearly supposed to make us think about the current ‘economic downturn’ but the solution to that is… baking? Really? There’s a real #middleclasswoes element to some of this. The Pierces never contemplate moving to a smaller house in a cheaper area, for example.

‘Mildred Pierce’ is beautiful but it isn’t pleasant.

‘Mildred Pierce’ is available now on DVD and Blu-ray

It isn’t just that they can’t make the vocal noises required to form words. There’s some evidence that speech and intelligence are intimately related, that it’s only language that allows us to formulate abstract ideas. There is a reason why your dog is quite capable of telling you it’s hungry, but has yet to reminisce about that walk in the park last Sunday.

Columbia University linguist Herbert Terrace thought all this worth investigating. So, in 1973, he came up with an experiment. He’d take a baby chimp from its mother, give it to a human family and teach it to communicate using sign language. Thus we’d find out what facilities our nearest relatives, at least, have to express themselves. The animal in question he named Nim Chimpski, a joke at the expense of a better known academic rival.

James Marsh’s ‘Project Nim’ uses a combination of interviews, archive footage and reconstructions to document the experiment in all its lunacy and dodgy ethics, and its story is disturbing on a number of levels. For one thing, Nim’s progress from rural idyll to medical lab is oddly reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’.

Just when you think it’s all going to end in tragedy, though, there’s a twist straight out of ‘Miracle on 34th Street’, and it turns to farce instead.

Then there’s the fact that most of the key players in this story are, let’s be blunt about this, nuts. Terrace is a shrivelled, moustachioed lump of self-justification, and seems to have a moral code less evolved than that of his subject. (Nim, at least, knows the word ’sorry’.)

His adoptive ‘mother’ Stephanie LaFarge is little better, bringing a chimp into a house of seven children on the Upper West Side and – this is the upsetting part – breast-feeding him. Later, after a decade apart, she visits Nim in his new home, and tells us “he wasn’t particularly attractive to me now he was an adult chimp”. It all raises rather a lot of unpleasant questions.

This blurring between Nim’s ‘human’ and animal natures is the most fascinating and uncomfortable thing about the entire venture. He wears clothes, knows what you do with shoes, drinks booze and smokes pot. He can tell you what he wants, how he’s feeling, and, when he tires of his lessons, that he needs to use the toilet. Some of his carers clearly saw him as more child than animal, bitterly accusing Terrace of deceiving him and weeping copiously at the memory of his story.

But – he’s a chimp. He’s capable of sudden, horrible violence, coming close to maiming at least two of his carers. At one point, he asks someone to pass him a cat because he fancies a cuddle. He tries to have sex with it.

If the experiment raises questions about Nim’s dual natures, though, Marsh’s film does the same for its human players. They’re cruel and abusive, they fight each other for dominance, they take a baby from its mother even as both scream. Terrace and LaFarge alike deny their lusts had any part to play in their actions, and we don’t believe either one of them. Animals may not all be human, but all humans are undoubtedly animals.

Project Nim is available on DVD now

I have caught every ‘Mission: Impossible’ film in the cinema since the franchise relaunched in 1996. While I did not have much knowledge of the source material, the first film’s cerebral take on the series and labyrinth of revelations and surprises hooked me into future installments.

Although the series took some schizophrenic turns – John Woo’s cinematic deviation in the second film being a 180 from the initial movie, and the third MI falling somewhere in the middle – it was refreshing to see the latest installment carry over the feel and tone of its predecessor.

It helps that the same production crew – JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot- are responsible for it, hand-in-hand with Tom Cruise and director Brad Bird (of ‘The Incredibles’). While the sense of continuity (in more ways than one) adds a layer for long-time fans of the film franchise, newcomers will have no trouble settling in for another rollercoaster.

‘Ghost Protocol’ makes no bones about where it stands: it is an action movie through and through, opening with an almost-pedestrian (by the series’ standards) action sequence, where we see agent Trevor Hannaway (played by ‘Lost’ alumni Josh Holloway) in possession of The Package (TM) and pursued by Enemy Agents. His subsequent near-escape and death is the first domino to fall, triggering the events of the rest of the movie.

