Denial

Denial is based on a 1996 legal case between Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz), an American professor of Holocaust Studies, and the historian David Irving (Timothy Spall). Irving sues Lipstadt over her book ‘Denying the Holocaust’ in which she accuses Irving of being a Holocaust denier and falsifier of history.

The trial is held in Irving’s native England where the burden of proof is with the accused not the accuser. Basically she has to prove that the Holocaust happened. Easy right. Not so.

Lipstadt, a runner and a dog lover (so you have to like her), engages a top legal team to fight her case. This actually means that she doesn't in the end have to prove anything as her legal team totally take over. So she can pretty much get back to her running and dog walking for the next few years as the process rolls along.

In fact solicitor Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott) and barrister Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) treat her more like a naughty child than the one accused. They quarrel about how to approach the case with Lipstadt wanting to take the stand herself and bring in Holocaust survivors to testify while Julius prefers to simply present the facts. So off they go to try to find proof of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Denial must have been a tricky film to make when you consider the topic, the potential for emotional bias and the fact the majority of the viewers either knew or could accurately guess the outcome of the trial. Which does not leave much scope to build meaningful tension but overall I think overall they did a decent job.

In court, Irving, serving as his own lawyer, has an answer for everything but not usually a very convincing one. So things progress as you would expect and hope until Mr Justice Gray (Alex Jennings) throws the defence team slightly off balance when he asks whether Irving might not actually be lying as they claim, if he genuinely believed the Holocaust didn’t happen. It is the one moment of ‘almost tension’.

Denial is easy to watch, informative but perhaps just lacking that vital dramatic spark that would have made it great.

Locke

The whole ninety minutes of Locke takes places inside his car and Tom Hardy (as Locke) is the only actor you see on screen. The supporting actors and actresses appear only as voices on the other end of his mobile phone. Thankfully on a hands-free kit or else it may have been a bit hard to follow, not to mention dangerous. 

I was a little sceptical about the whole idea and almost skipped this one in protest at such dullness. Good job I didn’t.

Ivan Locke is a construction manager about to oversee a massive foundation laying exercise for a huge new building. On the eve of this he climbs into his car and makes a phone call to tell his boss Gareth (Ben Daniels) that he isn’t going to be there to supervise. That isn’t going to go down well.

Then he phones his wife Katrina (Ruth Wilson) to tell her he isn’t coming home to her tonight and to tell his sons he won’t be there to watch the football with them. Katrina has even put the club shirt on for him and has the sausages under the grill. Then he tells her why, another woman is about to give birth to his child. That's going to go down even less well.

Then he phones Bethan (Olivia Colman). A woman he describes as plain and old with whom he once briefly worked and had a one night stand with, mostly out of sympathy. She is now giving birth to his child with very poor timing.

He has decided to abandon everything to attend the birth even though he barely knows her and certainly doesn’t love her because the child is his responsibility. 

While he makes the drive down the motorway from Birmingham to London, we are party to the calls he makes and receives. All the while his personal and professional life collapses around him.

After confessing his infidelity, his wife bans him from their home. Meanwhile his company bosses in Chicago fire him, yet his sense of duty means he takes every step to ensure the pour of the concrete that will make the foundations will succeed, talking his stand-in Donal (Andrew Scott), a man who likes a drink or two, through what he needs to do.

Locke is a man with an unrelenting belief that he doing the right thing.

I though it was excellent. A refreshingly low budget, captivating voyeur type film and something quite different. Tom Hardy is terrific but he has to be, no one else was going to carry the film if he didn’t. Simply because there is no one else.