Jude Law – The Magnificent 60s

Eden (2025) ****

By all accounts this should be a stinker. Colossal box office flop without little potential redemption in the form of critical accolades. Mis-sold as a horror survival thriller with too upscale a cast for that strategy to work. And yet it gives the likes of After the Hunt and Roofman an object lesson is how to make unlikeable characters appealing.

There’s no great secret. Just don’t hide anything. Make your characters upfront from the outset and let them roll the dice without artifice. Solve any puzzles. Set out your stall fairly and go with it. And you know what, put any random characters anywhere and you’ll trigger a battle for power.

This would be in the vein of Lord of the Flies (1963), Robinson Crusoe (1997 the most recent version) and Cast Away (2000), except the characters here are on a remote island by choice, sold on the notion of getting away from a civilization which is in a bad way, this being 1932 and the world in a spiral of financial depression and rising fascism.

Wannabe philosopher Ritter (Jude Law), determined to change the world, is narked when, three years into his sojourn on Galapagos, his hardly idyllic isolation with partner Dore (Vanessa Kirby) is interrupted by the arrival of fanboy Heinz (Daniel Bruhl), wife Margret (Sydney Sweeney) and ill son Harry (Jonathan Tittel).

Somewhat surprised at the unfriendly welcome, Heinz would be astonished to learn that Ritter suggests they go live in, unknown to them, one of the worst spots on the island, assuming they won’t survive and he can go back to peace and quiet. But the newcomers have come prepared for hardship and build a home and convert a spring into a home-made pool.

A grudging truce is shattered by the arrival of the Baroness (Ana de Armas), her two lovers Rudolph (Felix Kammerer) and Robert (Toby Wallace), and her wildly ambitious plans to build a luxury hotel. Worse, she’s determined to seize power, forcing those further down the society tree to bend the knee, and if her sex appeal doesn’t achieve that purpose, then she’ll take the old-fashioned route. Heinz kisses her outstretched hand but Ritter refuses. She’s a particularly ruthless specimen and when her supply of food runs out just steals from Heinz’s horde then has the audacity to invite him to a meal featuring the stolen food.

Her plan to set Ritter and Heinz against each other, her barbed tongue a singular weapon, only results in them forming an alliance. While it’s obvious it’s not going to end well, three sequences in particular are distinctly brutal.

Along the way, facades are broken. The Baroness has invented her title. Hunger is all it takes for Ritter to shift from his avowed vegetarianism leaving Dore is appalled. Her beloved donkey is killed. Heinz has to face up to the fact that Margret only married him to get away from home. After Heinz and Ritter conspire against the Baroness, Margret and Dore conspire against Ritter.

It’s about 15 minutes too long, the seeming need to wrap up the tale unnecessary, but the rest of it is a joy to watch. There’s one absolute cracker of a sequence. While Margret is giving birth alone and threatened by feral wild dogs, the Baroness pointedly ignores her plight, not surprising since she has more important matters on her mind, namely her lovers looting of Heinz’s stores.

I had not expected much in the way of performances. Daniel Bruhl (Rush, 2013) would at least be solid, but after Black Rabbit (2025) I thought Jude Law would be way over the top and the two actresses, struggling for critical acceptance, way out of their depth. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Jude Law goes back to the quiet brooding intensity that made him a star in the first place. Ana de Armas (Ballerina, 2025) steals the show as the arch manipulator, her mind quick enough to rescue any dire situation. Sydney Sweeney (Anyone But You, 2023) turns her screen persona on its head, famed cleavage kept under cover, as the stalwart, almost puritanical, wife.

While this might seem a bit of a come-down for Oscar-winning director Ron Howard after box office and critical hits like The Da Vinci Code (2006) and A Beautiful Mind (2002) and making do with stars of a lower marquee class than Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and in their day Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson and Jim Carrey, he’s tackled similar obsession before with In the Heart of the Sea (2015).

And he’s great with the cast, knocks over-acting on the head, so that every performance looks perfectly pitched and in keeping with the characters. The directing, too, is spot-on. Powerful scenes, such as the Baroness’s failed seduction of a millionaire explorer and a poisoning, are played in a low key. Written by Howard and Noah Pink (Tetris, 2023)

A shade too long, as I said, but several cuts above the likes of After the Hunt, Roofman and One Battle after Another.

