He’s inextricably bound up with the image of the goodly Gandalf the Grey for an entire generation of movie goers, but Ian McKellen has always been a wonderful player of less admirable screen characters. He was a memorably flamboyant Richard III in Richard Loncraine’s 1995 film. He was deliciously creepy as a fugitive Nazi hiding in an American suburb in Bryan Singer’s underrated 1998 thriller Apt Pupil.

In The Critic, he might just have outdone himself.

Adapted by playwright/screenwriter Patrick Marber from Anthony Quinn’s 2015 novel Curtain Call, McKellen is the titular critic, one Jimmy Erskine, for 40 years the “The Beast” of the West End, a man with the poison pen able to make and break careers in one review.

But times are changing. It’s 1934 and the newspaper he works for is trimming some of the editorial fat (and the associated expense accounts). The publisher, Viscount Brooke (Mark Strong), isn’t a fan of Jimmy’s vitriolic style. Moreover, he’s an ardent fan of an actress Jimmy has laid into of late – the fragile Nina Land (Gemma Arterton).

With his job and lifestyle on the line, Jimmy coerces Nina into a blackmail scheme to secure his byline. He miscalculates with doubly fatal...