The script smartly makes better use of Holloway’s character, providing a flashback that gives some depth to the situation Tom Cruise (as Ethan Hunt) and his IMF team find themselves in. It is one of a few spots where the script extends itself beyond the base Action Movie template.

And ‘Ghost Protocol’ is a great action movie, though you have to overlook some of the glaring flaws. The motivations for Cobalt, the rogue element which frames the IMF team for a bombing at the Kremlin, to trigger a nuclear war are, at best, undeveloped and mediocre. Cobalt himself is little more than a wafer-thin villain; there is not enough depth there to care about him as a villain other than he is able to stay a step ahead of our heroes at times.

Hannaway’s assassin, Sabine (played by Léa Seydoux), is given little else other than some quick skills with a gun, a desire for diamonds, and some tough talk. As a catalyst for some vengence-seeking by IMF agent Jane Carter (played by Paula Patton), that particular subplot goes away half-way through the film and in an unsatisfactory manner.

What works in the movie are the action sequences and the humor, even if the latter seems a little forced in spots (example: the part where Hunt and Brandt are attempting to board the train requiring authentication). But Cruise’s impromptu building climb in Dubai, the chase through the sandstorm, and the rather unique take on the battle in the parking garage are all well-done. It was refreshing to see the gadgets used by the IMF prone to fail, and some of the implausible leaps that most action movies take for granted are not quite so cleanly executed here (you’ll know the scene when you get there).

Bird is to be commended on the direction. He did an excellent job with the material, providing a slick look and keeping the franchise fresh, even as it is well into its second decade. The Dubai scenes are particularly impressive.

If you love the ‘Mission: Impossible’ movies, you will want to catch this. If you have been left unimpressed by each installment, there’s nothing really here to draw you back in. With a well-selected cast and solid direction, ‘Ghost Protocol’ may not be best entry in the series, but it is one of the most entertaining.

While the last jumping-on issue balanced an old classic with some more recent stories, then this one is as bang up to date as – one presumes – Titan is contractually allowed to get, reprinting for UK newstand readers three #1 issues from August and September this year.

For the uninitiated, this summer saw a line-wide reboot of DC’s superhero comics, so these three #1s have the advantage of being part of a conscious jumping-on point for new readers.

‘Justice League’ #1 is the lead story, and we’ve already reviewed it here and here, so I won’t bang on about it too much.

Suffice to say I wasn’t keen. I am, to say the least, not writer Geoff Johns’ biggest fan, and while he has some decent sight gags and action moments for penciller Jim Lee to execute with his usual flash, Johns’s script demonstrates a lot of the qualities I dislike in his work.

In particular there’s an unthinking harshness to Johns’ writing which fits poorly with the heroic ideal. Would Batman really shoot a grappling hook right through the flesh of a perp’s leg, or just try and get out of the way of two falling police copters rather than trying to avert the crash? No, but it looks action movie ‘kewl’ when drawn by Lee, so it happens.

‘Justice League’ #1 is a shallow blockbuster of a comic that doesn’t really go anywhere, but as the lynchpin of the new DCU it’s the kind of comic I feel almost obliged to keep up with. If nothing else DCUP allows me to do that for a third the price of getting the original issues.

‘Action Comics’ #1 is the smartest story here by some margin, re-imagining the very early career of Superman in a way that draws heavily on the socialist strong-man Siegel and Schuster created in the 30s, but brings those qualities into the early 21st century.

For a longer review posted shortly after publication see here. While I’m not claiming any great insight from hindsight, I’ve read the issue three times since it came out, at least partially to try and work out why it didn’t ‘click’ for me in quite the way it did for some of my peers.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to like about the cocky, youthful Superman with the working class costume who fights against social injustice. But for a Morrison comic this is very tame, restrained almost, perhaps as a nod to the low-key threats of the early superhero comics, back when Superman mainly fought generic hoods. There are some joyful moments of superheroic action, but few of the big ideas that we’re used to from Morrison.

