Red Sonja review – pixie-ish Matilda Lutz steps into Brigitte Nielsen’s battle corset for action remake

The revival of Nielsen’s 80s classic applies CGI and flashbacks a little too liberally, but there’s the odd glimmer of wit in an otherwise clunky script Ever since Brigitte Nielsen unlaced her battle corset after shooting ended on pulpy fantasy actioner Red Sonja back in the 1980s, there’s been talk of sequels and/or reboots. Truffle around the internet and you’ll find a saga to rival the finest in Old Norse about deals signed and projects greenlit and then abandoned over the years, with names attached to direct ranging from X-Men’s Bryan Singer to Transparent’s Joey Soloway. What a shame Soloway’s version never got off the ground because that surely would have been a hoot, and probably more interesting than this soggy, CGI-infused, low-budget confection that’s finally arrived. Little-known actor Matilda Lutz gets the lead role this time around, as well as getting all the hair extensions in the auburn aisle. She presents a Sonja that’s more a pixie-like hippy chick than Nielsen’s Val...

Streaming: the best holiday romance films

Netflix’s featherweight A Tourist’s Guide to Love follows a familiar arc, but there’s more to fall for in classics from Summertime to The Green Ray

There’s nothing new under the sun in A Tourist’s Guide to Love – though there’s an awful lot of that sun, brightening every postcard shot in this featherweight Netflix romcom, and for viewers starved of warmth after a long, dreary winter, that’s enough of a lure. It follows a familiar arc: reeling from a breakup, a perky travel executive (Rachael Leigh Cook) takes a trip to Vietnam for notional work reasons, only to be swept off her feet by her charming local tour guide (Scott Lý). The film hits every holiday-romance beat you expect, but it hardly needs to shake things up: cinema has a proud and comforting tradition of stories in which a trip somewhere sunny and far away proves just the ticket for a character whose life has hit the skids.

My favourite example of the form – the fine wine to the budget lambrini of A Tourist’s Guide to Love – remains David Lean’s Summertime (oddly available to stream only on the free, ad-supported service Pluto). Its story of a buttoned-up, middle-aged American secretary splurging her savings on a long-desired trip to Venice and finding, with a suave Italian antique dealer, the kind of spontaneous romance she’s never known, is the platonic ideal of the genre: bathed in sunshine and Technicolor, the character blooms before our eyes, but the happy ending is compromised and complex, and richer for it.

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