Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die review – AI is the bad guy in lively yet overstuffed caper

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There’s fun to be had in Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski’s satisfyingly tech-fearing adventure – but some restraint wouldn’t have gone amiss Despite directing a phenomenally successful franchise starter (Pirates of the Caribbean), two of its sequels (Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End), a smash-hit horror remake (The Ring), an Oscar-winning animation (Rango), and films starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts (The Mexican) and Nicolas Cage and Michael Caine (The Weather Man), Gore Verbinski never quite broke through as a name the average cinemagoer would instantly recognise. There are some through-lines in his work – a dark sense of humour, an ease with pushing megastars past their limits – but he was mostly there in service of something or someone else, whether it be IP or an A-lister. After both consumed him in 2013’s loathed flop The Lone Ranger, Verbinski went away and returned three years later with an extravagant “one for me”, the ambitious throwback horror A Cure...
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Berlin film festival 2023 roundup – prestige, politics and ethical starpower

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This year’s Berlinale continued the tradition of combining earnestness with red-carpet glamour – featuring Kristen Stewart, Bono and Steven Spielberg, and this time some real crowd pleasers

Berlin may not be as glitzy as the other big European festivals, Cannes and Venice, but it knows how to make the most of what you might call “ethical starpower”. Hence Steven Spielberg, present this year to accept the Golden Bear for lifetime achievement, who made an eloquent and imposing speech about longevity, healing and – as befits the locale – the weight of history. And hence serious-minded Hollywood actor Kristen Stewart heading a jury including Iranian-French star Golshifteh Farahani and previous Berlinale-winning directors Carla Simón and Radu Jude – a lineup that seems highly likely to make some daring awards choices.

But there’s also that long-standing Berlinale tradition of combining red-carpet prestige with a certain earnestness that doesn’t always flourish on the screen. A prime example this year was Golda, a solemn, sluggish drama about Israeli premier Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur war, with Helen Mirren giving a solid, thoughtful performance, only to be upstaged by her uncanny prosthetic makeup. And then there was Sean Penn’s documentary about Ukraine, Superpower, co-directed with Aaron Kaufman, in which an understandably starstruck encomium to Volodymyr Zelenskiy was overshadowed by much narcissistic hyperventilating about what an amazing thing it was to be Sean Penn caught up in the Whirlwind of History. It was a phenomenally gauche, ill-advised piece; by contrast, Eastern Front, from Ukraine itself, was the real deal, a sober, urgent, profoundly troubling documentary by Vitaly Mansky and Yevhen Titarenko, based substantially on the latter’s footage, shot on duty with a volunteer medical crew.

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