It’s notoriously difficult to make a film about the holocaust. The real life horrors are so monumentally huge, so shocking, so ungraspable, that any attempt to package them up into two-hour drama often seems trite for trying. Films about the Nazi war crimes need to be made, but few directors manage to shoulder the responsibility without buckling under the facts.  

Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass, The Twilight Saga: New Moon) looks for a way in via an extraordinary post-war story about the capture of Adolf Eichmann, but he ends up making an oddly disjointed thriller that doesn’t quite know what kind of film it wants to be. Luckily, two great performances from Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley go a long way towards making up for it.  

Adolf Eichmann was the SS “Obersturmbannführer” who helped to mastermind the holocaust, murdering 6 million Jews to become one of history’s greatest monsters.  

Adolph Hitler killed himself in the last days of the war, but Eichmann somehow managed to escape to Argentina, living out his days in Buenos Aires with his wife and son. In 1960, the Israeli intelligence service found out where he was hiding and sent a crack team of Mossad agents to secretly capture him and bring him back to Israel to stand trial. 

The Eichmann story has been the subject of a few films already (2007’s Eichmann, 2015’s BBC film The Eichmann Show, and Robert Duvall’s 1996 TV film, The Man Who Captured Eichmann), but the story of how Mossad smuggled him out of Argentina hasn’t really been told that well before – partly because it sounds like something out of an old Mission: Impossible episode.  

First off, there’s Peter Malkin (Isaac), the hotshot Mossad field agent who doesn’t respect his elders. Then there’s Dr Hanna (Mélanie Laurent), the anaesthetic expert who has a rocky past with Peter. Then there’s the driver, the heavy, the interrogator and the forger – all assembling to track Eichmann’s movements, drug him, make him wear a fake nose and squirrel him back to Israel via a commercial flight. Throw in a few Indiana Jones-style moving maps (it does) and the film sounds like a load of good old-fashioned fun. 

The only problem is, between all the A-Team antics in Buenos Aires, Weitz cuts in several harrowing flashbacks to show what Eichmann (Kingsley) did in Europe – with the tone shifting violently enough to make you feel sort of bad for enjoying it. Isaac does a great job playing the cocky spy (basically just doing Poe Dameron in a suit), but his quips all sounds a bit out of place when they come after a haunting memory of his dead family hanging from a tree. 

Odder still, the film takes a completely different direction in the second act – with Mossad’s plans backfiring to see them quietly babysitting Eichmann in a safe-house for ten days, gently trying to coerce a signature out of him. It’s a bit of a jarring scene-shift, but it’s here where Kingsley gets his best scenes.

Playing the exact opposite of his award-winning Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List in almost every way, Kingsley gets a great chance to showcase his range as Eichmann – deceptively charming, at times pitiably weak, but still frighteningly manipulative – even stealing the scenes when he’s sitting on the toilet.  

You simply can’t make a bad film about such an amazing story with this kind of cast, but Weitz struggles to make everything add up – missing beats, throwing off the pace and filing off the emotional edges. Throw in some seriously dodgy accents from the supporting cast, some dingy cinematography, and a distractingly jaunty score from Alexandre Desplat and you’re left with a bit of a mixed bag. 

Sitting somewhere between Argo and Munich, but not being as good as either, it’s hard not to think that Operation Finale isn’t the best version the Eichmann story that could have been made. But it’s also impossible not to sort of enjoy watching it anyway. 

Operation Finale is streaming now on Netflix.

This review contains spoilers.

1.5 Rise Up

The New Founding Fathers, at least those high up enough in the organisation, have granted themselves immunity from The Purge. I would assume that this doesn’t cover the Stanton family, given their relatively small time status in the grand scheme of things, but I wonder. Purge night has a surprising amount of rules for a night that has no rules. What happens to those that break them? If you’re an anti-NFFA organization, like the roadblock set up in earlier episodes to keep NFFA tourists out of a poor neighborhood or an armed group of revolutionaries like the ones that smash their way into the Stanton compound in the very exciting finale of Rise Up, who exactly is going to stop you from doing whatever you want to whoever you want?

And, more importantly, how do you convince one of these groups you’re not a part of their target audience when you look the part?

The Purge debuted with a bag, rattling off an impressive debut episode, followed up with successive episodes more or less of good-to-great quality, with varying story lines having varying levels of interest. Miguel has been the character that I’ve enjoyed following the most; he’s got a pretty familiar Purge plot line, and Gabriel Chavarria, Jessica Garza, and Fiona Dourif have all been putting in interesting work with what they’ve been given. That doesn’t change this week, especially after a stellar action sequence involving Miguel and Christopher Berry’s Rex.

