The Fall of the House of Gucci

Jesus Christ what a long, meandering mess. Adam Driver and Al Pacino are doing their best, I think, but the script is ridiculous, and Jared Leto is... honestly I have no idea what he's doing. It's clear that the character he's playing (Paolo Gucci) is a very silly nut of a man, but the whole thing feels like a weird bit, and the lines he says are so out of place – he's the only character who speaks like this – that he feels like he's just in another movie altogether. The worst part is that this movie just doesn't care about the Guccis themselves. It doesn't even really care about Maurizio (Driver's character); the film just likes him more than the others, which isn't much at all. House of Gucci doesn't really make fun of the Guccis, but it thinks this insane story of betrayal and murder is more interesting than them as people.

And then there's Lady Gaga, who is much much worse than she was in A Star Is Born. I've always thought that in that movie Cooper and his team edited around her in very smart ways, but here she's front and center, and although the movie thankfully sort of forgets about her for a stretch of act three, she's clearly the centerpiece of the film, the reason for it to exist, even. And she just can't really act. Sure, she can move around and say lines and wear clothes fabulously, but there's really nothing there that she's doing or giving away. She is, like Jared Leto, just doing a kind of long bit. It's crazy because the part is honestly perfect for her. But she just doesn't give the character any kind of life. Patrizia doesn't quite feel like a cartoon – although she is very silly and I laughed out loud several times – but she also never feels like she's a human at all. Just a kind of image of a person. It's a very bad performance in a movie that never works.

(Tom Ford makes an appearance in this movie, as a character, and he has the role of saving the Gucci brand. Ford has apparently said in interviews that he didn't like this movie either.)