ALSO SHOWING
Peter Rabbit (PG)
This tone-deaf adaptation of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit doesn’t so much capture the spirit of the beloved children’s picture book as take the basic idea hostage, sentence it to death and jump up and down on its grave. Voiced by a none-more-irritating James Cordon, Peter has been transformed into a petulant, irredeemable little rat-bag whose behaviour tips over from the mischievous disobedience of Potter’s book into sadistic, sociopathic narcissism. Less like a family-friendly cinematic treat for Easter than a solid argument for myxomatosis.
Tomb Raider (12A)
Rebooted as a video game in 2013, it was only going to be a matter of time before Hollywood had another crack at turning Tomb Raider into a viable movie franchise. The Angelina Jolie films from the early 2000s felt like relics even as they were being released, thanks to the way she was forced into fight a losing battle with a style of filmmaking more suited to elevating co-stars Daniel Craig and Gerard Butler to the A-list than figuring out how to make Lara Croft a robust heroine. That’s something the new film attempts to resolve by casting a ripped and ready-torumble Alicia Vikander as Croft and taking a leaf out of the grittier playbooks of Bourne and Bond. No longer dressed like a Playboy Bunny on safari, this Lara bleeds, broods and grapples with the reality of killing someone with her bare hands. Unfortunately she’s also been dully conceived as a punky trust fund rebel with unresolved daddy issues, something the film explores at great length by sending her on an origins-establishing mission to find out what really happened to her missing-presumed-dead father (Dominic West). Liberally ransacking the plots and set-pieces of various Indiana Jones movies along the way, Norwegian director Roar Uthaug has no sense of how to make this distinctive, running through one generic action scene after another and sabotaging Vikander’s efforts to take the role seriously by making the world around her either too corny or too bland.
Mary Magdalene (12A)
Starring Rooney Mara as Mary and Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus, this ultraserious appeal to the faithful and agnostic alike makes an admirable attempt to put a feminist spin on the gospels by moving its eponymous protagonist to the centre of the story and reclaiming her reputation from centuries of patriarchal damnation. Too bad then that while Mara brings her customary intensity to the role, she’s not given much to do apart from gaze beatifically at the enigmatic Phoenix.
Annihilation (15) Alex Garland’s Netflix-debuting follow-up to Ex Machina casts Natalie Portman as a military trained biologist recruited to investigate the “shimmer” – an alien-controlled area of national parkland that has caused the death of everyone who’s entered it, including, possibly, her soldier husband (Oscar Isaac). What follows mixes body horror with trippy mediations on the nature of existence.
The Square (15)
Winner of the Palme D’OR at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Ruben Östlund’s modern art satire picks at some pretty low-hanging fruit, but there fun to be had in the way it interrogates the moral commitment of artists and institutions intent on making great social claims for their work. The title refers to a new work intended as a “a sanctuary of trust and understanding”, values from which Stockholm museum curator Christian (Claes Bang – a dead ringer for Pierce Brosnan) finds himself straying as he enacts an ill-judged plan to retrieve his recently stolen mobile phone. ■