The Last Witch Hunter (12A)
The Last Witch Hunter is presumably meant be a Halloween-themed release. Vin Diesel, looking as ever like a human cigar stub, plays the title character, Kaulder, an immortal who lost his wife and child when they were cursed by a witch queen in the Middle Ages.
Now, in present-day New York, Kaulder, with fiery sword and palatial apartment overlooking Central Park, works for an organisation called 'The Axe and the Cross', which appears to be a paramilitary wing of the Catholic Church.
When his friend and mentor Dolan the 36th (Michael Caine) is found dead, Kaulder suspects black magic and sets about tracing a powerful Nordic warlord who plans to resurrect the Witch Queen and unleash a global plague.
As always, Diesel is as wooden as the national afforestation scheme but the $90m-budget Last Witch Hunter does boast some impressive production design and digital effects, notably the Witch Queen's lair and a creature called the Sentinel. But overall it is a little too 'dungeons & dragons' for my taste.
Still if this takes off in the US this weekend, you can expect a sequel.
Listen to me Marlon (15A)
The legendary Marlon Brando didn't do many public interviews during his career, despite his long-time commitment to political and social causes like the plight of the native American and civil rights – which is why the documentary Listen To Me Marlon has added interest.
It is a posthumous biography made up of clips from the great actor's screen performances, video of Brando being interviewed, and hundreds of hours of personal audio, including rambling messages he would leave on the answering machines of family and friends and even cassette tapes he recorded as experiments in self-hypnosis.
Writer, producer director Steven Riley was given access to all of this stuff, to a vast accumulation of recorded material and shapes it together in a collage that paints an extraordinarily insightful portrait of Brando.
The movie slips back and forth between present and past, connecting events from his often tragic old age, his prolific screen career, his tumultuous private life (he fathered at least 17 children) and his childhood which seems alternately blissful and horrendous in Brando's telling.
It is truly riveting stuff, done with skill and a thorough command of medium by Riley who connects up the elements in his profile with subtly and a real interest in Brando the man and the genius. It will be running exclusively at the Light House Cinema in Dublin from this weekend.
Mississippi Grind (15A)
Also out this weekend is Mississippi Grind, a journey movie about two gambling addicts travelling down the course of the Mississippi to a high-stakes poker game in New Orleans.
Made by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the writer/director team that made Half Nelson, it is more a sharply shaded character study than a movie about the forms of gambling practised by this pair – and it has two excellent performances by the Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn and the woefully under-rated Ryan Reynolds.
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