Channing Tatum walks ‘effortlessly’ between comedy and tragedy

The events that inspired “Roofman” fall squarely into the category of “stranger than fiction”, said Sophie Butcher in Empire. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a US army veteran named Jeffrey Manchester robbed more than 40 McDonald’s fast-food joints, by crawling into their roofs overnight and descending into the restaurants the following morning to hold staff up at gunpoint (while being disarmingly friendly and apologetic throughout).

He was eventually caught but he managed to escape, and then spent months hiding out in a branch of Toys R Us, living on baby food and M&Ms. Director Derek Cianfrance’s film based on these events is gritty but heartwarming, and features a “remarkable” performance from Channing Tatum, who depicts Manchester as “goofy and childlike”, while “effortlessly” walking a delicate path between comedy and tragedy.

The film opens before Manchester goes to jail, said Natalia Winkelman in The New York Times. In a voice-over, he explains that he had been desperate to change his fortunes, and win back his family. Instead, he ended up being sentenced to decades in prison. The section depicting his escape under a delivery van is “wonderfully engaging”, but soon we are in Toys R Us. Emerging during the day to mingle with shoppers, Manchester strikes up a relationship with a lonely single mother (Kirsten Dunst) who works in the store.

Thus the zany premise of the film disappears, as we sink into a mushy but also complex romantic comedy-drama. It’s “watchable” enough, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian, and both stars acquit themselves well. But Manchester – a criminal spinning a web of lies – gets off too lightly. Ultimately, the feel-good vibe feels a bit ill-judged.

by Andrew Ross Sorkin 

With “Too Big to Fail”, Andrew Ross Sorkin “defined the story of the 2008 financial crisis”, said Pratinav Anil in The Times. Now he has turned his gaze to an “earlier frenzy of leverage and illusion”: the Wall Street crash of 1929.

In the 1920s, with liquor outlawed, speculation became America’s “legal intoxication”. Financial regulation was lax – “insider trading was not a crime but a craft” – and debt was the “new gospel”. Key to Sorkin’s “blow-by-blow” account is a “gallery of finely drawn pen portraits”. We meet the “whip-smart” trader Jesse Livermore, who made “pots of money” shorting the market on 24 October – “Black Thursday” – only to “lose it all betting against the recovery”; the “folksy Southern Democrat” Carter Glass, the “presiding spirit behind” the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act; and even Winston Churchill, who was visiting New York in October 1929 and saw a man fling himself from his hotel window. If Sorkin’s concern for human drama makes his book seem superficial at times – he largely steers clear of “complicated explanations” – it is nonetheless “pacy” and enjoyable.

It certainly delivers plenty of “true-crime thrills”, said Zachary D. Carter in The New York Times. We learn all about the “outrageous pump-and-dump schemes”, in which bankers sold stocks to one another at inflated prices, encouraging speculators to “pile on”, before selling out and leaving the “suckers holding the bag”. There’s New York Stock Exchange president Richard Whitney, who extolled his employer as a “perfect institution”, while embezzling “more than $1 million (£750,000) of securities to fund a life of country estate fox hunting”. Inevitably, Sorkin’s cast is “almost all-male”, said Piers Brendon in Literary Review, but there’s one entertaining exception. Evangeline Adam, an astrologer, “made a mint” advising Charlie Chaplin and others to buy shares based on their zodiac signs, but lost $100,000 (£75,000) on Black Thursday.

Sorkin doesn’t neglect the “ugly aftermath” of the crash, when “panic moved from Wall Street to Main Street”, said Andy Haldane in the Financial Times. He documents the slide into the Great Depression of the 1930s, when unemployment rose above eight million and shanty towns, nicknamed “Hoovervilles” (after President Herbert Hoover), sprang up across America. The product of eight years of meticulous research, this book is a “work of true scholarship”. “A people’s tragedy told through the lens of the leading players”, it is sure to be considered one of the best books in the “Great Crash/Depression genre”.

Vivacious aristocrat who gave her name to a nightclub

A few months after founding the Clermont Club, his notorious gambling club in Berkeley Square, in 1962, John Aspinall leased its basement to his friend Mark Birley, an advertising executive. Birley converted the space into a nightclub, and named it Annabel’s, after his wife. It became, and remains, one of London’s most celebrated society hotspots. Yet for Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who died last week aged 91, her association with the club was just one chapter in a long life that was gilded and full of fun, but also punctuated by tragedy.

Born in London in 1934, she was the daughter of Robin Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, later the eighth Marquess of Londonderry, and Romaine Combe. She spent her childhood between three family piles: Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland, Wynyard Hall in Co Durham, and Londonderry House, on Park Lane. Her mother was attentive to her children, said The Times – until blisters appeared around her mouth. She died of cancer when Annabel was 17; after that, her father descended into alcoholism. She described herself as a shy, awkward girl, but when she came out in 1952 her grandmother – a famous society hostess – threw her a grand ball that was attended by Elizabeth II. The point was to find her a suitable husband, but by then Annabel had already met Mark Birley, a lanky Old Etonian, and they married in 1954. Soon, they had three children, Rupert, Robin and India Jane. She loved Birley, but he was busy and serially unfaithful; they drifted apart – and in 1964 she started an affair with the married businessman James Goldsmith. Though it was intense, her children remained her priority, and she was always with them in the holidays. Over Easter in 1970, she made the fateful decision to take them to Aspinall’s private zoo where Robin, then 12, was horribly injured by a tiger. She felt intense guilt that she’d let him into the enclosure; he always insisted that no one was to blame.

She was still married to Birley when she gave birth to Jemima, her first child with Goldsmith, in 1974. Their son Zach was born a year later. They finally married in 1978, and had a second son, Ben, in 1980; but by then Goldsmith – who was rarely at home – had fallen in love with another woman, and had children with her. Asked how she bore it, Annabel told friends that “what goes around comes around”; she had, after all, been his mistress for years before they married, which had hurt his then-wife. The worst blow, however, came in 1986, when her son Rupert went missing, presumed drowned, in West Africa. Goldsmith died in 1997. Birley, to whom she had remained close, died in 2007. In 2009, she said that people often assumed she was haughty, “when really I’m not”, and that the things that made her happy were quite simple: “Give me dogs, give me children, give me books.”