Cinema new releases for Friday 16th March - our film expert Jason Best reviews the best movies coming out including Peter Rabbit...
Peter Rabbit
Don’t expect anything the least bit twee about this live-action/CGI animation update of Beatrix Potter’s classic children’s tale. With a wisecracking James Corden voicing the mischievous young rabbit, it is be a riotously anarchic, boisterously funny affair. Listen out for Margot Robbie, Elizabeth Debicki, and Daisy Ridley as Peter’s siblings Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-Tail. ****
Tomb Raider
Oscar-winning Swedish actress Alicia Vikander leaps and bounds into the role of impossibly lithe, incredibly posh English adventurer Lara Croft in this eagerly awaited action movie reboot for the videogame icon previously played by Angelina Jolie. Back in the early 2000s, Jolie’s Lara lived in a stately home, but we find Vikander’s heroine slumming it in East London as a cash-strapped bike courier before she gets down to the business of solving the puzzling disappearance seven years earlier of her aristocratic archaeologist father (Dominic West). And when her search takes her to a mysterious island off the coast of Japan, Vikander’s Lara gets ample opportunity to display her derring-do in a series of hair-raising escapades and escapes that would have Indiana Jones doffing his hat in admiration. ****
Mary Magdalene
Rooney Mara takes on the role of one of the most enigmatic and controversial figures in the Bible, Mary Magdalene, the young woman who was among the leading followers of Jesus of Nazareth, and a key witness to his crucifixion and resurrection. Joaquin Phoenix plays Jesus and Chiwetel Ejiofor is the Apostle Peter in this slow moving but stimulating spiritual drama from Garth Davis, maker of 2016’s Oscar-nominated Lion. ***
Peter Rabbit pic: Sony Pictures; Tom Raider and Mary Magdalene: Alamy Stock Photo;