What used to be called a sleeper.

Catch it on Amazon.

Black Rabbit (2025) ***

I’ve never been a big fan of either Jude Law (Firebrand, 2023) or Jason Bateman (Game Night, 2018) so I admit I’m coming to this Netflix series with some hesitation. Despite his deuce of Oscar nominations I’ve never been convinced by Jude Law as an actor – he always seems to me one of the actors who “acts.” And sticking a beard on Jason Bateman and growing his hair long does not turn him into a badass. He’s directing himself here, at least for the two opening episodes, so I’m not sure he’s cracked that skill either.

And I can’t be the only one fed up with these movies or series that start at the end. You get some decent piece of action – here a robbery – and no sooner have you become interested than the action stops dead and up pops the legend “one month earlier” or “one week earlier” or “one day earlier” as if someone has got it into their heads that that automatically adds a hefty dose of tension.

So, basically, this looks like some sort of whodunit. Not revolving around murder as would normally be the case. But around the aforementioned robbery which has the hallmarks of an inside job. Possibly the finger won’t point at Jake Friedkin (Jude Law) who is after all the restaurant co-owner. More likely, you’d suspect his hustler brother Vince (Jason Bateman) who you learn in short order has stolen his father’s collection of rare coins, taken out loans against the family property, killed a guy and owes $140,000 to loan sharks.

But that last large debt brings Jake solidly into the frame. He’s had to, according to one of those unwritten laws that get trotted out at convenient times in gangster pictures, assume his brother’s debt. Worse, he’s not able to pay his own bills, a born hustler, has his eye on a bigger prize and just has to raise the presumably insignificant sum of $5 million to set up another more upmarket operation in a building built by Mies van der Rohe (famous architect in case you don’t know).

He’s planning to take his head chef Roxie (Amaka Okafur) with him so you’d think she wouldn’t bear a grudge. But, in fact, she’s pretty pissed off at her boss because he’s taken no action to prevent the sexual predatory activities of his partner Wes (Sope Dirisu), a successful recording artist who drinks the place dry (of high-priced champagne I should add). Wes has raped bartender Anna (Abbey Lee) and she’s been sacked and already taking revenge on TikTok.

*Hey guys, I’d just like to point out that two guys running ain’t exactly poster material.*

Jake has hired Wes’s interior designer girlfriend Estelle (Cleopatra Coleman) to give the new place a decent lick of paint, but Wes, who’s not in on the deal, has discovered his partner is soon going to be his ex-partner.

So from there on, every possible attempt to jack up the stakes occurs. Vince wins enough ($150,000) at the gambling tables to pay off his debt, but that wouldn’t make much of a story nor be true to his character, and he loses it all. And when the sale of the family property falls through he’s back to square one and the digital accounting begins – as in digit accounting as a hot-headed gangster saws off his little finger. Oh, and promises that next on the hit list would be Vince’s estranged daughter Gen (Odessa Young) a tattoo artist.

There’s a big chunk of back story to be fitted in. Jake was originally Wes’s manager, Vince was responsible for coming up with the idea of turning a derelict dump into a trendy bar and restaurant. So emotional debt is owed all round never mind the $140,000 outstanding plus whatever else Jake has clocked up.

So part The Bear, part sub-Scorsese with psychopathic hoods, and part the double-dealing that comes with running any business and soon enough I guess there will be a proper murder to deal with because glancing down the cast list I see a detective so that will be more suspects.

I’m not entirely sure there’s enough here to keep me pinned down in my seat for another six episodes. And part of the problem, I guess, is the all-action beginning which had me believing this wouldn’t just degenerate into a slow, draggy family saga (more family based than usual given the restaurant we are told is one big family). Created by Zach Beylin (Creed III, 2023).

I’m not optimistic.

