MikePadgett.com

• Director: Robert De Niro
• United States, 2006
• 

Matt Damon’s got a tough job here. On the one hand he needs to play the absolute stoic, for whom life-changing decisions are met wordlessly with little more than a glassy stare. On the other, he needs us to empathise with him as his personal life falls apart because he puts his country first.

Damon’s a pretty capable stoic, even if he’s pretty doubtful at everything else. His Tom Ripley was unfathomable, inscrutable. His Will Hunting was frustratingly brittle. And he’s got great support on paper: John Turturro (a wonderfully understated turn), Angelina Jolie (unforgivably miscast in a skeletal role), Michael Gambon, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt. Even Joe Pesci pops up briefly to lend a hand.

Trouble is, it doesn’t quite work. Though The Good Shepherd is a period piece, second time director De Niro can’t rely on nostalgia to warm our cockles as he did in A Bronx Tale. As a facsimile Cold War political thriller, it’s agreeably chilly, but the human story that acts as power generator struggles to get going and we’re left freezing outside.

• Director: Steven Soderbergh
• United States, 2007
• 

From far away you can hear the overhead lines crackling across the desert as they stretch through the arid expanses of Nevada toward the mirage glow of Las Vegas. That crackling, it’s the sound of Messrs Clooney, Pitt, Damon et al phoning their lines in.

If you put a scene’s worth of frames from Soderbergh’s movies on the wall, they’ll look lurid like a Warhol screenprint, so it’s no surprise that the neons of Vegas make Ocean’s Thirteen an orgy of colour and the barely trying cast is obviously as dazzled by the bright artificial as Raoul Duke.

This is a poseur movie for boys and girls who like to watch the boys and girls go by: since while Sinatra, Martino and the junior Davis brylcreemed their way through five casinos royale, these 21st century cruisers of the modern middle age are just too slick to make it stick.

• Director: Martin Scorsese
• United States, 2006
• 

Scorsese has finally won a Best Director Oscar for The Departed. What a shame he didn’t win for one of his earlier and better efforts, because this one just doesn’t compare.

Look past Michael Ballhaus’ superb cinematography and Scorsese’s rich scenemaking and the big problem is the generation gap. The elders in support - Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen and Ray Winstone - are excellent; it’s the youthful leads that don’t cut it: Leonardo Di Caprio, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg. And sadly the movie is all about them.

Wahlberg is foulmouthed but irrelevant and Damon is one-dimensional (Will Hunting being a much better Southie specimen), but I’m still sitting on the fence about Di Caprio. His performances exhibit occasional flashes of magnificence, but there’s still something of that awkward youth in him and The Departed is supposed to be a movie for grown-ups.

• Director: Stephen Gaghan
• United States, 2005
• 

Syriana is a literate and highly engaging story of cause and effect in the global oil industry. It has a self-propelling pace similar to the one that moved Michael Mann’s The Insider.

Clooney here is magnetic in his downbeat role as the ex-CIA agent Bob Barnes, whose life has been spent in the perpetual twilight of serving his country’s interests in the Middle East and now struggles with changes he can no longer control. Barnes’ story is one of several, the others being connected directly to the oil business, but each influencing the others.

Syriana is a portentous statement that’s already strikingly relevant given the Western foreign policy of our current era, but the film’s wider message should spread well beyond that.