Adaptations are the mac 'n' cheese of modern Hollywood. The marketing executive dangles a shiny bestseller before the film consumer like a matador's capote; powerless to resist its allure, he dives for knowing it's probably a mirage of brilliance - and that he won't even get to gore the guy behind it.
It's difficult to engage with Django Unchained fully and you can't help but find yourself waiting for the next exchange between the three central performances. Swinging wildly between incendiary genre masterpiece to slow, plodding disaster it represents everything that is best and worst about the controversial director.
Clint Eastwood's biopic J. EDGAR, which is released in the UK on DVD this week, emphasises the psychosexual torment in the life of legendary F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover. This year's Pulitzer finalist Anthony Summers, whose biography Official and Confidential demolished the image of Hoover as national hero, writes here on the hard facts behind the movie's story.