A Tale of Two Duds – The Northman (2022) / Fantastic Beasts: The Secret of Dumbledore (2022) – Seen at the Cinema

Hamlet goes Viking is basically as much of a story as “visionary director” Robert Eggers (The Witch, 2015) can be bothered with. Yes, there some Viking lore and for all I know this has been exceptionally well-researched but what it amounts to is the same kind of gobbledy-gook that makes no more sense than your average horror picture, with a ton of underdeveloped occult elements. Once our hero is freed from being hung from the rafters by crows beckoned, I presume, by some unexplained mystical power, pecking at the rope – and with a sword handily discarded in the vicinity – I was even more convinced this was a load of old cobblers.

So, basically a revenge saga. Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard) – pronounced Amlet for punters too stupid to get it – manages to escape when his uncle Fjolnir (Claes Bang) murders his brother King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke). Vowing revenge, he is next seen “years later” as part of a raiding party slaughtering a village. He discovers that his uncle has been dethroned by a bigger king and sent into exile in Iceland. So he hauls himself off there, pretending to be part of a chain gang. He has every opportunity in the world to kill his uncle – and save his mother (Nicole Kidman) who has been carried off – but there is always a really dumb reason why he can’t.

Revenge delay seems a pretty odd way of stringing out a movie. Of course, when he gets round to saving his mother it turns out she doesn’t want to be saved and – a la Hamlet – was in on the plan to kill her husband. He falls in love with fellow prisoner Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy) who spouts a lot of witch-type stuff that is no less convincing than any of the other spiritual malarkey.

There’s a lot of bloody violence, but the sexual violence is kept to a minimum on screen though Olga has clearly been abused by Fjolnir. And there’s a game that seems close to the Irish game of hurling and whole bunch of oddities thrown in there wholesale as if such a joblot will add depth to the movie. A misconceived art picture that looks more like a top-of-the-range direct-to-DVD movie that might have cost around $40 million rather than the $90 million quoted.

There’s a smorgasbord of dodgy accents and everybody speaks in stilted English, not far short of the “thee” and “thou” dialogue that critics used to make fun of. Alexander Skarsgard (Godzilla vs Kong, 2021) and Claes Bang (Locked Down, 2021) look rugged enough but neither has the screen presence of Schwarzenegger or even Stallone and it ends up Conan-lite. Anya Taylor-Joy (Last Night in Soho, 2021) looks as if she wondered how she managed to get talked into this. Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos, 2021) who has a plum scene towards the end offers the only acting of any distinction.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secret of Dumbledore

I kid you not, this is about an election. Yep, someone’s greenlit a $200 million fantasy picture about an election. Whatever delightful element the original entry to this series possessed has been destroyed not just by a preposterous storyline – this is for kids, remember – but a very somber tone. Everyone talks in a low voice, it is very darkly lit and there are those awful meaningful pauses.

The story they pretend is about to occur never happens. Something about “counter-sight” if I got that bit correct and how our heroes had to act together to “confuse” the bad guy because he could see into the future. There’s never any sign of him seeing in the future and most of the confusion arises because there are just way many characters. With a piece of Hollywood wizardry Grindelwald has completely changed his appearance, no longer Johnny Depp but Mads Mikkelson. You will be aware of the reason for this but Mads has taken on an impossible task. There already was an over-large contingent of players – Newt Scamanger (Eddie Redmayne) and his brother Theseus (Callum Turner), Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) and his brother Abeforth (Richard Coyle), Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), Jacob (Dan Fogler) and assorted characters who have a romantic interest in the principals.

But basically – hold your breath – Grindelwald is trying to crash an election party. Two candidates are already in contention to be, I presume, Chief Wizard. He kidnaps something that might be called a “chillin” – a mythical creature that looks like a gryphon – which like the wands in Harry Potter has a way of choosing the best person for the job. There’s very little CGI for a fantasy picture. One monster, a bunch of dancing lobsters (maybe scorpions, I couldn’t work it out) and the usual contents of Newt’s suitcase is just about it. The wands are now used more like light sabers or pistols. You won’t be surprised to learn there’s not much in the secrets department either.

There’s not enough Newt and he’s not as delightful as he once was and there’s far too much of boring electioneering, huge crowds gathered for rallies in favor of their candidates. This one cost $200 million and I have no idea what that was spent on. Certainly not the script. A franchise-killer if ever I saw one.