Flight * * * *
Cert 15, 138 mins

The genius of Denzel Washington is that he could probably mow down a dozen pensioners on the silver screen – and you’d still feel more sorry for him than the victims.

In new movie Flight, he’s an airline pilot who won’t admit to a drink problem.

So when a plane develops a major technical fault and he literally pulls out the stops to prevent a major disaster, will he be able to get away with it?

This is a terrific film on many levels, including the way it explores personal faith in a more subtle way than Life of Pi.

Primarily, though, it proves that Washington is the greatest black actor of them all.

In 2002, he became the second of only four black men to win the best actor Oscar.

More tellingly, his six nominations are now one more than fellow best actor winners Sidney Poitier (1964), Jamie Foxx (2005) and Forest Whitaker (2007) have managed between them.

Flight is the best broken-man, Oscar-nominated performance since Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas (1996).

Cage won the Oscar then, but Washington is even better.

That his character, Whip Whitaker, should also be a pilot with ‘102 souls on board’ gives Flight a chilling, United 93-style edge, and one that will make you think equally hard before boarding your next aeroplane.

The nosedive and crash scene here are brilliantly orchestrated, with Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis making a barnstorming return to live action for the first time since Cast Away and What Lies Beneath at the turn of the century.

Given that Zemeckis’s last movie was A Christmas Carol (2009), Flight’s use of hard drugs is shocking, too.

Not since Traffic made a best director Oscar winner out of Steven Soderbergh in 2001 has Hollywood gone so heavily down this thought-provoking route in what could otherwise have been just another A-list action thriller.

For the record, Denzel’s Academy Awards’ love affair now goes back 25 years.

His first headline-making supporting role in Cry Freedom (1988) was followed by a win in the same category with Glory (1990).

The biggest surprise about Washington’s career is that since winning that best actor Oscar for Training Day (2002), he hasn’t really put himself in a position to win another one thanks to a string of popcorn movies with the late Tony Scott (most recently Unstoppable) and his brother Ridley (American Gangsters).

If it’s a shame that he’s unlikely to become the first black star to win the biggest prize twice – thanks to Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in Lincoln making him odds-on to become the first actor to win three main Oscars – then hopefully Zemeckis will have at least put him back on the right flight path towards eternal greatness. He is that good.

American Presidential movies are suddenly like buses. 

Hyde Park on Hudson * * *
Cert 12A, 95 mins

After 16th US President Abraham Lincoln arrived beneath a stovepipe hat last Friday, Bill Murray now stops by in a wheelchair as No 32, Franklin D Roosevelt.

There are no moving pictures of the real Lincoln, yet Daniel Day-Lewis comes across as being utterly genuine. In contrast, the performance by Murray feels more like an interpretation.

We’re in Depression era US, shortly before an ‘inevitable’ war in Europe.

It’s June, 1939, and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (aka the Queen Mum) are making an official visit, desperate to win US support but at the weekend mercy of FDR’s relationships with his wife and mistress (both distant cousins) and domineering mother.

The real story of the film, based on her found diaries, is of Roosevelt’s relationship with mistress Margaret ‘Daisy’ Suckley (Laura Linney) – who died in June, 1991, six months short of her 100th birthday.

The Hyde Park here is a town located in the northwest part of Dutchess County, New York and, with a population of just 20,000 or so even today, it’s best known as being Roosevelt’s birthplace.

In the spring, FDR apparently spent a lot of time in Hyde Park on Hudson, ‘‘running the country’’ according to his mother, with lines like: ‘‘A government cannot afford to wait until it has lost the power to act’’.

Directed by Roger Michell (Notting Hill / Changing Lanes), Hyde Park is an uneven affair.

But, in ambition alone, it’s a big improvement on his last film, Morning Glory (2010), which featured Harrison Ford as a bad-tempered breakfast TV presenter.

Murray and Linney are Hollywood class acts, while the royals are played as a couple understandably out of their comfort zones by our own Olivia Colman and Samuel West (son of Timothy West and Prunella Scales).