However, one of the slower-developing plots gets very interesting this week, as the philosophical debate between Rick and Jenna regarding the morality of The Purge gets made into a literal, physical confrontation, as the picked-on minority literally takes up arms to rise up against the NFFA, with Catalina (Paulina Galvez) and company throwing open the doors and allowing the Stanton castle to be stormed in a hail of gunfire and a symphony of screaming.

Like most things Purge, it’s implied more than shown, but it’s handled very well by director Julius Ramsay. There doesn’t need to be a lot on screen, a bunch of people with flashlights and guns running across the lawn is sufficient, particularly when that’s emphasized by a few bloody extras in cocktail attire piled up by the staircase, blocking Rick and Jenna’s escape via the front door. Thankfully for Jenna, her kindness towards Catalina is going to be repaid, though I have doubts about how far two people in fancy dress are going to get on Purge night, even with Rick’s dagger.

That inversion, the privileged hunters becoming the helpless hunted, also plays out—albeit on a much smaller scale—in Rex’s trip to the auction block at the Carnival of Flesh. Miguel pulls a gun on him, he pulls a gun on Miguel, violence is exchanged, and in the end, Rex finds himself in the back of his pickup and sold for cash to the traders, giving Miguel his access to the carnival, just in time to find his sister about to be burned on a pyre by her vengeful ex-boyfriend Henry (Dylan Arnold). It’s a well-constructed fake-out; it seems like Miguel is going to save the day, then as he’s rushing to his sister’s aid he gets tackled by security. Henry’s back story with Penelope and Miguel fleshes out the scene, and it feeds both his revenge fantasies and into the ongoing thread that The Purge is merely legalised violence against women and the less powerful, further thrown into focus by the Matron Saints saving a woman from an abusive partner, and all have similar victim stories.

From a storytelling standpoint, it’s nothing new, but Jamie Chan’s script practically oozes with venom, both in terms of the way the Matrons decide to punish those that harm women on Purge night and with the way Henry recounts his relationship with Penelope. Two sides of the same twisted coin, perhaps? Jane would agree; she finds the whole “disfiguring someone rather than sending them to jail” bit to be distasteful, owing to her attempts to stop her Purge assassin from finding her target. Both parties want revenge for wrongs, be they real wrongs or imagined wrongs; there’s not a purity of purpose like that found in Joe, who seems (for now) to only want to help people without any sort of ulterior motive.

The Matrons are certainly much more morally pure than Henry, but it’s a question of taking the law into your own hands on a night that is lawless that seems to bother Jane more than the actual disfiguring. Despite her actions, she’s a right-and-wrong person, and when confronted with the reality of how wrong the Purge is, she turns against it and by extension her actions. I wonder how she’d feel about executing a whole party of NFFA donors and hangers-on, or how she’d feel about people voluntarily giving themselves up to be Purged in an effort to clean the country’s sins.

Murder is still murder, even when it’s for a good cause. Murder is still murder, even when it’s in the service of saving the soul of America. Murder is still murder, even when one party volunteers to be murdered with a blissful smile and a chanted mantra.

Read Ron’s review of the previous episode, Release The Beast, here.

The BBC has finally been able to move forward with a fourth series of Strike, following on from its successful adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s first three Cormoran Strike books, The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm and Career Of Evil. The broadcaster has been clear in the past that it had no intention of putting a new run of episodes into motion before the most recent novel was published, as it’s wanted to make sure Rowling (who has penned the book series under the name Robert Galbraith) could have a significant amount of input in the development of Lethal White for the small screen.

Four episodes of Lethal White are likely to hit the Beeb in mid-2019, with Tom Edge is returning to write, but no directors have been chosen to helm the fourth instalment as of yet.

In the meantime, here’s a synopsis of series 4 for you:

The new season follows Billy, a troubled young man who comes to private eye Cormoran Strike’s office to ask for his help investigating a crime he thinks he witnessed as a child and Strike is left deeply unsettled. While Billy is obviously mentally distressed and cannot remember many concrete details, there is something sincere about him and his story. Strike and Robin set off on a twisting trail that leads them through the backstreets of London, into a secretive inner sanctum within Parliament and to a beautiful but sinister manor house deep in the countryside.