Then there’s Rags Morales’ pencils, which feel patchy, especially in terms of the characters. His Superman and Clark are strong, but Lex Luthor in particular appears to have at least three different faces in one short scene. When Morales is good, he’s very very good – a sequence of Lois pursuing a criminal through a train carriage packs in a ton of character – but other pages feel fuzzier than they should be.

‘Action Comics’ #1 is a really strong issue. I just don’t love it, and I kind of expected to.

Which brings us to the final #1 reprinted here, ‘Green Lantern’ #1, written by Geoff Johns (again) and pencilled by Doug Mahnke.

While it’s debatable how many people will be rushing to buy ‘Green Lantern’ comics based on the largely apathetic response to this year’s movie, ‘Green Lantern’ #1 does have a simple hook that viewers of that movie will understand: that Sinestro, Hal Jordan’s mentor, has been through a phase as a yellow-ringed villain but has now been forcibly re-recruited to the Green Lantern Corps, at the same time as Jordan as had his ring stripped from him and been kicked out.

That’s who Nucky is – he’s Atlantic City’s political boss, not its crime boss. Well, not yet, anyway.

But as Nucky’s driver/gopher/surrogate son Jimmy put it back in the pilot, ‘You can’t be half a gangster Nuck, not anymore.’

Nucky was always planning to be a bootlegger (the 1920-set pilot shows Nucky and his political cronies crowing over how much money Prohibition will make them) but thanks to an unsanctioned and bloody robbery by Jimmy, he is soon at war with New York’s Arnold Rothstein.Rothstein is a real gangster… one who has future crime bosses Charlie Luciano and Meyer Lansky on his payroll.Plus he’s a professional gambler who fixed the World Series, as well as being wonderfully well-played by controlled-yet-compelling Michael Stuhlbarg.

So within the first few episodes, Nucky becomes both political boss and crime boss of Atlantic City. He is already A.C’s thoroughly corrupt treasurer: everyone pays him, from hookers to hoteliers, but in the pilot he also meets another person for whom he will cross the line from corrupt to criminal; the seemingly-innocent Margaret Schroder (rising Brit star Kelly McDonald), whose husband likes to beat her despite her pregnancy.

Nucky might be a bad guy, but like all the best TV bad guys, he has some standards. And he’s also a sucker for a damsel – we later learn that she’s not the first woman he’s tried to ‘save’… Jimmy’s Lady Macbeth of a mother being just one example.

And who’s Jimmy’s real father? Oh just Nucky’s old boss, the former boss of the city… yes, shit gets deeper.

So that’s the rather impressive set-up (minus the commanding Michael K. Williams as AC’s black boss, Chalky White – spin on that, Jim Davidson!) but despite all the evidence to the contrary, the problem here is the casting. ‘Boardwalk Empire’ is a good show that cannot be great because it’s hamstrung by the lack of charisma of its leading man.

The show’s creators called Buscemi’s character Nucky Thompson so they could add some made-up characters because the real guy, Nucky Johnson, was pretty much unopposed until he got nicked in the 40s, when he finally married his showgirl mistress.In reality he was a big, garrulous guy who everyone loved even though they knew he was a sonofabitch – rather like Tony Soprano as played by James Gandolfini. Not the miserable little Buscemi, whose hangdog face few women could love and most men could easily break.

‘Boardwalk Empire’ has won awards for its looks and its plotting (which is glacially slow, though it does pick up in Season 2) but my theory is that the presence of Scorsese as the pilot’s director and actor’s actor Buscemi has meant that no one will state the obvious: this show has all the potential in the world.  But, as viewers of ‘Boardwalk Empire’ can’t help but learn, it’s all about having the right man at the top. And he isn’t.

‘Boardwalk Empire: The Complete First Season’ is released on DVD on 9 January 2012.

