Stillwater (15)
Verdict: Lacking in fizz
Rating: 
The Last Letter From Your Love (12A)
Verdict: Unconvincing. full stop
Rating:
All films fall broadly into one of three categories: they are either more than, equal to, or less than the sum of their parts. Stillwater belongs squarely in that third group.
It boasts Hollywood's most reliable leading man, in the solid form of Matt Damon. As female lead, it has Camille Cottin, the beguiling French actress who will be familiar to fans of the glorious Netflix series Call My Agent!.
The director and co-writer is Tom McCarthy, whose splendid 2015 film Spotlight was nominated for six Academy Awards and won two, including Best Picture.
And it is inspired by the compelling story of Amanda Knox, the American student convicted of murdering her British flatmate Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2007, but later exonerated.
All that is more than enough to get expectations bubbling, but Stillwater works only in fits and starts. It is further blighted by insistently jaunty piano music that undermines and cheapens the drama.
Matt Damon stars as 'Bill' in director Tom McCarthy's 'Stillwater'. All films fall broadly into one of three categories: they are either more than, equal to, or less than the sum of their parts. Stillwater, BRIAN VINER writes, belongs squarely in that third group
Damon plays Bill Baker, a God-fearing, gun-owning former oil-rig worker with a baseball cap apparently stitched into place.
He lives in the blue-collar town of Stillwater, Texas, but is now working on construction sites to fund his regular trips to Marseille, where his daughter Alison (Abigail Breslin) is serving a nine-year sentence for killing her French-Arab girlfriend. Alison insists she was wrongfully convicted; Bill is doing all he can to help her prove her innocence.
This situation is complicated by their uneasy relationship. Bill seems to us like a pretty decent, hard-working, well-meaning cove, but to Alison he's serially messed-up and feckless, evidently on account of chronic past misdeeds. Yet there is no sign of these misdeeds, even in flashback. So we're being asked to believe in something when all evidence is to the contrary, a narrative hump that the film never really overcomes.
Then, with the French lawyers having washed their hands of Alison's case, Bill befriends a local actress called Virginie (Cottin).
This unlocks a whole different set of narrative problems as the picture changes tone as jarringly as Chopin giving way to Scott Joplin, seeming almost to forget about the imprisoned daughter while a laughably unlikely romance blossoms between the Texan roughneck and the sexy French woman.
(L to R) Camille Cottin as 'Virginie', Matt Damon as 'Bill' and Lilou Siauvaud as 'Maya' in Stillwater
Of course, it's Damon and Cottin, so it's hardly a surprise to find them falling for each other, and their bond is cemented by Virginie's cutesy eight-year-old daughter Maya.
She thinks Bill is just terrific, enabling a clunkily obvious contrast with Alison, who thinks he's a jerk.
Oh yes, Alison. It turns out Bill hasn't forgotten about her, because when he lovingly takes Maya to see her beloved Olympique de Marseille football team, he sets eyes in the enormous crowd on the one man who seems to hold the key to the whole case.
This slab of cinematic serendipity cues another tonal lurch as Bill goes violently rogue, but I'll say no more, except to reiterate that Stillwater is a whirlpool of improbable plot twists, dramatic misjudgments and silly music.
Soulful strings and poignant piano are on overtime again in The Last Letter From Your Lover, Augustine Frizzell's soppy adaptation of the bestselling Jojo Moyes novel.
The story is set across two time frames, with a modern-day journalist, Ellie
