On general release from Fri 20 Jan

Clint Eastwood / USA / 2011 / 137 mins

Following hot on the heels of The Iron Lady comes another biopic of one of the late 20th century’s most polarising figures: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. If this film had come from Oliver Stone we’d have got Hoover the monster dwelling in the darkness and it might have been fun, but Clint Eastwood isn’t interested in polemics so whilst never attempting to justify or diminish Hoover’s egotism, brutality, obsession and lawbreaking Eastwood gives us a man: complex, driven, tortured, and paranoid, but all too human.

Eastwood doesn’t shy away from Hoover’s sexuality but treats it without voyeurism and with a degree of sympathy – particularly for Clyde Tolson and the scenes between the two men are some of the most powerful and revealing in the movie. Like nearly all biopics, J. Edgar is a little too long and the technique of flash back and flash forward gets wearing after a while but with a strong central performance from DiCaprio, Judi Dench as Hoover’s mother and Armie Hammer as Tolson, Eastwood has produced an absorbing portrayal of a lawman who was fascinating and whose fingerprints can still be seen all over American politics and society.