The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm, and Career Of Evil have all been solid hits for the BBC, earning around 7 million viewers at their peak.

More as we get it.

There’s nothing about the idea of a Venom solo movie that precludes it from working. Tweak the origin, introduce a foe even worse than he is, and the Marvel Universe’s favourite brain-eating ET anti-hero is, in all probability, ready to go.

It’s worth stating that up front, because make no mistake, the thing preventing this movie from working isn’t that the concept is fundamentally bad – it’s entirely in the execution.

Tom Hardy stars as Eddie Brock, a down-on-his-luck journalist who finds himself dumped by his fiancé Anne (Michelle Williams) after a minor betrayal of confidence has unexpectedly large ramifications – specifically ones that leave him bonded to an alien symbiote. Riz Ahmed completes the main cast as Carlton Drake, an antagonistic and amoral futurist with designs on the stars. Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer directs, his usual charm buried somewhere between the woeful storytelling and the workmanlike CGI.

There’s no denying that Venom is a movie with some talent, but for the most part those talents are wasted in service of a dull, cliché-prone script with an incoherent narrative. There’s only so much any actor can do when the material is this devoid of charm, and to the credit of those in the movie everyone you see on screen is visibly trying to squeeze blood from a set of increasingly large stones, though mostly in vain.

If you were to pick a single thing wrong with Venom, it’s that it doesn’t seem to know what type of movie it is. The initial 45 minutes are a fairly po-faced portrait of a righteous man’s descent into bitterness at the hands of powerful enemies, albeit enemies with a sideline in xenobiology. It’s firmly in dull sci-fi territory, but at least it’s consistent. As soon as Eddie gets the symbiote, however, the movie decides it’s a PG-rated Deadpool, all bloodless ultra-violence and hilarious wisecracks of ambiguous intentionality.

Indeed, Eddie’s central tragedy – that he neglected to respect those he loved while pursuing his obsessions – doesn’t get anywhere near a resolution. Then again, neither do about six other plotlines that started in that first half only to disappear in the second. When Tom Hardy says that they left the best 40 minutes on the cutting room floor, it’s easy to believe; the film as released is only better than Suicide Squad because it’s considerably shorter.

Venom fans hoping for even a hint of cross-pollination with the Marvel Cinematic Universe will be sorely disappointed. In fact, an offhand mention of kryptonite means it lands it closer to DC’s movie universe than Marvel’s. The best you can say is that it’s not not in the MCU, though any hope of convincing Kevin Feige to put Toms Hardy and Holland on screen together are surely killed the moment Venom bids Eddie to divide the fresh corpses into two piles – one for bodies, one for heads.

In all fairness, the story the film aims for isn’t one that that would benefit from closer connections with the MCU. Stripped of any connection to Spider-Man the film reorganises the central conceit of Venom, taking him away from an expression of Brock’s anger and jealousy and moving him more towards (believe it or not) a manifestation of Eddie’s desire for friendship and love. A charitable interpretation might be that this is a buddy cop movie where one buddy is the other’s alien suit, and the moments where it works (and it does occasionally work) are those where Venom’s inner-voice injects some trademark maniacal humour into Eddie’s internal monologue.

However, Venom and Eddie’s relationship isn’t a theme that’s explored in any depth, nor a concept that forms the throughline of the movie. Indeed, there’s no coherence from one scene to the next in thematic terms, and scarcely any more in narrative ones. An attempt to capture Brock sees his pursuers instead attempting to kill him in increasingly elaborate ways. A subplot about the symbiote’s effects on its host is dropped without reference. Brock’s relationship issues seem to conclude without any attendant personal growth. And Carlton Drake starts off as a charming idealist but quickly morphs into a cartoonish moustache-twirler whose endless appetite for murder isn’t even thinly justified.

Perhaps worst of all is that there’s no-one in the film you can really root for, not least because Venom’s capricious nature is the only reason he even wants to stop his foe.

It is, we regret to report, a mess. And while there’s a cast doing all they can to keep the movie from collapsing, they don’t have the raw material they need to do so. The elements of a movie, like a symbiote and its host, need to be perfectly balanced to thrive. Venom, despite delivering that lesson, has yet to demonstrate it.

Christian Bale is good at looking like someone else. He puts his body through all kinds of awful things to bulk up, slim down, get fit, get fat and more for roles that always seem really badly timed (did he really need to shoot Rescue Dawn in between two Batman movies?). Healthy or not, he’s doing it again for Adam McKay’s Vice, a biopic of former US Vice President Dick Cheney. 

