The Butler

Director Lee Daniels hit the big time when Precious picked up a best screenplay Oscar in 2010, but his follow-up film, steamy thriller The Paperboy, was less well received. Daniels would seem to be on safer ground with this drama about Cecil Gaines, a black White House butler (inspired by real-life butler Eugene Allen) who served seven US presidents, from Dwight D Eisenhower in the 1950s to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. However, it's a sprawling, soapy affair with Gaines (Forest Whitaker) portrayed as something of a Forrest Gump figure, stolidly standing stock-still while significant moments of 20th-century history (the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, the Vietnam War) swirl past him. There's a certain pleasure to be derived from the star casting - Robin Williams as Eisenhower, John Cusack as Richard Nixon and Alan Rickman as Reagan (with Jane Fonda as Nancy) - but there's also an underlying TV-movie ambience to the tale and it would probably have worked better as a small-screen mini-series.