Trumbo
2015
***
Director: Jay Roach
Cast: Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Helen Mirren, Louis C.K., Elle Fanning, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg
In the early 1940s, Dalton Trumbo is one of the highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood. A few years later, he is blacklisted for his Communist sympathies and forced to churn out scripts under pseudonyms for any film project he can get. This is a compelling and entertaining but disappointingly conventional and adulatory biopic, which fails to shed any critical light on it protagonist. Bryan Cranston gives a charming lead performance as Trumbo and Helen Mirren is delightfully nasty as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Based on Dalton Trumbo by Bruce Cook.
