Chaos Walking
March is a good month for Tom Holland fans. As well as starring in Cherry, Holland can be seen in Chaos Walking, a high-concept science-fiction action movie from Doug Liman, director of Edge of Tomorrow and Jumper. Daisy Ridley plays an astronaut who is unfortunate enough to crash-land on this blokey dystopia and has to escape the clutches of a criminal mayor played by Mads Mikkelsen. Based on Patrick Ness’s award-winning Young Adult novels, Chaos Walking has been strolling towards our screens for years: principal photography finished in 2017, and there have been reshoots and delays ever since.
The Courier
Benedict Cumberbatch has been tipped as a potential James Bond, but in The Courier, he plays one of Bond’s less glamorous real-life counterparts. In 1960, just before Sean Connery signed up to be 007, a salesman named Greville Wynne was recruited by MI6 and the CIA to carry Soviet secrets back from Moscow. In the film, his wife (Jessie Buckley) wants him to abandon this increasingly dangerous mission, but Wynne believes that only his espionage can defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis. Directed by Dominic Cooke (On Chesil Beach), The Courier has a “fascinating” story, says Benjamin Lee at the Guardian, but Cumberbatch’s performance sells it. “He’s not always found his perfect fit in recent years, but this feels like the kind of role that could potentially return him to the awards conversation in a film that Oscar voters will lap up.”
Released on 19 March in the US, Canada, and Brazil, and on 25 March.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League
Justice League flopped when it came out in 2017, but fans of its director, Zack Snyder, argued that he wasn’t to blame. Snyder had to drop out before the film was finished due to a bereavement, and Joss Whedon, the director of the first two Avengers blockbusters, was brought in to complete it. The result was a messy compromise with a confusing plot, a muddled tone, and a notorious scene in which Henry Cavill’s mustache had been removed using CGI. But would Snyder’s own mean and moody version have been any better? A lot of people thought so and campaigned for the release of “the Snyder Cut.” Amazingly, they got their wish. More amazingly, Snyder’s re-edit cost an extra £50 million ($70 million), and it has a running time of four hours. Let’s hope he sorted out Cavill’s upper lip if nothing else.