Hyde Park on Hudson will appeal mostly to lovers of hot dogs and history; it reminded me of Frances McDormand’s Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day (2008) for good-but-flawed intentions that are odds-on to bypass mainstream moviegoers completely.

In retrospect, the fact that a man crippled by unspoken of polio held office for a record 12 years, is surely more fascinating than any single relationship, especially when he is said to have had other affairs. Shades here, then, of Helen Hunt’s Oscar-nominated role as a sex therapist for a sufferer of the disease in another current release, The Sessions.

Moreover, we now watch this knowing that in a few months’ time on September 3, 1939, Colin Firth’s Oscar-winning King George VI would be conquering his stutter to address the nation about the onset of the Second World War.

Hyde Park is of fleeting interesting to a degree, but always feels like it is missing more exciting historical opportunities at the same time.

Olivia Williams plays Roosevelt’s London-educated wife, Eleanor.

She would be worth a film in her own right for supporting her man, pioneering modern First Lady communication skills and for her record with the UN and women’s / civil rights until her death in 1962, aged 78.

Bullet to the Head * * *
Cert 15, 91 mins

It’s a toss-up as to who is trying to make the biggest comeback here.

Is it leading man Sylvester Stallone, now 66, and semi-revived on the back of The Expendables’ ensemble hits?

Or director Walter Hill, a 71-year-old whose better known movies include Nick Nolte’s 48 Hrs (1982) and Schwarzenegger’s Red Heat (1988)?

In the end, you could call it a draw, with Hill not averse to delivering endless carnage on screen.

And Stallone remaining engagingly invincible as James Bonomo, an uncompromising hitman who is eager to dish out some rough justice.

Filmed in New York and New Orleans, Bullet to the Head’s dog-eat-dog theme might have worked better as a corporate parable than as a wholly escapist cop drama.

Too much doesn’t make sense and the convoluted mid-section dilutes the early energy of smart one-liners and Sly’s kick-ass pensioner attitude.

But Stallone remains a growling star you can’t take your eyes off – for all of the right and wrong reasons which put him on Hollywood’s pedestal in the first place.

Movie 43 *
Cert 15, 90 mins

Even allowing for Hollywood’s gross-out depth charges in recent years, it’s hard to imagine any future film consistently setting off more lowest common denominator detonators than this one.

Made in sections shot by a dozen directors, but overseen by Peter Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary), the thread of the film is that three teenage boys are trying to find a notorious, banned film called Movie 43.

Instead, they discover a series of comedy sketches starring A and B-listers which leave nothing to the imagination, from Hugh Jackman’s testicular throat appendages (surely guaranteed to help Daniel Day-Lewis’s bid to win the best actor Oscar) to Richard Gere’s wandering hands, Stephen Merchant fondling Halle Berry’s basketball-sized breasts and Anna Faris’s inexplicable desire to be humiliated in the worst possible fashion.

This is nothing more than a chance to watch many of your favourite stars embarrassing themselves like 13-year-olds high on illicit booze.

Don’t spoil your illusion of these actors in other, superior films. Hire their other 42 movies instead.

Small Creatures * * *
Cert 15, 91 mins

Made on a micro-budget, this mid-teen drama from Liverpool is showing tonight (Thu) as one of Roger Shannon’s new talent Departure Lounge screenings at the Midland Arts Centre (8.30pm).

Promising director Martin Wallace delivers a series of adolescent dilemmas where loyalty and self-preservation clash head on, with the availability of friends’ sisters providing light relief from the more aggressive scenes.

If Small Creatures didn’t descend into Brookside TV territory with language like ‘‘What did the bizzies say?’’, Wallace could have built on a tremendously promising opening to deliver something more akin to last year’s thoroughly-sustained Belgian film, The Kid With a Bike.

Warning: it also appears as if wasps were harmed in the making of this film.