Rosamund Pike

Saltburn

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Oliver relaxes in black tie at Saltburn

The music in Saltburn tells you a lot of what you need to know about the movie. Starting with Zadok the Priest and ending with Sophie Ellis Bextor singing Murder on the Dancefloor, this is a big, gaudy, fun switchback that surely would have been made in Technicolor if the process was still about. A superheated noirish romp is what you get either way. The plot is simple but it plays with expectations about who exactly is zooming who. Poor little rich boy Felix (Jacob Elordi) befriends poor little poor boy Oliver (Barry Keoghan) at Oxford University, where Felix is a student as if by right and scholarship boy Oliver is there on … Read more

Radioactive

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Marie Curie in the lab

Radioactive is a biopic, and Marie Curie is its subject. An interesting proposition – most people know the name Curie but who knows anything about the actual woman? She discovered radiation, or radium, or X rays, or something, the general level of ignorance about Curie’s life making the default of the biopic – leaping from one headline event to the next – impossible. It sets writer Jack Thorne, director Marjane Satrapi and, to a slightly lesser extent, actor Rosamund Pike free to do what they want. And what they want to do is celebrate the woman as a force of nature, a scientific marvel, a tireless worker and an iconoclast who took on the … Read more

I Care a Lot

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Peter Dinlage and Rosamund Pike

You used to see plenty of films like I Care a Lot in 1990s. In the slipstream of Quentin Tarantino’s first burst of success there was a glut of movies with a “who’s zooming who” plot playing out in an “only in the movies” universe of smart talk, skull-cracking violence, hot women, cool men, gunplay and cars. Joe Carnahan – one of the best of the bunch of writer/directors working the territory – summed it up well in the title of his 1998 debut, Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane. There was a real sense of writers and directors having a lot of fun. Sometimes more than the audience. I Care a Lot’s writer/director … Read more

Fracture

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Rosamund PIke and Ryan Gosling

Anthony Hopkins plays the cat to Ryan Gosling’s mouse in this glossy thriller from Gregory Hoblit, whose CV (including 1996’s Primal Fear and 2002’s Hart’s War) demonstrates he’s a slick journeyman. Hopkins is the wealthy Irish-American engineer who’s flagrantly killed his wife but has so arranged things that the case against him appears to be falling apart in the courtroom, in spite of the fact he was found with the weapon in his hand and has fessed up. Can public prosecutor Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling) nail him? The film is more a howdunit than a whodunit, and ingenious enough, though Fracture does come with its own faultlines. There’s simply not enough Hopkins, and … Read more