The crowds passing through Westminster on Wednesday evening would not have been too surprised to encounter one of the political village's most famous faces, with its trademark thick black spectacles and the lights of the camera crew bouncing off his shiny dome. 
 
 What might have caused alarm, however, was that the BBC's political editor Nick Robinson was in the process of violently stamping on a placard he has just wrested from the hands of anti-war activist. When challenged over this most partial of activities, which was unfortunately captured on camera and uploaded to the internet yesterday, Mr Robinson said he was "not even remotely ashamed". 
 
 Those who watched the BBC's Six O'Clock News may have witnessed the irritation which caused the usually mild mannered correspondent to engage in this moment of rage: the placard wielder had been continually interrupting his broadcast. In the footage Mr Robinson is shown trying to pull apart the sign – which read "Cut the war not the poor" – before stamping on it, while a protester shouts: "You should be ashamed of yourself, mate." 
 
 Confronted after the incident by the camera-wielding activist, Mr Robinson remarked: "I'm not remotely ashamed of myself." But a posting on his blog yesterday evening revealed he has since softened his stance. 
 
 "I have a confession," he wrote. "I grabbed the sign and ripped it up – apparently you can watch video of my sign rage in full glorious technicolour on the web. I lost my temper and I regret that." ||||| The Queen made a rare intervention on the political stage when she expressed the hope that voters will "think very carefully about the future" before the Scottish independence referendum on Thursday. 
 
 As David Cameron prepares to issue a warning in Scotland that a vote for independence will lead to a permanent split from the UK, campaigners for the union welcomed the Queen's remarks as a reminder of the monumental decision facing voters in Scotland. 
 
 The comments by the Queen came as she left Crathie Kirk near her Balmoral estate in Aberdeenshire after the Sunday morning service. The Queen told a well-wisher: "Well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future." 
 
 The Queen's remarks were interpreted by no campaigners as helpful to their cause. They were seen to tally with a warning the prime minister will deliver in Scotland on Monday, on his final visit north of the border before Thursday's vote, that a vote for independence would lead to an irrevocable break with the UK. 
 
 The prime minister will say: "This is a once-and-for-all decision. If Scotland votes yes, the UK will split, and we will go our separate ways for ever." 
 
 Downing Street sources said that Cameron would also have a positive message about the benefits of remaining in the UK. He may refer to a decision by David Beckham to put his name to a long list of celebrities, actors and cultural figures who have signed an open letter urging Scotland to vote no. Organised by the TV historians Tom Holland and Dan Snow, their "stay with us" campaign is due to hold a vigil in Trafalgar Square, London, tonight. 
 
 A series of opinion polls confirmed the two campaigns are in effect neck and neck. An Opinium poll for the Observer found that no was six points ahead with 53% to 47% for yes. A further poll by Panelbase for the Sunday Times put the two campaigns only two points apart at 51% for no and 49% for yes. A further ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph gave yes a more dramatic lead of 54% to 46%, but its significance was played down since its sample was only 700, under the normal threshold of 1,000 voters. 
 
 Alex Salmond said that the "extraordinary manifestations" of support he has encountered during a whistle-stop tour of Scottish towns and cities over the past 72 hours has convinced him he is on the verge of a historic victory that would lead to the collapse of the 307-year-old union. 
 
 Pointing to the Scottish National Party's shock landslide victory in the 2011 Holyrood elections, where it won the first overall majority since devolution in 1999, the first minister told the Guardian: "I sense a momentum which is much greater than that. I experienced that campaign and I knew what was happening – it was great but I see now on the streets of Scotland today – the east end of Glasgow and Dumfries where 500 people arrived out of nowhere to campaign on the bridge over the Nith – these are extraordinary manifestations of people mobilised because they sense the momentum for Scotland; this time of opportunity, this chance of a lifetime." 
 