When the foreman on a momentous folly spontaneously combusts, a soon-to-be-crowned empress, Wu (Carina Lau), recalls a political enemy from exile. Detective Dee (Andy Lau) may be implacably opposed to her rule, but if anyone can solve the murder, lift a curse and ensure her coronation takes place, it’s Dee.

I’m a huge fan of Tsui Hark’s work. He makes films that blend insane spectacle with coherent plots. And that’s rarer than you might think. The spectacle in Detective Dee is jaw-dropping: the opening sequences in a giant half-built statue of Buddha that would dwarf London’s Shard indicate we’re in a steampunk version of the Tang dynasty.

(Well, technically this predates the steam age, but the concept of old technology blown up to SF proportions is still present. Bamboopunk, anyone?)

In this spectacular mileiu the story unfolds as a blend of detection, mysticism and martial arts action, the latter helped by Sammo Hung’s kinetic choreography. It’s a historical blockbuster, basically, as loosely connected to real history and as devoted to action and spectacle as any major Hollywood release, but with a very different cultural basis.

To an outsider, a lack of cultural grounding make some elements of the story hard to follow, especially in terms of what is and is not possible in the fantasy-tinged past of the story. It’s difficult to entirely grasp a murder mystery story where some forms of superhuman powers are considered entirely normal and others are impossible, and therefore evidence of fakery.

There’s also the obligatory dose of Chinese nationalism in terms of an underlying theme of putting the greater good of the nation above justice or freedom for individuals which hits a slightly sour note.

These issues aside, ‘Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame’ is a thoroughly entertaining action mystery with some great settings and set-pieces. At the heart of the story is a character with great potential – Detective Dee is smart, thoughtful and compelling, with Andy Lau delivering a nuanced and charismatic performance. Hopefully this is just the first of Detective Dee’s big screen adventures.

Broadcast in the mid 90s on BBC2, during a period when British TV didn’t make really make any fantasy or SF shows, its a real oddity. Six thirty minute episodes, shot on video for a sitcom budget, it has the slightly shoddy feel of what ‘Doctor Who’ might have been like if it hadn’t been canceled in 1989 and had instead limped on to 1996 in increasingly compromised form.

(Instead we got a semi-Americanised ‘Doctor Who’ in 1996, but that’s a completely different dead-end altogether.)

‘Who’ aside, it feels a lot like a BBC children’s fantasy serial, albeit one that’s been bumped past the watershed due to a surprise inclusion of swearing and grotesquerie.

Whatever comparison you make, ‘Neverwhere’ is an oddity, and nothing else like it was broadcast during that period.

Now, a Neil Gaiman-penned fantasy series from the BBC would be a big deal, but at the time ‘Neverwhere’ more or less sank without trace: no-one knew quite how to take it, and arguably the producers didn’t know how to actually make the damn thing.

‘Neverwhere’ was made by Lenny Henry’s Crucial Films (the series is co-devised by Henry, who approached Gaiman with a germ of an idea about a London-based fantasy series), and on the new introduction to this 15th anniversary edition Henry admits that an independent production company that had mainly worked on comedy wasn’t necessarily set up for making a fantasy drama on this scale, especially on a tight budget. Gaiman adds that while new digital film-making and editing techniques were emerging in the mid 90s, the makers of ‘Neverwhere’ didn’t have the knowledge to apply these.

BBC decisions certainly didn’t help, with the network imposing the thirty minute episode length (odd for a drama), and requesting that the series be recorded on videotape and ‘filmised’ later, only to then decide not to use the film-ising process after all. The result is visually somehow both flat and garish due to being lit for film but captured on unsparing video, and because of this manages to look oddly cheap even when shot in some spectacular locations around London.

Even the better creative decisions feel ill-at-ease. Dave McKean’s title sequence is striking, but it looks a bit  like something from a 1980s hologram gallery and is too ethereal and vague to work as a tone-setter. Brian Eno’s music is rattlingly distinctive, but yet again feels slapped on and rarely complements the action. There are a couple of set-piece moments of action that, for all the production team’s efforts to create and edit them effectively, just don’t work well enough.

