MikePadgett.com

• Director: Kevin Macdonald
• United Kingdom, 2007
• 

James McAvoy’s turn as leading man here is a superb mix of naïveté, youthful exuberance and abject fear. It’s perhaps unfortunate then that Last King will always be remembered - pretty much to the exclusion of everyone and everything else - for Forest Whitaker’s career-defining performance.

As General Idi Amin Dada, the complex, brutal and at times thoroughly unhinged dictator of Uganda, Whitaker is terrifyingly believable. Just as Amin dominated Ugandan life so completely, Whitaker completely owns this movie, his character even managing to dominate the scenes in which he doesn’t appear.

Director Macdonald might not have intended to stake the entire success of the movie on the Amin characterisation working well but it seems that way, with Whitaker justly earning 2007’s Best Actor Oscar, such that you have to wonder what else there is to say about Last King without mentioning him. Art imitating life, indeed.

• Director: Jim Jarmusch
• United States, 1999
• 

Ghost Dog is the closest Jim Jarmusch comes to conventional cinema, though as Jarmusch fans will confirm, it’s hardly a standard issue movie.

The superb Forest Whitaker conjures a bulky eponymous hero that weighs in somewhere between urban ninja and soft-hearted simpleton. The remainder of the cast consists of kooky, pensionable-age Italian American gangster cutouts and Isaach De Bankolé in a frankly bizarre supporting role.

Ghost Dog is about subtletly and humour and has much in common with the themes and spatial awareness of Japanese cinema.