Andrew V. McLaglen directs Roger Moore, Anthony Perkins and Michael Parks in this teatime thriller where an eccentric lord leads a diving team against a group of villains holding oil rigs to ransom. 

A bargain bin airport novel given the big screen treatment, this trundles along pleasantly, albeit with very little action. The bulk of the movie consists of talking and sneaking. But what a cast of absolute treats to go talking and sneaking around with for two distractingly old school hours. Moore excels as an anti-Bond; swigging whisky, hating women, doing cross stitch to help him think and leaving the castle estate to his pack of kittens should the rescue mission go tits up. In Moore we trust, the kittens will have to wait to sell off his ancestral pile. In throwaway boy’s own nonsense like this my Bond lives forever.

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Robert Altman directs Keith Carradine, Karen Black and Ned Beatty in this sprawling ensemble following a week of country music, affairs and electioneering. 

The danger with writing this blog is revealing to my half dozen readers that occasionally there’s a bonafide classic that just does nothing for me. The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, E.T. and this. Other people’s favourites and universally lauded critical darlings that genuinely baffle me with their inertness. I usually enjoy a mosaic narrative (Dazed and Confused, Do the Right Thing and Pulp Fiction are among my favourite films) but this proves dawdling and purposeless. It squanders a good cast and some decent original songs on grating, pointless, obvious sequences that bored the skin off me.

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Richard Fleischer directs  Arnold Schwarzenegger, Grace Jones and Sarah Douglas in this violent fantasy romp which sees Conan escort a nubile princess to reclaim a jewel. 

Less emphasis on the epic and more on daft kinetics, this is the most watchable of the Conan series. So it’s silly, and Olivia D’Abo is far far too young to be the Tits & Ass for the lads… it powers along through ornate sets and consistent character design pleasingly. And even with almost endless shots of Arnold’s prime warrior slaying physique, Fleischer still somehow finds room for both Eighties faves Sarah Douglas and Grace Jones to vamp it up proper rotten.

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RZA directs himself, Russell Crowe and Lucy Liu in this wired yet reverent pastiche of retro kung-fu flicks.  

Visually opulent and well cast, this is an amped up, playground run through of all that is great about mad old martial arts flicks. It is a little too jam packed with characters and incidents to ever truly coalesce into a flowing journey. RZA’s vanity casting of himself in the lead role leaves a gargantuan charisma deficit and the jarring use of hip hop language and misogyny tarnish a fair few sequences. Still Russell Crowe and Byron Mann are particularly good value.

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John Madden directs Jessica Chastain, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Michael Stuhlbarg in this political drama about a hard nosed lobbyist who crosses over to the side of gun control. 

This whole lengthy walker / talker orbits around a supposed powerhouse performance by Chastain. Yet she remains an enigma throughout, blurry at her ill defined edges, inhuman… and not in a dastardly way. As an insight into the world of cut throat influence groups it share more with the pulpy Grisham novels Sloane reads in her downtime than say the high watermark passionate exploration of a The Social Network or a Moneyball. That’s the inimitable power Aaron Sorkin brings to his own potentially dull corporate dramas, a power no-one has ever got close to matching, certainly not here. You feel your own knowledge of this lobbying subculture is being affirmed, rather than expanded. Unforgivably though, the twists are foreseeable, especially the final piece of brinkmanship involving a support member who is too good to be cast aside from the main thrust quite so early. Bragging time, I rarely get caught pants down by a narrative switcheroo these days, I’m as cynical and searching as the avatars here are supposed to be. But a movie like this really should try much much harder to at least obfuscate its surprise coup de grace to battle hardened eyes. Not awful, merely a slick fail.

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