Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Crime 101

Director – Bart Layton – 2025 – US, UK – Cert. 15 – 140m

*****

high class lone operator thief and the rigorously analytical cop on his trail cross paths with a disillusioned insurance saleswoman to the wealthy – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 13th

As coloured dots come into focus, they are revealed to be the lights of a Los Angeles freeway upside down, an image which bookends the movie. Davis (Chris Hemsworth) exercise in his sparse apartment before donning a suit. Detective “Lou” Lubesnik (Mark Ruffalo) shaves in his small, untidy bathroom. Sharon Coombs (Halle Berry), in her bathroom, goes through the laborious task of applying make-up.

This is essentially a four-hander – more of the fourth character later on.

Davis is a lone operator who thinks through his proposed robberies beforehand in such a way as to ensure that no-one gets hurt. LAPD investigator Lubesnik has become obsessed with a string of robberies he believes committed by the same person, to the detriment, as his colleagues and superiors see it, of his regular police work. Sharon works for a high end insurance company who have been stringing her along for years with hollow promises of board membership to use her now fading good looks to close sales to wealthy clients.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Green Knight

Director – David Lowery – 2021 – UK – Cert. 15 – 130m

***1/2

A retelling of the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from Arthurian mythology – out in cinemas on Friday, September 24th

This immediately sets out its stall with a woman leading a horse out of a courtyard and Gawain (Dev Patel) being awoken by a bucket of water on Christmas Day thrown by his lover Essel (Alicia Vikander) in a building which may or may not be a brothel. He attends mass with her, then goes back to his mother (Sarita Choudhury) who is going to pass attending the King’s court this Christmas Day.

The colour blind casting here has the good sense to cast Gawain and his mother in a similar ethnicity, which is certainly consistent and avoids the problems it produced in The Personal History Of David Copperfield (Armando Ianucci, 2019).

Whatever expectations of straightforward narrative the unwary moviegoer might have had from watching the trailer have been dashed. Much of the rest of the film is similarly oblique. While there is a basic underlying structure of a quest, what happens in the course of that quest comprises serial events and incidents en route that seemingly bear scant relation to the quest itself.… Read the rest