15, 108mins
Ryan Gosling is normally brilliant as an inexplicable outsider. Here, he is just inexplicable as a morbidly detached ingénu called Leland who is locked up for the murder of a mentally retarded young boy. A greedy prison tutor (Don Cheadle) thinks he can tweak a book out of the grisly incident. Kevin Spacey, as a world famous novelist and Gosling’s absent father, steals the best and cruellest lines.
As for Gosling? How do you keep faith with a hero who claims the world would be an infinitely better place if people said happy words to each other such as “strawberry” and “kisses”. He’s the first person I’d push under a bus.