Despite having been very impressed by him in Romeo and Juliet<\/i> and Catch Me If You Can<\/i>, Leonardo DiCaprio has never really had much appeal for me as a star<\/em>. His heartthrob status has got in the way of my appreciation of him. (I still haven’t seen Titanic<\/i>, and have no particular plans to.) But The Aviator<\/i> has changed all that. His performance as the obsessively driven Howard Hughes is, quite simply, spectacular. It’s a demanding role, calling for a convincing portrayal of both fierce determination and drive and introverted neuroticism, and DiCaprio pulls it off like a master. Scratch that, with this role he shows that he is<\/em> a master.<\/p>\n But even with this performance, DiCaprio doesn’t own<\/em> the film: Cate Blanchett races off with an amazing piece of character acting as she totally becomes<\/em> Katherine Hepburn. The supporting cast, from small parts such as Jude Law’s Errol Flynn, to major antagonists like Alec Baldwin’s Juan Trippe, is stellar. (Definitely a candidate for the award for best<\/em> use of the word “fuck” in a serious screenplay*<\/a><\/sup>.) Even at a challenging three hours long, the film is never less than totally engrossing. A masterpiece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Despite having been very impressed by him in Romeo and Juliet and Catch Me If You Can, Leonardo DiCaprio has never really had much appeal for me as a star. His heartthrob status has got in the way of my appreciation of him. (I still haven’t seen Titanic, and have no particular plans to.) But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[1142],"class_list":["post-1521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films_5_stars","tag-legendshome"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1521\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}