At The Movies: Roofman has heart and humour, The Woman In Cabin 10 sinks as a whodunnit

Roofman (M18)

125 minutes, opens on Oct 23
★★★★☆

The story: In the late 1990s, a United States army veteran (Channing Tatum) convicted for robbing 45 McDonald’s outlets escapes from prison, holes up in a Toys“R”Us store in small-town North Carolina and falls for an employee.

Jeffrey Manchester’s cross-country spree, breaking into fast-food locations through their roofs, has the makings of a movie. But Roofman by American indie writer-director Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, 2010; The Place Beyond The Pines, 2012) with Tatum in the title role is a true-crime dramedy stranger than fiction because of what happens after.

For six months, Jeffrey hides in the toy emporium, inside a hollow wall. He emerges during closing hours to amuse himself, and Tatum is a joyful sight, spinning around the shop floor on a children’s bike and dancing in his underwear as if teasing a Magic Mike (2012) routine.

The isolation soon gets to him. He installs baby monitors to surveil the staff, which is how he notices hard-working divorcee Leigh (Kirsten Dunst).

They begin a relationship and Jeffrey, calling himself “John Zorn”, becomes a trusted member of her local church as well as her home with two daughters (Lily Collias and Kennedy Moyer). They are surrogates for his kids, whom he desperately misses. A devoted family man, Jeffrey had turned career criminal primarily to provide for them.

Tatum is easy to like as this sweet-soul outlaw. His Hollywood-star charisma sustains the story’s tone shifts from breezy comedy to romance to, ultimately, heartbreak.

Doom hangs over the affair, and the suspense is driven by Jeffrey’s increasingly bold re-entry into the community. He yearns for human contact at the cost of inevitable recapture, for is not loneliness its own kind of prison?

Hot take: This caper is a mix of hijinks, humour and heart as improbable as the charming anti-hero.

The Woman In Cabin 10 (NC16)

92 minutes, available on Netflix
★★☆☆☆

The story: While on board a luxury yacht for a travel assignment, London journalist Laura “Lo” Blacklock (Keira Knightley) witnesses a body tossed into the briny late at night. Why is everyone saying it never happened?

Who does not love a twisty whodunnit? Unless the twist is given away early like in The Woman In Cabin 10, an inept adaptation of English author Ruth Ware’s 2016 best-selling novel of the same name.

Guy Pearce plays Richard Bullmer, a plutocrat so oleaginous, he can only be a villain.

He has organised the three-day voyage across the North Sea for a fund-raising gala to benefit the research foundation of his Norwegian shipping heiress wife (Lisa Loven Kongsli), who is dying of leukaemia.

The guests are his nouveau riche pals, plus his physician (Art Malik) and Lo’s photographer ex-boyfriend (David Ajala), and Lo is the uneasy outsider: They object more to the shoes she wears than to the suspected homicide in their midst.

Australian director and co-writer Simon Stone (The Dig, 2021) is too serious to recognise the potential for a campy class satire.

And as an unreliable female narrator thriller, the latest in the Gone Girl (2014) and The Girl On The Train (2016) subgenre, this Netflix production lacks psychological nuance. Lo’s sanity, although questioned by the others, is never in doubt even when she insists the mysterious victim is the woman from her adjoining room: this titular cabin 10 is unoccupied.

All passengers and crew are, moreover, accounted for.

An intrepid reporter, the gaslit heroine will stop at nothing to solve the conspiracy, running around outlandish intrigues and braving repeated attempts on her life for an unworthy movie.

Hot take: It is a sinking feeling, seeing what has become of a promising high-seas murder mystery.