Casino Royale (2006)

From its opening scene, a vertiginous dash through a construction site, the pace and excitement of this 2006 film of Ian Fleming's first Bond book never lets up, except perhaps for the card game where an effort is made to keep things moving with stairwell fisticuffs, a shower trauma, some defibrillator nonsense, but James has a card game to play and so the action is interrupted by really quite ridiculous scenes of the agent with a licence to kill repeatedly returning to the card table, coolly adjusting his cuff while a look of muted surprise appears on the face of bad guy Mads Mikkelsen.

★★★★★

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The Salvation (2014)

This Danish production set in an Old West with computer-generated stormy skies spends far too much of its running time demonstrating just how bad the bad guy, Henry Delarue, is - he hunts and tortures his brother's killer, hunts and batters a mute woman, kills off the townsfolk two-by-two (you won't care) and extorts from them their land deeds - so when revenge is finally metered out in a rush at the last minute, it no longer even matters by whom: it is simply the long overdue comeuppance needed to end the dreariness.

★★☆☆☆

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Dark Shadows (2012)

For those like me who watch this unaware of the gothic tv soap opera "Dark Shadows" that was popular in the 70s, Tim Burton's big screen adaptation with Johnny Depp yet again sporting a deathly pallor as vampire Barnaby Collins is an elaborately produced, occasionally funny but ultimately bemusing oddity; and now, having googled and read up about the tv series "Dark Shadows", I can in full knowledge confirm this tribute is an elaborately produced, occasionally funny but ultimately bemusing oddity.

★★★☆☆

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