My Dinner with Hervé (Sacha Gervasi, 2018)

Based on the director's actual encounter with the actor in 1993, days before he committed suicide, My Dinner with Hervé stars Hollywood's current go-to-dwarf (for only one can be accommodated at a time) Peter Dinklage as Villechaize and Jamie Dornan of Fifty Shades of Grey as a journalist who is a recovering alcoholic and very much in the last chance saloon with this interview. The casting is of huge relevance since, without it, what we have is a rather pathetic figure famous only for being in a supporting role in one Bond film and a long-running crap if popular TV series, which he will not stop going on about as if they were God's ways of compensating him for his physical limitations. The friendship that forms between the two, Villechaize baiting the journalist continually in his nasal tones with his boozing, leching, railing against the world and spiky personal barbs until he finally snaps, is wholly credible, and this sustains a story that would otherwise be too slender, even if we know that everything said by Villechaize is in effect part of a suicide note and stained all the way through by that.

6/10