Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (Rated R)
Annette Bening is strong as Gloria Grahame. Portraying the onetime Hollywood star from the 1940s-’50s in her last years (the ’70s-’80s), Bening endows her with pain, flirtatiousness, anger, wit, desperation and humor. She is the standout element in a dramatization of unpromising source material—the memoir of British thespian Peter Turner on his difficult December-May romance with the actress and her eventual death from cancer. Aside from a clever step-through between past and present that is the movie’s recurring visual signature, Film Stars is flat and a little dull—aside from Bening’s performance.
