Glad this was playing on the plane last week. Nice film. I enjoyed it, despite nothing particularly standing out. O'Dowd and Foster are good, and the whole cast is really. Several nice cycling scenes in there. What made it good for me above all is just the fascination with the story. In documentary form this also could have been better though. Now there's was too much of a forced narrative from the journalist following Lance. With a kind of interview style of several players involved it could have been more compelling.

B

Disgraced American cyclist Lance Armstrong's use of performance-enhancing drugs and his subsequent fight to conceal his cheating is dramatized in The Program. It plays as a crime drama by way of a sports biography. The film is directed by Stephen Frears, a gifted and fairly prolific journeyman who every now and then crafts a perfect film (Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity). This one has flaws: it cannot decide to what degree this is Lance Armstrong's story or David Walsh's. Walsh is a Sunday Times sportswriter who doubted Armstrong for years, a suspicion which earned him scorn and ridicule and then belated justification. Walsh, played with characteristic geniality by Chris O'Dowd, is always in the film just enough to register as a main character, but never enough to become well-developed or particularly interesting beyond his admirable prescience. The film also ends rather abruptly after condensing a significant amount of history into roughly an hour and 40 minutes, opting to ignore how Armstrong exists today: at once ruined and yet also forgiven, active on Twitter and attending prestigious galas despite still refusing to detail much of the steroid abuse he broadly confessed to in a widely watched one-on-one interview with Oprah.

These shortcomings are counterbalanced, however, by a spry, stylish aesthetic (the Tour de France sequences are crisp and kinetic) and several top-notch performances. Ben Foster's creepily clenched-fist interpretation of Armstrong is the main attraction—he expertly captures the real man's perverse gift for presenting a lie with incredible resolve, disguising practiced indignation as honesty—but also superb is Jesse Plemons as Armstrong's more conflicted teammate Floyd Landis, as well as Guillaume Canet, exuding campy sleaze as Italian blood-doping pioneer Dr. Michele Ferrari. At last, the film is buoyed by what registers as deeply felt resentment: it is truly fascinated and repulsed by the extent to which doping has become synonymous with cycling and how long a con artist was heralded as a hero, fortified by his wealth, a reluctant media, and a yellow-branded aura of patriotism and uplift.

B

I wish, during the commercial montage, they recreated this legendary, cringe-worthy Nike commercial.

"Everybody wants to know what I'm on. What am I on? I'm on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day. What are YOU on?!"

Ha.