Review: Tomb Raider (2018)

* *
Director: Roar Uthaug
Starring: Alicia Vikander

File this one under "Movies You've Already Forgotten About, Even Though They Only Came Out A Few Months Ago," and with good reason. Tomb Raider is a forgettable adventure movie that forgets the key thing that tends to make adventure movies successful - it's not very much fun. This is a movie with a plot that centers on a giant tomb that is full of elaborate puzzles that need to be solved in order for the players to survive and it somehow manages to be mostly boring. It never had to be great, it never had to be groundbreaking, it didn't even need to stray too far from its video game origins, but it needed to be entertaining and, save for a moment or two scattered throughout, it fails. It is, at least, better than last year's tomb raiding movie The Mummy, but if you've seen The Mummy then you know that that's pretty faint praise.

Review: The Danish Girl (2015)

* * 1/2
Director: Tom Hooper
Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Alicia Vikander

I can't help but wonder how much better The Danish Girl could have been if it was actually about Lili Elbe. In its present form, The Danish Girl is the sort of standard issue prestige picture Hollywood typically resorts to when it finds itself trying to grapple with the plight of the "other": handsomely mounted, polite and playing it safe narratively, and using a character that better reflects the sensibility of the people making the movie to act as the lens through which the minority character's story is told. This is Lili Elbe's story by way of Gerda Wegener. It's so much Gerda Wegener's story that she is the "Danish girl" of the title, referred to as such by another character. She's the character we meet first. She's the character we see last. The distinction between "lead" and "supporting" performances for the Oscars has always been a bit sketchy, but Alicia Vikander winning as supporting actress for this film renders the distinction entirely meaningless.

Review: Ex Machina (2015)

* * * 1/2
Director: Alex Garland
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac

Word of advice: if an eccentric (and possibly insane) billionaire invites you to spend a week at his isolated, Bond villain style lair, even under the guise of it being the prize in a contest, don't go. Just don't. Nothing good will happen there. Especially if there are robots involved. Someone is going to die, there's no way around it. Best case scenario, you spend a week on an estate so vast that it takes over two hours to travel the length of it by helicopter, yet feels as claustrophobic as a prison cell. It makes for a bad vacation - but a pretty solid science fiction psychological thriller in the hands of writer/director Alex Garland.