The Blonde Ambition

"What if someone good made a horror picture?" asks Alfred Hitchcock of his wife Alma Reville early on in Sacha Gervasi's clever and witty drama about the making of Psycho. Psycho was itself the film that so emphatically answered that question in 1960 and the story of its creation – based on Stephen Rebello's enthralling 1990 account, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, and scripted by John McLaughlin – is at heart the story of a marriage, between a fat, ugly genius and the "tiny, birdlike woman" who was invigilator, confidante and touchstone to his talent.

The film opens with Hitchcock speaking directly to us, Alfred Hitchcock Presents … style. He's just enjoyed the huge success of North by Northwest and is at a loose end for projects. Offered Cary Grant in Casino Royale, he reminds his assistant Peggy Robertson (Toni Collette): "I just made that movie." His ears prick up, however, when he encounters Robert Bloch's Freudian gore-transvestite-incest-necrophilia shocker Psycho, which horrifies everyone he shows it to, but which might give him the edge he needs in his private war with French director Henri-Georges Clouzot, whose Les Diaboliques has critics talking of "French Hitchcocks" and similar rot.

But Paramount won't back it, and the Hitchcocks are driven back on their own resources, and into one another's company. We see them in domestic harmony, 34 years married, Alfred in the bath reading the Times, and Alma clad in the same white bra and slip that Janet Leigh will wear in Psycho's opening sequence. Alma has the epicurean Hitchcock on a diet and one senses trouble in paradise. The film essentially tells us how their marriage suffers until she, in a magisterial, bark-stripping tirade, finally reminds him of her indispensable role in his success: "I was once your boss!"

The device that speeds along the estrangement of the partnership is the movie's weakest invention, a screenwriting project with another writer (Danny Huston), a fool and a hack in Hitch's eyes. But one should treat that like a McGuffin – a plot engine – forget that the middle section sags a little, and enjoy the ride. The making of Psycho is depicted in detail without our seeing one frame of the completed movie. The closest we come is when Hitchcock stands in the lobby outside the premiere, faux-conducting Bernard Hermann's slashing violins; he has a combination of a maestro's manual flourishes and a murderer's manic stabbing motions as the audience inside wails and howls its way through the shower scene. It's a magnificent moment for anyone who can blink-sync their way through those infamous 45 seconds, and beautifully brought off by Hopkins, who hasn't had this much fun in years.

All the smaller roles are neatly filled, particularly Scarlett Johansson's Leigh and James Darcy's Tony Perkins, the latter almost eerily resembling the original; plus Kurtwood Smith as the fuming head of the censor's office and Ralph Macchio as screenwriter Joseph Stephano. But it lives and breathes through Hopkins and Mirren. Unlike Toby Jones's Hitch in The Girl, which physically and vocally evoked the director very convincingly, Hopkins relies, as with his Nixon, on a few tics, some prosthetic fakery, and just lives the man, pink, pale, blinking and blimpish, held up by iron certainty in his own talents.

Mirren matches him, though, despite a slightly thankless and less rounded role to which she brings all her heft and leverage; finally, however, she is the film's – hell, both films' – secret heroine. Forget all those blondes – count on the redhead.

After its premiere at Cannes earlier this year, Walter Salles's On the Road – based on the 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac – has now arrived for its UK release in a re-edited form, trimmed by 15 minutes to just over two hours. The dissatisfactions of this overripe and overblown road movie remain exactly the same. The film is stiflingly reverent towards its source material, and indeed towards itself. It's good-looking and handsomely produced, but directionless and self-adoring, richly furnished but at the same time weirdly empty, bathed in an elegiac sunset glow of male adoration.

What seemed rhapsodic and euphoric on the page here looks smug, self-regarding and intensely self-conscious. When the actors start mouthing ersatz-passionate dialogue about poetry and novels, the movie starts to flatline, and worse still, when they start on about how incredibly life-affirming they all are, it is as dead as a haddock on a slab. The men in the film look hopelessly shallow. The women become, by contrast, sharper and more interesting in their dissent and discontent, but in a way that unbalances and destabilises the drama. It's comparable to Salles's other road movie, The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), about the early adventures of Che Guevara and his buddy Alberto Granado, but there the travellers were learning to think and care about people other than themselves. This isn't the case with the heroes of On the Road, who have dozens of madly contrived parties, in which they heroically swig from bottles, smoke joints, have sex and become narcissistic and boring in a way that isn't intentional.