 Salmond had earlier moved to reassure traditionalists when he said the "Queen and her successors" would remain as head of state in an independent Scotland. He told the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1: "We want to see Her Majesty the Queen as Queen of the Scots. That is a fantastic title and a fantastic prospect." 
 
 The Queen indicated that she is fully seized of the historic importance of the referendum when she spoke about the vote outside Crathie Kirk after a well-wisher joked that they would not mention the referendum. The Queen, who remains above the political fray as a constitutional monarch, observed the proprieties of not endorsing either side in the referendum. 
 
 A Buckingham Palace spokeswoman said: "We never comment on private exchanges or conversations. We just reiterate what the Queen has always said: she maintains her constitutional impartiality. As the Queen has always said, this is a matter for the people of Scotland." 
 
 But the Queen's remarks were warmly welcomed in private by the pro-UK side, who are keen to impress on voters that they will make an irrevocable decision if they vote for independence. In his address, the prime minister will say: "This is a decision that could break up our family of nations and rip Scotland from the rest of the UK. And we must be very clear. There's no going back from this. No re-run." 
 
 The remarks by the Queen came after the palace insisted last week that the monarch, who spends every summer at her Balmoral estate and whose mother was Scottish, was remaining above the fray in the referendum. This followed reports that the Queen was horrified by the prospect that her kingdom may be broken up. 
 
 Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, weighed in last week when he said it "might be handy" if the Queen intervened on behalf of the pro-UK side. Some campaigners for the union have pointed out that in 1977, the year of her silver jubilee, the Queen said in a speech in Westminster Hall: "I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland." 
 
 Salmond insisted that a yes vote was thriving because of a "joyful, liberating and empowering" grassroots campaign. But the yes campaign came under heavy attack after hundreds of pro-independence protesters marched to the BBC Scotland headquarters in Glasgow calling the BBC's political editor, Nick Robinson, a "liar", and demanding he be sacked. 
 
 Robinson clashed with Salmond last week after the BBC journalist pressed the first minister over threats by banks to leave Scotland. The crowd accused the BBC of "killing democracy", claiming in one large banner that Robinson was "a totally corrupt journalist these days, typical of the British Biased Corporation". 
 
 Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former head of communications, tweeted: "had my run-ins with BBC, but organised protests like the one going on now is beyond Tebbit, and not far off Putin. Vote YES for intimidation". Further evidence about the deep misgivings of the UK's largest companies emerged after 78% of company chairmen in FTSE 100 companies said independence would damage the economy, according to a poll by the executive consultancy Korn Ferry. Only a third of the 28 chairmen polled said they were "fully prepared" for a yes vote. 
 
 The centre-right Centre for Policy Studies thinktank warned that Scotland faced a £14bn black hole in its budget, because of an expected slump in North Sea oil forecasts and "the probable flight of a large proportion of the financial services sector from Scotland." 
 
 • This article was amended on 15 September 2014. It mistakenly described Tom Holland as an actor. He is, among other things, a TV historian. This has been corrected. ||||| The Problem With Saints On the lifeless Jackie Robinson biopic 42. Plus, Danny Boyle's twisty Trance. By Wesley Morris on April 11, 2013 
 
 Whenever it is that an icon passes from being human to being a saint is the point at which it's probably too late for a good movie. All you get is the lessons learned and very little of the naturalism or idiosyncrasy or personality that made the person iconic in the first place. Or you get all that courtesy of a great performance, but then there's no filmmaking or storytelling to support it. You rarely get both acting and an angle, the way you did, say, with Walk the Line and Lincoln. It's usually that the subjects mean so much to the filmmakers that they can't bring themselves to take the subjects out of their historical packaging and play with them, lest they lose their value. 
 
 That's the Jackie Robinson situation. In 1950, Robinson played himself in The Jackie Robinson Story, which was basically a hero giving a feel-good book report on himself. He's been in bubble wrap ever since. But after turning down other movies, including one Spike Lee and Denzel Washington wanted to make, Robinson's widow, Rachel, finally said yes. So 66 years after Robinson became the first black major league baseball player, here we are with 42, which has been made with such reverence for Robinson's importance that Robinson is barely there. 
 
