Serena directed by Susanne Bier with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper

Set in 1929, at the time of the crash, impulsive George Pemberton, timber merchant, falls for Serena who is horse-crazy with just a touch of the shamanese: she can tame eagles and turn a profit. Rhys Ifans is a loyal worker who believes in prophecies and when Serena saves him from bleeding to death, he vows eternal fealty to her. It is a brutal world as frontiers, on all fronts, are redrawn. Yet nature through the smoky mountains of Tennessee, its rattlesnakes and doom-laden beauty is European director, Susanne Bier’s, real triumph. Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper do their best as noir slam-dunks deforestation, with Lawrence the more successful of the two. The flaw is in the structure, despite the film’s firey apocalyptic ending. Pursuit and payback occur with alarming frequency, in the dying third, but the focus is George’s awareness not Serena’s discovery.....Close but no smoking cigar