The road trip back and forth across the US is part of the literary education of budding writer Sal Paradise, played by Sam Riley. In the late 1940s, Sal's father has just died; he hangs out with the gabbling Ginsberg-figure Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge) in various hipster dives, but is himself blocked. Then everything is turned around by meeting a beautiful man, Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund), based of course on the Beat icon Neal Cassady. He's a wild free spirit, a wanderer taking odd jobs and turning tricks. Dean is gloriously unfettered by the boring bonds of hearth and home; he is a hobo of the mind and spirit, just taking off when and where he pleases, squeezing life dry. His companion is the gorgeous 16-year-old Marylou, played by Kristen Stewart, but he seems to have other quasi-conjugal ties around the country about whom he isn't too worried. Inspired by this freewheeling alpha-male, Sal himself hits the road, sometimes with Dean, sometimes without, scribbling notes for a book.

Sal has a sort of homoerotic bond with Dean, which is displaced into their mutual infatuation with Marylou, but there is never any sense that either man genuinely cares for Marylou, or is interested in her: there are many, many scenes in which the guys greet each other with fond hugs, fonder than the embraces they give the women, but even these emotional connections are subordinate to the ones they have with themselves.

Other friends and acquaintances join them on the road, and we become aware that while the guys are heading for the hills, they have in almost every case left a woman behind, fuming. Camille (Kirsten Dunst) finally throws Dean out on his ear; Galatea (Elisabeth Moss) rages at her errant husband – and the women's anger, though shrill and futile, has a kind of real life that the complacent male voyagers do not. Marylou herself is endlessly tolerant, endlessly bland. What has she sacrificed or gained in her emotional and erotic adventures with the two heroes? It's a mystery. Viggo Mortensen and Amy Adams have eccentric cameos as Old Bull Lee (based on William Burroughs) and Jane, a couple who give houseroom to the travellers.

On the Road was an explosion of literary energy, an intensely American grabbing of possibilities, but the movie insists too much on its elegiac past tense. For me, the film comes fully alive only in the break between Sal and Dean, a break that shows something has been at stake after all. In literature, as in life, there are winners and losers. The writer may have been subordinate to the glamorous man of action, but has been all along a kind of parasite. Poor Dean is just raw material for fiction, destined to be left behind as Sal becomes a New York big-shot, but even here, Sam Riley's Sal does not register any sense of sadness or betrayal or what Greene called the splinter of ice in one's heart that a writer needs – merely a vague regret. Well, that arguably does justice to the ruthlessness and reserve a writer needs. The journey is supposed to count more than the destination. Both feel like a disappointment here.

Brian De Palma's "Passion" had comeback written all over it. When movie audiences last saw the director of such classics as "Blow Out" and "Phantom of the Paradise," he'd strayed outside his usual horror-suspense comfort zone with "Redacted," a "Casualties of War"-ish found footage movie about Iraqi war atrocities that was well-intentioned but muddled. "Passion," in contrast, had all the makings of a return to form: seedy source material, sexy female stars, vengeful co-workers in a tale of rivalry and, y'know, passion. Even the title of the movie it's based on -- "Love Crime" by French director Alain Corneau -- screams De Palma. "Love Crime" could be the name of almost every single film he's ever made.

Alas, the critics' comments about "Passion" at the Venice Film Festival were generally more "go away" than "come back," and the reviews range from middling to disappointed to downright disgusted. That lower end of the spectrum is where you'll find Guy Lodge who gave the film a D+ at HitFix . It's not just bad, he claims, it's totally lifeless. Flat, ugly, with two very miscast leads in Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace, Lodge found very little to praise, much less feel passionate about. "Were De Palma’s name not on the thing," he writes, "you’d assume it was the work of a genre journeyman with a hard-on for "Dressed to Kill.'"

Lodge's review is the most strongly negative published so far, but just about every article strikes similar notes of frustration. In The Hollywood Reporter , Neil Young calls "Passion" "disappointingly anemic," taking De Palma to task for his heavy-handed choices in the realms of screenwriting, lighting, camera angles, and score. Though he admired De Palma's latest use of his signature splitscreen technique, he was generally underwhelmed by the filmmaker's nods to his past work, writing that "the impression is that De Palma is indulging himself with homages to his own Hitchcockian greatest hits, with results that veer close to self-parody on occasion and emphasize just how far this once-outstanding director's creative star has plummeted."