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

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...

Who was Muriel Box, Britain’s most prolific female film director?

She was also the first woman to win an Oscar for best original screenplay. Now a new radio documentary aims to give her pioneering work a fresh appraisal

In 1991, as a film student, I was offered £50 by a German women’s collective to shoot Muriel Box. But when the documentary director and I arrived at her home we were told that she was too ill to see us. She died a few months later aged 85. While I regret never meeting her, I’m also relieved. How terrible to have shown even a glimpse of my full ignorance of her achievements, a pioneering film-maker who had fought her way through an industry hostile to women to make a major contribution to cinema.

Box directed 13 feature films in the 1950s and early 60s and remains Britain’s most prolific female director. Her titles, made for a mainstream audience, include The Passionate Stranger, an imaginative retort to the romance novel, which boldly experiments with form; the controversial juvenile courtroom drama Too Young to Love; and Box’s favourite, The Truth About Women, an eclectic tapestry of the complex lives of women.

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