Riffing on early David Mamet or Neil LaBute, writer-director Patrick Stettner's superb three-hander anatomises the airless, amoral culture of top-rank executives. In a faceless airport hotel, high-flyer Stockard Channing plays sadistic sex-and-power games with young business rival Julia Stiles and corporate headhunter Frederick Weller. Sharp, astringent, and proof that complex ideas and strong performances transcend even minimal budgets.
A double header, featuring two of David Lean's finest directorial efforts. Hobson's Choice (1954) sees Charles Laughton's magnificently overbearing Lancastrian patriarch butt heads with his equally stubborn daughter Brenda de Banzie, while John Mills is splendid as her husband, the worm who turns. The Sound Barrier (1952), in which Ralph Richardson attempts to devise the first faster-than-sound plane, sees stiff upper lips wobble as his efforts come to grief. It's also notable for some fine aerial sequences. Bravo, chaps!
One-time Ed Kuepper cohort Hancock has been in various Australian bands since the '80s, and it shows across her maturely enthralling solo debut, on which she sounds like a less fractured Marianne Faithfull. Backed by a fine band who effortlessly blur the boundaries between rock, folk and jazz, her own compositions are marked by arresting observations on the war of the sexes. Yet best of all are her extraordinarily haunting covers of David Crosby's "Everybody's Been Burned" and, more improbably, Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" done country-rock style.
