15A | ★★★★✩

There was a time when theatre critics had power and influence over what show lived and died and which actor’s career flourished or withered. Today they (or, full disclosure, we) are just one voice in a landscape of digitised opinions, albeit we hope better informed than most and perhaps, just maybe, better writers.

Whether this change is a good thing (it is) is not the concern of this movie, which stars a sprightly Ian McKellen who since filming finished fell off the stage while playing Falstaff resulting in a break from acting, though thankfully no broken bones.

Set in the 1930s when London’s streets were stalked by Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirts, McKellen’s stone-faced critic Jimmy Erskine is a gay hedonist who when he’s not slaying those on stage is risking arrest in the local park.

Ian McKellen

The grand paper for which he works is The Chronicle – Daily, not Jewish alas – which has been inherited by the aristocratic and gentlemanly proprietor David Brooke (Mark Strong). Brooke wants to beef up the organ’s credentials as a family newspaper. Erskine finds the new line impossible to toe and when he is fired sets out to wreak his revenge on his employer with bribery and blackmail.

Gemma Arteron

Based on Anthony Quinn’s popular novel Curtain Call, the film’s tight-knit group of characters seems hard to credit if you think too long about it. Central to Erskine’s conspiracy is the actress Nina Land (Gemma Arterton) who is bribed with good reviews to seduce the married Brooke. Meanwhile, the proprietor’s haughty daughter Cory (Romola Garai) is unhappily married to Jewish artist Stephen who is desperately trying to reignite his affair with Nina, when he is not painting the portraits of his father and Erskine who belong to the same club.

Yet this melodramatic web has an air of credence thanks to possibly the best screenplay written by Patrick Marber since his Oscar-nominated Notes On A Scandal.

“I shouldn’t have married a Jew,” spits Garai’s Cory (a role, incidentally, somewhat opposite to the one she is about to perform in Giant in which she plays Jewish American publisher Jessie Stone).

In this seedy, sepia vision of 1930s London gracefully directed by Anand Tucker, McKellen’s Erskine is the delicious embodiment of cruelty and wit in ways that make you wonder if it’s possible to have one without the other.