Movie reviews: Side Effects

Heralded as Steven Soderbergh’s final movie, Side Effects (15A) opens up in sombre fashion, as psychiatrist Dr Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) attempts to treat a patient, Emily (Rooney Mara), with a combination of anti-depressants.

What promises to play out as a polemical docudrama along the lines of Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), however, becomes a gripping, provocative thriller when Emily defies Jonathan’s prognosis and commits a murder. Are the drugs responsible? Is Jonathan culpable for his misdiagnosis? Or is something a little more sinister at work? Scott Burns’ screenplay offers plenty of twists and turns that play with the audience’s expectations of a Hollywood thriller, and Soderbergh’s direction is so deftly assured that the blend of thought-provoking subject matter and pot-boiler treatment appears seamless. Catherine Zeta-Jones just about stops short of twirling a moustache in her arch-villain turn, Channing Tatum, underplays his rogue Wall Street trader role, and Rooney Mara is deliciously ambiguous as a potential femme fatale. Jude Law is superb, turning in one of the best performances of his career as the smug, self-absorbed shrink. All told, Side Effects is a powerful, thought-provoking thriller.

Oz the Great and Powerful (PG) is a prequel to The Wizard of Oz (1939), in which circus magician Oscar Diggs (James Franco) is whirled away by a tornado from a black-and-white Kansas and set down in the fabulously colourful land of Oz. There he encounters the witch Theodora (Mila Kunis), who tells him that he has arrived to fulfil the prophecy and set free the people of Oz from witch Evanora (Rachel Weisz). The flaky Oscar’s habit of wooing the most beautiful woman in his orbit kindles Theodora’s wrath when he falls for the good witch Glinda (Michelle Williams). Director Sam Raimi treads a fine line in remaining true to the 1939 version of Oz and still offering a fresh, persuasive origins tale, and he is for the most part successful. The allows for plenty of in-jokes for fans of the original movie. James Franco lacks the charisma to convincingly carry off the part of the wizard-in-waiting. He has the misfortune to play most of his early scenes against the eye-poppingly beautiful Mila Kunis, who comprehensively steals the show.