A Late Quartet

"A Late Quartet"

"As Reported by Dollyforme"

This wonderful movie stars the beautiful and brainy Imogen Poots (yep – that is correct) in the second movie I’ve seen her in. First was Fright Night. She’s hot and 23 – so we’ll be seeing much more of her in the future.

British actress Imogen Poots is the daughter of Fiona and Trevor Poots, a television producer. She was educated at Bute House Preparatory School for Girls, Queen's Gate School for Girls and Latymer Upper School, all in London. When she was a teenager she began attending the Youngblood Theatre Company, and developed a love of acting.

Poots' screen debut came with a role in British medical drama "Casualty" (1986). She made her big screen debut as Young Valerie in V for Vendetta (2005), and went on to appear in various projects, including 28 Weeks Later (2007), Me and Orson Welles (2008), "Bouquet of Barbed Wire" (2010) and Fright Night (2011).

Anyway, A Late Quartet is a films for grown-ups. They're regretfully rare, but we have one in A Late Quartet. What could be construed merely as a music film is in fact a tightly wound, deliberate and sensitive depiction of creative, platonic and romantic relationships on the edge of destruction.

Affairs, betrayals, sacrifice — together this list appears as standard soap opera material. But in the assured hands of former documentary-maker Yaron Zilberman, they are so much more.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Christopher Walken and Mark Ivanir give astonishing performances as members of an esteemed Manhattan string quartet. As a creative family, the quartet’s future is thrown into doubt when Walken's character develops Parkinson's — a particularly devastating diagnosis for a musician whose profession hinges on the dexterity of his hands.

Here is a film that presents the complexities of regret, the price of compromise and the undoable consequences of the decisions you only realise in retrospect were, in fact, decisions. All these themes find their mirror in the intimacy and sacrifice of the quartet's musical collaboration and the intensity of their tenuous creative bonds.

A Late Quartet is finely tuned and deeply moving. Its precise, dynamic dialogue gives the impression of being written by a master playwright. Its score rates a special mention — composer Angelo Badalamenti also wrote Twin Peaks’'unforgettable theme. Its characters are fully fledged vessels of hurt, resentment and miscommunication, but they're not monsters — they're just actually human. And for a real, grown-up, mainstream film, that's not just unusual, that's something to treasure.

It is rated R for some hot sex and language. No – there is no nude scene of Imogen Poots. Maybe in a future movie she’ll be in the buff. However, rent this movie – it is wonderful and the acting and music are top notch.

I loved every minute of it and so will you. We’ll see (hopefully soon) much more of Imogen Poots and I can’t wait.