Things to do in Madrid in August

You know him as a surly lunk of slab-faced Aussie manhood. But Russell Crowe shows his squishy side as the director of this soft-hearted war melodrama. He also stars as Connor, a farmer whose three sons are missing presumed dead on the WWI battlefield of Gallipoli. Coming on like Liam Neeson without the leather jacket, four years later he travels to Turkey, dad-on-a-mission style, to bring home the bodies of his boys. Once there, he encounters the obligatory sneering British officer who orders him back to Australia. (read more)

Who would you choose to take along on a pioneering Egyptian tomb excavation? Chances are, it wouldn’t be a guy who looks like Indiana Jones’s bookish, bad-tempered uncle, the year’s most hapless screen blonde and the mouthy one from ‘The Inbetweeners’. Yet here they are, getting into all manner of scrapes inside a millennia-old structure buried deep in that part of the Sahara desert that looks suspiciously like California. (read more)

Cinema lovers, you should thank God for Kevin James. This oft-ridiculed screen giant is here to answer a question that has plagued mankind for decades now: what would a film be like if every single person involved made as little effort as humanly possible? It’s been six years since the inexplicably successful ‘Paul Blart: Mall Cop’, and our hero (Kevin James) is in a rut. His wife has left him, his mother was flattened by a milk truck and his daughter Maya (Raini Rodriguez) is planning to leave home. (read more)

A powerful true-life tale becomes the stuff of workaday drama in ‘Woman in Gold’. A dusky lady looks quizzically out from a mosaic of gold leaf in the Klimt canvas dubbed ‘Austria’s Mona Lisa’. But for elderly LA resident Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren), it’s a portrait of her Aunt Adele, and a painful reminder of the lives, home and property wrenched from her Jewish family during the Nazi annexation of Austria. In the late 1990s, changes in Austrian law allowed the handing back of looted treasures to their owners. So Mirren’s crotchety but indefatigable Maria and a junior lawyer (Ryan Reynolds) begin an against-the-odds battle against Vienna’s state-run Belvedere Gallery. (read more)