The Killing Of John Lennon (15)

This tells us precisely nothing about John Lennon and a sight too much about his killer, Mark Chapman, a Hawaiian security guard beset with psychotic delusions fostered by, among other a things, a deep misreading of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Jonas Ball gives his all to the role of Chapman, but script-wise he's on a hiding to nothing.

Once he leaves Hawaii in late 1980 and starts to haunt the street outside the Dakota Building, Lennon's Manhattan residence, this portrait of a mind in meltdown switches to a ghoulish chronicle of a death foretold. "Something's gonna be happening soon," Chapman tells a cabbie, and even though Chapman's words are drawn from his journals, it tells us no more we already know i.e. he was as mad as a snake. The actual murder is a pathetic attempt at verit.

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