Christopher Plummer

A shadow of Christopher Plummer's is used in two opposite directions on two archive pages. Leslie Felperin writes that his career-making turn in the same role, in The Fall of the Roman Empire, cast a shadow over Gladiator, and measures Joaquin Phoenix's success by his managing to wriggle out of it. Kate Stables has the shadow coming from him instead: in Beginners the efforts of the two leads are cast into shadow by Plummer, who gobbles up the role. Stables adds that he is having a late-life flowering, with notable turns in The Last Station and My Dog Tulip. Mark Kermode gives his Mike Wallace in The Insider a calibrated adjective, ever-so-slightly slimy.