 Brian Helgeland (Payback, A Knight's Tale) wrote and directed this movie, which concentrates on Robinson's debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and sometime after the halfway point he lays out his angle. It's Robinson's (Chadwick Boseman) first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, and for each at-bat against the Phillies, Philadelphia manager Ben Chapman (Alan Tudyk) leaves the dugout and proceeds to call him "n----- " the way you'd call your dog into the house. It's a good scene that goes on long enough to leave a simmer in your blood. And after he pops up during his next-to-last at-bat, with Chapman still going, Robinson leaves the plate, steps down into the tunnel beside the dugout, howls out his rage, smashes a bat, and crumples to the ground. 
 
 While he's crumpled, Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford), the Dodgers general manager who hired Robinson, appears and proceeds to explain that his controversial hire can't get mad since that's what the bigots expect. There's too much riding on his player for him to run out of cheeks to turn. (But Robinson already knows this. In one of his first scenes, he calmly but tensely threatens to go elsewhere for gas after the white service station manager refuses to let him use the bathroom.) Rickey's pep talk puts Robinson in the movie's thematic place. His function is only curative: "You're medicine, Jackie." 
 
 42 is a Hollywood movie about American racism in which the objects of that racism must summon their most noble selves. Helgeland, who's white, doesn't imagine how it must have felt being slurred as relentlessly as Robinson was. So Robinson serves as a lesson not in triumph, but in tolerance. This is the sort of movie in which Jackie and Rachel Robinson (Nicole Beharie) don't have to change. White America does. That's great for messaging, but hell on drama. 
 
 All the changing here happens to the players and the management of the Dodgers organization. Helgeland skillfully writes around the problem of how white racism affects non-racist whites. And he's a smart, sensitive-enough writer to make this an interesting, worthy emotional pursuit. The players draft an anti-Robinson petition not long after his arrival, and one by one find themselves changing their minds. Robinson was never a problem for Pee Wee Reese, whom Lucas Black plays, but when the Dodgers wind up in Cincinnati, he shows Rickey a threatening letter someone wrote him and worries that his relatives in Kentucky will go bananas. Then Rickey shows Reese the pounds of hate mail that Robinson gets, Reese goes out on the field, puts his arm around his teammate, and lets the crowd savor the image. Having an actor play Robinson makes sense for realism, but most of the time a piece of cardboard with Robinson's likeness would have done the trick. 
 
 Boseman has very little to do that makes Robinson a character. His best scenes are usually somewhere on the baseball field. The challenge in them for an actor is to find a way to combine Robinson's athleticism with his joy at being an athlete. He puts some cocky comedy into his base stealing and a little bit of sex into the performance. Beharie is a strong, charismatic actor who needs a great role. (Here she's playing a great woman, and that's not the same thing.) Most of the other black characters, like the sports reporter Wendell Smith (Andre Holland), have nothing to them but their goodness. Smith is turned into a glorified butler for Robinson. And there's an embarrassing couple of scenes with a precious tyke who, we're told during the closing credits, will grow up to be Ed Charles, who played for the Mets and Athletics. He explains plays for his mother, but is played by the kind of child actor who gives you cavities. 
 
 Most of the funny and insightful stuff falls to actors like Christopher Meloni, T.R. Knight, Hamish Linklater, Max Gail, and even Tudyk. Ford, meanwhile, turns jowly and growly to play Rickey. He doesn't have the suffocating hardship of upholding a legacy because Helgeland has given him all the self-congratulatory stuff to play. Ford can get high and mighty with all the grandstanding he gets to do because Rickey here is right. He's shamelessly entertaining in chewing everybody out and cheering everybody up. But by lifting up Ford and Rickey, the movie makes Robinson beside the point. 
 
