Madame Bovary for modern marital mores
GustaveFlaubert was one of the great literary stylists which makes his work essentially unfilmable. Little wonder, then, that the director Anne Fontaine has chosen to film not Flaubert in the original, but the graphic novelist Posy Simmonds’s modern-day take on Madame Bovary, Gemma Bovery (15) .
You know the plot: Gemma (Gemma Arterton) and her husband Charlie (Jason Flemyng) are content, but she can’t help feeling that something is missing from her life. Enter the local rich kid, Hervé de Bressigny (Niels Schneider), and all of a sudden Gemma knows what it is...
Matt Damon is as handy as they come in The Martian (12) . He plays Mark Watney, an astronaut stranded on the red planet after an expedition goes wrong. Soon enough he has worked out how to extract water from rocket fuel and even how to grow food in an oxygen-free environment.
Given it’s directed by Ridley Scott, The Martian is surprisingly optimistic. There are no acid-dripping alien sand Drew Goddard’ s clever script and Damon’s goodhumoured performance mean it evades the soliloquising tedium you might fear.
Far worse than we had any right to expect are The Walk (PG) – in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt pretends to be a French highwire artist by adopting a Peter Sellers-style accent – and Life (15) – in which Dane DeHaan pretends to be James Dean by imitating Philip Seymour Hoffman imitating Truman Capote.
Bad sight of the week
comes 10 minutes intonto Frankenstein in (18) , when n the monsterr picks up a cra- nial saw and… … But no.
We don’t’t want to go there, re, do we? Sufficientcient to say that evenn with the talents of Danny Huston and Carrie-Anne Moss as the husband-and-wife team who knock up their newborn from a few spare parts lying around their hospital, this gratuitously gruesome movie, with Xavier Samuel, left, is a mess.
Crimson Peak (15) is gory, too, but at least Guillermo del Toro’s picture looks a treat. Shot in russets and golds, and boasting some magnificent CGI work, it’s a kind of 19th-century Hammer Horror starring Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain.
As shot by ace cinematographer Roger Deakins, Sicario (15) looks a treat.t But even Emily Bl Blunt, left, can’t save this confused and confusing tal tale of a black o ops drugs bust f from being a b bad trip.
And don’t go anywhere near A Walk In The WoodsWo (15) , a am movie of interest on only because it proves th that 79-year-old Robert Redford, playing author Bill Bryson, can still stand erect while wearing a backpack.
If that sounds drama-free, then get a load of Irrational Man (12)
, the latest in Woody Allen’s woeful attempts to convince himself that he’s Dostoyevsky.
Joaquin Phoenix plays a flabby philosophy prof who poisons a judge because, well, he’ll tell you himself in one of the movie’s interminable voiceovers. Go back to comedy Woody.