Benedict Cumberbatch is spectacular: The Power of the Dog reviewed

Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog could also be called The Power of Benedict Cumberbatch, as he’s so spectacular. He plays a ruggedly masculine cowboy with an inner life that isn’t written, but that we somehow still see. It is also clearly Campion’s best film since The Piano or my own favourite, An Angel at My Table (as for Bright Star, we said we’d never talk of it again — why did you even bring it up? We all have our off days).

The film is based on the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage that was praised to the skies when published but sold very few copies, unfathomably. (Same with John Williams’s Stoner.) Set in Montana in 1925, it’s about two brothers, Phil (Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), who own and run a cattle ranch.