Do you like montages, but grow bored with the tedious plot bits between them? Then Pirate Radio is the movie for you. Director Richard Curtis, the one-man British rom-com machine behind the scripts for Four Weddings And A Funeral, Notting Hill, and the Bridget Jones movies, follows up Love Actually with another spirited ensemble piece, featuring such big talents as Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, and Nick Frost. Most of them play the DJs of Radio Rock, a 1966 pirate radio ship that piped the devil’s music to the British populace from offshore. But the great soundtrack serves only to push the torpid narrative forward…
Fans of volatile character actor Michael Shannon have reason to be excited to see him as the lead in the throwback film noir The Missing Person, which casts him as a down-and-out gumshoe assigned to shadow a man on a train. But when Noah Buschel’s moody independent feature inserts a 9/11 connection into the proceedings, the rich atmosphere collapses into mawkishness.