To make things harder on Bale, Vice follows Cheney through two different periods of his career – from young(ish) Washington grafter to the much older (much fleshier) man holding George W Bush’s puppet strings. 

Calling on Bale to play two different ages of the same middle-aged man, Bale had to shave his head, bleach his eyebrows and gain 40 pounds to give the hair and makeup artists enough to work with. 

Annapurna pictures has now the first photo of Bale in costume as the younger Cheney:

 And, even more remarkably, as the older Cheney: 

“What Christian Bale really does is he psychologically breaks someone apart and puts them back together again,” McKay told Deadline. “I’ve never seen someone work so hard at it, and it is hard on him, but really amazing to watch. The second I thought of doing the movie, I knew right away, the most exciting person to play him is Christian.”

The film also stars Amy Adams as Lynne Cheney, Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld, Sam Rockwell as Bush, Bill Pullman as Nelson Rockerfeller and Tyler Perry as Colin Powell. Bale is reuniting with McKay after starring in his 2016 financial crisis comedy, The Big Short. 

Bale has also confirmed that Vice is not going to be a straightforward biopic, and that the role of Cheney has been one of the most challenging of his career. “It’s taken as much research as I’ve ever had to do for any other film,” he told Interview. “Adam likes a lot of improvisation, and when you’re playing Mr. Cheney, you need to not only speak in the vernacular that he would speak in, but all the policies that he would be aware of and instances of them, the abbreviations for all of them, and be able to just go with it. So it was very fascinating for me.”

But why tell Cheney’s story now, when American politics is going through an even tougher time than it did back in the 00s? 

“Someone had to crack the safe first. Someone who understood power and how to manipulate it. Someone no one would notice. An ultimate insider who knew every trick in the book,” McKay told Vanity Fair. “America didn’t get to the delightful place we’re at today by accident…”

Vice is expected to arrive in UK cinemas in early 2019.

This month’s First Man tells the story of NASA’s greatest achievement, but 17 years after Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members before they reached orbit. 

Amongst the astronauts on board was 37-year-old Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher who was travelling to space to conduct experiments and to teach the first lessons in zero gravity. Before the launch McAuliffe was held as an inspiration for children everywhere, and after the tragic accident her legacy has continued to inspire – with schools (and one crater on Venus) named after her, scholarships set up in her name and a posthumous Congressional Space Medal of Honor awarded to her family.

The Challenger disaster has been dramatized before – first in 1990 as (with Karen Allen as McAuliffe in a TV film that sidelined her a bit), and again in 2013 (focusing more on the aftermath), and now Michelle Williams has signed on to play McAuliffe in a new film that will focus on her story in full. 

The Challenger will be directed by Martin Zandvliet (Land Of Mine), with filming expected to begin next May. 

“We are more than humbled and extremely grateful for the opportunity to help tell the story of Christa McAuliffe and the Challenger mission,” producer Ben Renzo tells Deadline. “Christa McAuliffe’s legacy deserves the strength, courage, experience and humanity that Michelle Williams brings to the role. The entire Argent team is honoured and eager to responsibly capture and share the events and personal journeys of those surrounding this important historical moment with audiences around the world to help remember and further appreciate the sacrifices Christa and rest of the Challenger crew made to further our journey into space.”

“Every great dream begins with a dreamer,” said former slave Harriet Tubman, responsible for releasing the shackles of generations of slaves before the American Civil War. The upcoming biopic Harriet, which will chronicle the life of the heroic abolitionist, has just added Janelle Monáe to the cast alongside Tony, Emmy and Grammy Award-winner Cynthia Erivo as Tubman.

Harriet is being directed by Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou, Talk To Me) off a screenplay she co-wrote with Gregory Allen Howard (Ali, Remember the Titans). This will be Lemmons’ first directorial feature since Black Nativity in 2013.

Harriet follows Tubman, who was born into slavery, escaped in 1849 and helped free dozens of slaves through the Underground Railroad during the pre-Civil War period. Tubman served as a spy for the Union Army during the war and campaigned for women’s suffrage after it ended, so it seems a bit odd that she’s not that well known outside America – and odder still that she hasn’t already had her lifestory told.

Monáe joins Tony and Grammy Award-winner Leslie Odom Jr., Joe Alwyn, multiple Grammy Award-winner Jennifer Nettles, Clarke Peters, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Zackary Momoh, Deborah Ayorinde, and Vondie Curtis-Hall. Details about Monáe’s role are still under wraps.

