Pierce brosnan

Last year, I wrote a feature for this magazine in which, disturbed by the apparent revival in the British gangster genre, I counseled a degree of caution as to its practitioners’ apparent lack of discernment in their approach to the tropes and clichés of the tradition. “We will be left," I concluded, "with the cinematic equivalent of bald men fighting over a comb: a boot, stamping on a human face for all eternity, while someone calls someone else ‘a slag.’ It is not, perhaps, the most enticing of prospects.” If the Guy Ritchie-Tom Hardy collaboration MobLand is not as hideous a creation as this suggests, it is also something of a disappointment given the cast and creative talent involved.

If you would like to see that rarest of endangered species — a smart, witty and original 90-minute thriller aimed at adults — then stop reading this review immediately and go and see Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. It is a film that is probably best enjoyed by going in entirely blind, where the bare bones of the premise, revolving around a husband-and-wife pair of British spies who find themselves under suspicion of treachery, possibly by one another, is all you need to know. Yet if you need further convincing, then rest assured that this a one-of-a-kind blend of Mission: Impossible, Private Lives and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, with a little Mr. and Mrs. Smith thrown into the mix, to season.

Something happened in American society between the release of Bros last weekend and 2018, when Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic of gay, HIV-positive Queen front man Freddie Mercury, grossed $900 million at the box office. Comedian Billy Eichner’s gay romcom barely eked out a pathetic $4.8 million on opening night, around the same amount that Ellen "Elliot" Page spent on flannel shirts and Groucho Marx glasses last year. Why the disparity in box office takings? Well, American moviegoers became deeply homophobic. That’s according to Eichner himself, who wrote on Twitter following the paltry opening weekend numbers, “That’s just the world we live in, unfortunately.