With Cannes looming and a week of film meetings to sound intelligent at, I did a catch-up double bill yesterday.  As an Cineworld Unlimited Cardholder, I tend to do that thing of turning up and letting the times dictate what movies I see.

It was this process that found me in the audience for 'Centurion', though I was heartened to see that this film was directed by Neil Marshall and made by the same team as did the brilliant 'The Descent' and an all time fave of mine, 'Dog Soldiers'.

As a fan of most things Romano British, I enjoyed the film well enough.  Picts are badasses, don't mess with us.  The fighting entertains, but the script was not... well, very good.  Much of this was down to clunky narration that seemed fairly pointless and gave the film a strange modernistic feel that clashed with its setting.  There seemed to be a kind of genre confusion as we were caught somewhere between epic and the more staple Marshall - 'Group of people end up somewhere remote pursued by scary things that pick them off one by one'.  His usual effective straight up chlaustrophobic shooting was interspersed with sweeping helicopter shots of men running along mountaintops - ala Lord of the Rings.

The anti-subtle allusions to modern post-imperial values were nauseating, none more so than in the form of the lovely Scottish accented Pict witch who was criminally utilised by way of cringy dialogue all set up to labour the point that 'Not all Picts are bad people and not all Romans are either'.  But for a film about people being hit in the face with axes, it does the job, aptly, if not eloquently.

The same could not be said of Kick Ass!  Smart, edgy, irreverent, fabulous.  Jane Goldman deserves massive credit, not only for being able to live with Jonathan Ross without throttling him in his sleep, but along with Matthew Vaughn writing a simply brilliant screenplay tellingly brought to life in vivid, violent techicolor by the capeable adult cast and the showstealing turn from Chloe Moretz as the tiny purple-clad ninja of death.  The film goes to surprising and dark places, wearing the clothes of reality until ditching them where appropriate for 'kicks'.

Amid the flurry of comedic violence are moments of true subtle poignancy which I won't spoil by naming overtly, but this is a very well crafted film in which death is shuffled in with hilarity and dealt card by card and side by side.  It shouldn't work, but it does.  Fabulous.