The acting is more consistent in quality, although there’s a bit of wrestling with the tone. Gary Bakewell, best known as Paul McCartney in 90s beatopic ‘Backbeat’, is fine as everyman Richard Mayhew, and brings a little acidity to a role that could have been overly bland. Laura Fraser is appealing as Door, one of Gaiman’s signature quirky female characters, but is held back a bit by the need to deliver cutely opaque dialogue that takes away from the urgency of the character’s motivation.

Elsewhere, Hywel Bennett and Clive Russell are brilliantly over the top as sadistic villains, Peter Capaldi brings some complexity to a role that could be very silly in other hands, while Paterson Joseph doomed himself to be forever tipped as a potential Doctor Who with his hugely doctor-ish turn as the very doctor-ish Marquis de Carrabas. There are also a number of show-off character roles for the likes of Julie T Wallace and Freddie Jones, and right at the bottom of the cast list a young Tamsin Grieg as a sexy goth.

‘Neverwhere’ has a good premise, the idea of this other London where the names on the tube map are literal, from seven sisters to an order of black friars to a real angel in Islington. Gaiman gets some mileage out of this, and creates some really distinct characters amongst the subterranean denizens of London Below. Gaiman’s strength as a writer has always been that he writes lyrical, poetic dialogue, a quality which set him well ahead of the pack in comics and is similarly rare in television drama, and there are some fantastic lines here, even if they’re occasionally overwrought.

While Gaiman’s writing style is great, his plotting can often be more prosaic. For a writer who made his name with ‘The Sandman’, a story about the history of stories, he often writes fairly straightforward, linear quest narratives. ‘Neverwhere’ is one of those, six episodes of the characters going on a journey through London Below and encountering a number of challenges and eccentrics on the way. There’s not much in the way of twists for six weeks of television, although obviously that’s less obvious on DVD where any but the slowest viewer is likely to watch the whole thing much quicker.

For all its production problems, budgetary problems and eccentricities I found myself enjoying rewatching ‘Neverwhere’ a lot more than I expected to. On broadcast it arrived in a landscape parched of fantasy shows, on a wave of low-level fanboy hype, and I ended up disappointed. This time I set out with low expectations and was pleasantly surprised – although the production is shaky there’s an odd verve and charm to ‘Neverwhere’ that makes up for a lot of its flaws.

‘Neverwhere’ is an oddity, certainly, and part of the interest of the special features on this DVD is hearing about the background to such a flawed and strange production, but it’s a good little drama series, and therefore gets a cautious recommendation.

In fact, at the end of the first series I said (not on here, just out loud to my wife) that I wished there had been such captions. It began with the sinking of the Titanic (1912) and ended with Britain entering the First World War (you know when that was, yes? Well, just in case: 1914). It wasn’t until the penultimate episode that I realised the war was imminent, because I thought the series had only covered a few months. I didn’t notice any indicators that more time was supposed to have passed, and it felt like the characters’ story covered less than a couple of years.

Presumably I wasn’t the only person who went ‘Wuh?’ at that point because they have slapped those date captions on the second series. However, watching the second series in the knowledge that it spans a three-year period hasn’t made it feel like three years’ worth of events in the characters’ lives. We’re now seven years on from when we met these characters, and to be fair they have all changed in that time, but strangely they don’t feel older. Which is partly because they don’t look older, to be fair – but it does feel like the only reason the series is moving so fast is because writer Julian Fellowes wants to make use of historical events from the period and so he keeps bumping the timeframe up so that he can get to the next one. This makes the plotting feel artificial. Downton is mostly concerned with its multiple ongoing storylines, and the way the series is plotted makes it feel like the household has about three really eventful weeks every year, where lots of things occur simultaneously for no reason, and then sod all happens for months in between.

