Money Monster (2016)

A finance news presenter of the zany sort you might see on a morning talkshow is taken hostage live on television and saving him requires a producer to unravel the mystery of an overnight $800 million drop in shareholder value in the mega Ibis corporation; luckily for the hostage, solving the mystery is a brief matter of joining two enormous dots in a movie that eschews satire and its potential as a corporate thriller, opting instead for cartoony, highly unlikely drama.

★★☆☆☆

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The Visit (1964)

Not the M Night Shyamalan thriller but also something of a garish fairytale, this is the 1964 movie version of Friedtich Dürrenmatt's 1956 tragicomic play about a fabulously wealthy woman who, like The Count of Monte Cristo, returns to her childhood home to exact revenge, but unlike The Count of Monte Cristo she makes her past and her motives crystal clear, announcing an unsettling proposition at a dinner party thrown by the town in her honour: she will give the townspeople $2 million dollars if they acknowledge the injustice she suffered as a 17 year old and kill Miller, the man who put her 'in a family way' before conspiring to run her out of town — money corrupts is the main message, put simply, but in light of recent real-life retrospective litigations, there is other food-for-thought.

★★★☆☆

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The Million Pound Note (US: Man With A Million) (1954)

Two mischevious British toffs make a penniless American in London, Henry Adams (played by a rather dreamy Gregory Peck), the subject of a bet, handing him a million pound note and watching as high society reacts around him, in this enjoyable comedy, a little bit "Brewster's Millions", a little bit Trading Places, based on a Mark Twain short story.

★★★★☆

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