Locke (Steven Knight, 2013)

Tom Hardy plays Ivan Locke, a construction manager hitting a crossroads in his life the night before a huge project, as he discovers an extramarital one-night stand he had the year before has come back to haunt him. The whole film is the camera pointed at him and no-one else, as he drives through the night trying to put things right even as they unravel. it sounds like the stuff of filmic nightmares, with not even the manoeuvering room of a stage play, and it is, but only in that there's no way of honestly making a man's disintegration pretty. This is Hardy's best role to date, with real meat: his attempts to justify his work and personal lives to each other with increasingly pained comparisons between the two are quite heart-breaking to watch before long.

8/10