This has been true of both series, but not only has the second series stretched the timeframe further, it’s tried to do more and lost focus in the process. The first series had a clearer sense of purpose, revolving around the problem of succession. This series has had more characters and more disparate storylines, with certain characters doing dramatic things seemingly because they have nothing better to do (Lord Grantham’s tentative affair, an expression of how useless he’s felt during the war, is especially unconvincing). And even with the extra running time, it has frequently resorted to perfunctory set-ups. Plot developments practically arrive at Downton via telegram, to be read out to the family over dinner. The death of Bates’ wife was signalled four times in episode six. The first signal – Bates’ offhand comment that he wished she was dead – made it clear that (a) she would die imminently, (b) Bates would be arrested for her murder, (c) he would be innocent precisely because the circumstantial evidence is stacked against him. The last part of that hasn’t even happened yet but I’m confident it’s what’ll happen.

That said, the ratings have been even better than the first series, which suggests it does its job. It’s still very nicely made, and performed by excellent actors wearing beautiful clothes. Arguably the Sunday night ITV audience doesn’t want to be surprised. However, to claim that Downton sits alongside previous ITV drama highlights like Brideshead Revisited, or that ITV is beating the BBC at its own game, gives it far too much credit.

Buy the second series of Downton Abbey at Amazon.

Tintin comes to the screen with similar, unnecessary titivation that does nothing to improve on its original incarnation.

The film foolishly opens with some clean, charming flat animation, that tells the pre-story of the young reporter’s exploits as the credits roll. Although, flatter and more abstract than the ligne claire style comics the film is based on, this part of the film had charm and style that told its tale quickly and efficiently.

Unfortunately the CGI motion caption that the rest of the movie is rendered in didn’t do the job quite as well. Nearly every motion caption film that comes out – Tintin follows The Polar Express and Beowolf – suffers from the same problem, the ‘uncanny valley’ effect where the combination of near photorealistic animation and unnatural movement is unsettling, as it isn’t quite real and doesn’t have the charm of normal animation either.

If Spielberg’s film had been a more stylised form of animation – whether cell or CGI – or live action, it could have been a much better film, but instead this half way house seems an easy option combining the veneer of reality with set pieces that are much easier to render in CGI than with sets and props.

With the ability to create anything on screen, much is surprisingly familiar – a pirate battle is straight out of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies – and the various chases feel like the director pastiching his own Indiana Jones films.

Although Tintin is better than the most recent Indy film, that’s damning the movie with faint praise.

The film opens fairly promisingly with sight gags such as the lead character having his portrait drawn in the style of Hergé and, on seeing his reflection in a mirror, he smooths down his trademark quiff only to have it spring back up again, but between them Steven Moffat (Britain’s finest genre TV writer), Edgar Wright (Britain’s finest genre director) and Joe Cornish (Britain’s most promising new genre director) have managed to come up with a script that is almost entirely devoid of character development and exists only to allow the director follow each theme park style set piece with another of the same.

The voice cast is at least pretty good, even if Jamie Bell seems to be unnecessarily channeling Ewan McGregor in his performance and much of the comedy works, even if it seems to be aimed at a younger audience than even the original comics. However the overall effect seems to be a wasted opportunity, taking comics with charm and a significant place in culture and turning them into another workmanlike Hollywood franchise.

Like the other Pirates saga mentioned above, this is part of yet another cinema trilogy (which I suppose shouldn’t be a surprise due to Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s involvement) and like the Caribbean sequels can’t even tell a story with a proper ending after a bloated running time.

I have to admit I was never the greatest fan of Tintin comics or the classic animated series, but even a casual knowledge of them makes it obvious this film does a disservice to both.

Secret of the Unicorn isn’t unwatchable and there are worse options to entertain one’s kids during half term – hoping the film might send them in the direction of the comics and that if the sequel does get made, Jackson does a better job than his colleague. But those weird shoes made more of an impression on me than the preceding film and I’ll probably remember them longer than the CGI Sturm und Drang on screen.