Capote

Philip Seymore Hoffman won best actor this year at the Oscars. He has been an actor I have always been impressed with due to his unusual, and deeply focused acting. However, nothing I had ever seen of his acting could have prepared me for the blitzkreig performance he delivers in Capote. Hoffman is a tour de force throughout the movie; from the moment you hear him say his first lines in that accent and style he adopts throughout the film, to the moment when he is finally silenced by what he has to watch in a prison warehouse, Hoffman is mesmerising. His work is one of the best I have seen in recent years, and thats saying something. perhaps the last actor I can think of with such a performance was Roberto Benigni in Life is Beautiful.

Capote is a true story, recounting the life of Truman Capote who became the most famous author in America after he realeased a book outlining the events that took place in a small Kansas town in 1959. It is a brilliant movie, and though the story might not provide anything spectacularly different from many other biopics that have been released by Hollywood time and again, it does provide one angle that is sorely missing from almost every Hollywood movie these days- brilliant acting.

Highly recommended.