Tate Modern’s massive bulk looms impressively on the south side of the river. Its vastness is quite awe-inspiring.

I rolled up here this morning to see the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition, which proved to be wonderful.

Each room of the exhibition showcased a different period and style of her art, including abstract expressionism, New York cityscapes, New Mexico landscapes, skull paintings, and leaves and flowers.

Prominently displayed near the entrance to the exhibition was the striking ‘Red and Orange Streak’ (1919), its strangeness exuding a powerful aura.

From the same year, the charcoal on paper ‘Black Lines’ (1919) was equally entrancing.

One of the most interesting ideas in O’Keeffe’s work is the notion of synaesthesia, the stimulation of one sense by another. Many of her paintings engage with this notion.

‘Blue and Green Music’ (1919/21), for example, attempts to render the effect of music visually.

This painting’s blend of sharp geometric angularity and rippling wave forms is very intriguing.

Further on in the exhibition, ‘Mask with Golden Apple’ (1923) caught my eye with its simple palette of brown and gold against a light grey background, and the surprising effect caused by seeing a mask lying horizontally rather than set vertically covering a face.

Amongst the New York pictures the standouts were ‘New York Street with Moon’ (1925), with its towering perspective irresistibly drawing the viewer’s gaze up to the moon blanketed by clouds, and the very dark atmospheric ‘New York Night’ (1928-9), with the evening traffic streaming anonymously off into the far distance.

A much more bucolic note is struck by the Lake George paintings of rural, upstate New York, as in the calmly beautiful ‘Lake George’ (1922) and the rich autumnal colours of ‘Autumn Leaves – Lake George, N.Y.’ (1924).

O’Keeffe’s relocation from an urban environment to New Mexico inspired her so called ‘skull paintings’, which feature the skulls of animals in desert landscapes.

The memorable effect of these paintings is that they are not at all morbid; rather, they seem to celebrate the skulls as objects of beauty in themselves, as in ‘Mule’s Skull with Pink Poinsettia’ (1936).

In this painting, the skull in the lower left foreground sits on the desert sand like a glorious sculpture on display.

‘Deer’s Skull with Pedernal’ (1936) likewise has a celebratory rather than mournful effect, the skull as beautiful in its own way as the New Mexico hills behind it.

On coming out of the exhibition I got a fantastic view of St Paul’s Cathedral and the river from a small balcony outside the shop on Level 3.

Because of the slightly raised elevation, from here you get a view of St Paul’s that includes all of its expanse rather than just the dome and its immediate surroundings.

By now lunch was beckoning.

I walked across Waterloo Bridge and headed to Thai Square restaurant on Trafalgar Square, where I had a delicious soft-shell crab with mango salad.

Even though that dish only had one pepper out of a possible three on the menu (to indicate how hot it was), it still packed quite a kick.

After the meal I made my way to Picturehouse Central to meet up with a friend for the mid-afternoon showing of The Infiltrator, directed by Brad Furman and starring Bryan Cranston.

Before the film started we had time for a pint of fresh and hoppy IPA at the members’ bar.

I wasn’t expecting too much of ‘The Infiltrator’.

I assumed that it would be a run-of-the-mill thriller, hopefully elevated by the presence of the charismatic Cranston.

But it turned out to be very good, far surpassing my admittedly modest expectations.

The script is very well written, with some very sharp and amusing dialogue.

The pacing is just right, and there are some nice visual touches such as overhead shots of Cranston’s undercover Customs official, the distanced downward view accentuating the character’s solitude and vulnerability.

The rest of the case are also very good, particularly John Leguizamo and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor.

But it’s Bryan Cranston’s performance that lingers in your mind afterwards. He has got real depth and screen presence.

After ‘The Infiltrator’ ended, we left the cinema and spent a couple of hours of this warm September evening drinking Dark Star Hophead beers on the pavement outside The Harp pub on Chandos Place.

A sharp-eyed member of the pub’s staff made sure that all of us al fresco drinkers were standing behind a line painted on the pavement so that pedestrians could get past without spilling onto the street.

Related Post: ‘The Post’, Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA)

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It’s all happening today – the Chinese New Year celebrations, Valentine’s Day, and the BAFTA awards.

Signs of all those can be seen in central London, particularly around Covent Garden where we go to Palm Court Brasserie for a suitably romantic meal before heading along to Picturehouse Central to see the eagerly awaited Trumbo.

Usually I find sitting through pre-film trailers to be a dispiriting experience, but today one particular trailer stands out. It’s the trailer for ‘Hail, Caesar!’, the new Coen Brothers film, which looks very funny. Will need to go see it when it opens here in a couple of weeks time.

Bryan Cranston is superb in ‘Trumbo’, playing the main character with an understated power that honours the persecuted screenwriter’s humanity as he outshines and ultimately overcomes the mean-spirited political witch-hunting of the era.

It’s still chilling to be reminded of the humiliation of prison and ostracism that befell so many American citizens during the intolerance of those vindictive years.

On the other hand it’s reassuring that politically liberal films like this can be made today without everyone involved being hounded for their beliefs.

So while Bryan Cranston puts in a performance that is worthy of an Oscar – not that he will get one this year, as it seems that Leonardo DiCaprio’s name is already engraved on it for The Revenant – the rest of the cast are equally memorable.

Helen Mirren is disturbingly convincing as Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnist driven by vanity and political prejudice.

Michael Stuhlbarg is excellent as Edward G. Robinson, playing Robinson with a subtle mix of chutzpah and vulnerability.

John Goodman electrifies the story in a couple of wonderful scenes which delighted the audience at today’s showing, particularly the scene where he pursues a witch-hunting creep out of his office with a baseball bat.

Cranston’s speech at the end of the film is beautifully delivered and very moving, and not too long or drawn-out.

‘Trumbo’ is a great film, surpassing the high expectations I had of it.

Related Post: ‘The Infiltrator’, Picturehouse Central, London

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