Tuner      Director: Daniel RoherCert: 15AStarring: Leo Woodall, Dustin Hoffman, Havana Rose Liu, Lior Raz, Tovah FeldshuhRunning Time: 1 hr 47 minsHere is an old-school thriller – the sort they don’t make any more – that makes cunning use of two fine actors born 59 years apart. Leo Woodall, so good in The White Lotus and Nuremburg, plays Niki, the titular piano tuner, a man with perfect pitch and painful oversensitivity to everyday sound. Dustin Hoffman is Harry Horowitz, the young man’s mentor, and a friend of every piano in New York City. Tovah Feldshuh, a Broadway veteran, offers strong support as Harry’s long-suffering wife. It would be a pleasure to sit through two hours of those three actors doing nothing else but bat back Daniel Roher and Robert Ramsey’s gently amusing dialogue. Now 88, Hoffman remains as sharp in his timing as he was when jousting with Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, close to 60 years ago. Woodall, whose good looks may distract from his quirky talent, knows when to assert and when to let the older man boss the scene.Unfortunately, there must be a plot, and as is so often the case these days it involves splinters of the Russian mafia. Early on, Niki, whose superhearing allows him to sense the movement of tumblers in locks, helps Harry open a safe to which he has lost the combination. Sometime later, when working in a posh house, he, a bit too coincidentally, encounters beefy types attempting their own bit of entirely innocent – we’ll see about that, shall we? – safe breaking. Soon he is tied into the gang and, in need of money to pay Harry’s medical bills, finds himself helping them play Robin Hood among the super-rich of the Upper East Side.The gangster stuff ultimately becomes overheated. Niki’s slide into the dark side is as implausibly sudden as his moral rationalisations are hard to wear. Rather better is the tentative romance he starts with Havana Rose Liu’s gifted composer, but we are always aware those two strands are bound to fatally tangle.For all the unfortunate messiness of the film’s later stages, Tuner, shot energetically by Lowell A Meyer, remains engaging throughout thanks to consistently original performances and notably witty dialogue. These are fleshy characters with eccentric motivations who could easily have breathed air in the postclassical cinema of the United States in the 1970s. Well worth chasing down.In cinemas in Derry and Belfast from Friday, May 29th. Across Ireland from Friday, June 5th