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Film Review: Tomb Raider
★★★☆☆ Positioned as a prequel to the films from the early 2000s, and similarly based on the hugely popular video game, Roar Uthaug’s Tomb Raider is an attempt to explain the origins of Lara Croft. Overall, it’s an enjoyable watch, but the weak script inevitably lets it down, and what could have been high-camp fun…
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Film Review: Ready Player One
★★★☆☆ There are few directors other than Steven Spielberg that could direct a film like Ready Player One. Based on the novel by Ernest Cline, it’s a story that rides the current slipstream of nostalgia for 1980s pop culture as well as picking up on the recent shift towards a world in which geek is chic…
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DVD Review: Legend of the Mountain
★★★★★ The scholar Ho Qinqyun (Chun Shih) is sent to General Han (Yueh Sun) to copy the Mundra Sutra, a powerful magic text. However, on arriving at Han’s apparently abandoned fortress, Ho meets Madam Wang (Rainbow Hsu) and her beautiful daughter Melody (Feng Hsu), who harbours a preternatural interest in the Mundra Sutra. Chinese director…
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Criterion Review: The Age of Innocence
★★★★☆ In 1870s New York, Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) prepares to marry the sweet-natured Mary Welland (Winona Ryder). But while their wealthy families look forward to consolidating wealth and influence through the match, Archer’s eye is drawn by the disgraced European aristocrat Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer). Arguably the greatest living American director, Martin Scorsese’s…
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Film Review: The Square
★★★★★ Swedish writer and director Ruben Östlund offers up another skin-crawling, hilarious study of the male ego battling against its own lack of self-awareness with The Square, winner of last year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure won great acclaim for its deliciously awkward portrayal of a young father who…
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Banking on a box office hit
There was a time when betting sites would only take punts related to the most popular sports like football, horse-racing and boxing. Today, betting now covers a number of niches and industries, and it seems that there’s a betting market for almost everything you could ever think of. You want to bet on which political…
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DVD Review: The Barefoot Contessa
★★★★☆ At the funeral of Hollywood ingenue Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner), the mourners recall their time with her. Among them are world-weary director Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart), slimy studio shill Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien) and amoral socialite Alberto Bravano (Marius Goring). Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa is at once a deeply satirical depiction of Hollywood…
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Film Review: A Prominent Patient
★★★☆☆ The always interesting Karel Roden is the MVP in Julius Ševčík’s A Prominent Patient, playing Czechoslovakian diplomat Jan Masaryk in this handsomely mounted Czech answer to a certain Oscar-winning Gary Oldman drama. This divergence comes in the very crux of A Prominent Patient, and indeed inspires its English-language title (for use in territories where…
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DVD Review: Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
★★★☆☆ Hedy Lamarr is often remembered as “the most beautiful woman in the world” and one of the most glamorous stars to ever grace the silver screen. Her stunning looks and alluring screen presence offered her a successful Hollywood career, before personal tribulations and wide known controversy triggered an early retirement. Filmmaker Alexandra Dean explores…
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DVD Review: La Prisonnière
★★★★☆ Re-released on DVD and Blu-ray this week, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s final film, the S&M-themed La Prisonnière, is a riveting melodrama which shows up the Fifty Shades of Grey series for the Mumsnet version of kink that it is. Josée (Élisabeth Wiener), a television editor in a relationship with the older artist Gilbert (Bernard Fresson), one…
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