The Drop

A star-making performance by Tom Hardy highlights the week in film.

Passion

I don't spend a lot of time re-reading my old reviews, but I must admit I rather liked my note on 2011's French import "Love Crime": http://www.jordanonfilm.com/2011/09/love-crime-much-more-fun-than-good-movie.html#more .  Now Brian DePalma has remade "Love Crime" as "Passion," and I'm afraid to say all he's achieved is to eliminate (most of) the campy laughs that made the original, as I called it, more fun than a good movie.

Prometheus

The first, great-looking hour of the 3-D and IMAX-enhanced spectacle "Prometheus" had me sitting straight up in my seat, nerve endings fully engaged by director Ridley Scott's vision of cave paintings by early man, spanning continents and millennia, pointing to a distant planet that may hold the secret of the origin of humanity. The script adverts to several of the most fundamental questions of our existence, from natural selection to the existence vel non of a deity to whether we are fundamentally good or evil.