Hot Trailers

Alicia Vikander (left). PHOTO: YOUTUBE
Ethan Hawke and Greta Gerwig (both above). PHOTO: YOUTUBE

THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS

Oh, you know how it is. You're a handsome lighthouse keeper (Michael Fassbender) on a lonely island in Australia with a beautiful, lonesome wife (new Oscar winner Alicia Vikander, above).

One day, a boat washes up ashore with a crying baby in it. It is sort of like Moses but without the river Nile.

All is hunky-dory as the cute little girl grows up, until another beautiful lonesome woman (old Oscar winner Rachel Weisz) pops up and could be the kid's real mother. The hubby wants to give back the child, but the missus resists.

As Shakespeare would ask - to be parents or not to be?

In fact, any of this classy trio of thespians could do Shakespeare since this trailer is full of the angst, pain and morose moments that permeate "return to seller" conflicts at an adoption agency.

By the way, Fassbender and Vikander are really an item.

"One day, this will all feel like a dream," he comforts her. I tell you, this line will surely come in very handy at next year's Oscars.


MAGGIE'S PLAN

Man, talk about "return to seller". This romcom clip, broken into chapters like a Quentin Tarantino mini movie, is about Maggie (Greenberg's indie actress Greta Gerwig), a woman who hooks up too rashly with a married man - a self-absorbed "bad boy of fictocritical anthropologists" (Ethan Hawke, both right) - who leaves his domineering professor wife (Julianne Moore) for her.

After the glow ends and the new hubby is found to be insufferable, Maggie has a brilliant plan to, well, return him to his now ex-wife.

"There might be an opportunity to get the two of you back together," Maggie negotiates with the dragon- class former missus. Hey, I tried to get my money back yesterday too, when I had buyer's remorse over my dysfunctional laptop. Move over, Woody Allen.

The new narrator of quirky, chatty New York neuroses is writer-director Rebecca Miller, daughter of late famed playwright Arthur Miller and spouse of Daniel Day-Lewis. You know, the sort where people make wry observations about other people which border on clever truth when delivered by comedians such as Maya Rudolph and Bill Hader here.

Travis Fimmel, the Vikings dude, pops up to woo Maggie too.

Over in that brutal television series, the women go into battle to plunder possessions and maybe, I suppose, occasionally return them.

Now, this modern-day version of that sort of refund looks fun.

Tay Yek Keak

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on March 02, 2016, with the headline Hot Trailers. Subscribe