At The Movies: Viola Davis crushes it in G20, Seven Veils a showcase for Amanda Seyfried

G20 (NC16)

108 minutes, premieres on Prime Video on April 10
★★★☆☆

The story: When the G20 summit in South Africa is hijacked by terrorists, United States President Danielle Sutton (Viola Davis), their main target, must evade capture and defend her family and the international dignitaries.

Hollywood actress Davis is a member of the elite EGOT club, winner of an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and two Tonys.

Not easily content, the 59-year-old has added Krav Maga to her acting arsenal for the entertaining thriller G20. This Madam President is an Iraq War veteran. She will leverage her military expertise to navigate the crisis as the attackers prepare to destabilise the global economy via cryptocurrency and deepfake.

The middle-aged black lady boss actioner by director Patricia Riggen (The 33, 2015) is so on the nose in its currency, crossing off, as it does, diversity, disinformation, US foreign intervention and the Afro-centric blockbusters Black Panther (2018) and The Woman King (2022) – the latter also starring Davis – it can only be tongue-in-cheek. How else to explain a daft line like “We will save the people in the kitchen”?

Danielle is serious all the same about rescuing the hostages, her husband (Anthony Anderson) among them. She is a working mum of a rebellious teen girl (Marsai Martin) and a son (Christopher Farrar). There is nothing she cannot do and she crushes it, whether shootouts, deadly chases or an epic fight in a spinning helicopter.

Lending support are her bodyguard (Ramon Rodriguez) plus an animated diplomatic corps comprising the British Prime Minister twit (Douglas Hodge), a skittish Italian (Sabrina Impacciatore) and the South Korean First Lady (MeeWha Alana Lee) in her hanbok.

An American uniting the free world against a common enemy is the ultimate escapism.

Hot take: Not since Air Force One’s (1997) Harrison Ford has a state leader been this exciting.

Seven Veils (NC16)

110 minutes, now showing
★★★★☆

The story: Theatre director Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried) is entrusted with reviving her late legendary mentor’s opus Salome, but the experience awakens long-repressed traumas.

The 1905 opera Salome by German composer Richard Strauss enacts the eponymous princess’ infatuation with the prophet John the Baptist. She dances the infamous Dance of the Seven Veils before her stepfather King Herod in exchange for John’s head so that she may finally kiss his lips.

Jeanine’s affairs in Seven Veils are almost as perverse, albeit without the decapitation. Her much older, married mentor was her lover, and he had appropriated her memories of her father’s childhood abuse for his Salome.

All her unresolved feelings are coming back to her during her rehearsals, which are really Armenian-Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan’s 2023 mounting of Salome for the Canadian Opera Company: Egoyan concurrently filmed his actual opera and his fictional movie, collapsing documentary and dramaturgy, even as Jeanine’s professional and personal history troubles her present to cause backstage chaos.

The intricate meta-text, impossible to pick apart, is mesmerising.

A force in art-house cinema during his early career highs of The Adjuster (1991) and The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Egoyan is an auteur of chilly, cerebral precision.

This is, nevertheless, an intense psychological drama with expressionistic shadow-play designs.

American actress Seyfried continues to do some of her best work with Egoyan in their second movie together after the erotic mystery Chloe (2009). Despite a fragile emotional state further strained by a failing marriage, management conflicts, politicking and a #MeToo scandal, Jeanine is impassioned in seeing her production through – it is by confronting her past that she will be freed of it.

Hot take: Seyfried brings operatic ardour to a layered tale of female desire and sexual violence.