Trumbo

The paranoia-fuelled blacklisting of film-makers for their Communist Party sympathies in the 1940s and 50s remains a prickly subject for Hollywood. So the producers of this biopic of unrepentant, Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (a "swimming-pool socialist", in the wry words of one colleague) should be applauded for getting the finance together. Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston brings stature and eccentricity to the title role and director Jay Roach (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents) relishes re-creating scenes from key movies and the postwar Tinseltown milieu, cleverly blending newsreel of the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings with dramatisation. But Trumbo doesn't stray far enough from karaoke star-spotting (notably John Wayne and Kirk Douglas) to reach any deeper understanding of a shameful situation. John McNamara's script oversimplifies complex material and leaves characters spouting rhetoric. While Red-bashing, antisemitic columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) is no more than a panto villain. At least Michael Stuhlbarg brings humanity as a stoic Edward G Robinson and John Goodman injects some uncouth energy to his B-movie producer Frank King, but The Front, the 1976 fictional account of this grim period in postwar US history, did a more focused job.