TULIP FEVER

Need a diabolical Bond villain? Get Christoph Waltz.

Need a mean husband in 17th- century Holland? Get him, too.

Nobody can do Sneering Nasty Man with subtle cruelty like he can.

In this period drama, Waltz plays the much older husband of Alicia Vikander, who seems to be suffering under his stern authority and, hence, spends secret naked time with an eager young artist (Dane DeHaan) her hubby hires to paint her portrait.

"First to flower, first to fall," Waltz muses arrogantly, referring to both his wayward spouse and the tulip flower at a time when heady Tulip Mania hit the Netherlands as the Hello Kitty craze of its day.

This entire high drama of suspicion, lust, stifled society, hubba-hubba hanky-panky and Vikander hiding in a coffin to escape her hubby could be as ridiculous as those collars the Dutch used to wear around their necks.

BLOOD FATHER

This action thriller looks like Mel Gibson's answer to Liam Neeson's Taken.

It could be called Never Taken A Shower as Gibson looks like an unwashed, bearded, trigger- happy Saddam Hussein-lookalike who is just so awesome zooming around on dusty, sun-baked American highways on a motorbicycle with a shotgun.

The deal is that he, a crusty tattoo artist and former convict, needs to break his good-behaviour parole to go into Road Warrior mode to protect his reckless daughter (True Detective's Erin Moriarty) from vicious drug dealers.

I think Mad Mel saw a box-office goldmine in Neeson's own Taken success story of harming people in a reluctant ageing-bada** way and decided to cash in too before heading for the retirement home.

"About all I know is running, surviving," he claims. Should include "copying" too.

Tay Yek Keak