Very interesting critique, there, Irishman. My flatmates saw it last night, and loved it (I had to do an essay), and I must be honest, I'm looking forward to it. Eva Green is absolutely gorgeous, and I've heard it's a lot more gritty, which was my biggest problem with Die Another Day, which I'd rank as one of the worst Bond films.

Yesterday I saw two films on the big screen, one for the second time, which I found rather pointless, another was a masterpiece:

Shrek 2
Andrew Adamson / Kelly Asbury / Conrad Vernon 2004 US 2nd time; big screen
The ogre must race against time in order to retain his new wife, whose parents are plotting against him.
So drenched in references to pop culture, and so reliant on audience awareness of such references, in ten years time this film might have fallen into complete obscurity; different actors play the same minor characters depending on which country it was distributed in, and it is so determined to be hip and of its time that it will soon be outdated. There are a few good visual gags here and there, most of them involving minor characters, but the humour is often forced and simply not funny; it doesn't even look all that astonishing.

Les enfants du paradis Children of Paradise
Marcel Carné 1945 France 1st time; big screen
The Boulevard of Crime, 19th Century Paris: the lives of a stage actor, a mime, a whore, a thief, a nobleman and an actress intertwine, and cross again seven years later.
Spellbinding for those who adore multi-layered scripts and visual frames packed with action and movement; it is entrenched in period detail so as to be seamless, and so riveting in its characters and exploration of acting and the entire notion of acting, that it belies its three-hours running time. Told in two parts; the first an interesting, extended means of expositing its characters, the second, set years later, bringing them back together again for a bitter explosion of love, regret and deep sorrow.