“My grandmother was a sharecropper. She picked cotton in Aberdeen, Mississippi,” Monáe proclaimed when she performed at the January 21, 2017, Women’s March in Washington, D.C. Fresh off her masterful science fiction inflected third solo album Dirty Computer and the accompanying Dirty Computer: An Emotion Picture, the Prince protégé kept full creative and branding control as a non-negotiable condition when Sean Combs signed her to Bad Boy Records in 2008. 

Monáe previously acted in Moonlight and Hidden Figures, and will soon be seen in Robert Zemeckis’ Welcome to Marwen, which co-stars Steve Carrell, Leslie Mann, Diane Kruger and Gwendoline Christie. 

Harriet is set to begin filming this October in Virginia, and should be aiming for a release around 2020 – when Tubman’s face was supposed to be put on the 20 dollar bill (before the US Treasury Secretary controversially threw the idea out, saying that he had “more important issues to focus on”).  

Culture Editor Tony Sokol cut his teeth on the wire services and also wrote and produced New York City’s Vampyr Theatre and the rock opera AssassiNation: We Killed JFK. Read more of his work here or find him on Twitter @tsokol.

Google is entering the growing world of video game streaming with a new program called Project Stream. 

The idea behind Project Stream is ambitious, yet oddly simple. Google wants you to be able to stream some of the latest video games directly from your Google Chrome browser. Essentially, they want browser games to go from those tiny Adobe Flash projects to full-length, Triple-A gaming experiences, and they want to start that transition by allowing a small number of testers to play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey directly from their browser. 

It sounds crazy, but if the footage that Google released of Odyssey running on Project Stream is to be believed…well, it just might be crazy enough to work. Granted, this whole thing is dependent on a large number of factors. For instance, Google knows that not everyone has access to true high-speed internet. Even if they do have access to quality internet, Google has to find a way to deliver the kind of gaming streaming experience that is relatively lag-free and suffers no downgrade in graphical quality. 

However, Google feels that the evolution of entertainment delivery necessitates that they find a way to make video game streaming work. 

“Streaming media has transformed the way we consume music and video, making it easy to instantly access your favorite content,” says Google via a blog post. “It’s a technically complex process that has come a long way in a few short years, but the next technical frontier for streaming will be much more demanding than video.”

You can read more about Project Stream test here, but you won’t be able to sign-up for the first test unless you live in the United States unfortunately. 

Where Project Stream goes from here remains to be seen. 

Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014. 

A rapid series of rumors and leaks suggest that a major new Harry Potter RPG is in development.

It all started when users on Reddit, ResetEra, and other online forums began sharing what looked to be footage from a new, previously unannounced Harry Potter game. The footage showcased a young wizard roaming the halls of Hogwarts and doing battle with various foes. While the “footage” was captured via a shaky, and seemingly secret, recording, the game looked beautiful and appeared to be somewhat far along in the development process. Of course, that’s somewhat strange to hear considering that there’s been no word regarding any new Harry Potter project in development. 

The video in question was taken down by Warner Bros. not long after its initial upload, which only made things worse. Initial rumors suggested this game was everything from Rocksteady’s next project to a flat-out fake made by a talented fan. 

However, new evidence suggests that this footage may indeed be from an upcoming Harry Potter game. 

Eurogamer has spotted a tweet from BBC News reporter Lizo Mzimba who says that sources are telling him that this footage is from an upcoming Hary Potter RPG that is believed to be called Harry Potter: Magic Awakened. He says that other titles like Magic Forever are also being considered. Interestingly, he also notes that this may just be one of several Harry Potter games currently in development. 

Mzimba doesn’t name his sources, but it’s worth noting that he’s a well-known Harry Potter fan who has historically been close to the franchise. To that end, Eurogamer is also citing similar sources close to the project who are confirming that this game is real and is currently in development. They, and other sites, are also suggesting that it’s highly possible that this game is being developed by Avalanche Software (the team responsible for the Disney Infinity series) and that it’s likely an “AAA” size game with “narrative and branching storytelling.” However, some of that information is speculation based on reports of what Avalanche has been working on since they were acquired by Warner Bros. 

Further rumours suggest that this game may be at least a year away from actually being released. While that has not been confirmed at this time, we fully expect to see some official footage from this game sometime during the next few months if it is indeed a real project. 

Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.