OUT OF BLUE – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

An astrophysicist with a funky retro style, Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer), is found shot to death in her New Orleans observatory the morning after she gives a melancholy lecture on how we are all stardust. Alcoholic homicide detective Mike Hoolihan (Patricia Clarkson) catches the case, which may or may not bear certain similarities to the murders of a long-ago, never-caught serial killer.

British writer-director Carol Morley, with her first film set outside the UK, has transformed Martin Amis’s novel Night Train into a limp noodle of a cinematic noir that, most criminally, drains the usually marvelous Clarkson of her deliciously eccentric charisma. But only slightly less criminal is how Out of Blue attempts a slow-burn mix of pseudoscientific philosophizing about “dark matter” and “dark energy” with Hoolihan’s beyond-clichéd worn-out-cop psyche and the usual ugly human impulses that drive the crimes explored here. Continue reading…