Venom: The Last Dance
(15) 109mins
★★★☆☆
Tom Hardy returns as Eddie Brock for this last instalment in the Venom trilogy
"SCIENCE is sacrifice" declares Juno Temple’s Dr Teddy Payne, a UFO geek who works in a secret underground lab researching alien life. But not at the expense of an entertaining Marvel storyline. Tom Hardy is back as the symbiote Eddie Brock for this last instalment in the Venom trilogy. And it’s a great fun finale.
Half good-looking guy, (I’ve won sexiest man awards, Eddie quips), half genial but grotesque monster, the intertwined duo are now carrying the Codex, a key to other worlds. But evil Knull, the creator of symbiotes, wants it back. We find our tangled twosome in Mexico, embarking on a road trip to New York.
They’re being pursued by both military investigator General Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and a rampaging Xenophage. The monster can track the location of the Codex and has been dispatched to retrieve it, while Strickland wants to destroy it. Both predators will ultimately hunt to kill.
Emilia Perez
(15) 132mins
★★★★☆
Emilia Perez is a Spanish musical-crime drama
IT’S rare to watch anything these days that feels entirely original – but this Spanish musical-crime drama about a menacing Mexican cartel leader who hires a paralegal to help him undergo gender reassignment surgery - comes close to achieving it. Directed by Jaques Audiard, the boundary-pushing screenplay with its spoken and sung dialogue would be so at home on the stage, at the end you almost expect the cast to appear for a curtain call.
The Room Next Door
(12A) 107mins
★★★☆☆
Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton star in The Room Next Door
LEGENDARY Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language debut, is an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel, What Are You Going Through. It stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton as old friends who reunite in a crisis. Ex-war reporter Martha (Swinton), diagnosed with terminal cancer, is grappling with the expectation that she must fight her illness by any means.