 It's possible that Helgeland is thinking past the matter of racism altogether. A lot of 42 feels like an allegory for how things might go for that first openly gay guy in a major league locker room — all the awkwardness about showering together and sharing rooms, the complaints about not wanting to play with someone who's deemed different, the way that after a season of prolonged exposure everyone's tune changes and the outcast is embraced. But whether Helgeland is thinking about Jackie Robinson or his to-be-determined gay counterpart, 42 ultimately doesn't feel like a sports drama as much as it does an epic commencement speech. 
 
 
 
 Fox Searchlight 
 
 One reason to love Danny Boyle is that we'll never have to put up with a Jackie Robinson movie from him. Or if it comes to that, he'll find an imaginative reason to do it. Last summer, he had James Bond throw Queen Elizabeth out of a helicopter to open the Olympics. He gets off on his irreverence. 
 
 Trance is high-order, film noir nonsense that takes Boyle back to the thrillers he made at the start of his career with John Hodge (he wrote Trance, too), like Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, that were preoccupied with the grimy corners of the psyche. Boyle's no longer a grimy filmmaker. He likes sleek, icy images that seem launched from cannons and slingshots or pushed through syringes. 
 
 Trance concerns an auction-house art heist that goes south when the job's inside man, an auctioneer named Simon (James McAvoy), takes a shot to the head that erases his memory of where he put the Goya painting he helped steal. The ringleader is a guy named Franck (Vincent Cassel), one of those elegant thugs who surrounds himself with a trio of goons that do the bone-breaking while he sips cognac or whatever. When it's clear that Simon suffers from honest-to-goodness amnesia, Franck lets him select a hypnotist to help him retrieve the memory. 
 
 You suspect the movie's up to no good because Rosario Dawson plays the shrink Simon picks. There's no reason to ask us to believe Dawson as a medical professional unless she can turn that belief on its head. Eventually, this woman talks her way into Franck's criminal circle. She argues that Simon doesn't feel safe remembering where he's put the painting because he knows Franck and his friends will just kill him when he does. What ensues is group hypnosis, some sex, and two or three changeups that don't twist the plot so much as reroute and rewire the movie. 
 
 This is Boyle's first movie set entirely in London since 2003's 28 Days Later , and his affinity for affixing his camera to everything speaks to the city's reliance on closed-circuit surveillance. He's working with the editor Jon Harris and his usual cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, and they give the movie the exhilarating attention-deficit disorientation that Boyle has turned into a legible cinematic language. Symmetrical reflections in glass that turn into a living Rorschach, a hypnosis head trip that requires use of an iPad to extend the trip, the vaginal lattice of a highway overpass at night: His eye is manic without ever descending into madness. 
 
 Besides, the script, which Hodge wrote with the science fiction TV writer Joe Ahearne, goes crazy enough. At some point, you don't know whom to trust or what's real or why anybody is doing what they're doing, but McAvoy, Dawson, and Cassel work well together. Dawson is required to put her nude body to incoherent if not gratuitous use, but she's also perfectly plausible when discussing the rare psychological state of extreme suggestibility. Even after the movie has gone off the deep end and into a moral pit, you're not sure whether it makes any sense. By then, Boyle has fried enough of our senses that Simon's extreme suggestibility is contagious.
– Mild-mannered BBC political editor Nick Robinson was transformed into a ball of rage by an anti-war sign being waved in the background as he broadcast from Westminster. Robinson delivered his broadcast calmly, then turned around, grabbed the sign from the protester, tried to rip it apart, and stamped on it, the Independent reports. Robinson later wrote on his BBC blog that he regretted losing his temper and erupting in "sign rage." However, he wrote, "as I explained afterward to the protesters who disrupted my broadcast, there are many opportunities to debate whether the troops should be out of Afghanistan without the need to stick a sign on a long pole and wave it in front of a camera."