The Playlist

Playwright Robert Longfellow, the lead character in “Collaborator,” is a familiar New York intellectual struggling to produce honest work. Despite notably lucrative side gigs as a Hollywood screenwriter for hire, he hasn’t lived up to what the (fake) Times loudly boasted as a once-hypothetical “the voice of a generation.” His latest play, “American Excursion,” was a flop, and if you really need to know more about that play beyond the title, they you probably don’t recognize the sweater-vest frou-frou type here personified by writer, director and star Martin Donovan.

For whatever reason, directorial debuts by British character actors tend to lean towards the gritty kitchen-sink drama; Tim Roth, Gary Oldman and, more recently, Paddy Considine have all broken their filmmaking cherry with uncompromisingly tough, bleak subject matter. Considering that it involves abandonment, council estates and the risk of being taken into care, one might be forgiven for expecting the same from Dexter Fletcher's first film, "Wild Bill." But then, Fletcher's best known for being one of the central quartet, alongside Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng and Nick Moran, in Guy Ritchie's debut "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels," and for appearing frequently in 's pictures, so could Fletcher have turned out some kind of guns and geezers movie instead?

There’s a familiar, some would say endless, argument about the British film industry: that the films it produces are essentially afraid of tackling the present and pressing contemporary issues. British directors, or at least the companies that finance their films, have rarely tried to engage with the shock of the now, and instead remain happy to retreat into a comfortable, mindless and nostalgic past that probably never existed in the first place. The recent riots that rocked the capital, for instance, or the fall-out from the News International hacking scandal are subjects less likely to be turned into a feature film than, say, something like “Notting Hill 2,” or any another mythological and monocultural representation of London or -- God forbid -- one of the country's other major cities. Occasionally someone comes along with a stick and pokes the ruling classes in the eye (think “The Shooting Party” or “Gosford Park”) but screenplays penned by Julian Fellowes can hardly be considered the stuff of breath-taking dynamism. When the Brits aren’t churning out benign pictures about a benign royal dynasty (hello, “The Queen” and “The King’s Speech”) or enlisting scads of former theatre directors (Richard Eyre, Stephen Daldry, Nicolas Hytner, Sam Mendes) to blandly recreate their deferential attitude towards bland material, they make shockingly poor gangster pictures that would make even a hack like Guy Ritchie blush.

What else can we say about the lovely and talented Olivia Williams except that she's consistently great in pretty much anything she's in. Most American audiences became familiar with her she when she starred in Wes Anderson's sophomore effort "Rushmore" and it looks like a reunion of sorts with another cast member is in the works.