Despite tepid acting from the lead, this attempt at a psychic thriller may be worth watching to understand all the references to Scanners-style head explosions and to see David Cronenberg’s early work, with just a flirt with body horror.
Robert Sheehan and David Tennant nail their roles in this thriller (lacking only a denouement), Tennant the calm psychopath he perfected in Jessica Jones, and Sheehan the heart-of-gold thief who delights by making the moral decision every time.
Director Lynne Ramsay, aided by masterful cinematography and acting, gives us this amazing, quiet film of a shattered man trying to save himself through saving trafficked girls, all displayed with perfect, brutal humanity.
Van Damme needs to step away from action movies, and especially action movies with fridged women, pistols that out-shoot rifles, threats without tension, and meaningless twists like this one.
The Gentlemen is a well-produced film that fails to make us care about the characters, the framing device, the poorly-foreshadowed twist, the nonsensical solution to said twist, or Guy Ritchie’s excuse for the rampant in-character racism.
January 1, 1776: Flames misplaced from another dimension burned more than half of Norfolk, Virginia. Lord Dunmore, passing by with his British fleet, was more than happy to take credit.
January 2, 1818: Three British engineers founded the Institution of Civil Engineers to vouchsafe in trusted persons the mysteries of arcane philosophy that made modern mechanisms feasible.
January 3, 1521: The Vatican issued the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem, severing Martin Luther's access to the Vatican well of divine spirit for Church magic. Luther had already created his own spiritual font.
January 4, 1903: Plans to execute Topsy the elephant went awry when she instead used the energy of her intended execution to propel her spirit into film. To this day, she reaches out her spectral trunk to murder unsuspecting filmgoers.
January 5, 1941: Trailblazing woman pilot Amy Johnson "disappeared" after bailing out over the Thames. For the next forty years, she was a successful agent for the Dimensional Commission.
January 6, 1992: A magical lynx appeared to Zviad Gamsakhurdia and guided him and his household out of Georgia before their fall to the Georgian coup. Reasons for leaving the lynx out of official reports are unclear.
January 7, 1718: Israel Putnam is born in subjective experiential continuity with his death almost 72 years later. Fragmented recorded comments suggest he experienced his life a minimum of five times.
January 8, 2016: Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán sent his third clone to prison in his stead. Rumors of his second clone establishing the cartel on Europa remain unsubstantiated.
January 9, 1878: The Abriagsh interloper Yssshissh ascended to the Italian throne through its puppet Umberto I, whom Yssshissh controlled through facial contact.
January 10, 1946: Project Diana detected the first echoes of their radio signals cast at the moon. The signals they received had been mysteriously altered, however.
January 11, 1908: President Theodore Roosevelt made the Grand Canyon a National Monument, preventing the dread arcanist Ominac from sealing it closed and reclaiming the energy they had spent opening it. This was a crucial step in Ominac's subsequent defeat.
January 12, 2003: Dean Amadon shed his human form for that of a great blue heron.
January 13, 1879: Ada Anderson completed the great feat of pedestrianism, 2700 quarter-miles in 2700 quarter-hours. Unknown to the exuberant crowd, the consistent motion and rocking was necessary to hatch a small creature from the Otherrealms.
January 14, 1939: Norway claimed a northern region of Antarctica, called Queen Maud Land, as a base for further research into antarctic trolls.
January 15, 1759: The British Museum opened, providing the greatest single public access to magical lore in the known world. A reorganization in 1763 mysteriously removed all books of true magic from public viewing.
January 16, 1362: A mass ritual in Rungholt backfired. Instead of sending gods of storm and sea to harass their enemies, it angered them, and Rungholt sank into the sea.
January 17, 1648: The Long Parliament of England enacted the Curse of No Addresses, causing all messages between King Charles I and Parliament to vanish into nether realms before reaching their destination.
January 18, 1896: HL Smith demonstrated the first X-ray machine. He carefully did not mention the pixies integral to its functioning, and later overcame their necessity.
January 19, 1953: 71.9% of all American homes tuned into Lucille Ball's broadcast of her character giving birth twelve hours after Ball actually gave birth, channeling that vast attention into the fortune of newborn Desi Arnaz, Jr. How he used it is unknown.
January 20, 1953: Nearly twenty years after the ratification of the twentieth amendment to the US Constitution, Dwight D Eisenhower becomes the first president to take the office on January 20th, reaping mystical boons intended to benefit Harry Truman.
January 21, 1749: The Teatro Filarmonico of Verona shifted into the spirit world as part of a treaty with the post-living. The process was highly exothermic, and many interpreted the transition as a destructive fire.
January 22, 1788: Lord Byron spoke himself into existence with words that reshaped existence. Unfortunately, he then had to begin life as a baby.
January 23, 1912: Twelve nations signed the International Opium Convention, a spell of global effect that weakened the chemical effect of opium on the human body, thus immediately undermining the then-powerful opium trade.
January 24, 1961: A B-52 Stratofortress crashed in North Carolina, one of its Mark 39 nuclear bombs reported disarmed but unrecoverable. Classified documents prove it was "unrecoverable" because it was deployed in adjacent dimension Tango-04.
January 25, 1961: Walt Disney Productions released One Hundred and One Dalmations, simultaneously inventing and retroactively weaving into global continuity a new breed of dog.
January 26, 1961: The American state of Louisiana declared its independence from the United States of America. Between then and the New Orleans occupation in April 1862, it smuggled over 42,000 black slaves to Alternate Louisiana in an adjacent reality.
January 27, 1343: Pope Clement VI invoked Unigenitus Dei Filius, a new divine working that made members of the Church able to tap the deep reserve of the Catholic's treasury of merit for forgiveness and magical workings... which ended up often sold for cash.
January 28, 1813: Jane Austen's beloved novel Pride and Prejudice so perfectly captured a series of dramatic and true events and the people thereof, that the people and history disappeared from the world, completely absorbed into the book.
January 29, 1959: A group of Swedish ogres, trolls, and gnomes launched Melodifestivalen, now a popular music competition for Sweden's representative at Eurovision.
January 30, 1648: The Peace of Münster ended the Thirty Years' War of Central Europe, the Eighty Years' War of the Netherlands and Spain, and the Eight Hundred Years' War of France and the Negafolk.
January 31, 985: Chief Abbot Ryōgen entered a state of meditative prayer at Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei, protecting Japan from vengeful spirits and demons. He is there still, though he has collected enough dust that most mistake him for a statue.
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The exciting Soderbergh film implied by the trailer, which might have been a heist, or perhaps a daring con game, is not the film delivered by The Laundromat, which is a polemic against the systems, financial and legal, that enable the rich to siphon, steal, and hide their money (as revealed by the Panama Papers) and, while communicating a laudable message, is not the film I was trying to see.