Welcome to the month of March in which there is a tonne of films vying for your pocket money at the theatres. I’ll do my best to direct your spending – this week alone there are ten films coming out on general release.
First up is Focus, a conman meets congirl story starring box office magnet Will Smith and Wolf Of Wall Street’s Margot Robbie – the early word is not favourable.
Still Alice earned its lead Julianne Moore an Oscar recently as a linguistics professor diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, while Mortdecai is a comedy starring Jonny Depp as a debonair art dealer who hopes to recover lost Nazi gold. It’s confidently being dubbed ‘the worst film of 2015’.
The master of theme park macabre, Tim Burton, returns to our big screens this week with Big Eyes – a film that dramatises the legal difficulties surrounding the work of ’50s painter Margaret Keane whose husband for many years was believed to be the artist behind her immensely popular painting. While Ewan Mcgregor also makes a return with a tepidly received prison drama-cum-heist movie, Son Of A Gun.
Finally, this week boasts two sci-fi films that concern themselves with the future of robotics and artificial intelligence: writer Alex Garland (The Beach) makes his directorial debut with Ex-Machina, a drama that blurs the distinction between man and machine as a young programmer is invited to take the ultimate Turing test. If you were limited to one sci-fi this week, I’d go for Garland’s. Read this week’s review of District 9 director Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie to find out why.
Elsewhere, Cinemateket is running Ireland On Film – a short season of Irish cinema from the last decade. Films include Calvary (screening March 5 at 19:15), a tragicomedy in which Brendan Gleeson portrays a priest given one week to live before he’s murdered for sex crimes he never committed, and Good Vibrations (screening March 7, 19:15) which concerns a man who opened a record store in 1970s Belfast during ‘the Troubles’ and became a punk legend. See dfi.dk/Filmhuset for the full listings.
