Gwyneth Paltrow

Seemingly late in the game of David Koepp’s Mortdecai, the eponymous character (played by Johnny Depp) asks his wife, “Are you quite finished with your barrage of insults?” It’s an apt question for the film itself, a cataclysmically unfunny, unbelievably tedious disaster of baffling misjudgments and multiple career lows that feels as long as Shoah, and only a little less harrowing. No such luck, though, as the film goes on for another 25 minutes. It then ends on people about to throw up. Also apt.

A Perfect Murder is anything but. Far from a complete misfire, Andrew Davis starts things off very nicely and definitely manages to cover some of the cracks in the armor with some slick direction and an impressive cast, but the script is woefully uneven, even unsure of itself at times. It makes for a decent thriller but all three leads have been in far better movies than this.

The most unsettling element of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (which is, by any metric, a deeply discomfiting film) is its plausibility. The film has a clinical approach that underlines how possible its central crisis is and how powerless we would be to stop it. The film has a global scope and an all-star cast, but what resonates most is the idea that this could happen. Anywhere. Anytime. To any one of us.

Iron Man 3 Directed by Shane Black Written by Drew Pearce & Shane Black USA, 2013 Fun has become a slightly forgotten commodity in the summer blockbuster, with many studios and filmmakers now inspired by the efforts of directors like Christopher Nolan to be as grim as possible. The modern superhero often has to be …

Contagion Written by Scott Z. Burns Directed by Steven Soderbergh US, 2011 The big news behind Contagion is its star-studded cast: Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, John Hawkes, Marion Cotillard and Bryan Cranston.  While the performances are exceptional, perhaps lost in the name-dropping is director Steven Soderbergh, who navigates skillfully …