Tom Hardy

I’m about to give away the opening scene of the latest gangsters-are-cool drama MobLand. Don’t worry. It won’t spoil anything. By the end of this review you won’t want to watch even a moment of this dog’s breakfast of an atrocity of charmless, witless, misbegotten, amoral tripe anyway. So we’re in a basement with Tom Hardy, playing his usual amiably ruthless hard-man character. This time he’s called Harry Da Souza and he’s the chief fixer for a London-based Irish crime family called the Harrigans. On this occasion, Da Souza is mediating between two lower-tier rival gangs, whom he has orders to make apologise to one another. After much tense negotiation,

Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders is based on the book by photojournalist Danny Lyon, first published in 1968, about his years embedded with a lawless motorcycle gang in Chicago. Nichols (Take Shelter, Mud, Loving) has imposed a fictional narrative arc and while it’s bogus in some respects and the arc quite familiar to anyone acquainted with stories about male subcultures – the fatal flaw of loyalty etc – it is well-crafted, stylish, has some potent scenes and a fantastic cast. The film stars Tom Hardy, Austin Butler and Jodie Comer, who manages to wipe the floor with both of them. You may wish to look away from the violence – if