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Doctor Strange opened in local theatres today, more than a week ahead of its US debut. The latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Rachel McAdams, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, Mads Mikkelsen, and Tilda Swinton, who can play any role she wants as far as we’re concerned.

Saffy’s Wow face

You will enjoy Doctor Strange if

– You’re into eastern mysticism, magical arts, astral projections and that mind-bending stuff that was big in the Sixties when the comic book first came out.
– You like seeing Benedict Cumberbatch playing another arrogant genius (See Sherlock, See the Star Trek Khan redo, See The Imitation Game, See The Fifth Estate). Typecasting!
– You like seeing Benedict Cumberbatch as an arrogant genius who has a life-threatening experience and learns to see past his enormous ego to serve the greater good (See Iron Man, which launched the Marvel movie universe).
– Tilda Swinton is your life guru.
– The concept of alternate universes and time loops appeals to you.
– You’re a completist and you have to see where one of the Infinity Stones comes from (That is not a spoiler).
– Years of watching two Marvel superhero movies every year have trained you to sit through the end credits for a surprise guest appearance. (There are two closing credit sequences.)
– You get a kick out of random pop references in your superhero flicks.
– You prefer your superhero flicks to be fun, because life is grim enough.
– You approve of the Petyr Baelish/Littlefinger look that Stephen Strange ends up with.
– You’re thrilled by reality-bending, folding, splintering effects, like Inception without the “Look, this is the greatest thing ever!”
– Seeing Stan Lee reading The Doors of Perception makes you happy.
– You are not yet exhausted by the endless parade of superhero movies.
(You live for superhero movies/You do not live for superhero movies.)
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Girl On The Train tries so hard to out-Gone Girl Gone Girl, it derails itself. Incoherent, irritating, suspense-free and a waste of Emily Blunt and Rebecca Ferguson.

Like most recent Woody Allen, Cafe Society is a retread of peak Woody Allen—in this case Crimes and Misdemeanors—but if you need cheering up you could do worse. Bonus question: Do all the protagonists of Woody Allen movies do a Woody Allen impression? Even Cate Blanchett was doing his speech patterns in Blue Jasmine.

What would be great: Emily Blunt in a Woody Allen movie.

The Woman Who Left, a black-and-white revenge thriller lasting 228 minutes, has won the Golden Lion at the 73rd Venice film festival.

The 19th film by Filipino director Lav Diaz, 57, it focuses on the struggle of a schoolteacher to reintegrate into society after 30 years in prison for a murder she didn’t commit.

“This is for my country, for the Filipino people; for our struggle and the struggle of humanity,” said Diaz, thanking the jury headed by British director Sam Mendes.

In second place, winning the Silver Lion, was Nocturnal Animals, a mordant thriller by Tom Ford which stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams in dual roles as a once-married couple and as the protagonists in the novel one of them has written.

It is the fashion director’s second film; his first, A Single Man, also had its first screening at the festival, in 2009, taking best actor for Colin Firth.

The award for best director was tied between young Mexican Amat Escalante (for The Untamed) and veteran Russian Andrei Konchalovsky for his Holocaust drama, Paradise.
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How do you turn an amazing event that lasted all of 208 seconds into a two-hour movie? Especially if the hero at its center is a man so dignified, selfless, and flawless that he doesn’t even allow himself to feel pride at his stunning feat? First you cast Tom Hanks, the world’s most sympathetic everyman, whom we’ll believe in almost anything (except Dan Brown movies). Then you line up an antagonist.

Now who would be the villain in the true story of Captain Chesley Sullenberger, the veteran pilot who made a forced landing of a crippled airplane with 155 people on board on the Hudson River in the dead of winter? The geese who crashed into the plane, causing both engines to fail? The media, which has the habit of declaring people heroes one minute, and then tearing them down in the next? That giant caterpillar on co-pilot Aaron Eckhart’s upper lip which obscures his granite-like beauty?
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quSDaq ba’lu’’a’ (Is this seat taken?)
Usage: When you’re sitting down to negotiations with a Klingon, it’s probably best to proceed with caution—although your polite question may betray your humanoid tendencies.

vjIjatlh (Speak)
Usage: As a greeting. “A Klingon will not waste time on trivial pleasantries,” notes Windsor. Why say “hello” when you can issue an order, instead?

Read it in Wired.

Today is the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, the series that saved my life. I was an antisocial 11-year-old nerd when Star Trek reruns started airing on local TV (We martial law kids only had 4 channels). It introduced me to science-fiction and the idea that the universe was bigger than I could possibly imagine, and crammed with possibilities, including people I could talk to who would not think I was a freak. Thank you, Gene Rodenberry and all the brilliant writers who boldly went where no one had gone before, and took us with them.

It turns out zombies really can’t be killed. The Walking Dead has been on forever, and it seems like a new zombie apocalypse movie/tv series premieres every month. Please, there are zombie romcoms. The Korean blockbuster Train to Busan by Yeon Sang-Ho takes all the tropes of zombie movies and throws them onto a speeding train, where the living must fight their way through cars packed with the frothing infected. The characters and the situations are familiar—you know exactly who will live and who will die—but the filmmakers make us care about the people, and then they execute the set pieces so well (with clever updates on the genre, such as the tunnel scenes), that they make the undead feel fresh and new.

There’s something for everybody: action, melodrama, comedy, tears and singing. It’s a great crowd pleaser—at a Sunday afternoon screening the audience shrieked, yelped, laughed, sobbed, and scared themselves silly. Train to Busan reminds us that cinema is a communal experience. Like that other terrific train movie, Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer, it lends itself to all sorts of interpretation. Class, economics, migration and refugees, crowds and chaos, survival and altruism, game theory—knock yourself out.

Often, life in 2016 feels like Train to Busan: beset on all sides by brain-eating killers.

Watch it.