Two movies I saw on my recent flight left deep impressions. Widows , starring Viola Davis, was remarkable right until the final one third. It’s got a cool, lady-centric premise: Four women have been widowed as a result of a criminal-caper gone wrong. Their husbands were the criminals and partners in a heist. So the four women join forces under the leadership of Davis’s character and become a criminal gang themselves in order to complete the heist.

There’s much more to this story, but the partnership of the amateur women-criminals is the meat and potatoes. It’s fast-paced and clever, with each woman bringing a different skill-set to the team. Elizabeth Debicki, one of the four, is especially astonishing to look at, an impossibly slender blonde-giraffe of a woman whose unhappy marriage makes her participation in the scheme oddly poignant. Then the plot-twist that such films inevitably depend upon comes along and it absolutely didn’t work for me. Since I can’t reveal it you’ll just have to see for yourself to decide.

Green Book has more than one silly plot twist. But Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali as Tony Lip and Dr Don Shirley respectively both turn in glittering performances. For me, it was worth it just to watch them, even as the story turned from mildly unlikely to hopelessly murky. It’s based on a true-life tale, set in the bad old days in the US, when racial segregation in the South was still enshrined in the law. Shirley is a world famous jazz pianist while Tony Lip is a professional bouncer. Shirley employs him as a driver and muscleman, during a concert tour of the Southern states.

It’s no surprise that they become fast friends by the end of the film but the real subject is meant to be the unvarnished presentation of race-hatred. The Oscar-winning film was condemned for being a crude effort to present the original story as a “white saviour” fairytale. It’s certainly crude in that sense but in the end, we’re told that Shirley and Tony really did become besties forever. That sounds to me like a sort of miracle, given the social gulfs separating the men. Definitely worth embalming in film.

Speaking of miracles, this afternoon I saw, on Netflix, a modest little film called The Hippopotamus (2017). I found it unexpectedly rewarding — perhaps because I’d not read anything about it in advance? It stars Roger Allam in the title-role as a middle-aged lapsed poet, who visits an English country estate in contemporary England, on the quest of miracles. The story is very slight. What lights the film up is the dialogue and the cool, clever way in which it spotlights the power of poetry.

Stephen Fry is one of the three scriptwriters and his spicy intelligence easily enlivens the set-pieces and cardboard characters. Personally, the only thing I missed seeing was — you guessed it! — a hippopotamus.

Manjula Padmanabhan , author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column

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