Reviews

Peter Weir's adaptation of Joan Lindsay's novel worked superbly because of its contradictions and subtlety - genteel young society ladies in a finishing school on the untamed borders of the Australian Bush, guileless and innocent, their sexuality and sexualisation perceived variously through the contrasting filters of their bitter, repressed Headmistress and the barely co-ordinated adolescent infatuation of two young male onlookers. Nothing is resolved at the end of the tale, the cause of the girls disappearance is not explained, and though though atmosphere and symbolism hint at a possible supernatural causality , details are ambiguously rendered - the explanation may be mundane - but we will never know. Insinuation and suggestion create one of the most haunting mysteries in cinema precisely because of the lack of detail.

Given the unique appeal of the original novel and movie, one has to ask why Amazon bothered to adapt the story in such an unsubtle, bastardised form. the guileless girls are now worldly little madams, their sexuality more explicitly rendered, and everyone HAS to have a secret past.

Rachel Roberts was so effective as the monstrous Headmistress precisely because the reasons for her cruelty and bitterness were not explored: they are an incidental detail in a much larger drama. Here Natalie Dormer - a fine actress who deserves better - has hidden motives and a shady past which I fear will become a driving force in the narrative. And, of course, in keeping with the sledge-hammer subtlety of the show, she too is over-sexualised. Similarly Miranda, the 'Botticelli Angel' in the original is a cypher - all things to all people, and an idealised object of inexplicable fascination to all. Here the writers lazy spoon-feeding of salacious detail to keep audiences interested (because clearly we won't stay watching otherwise) shas her as a tomboy and a troublemaker, running off into the woods and pi***ing in a bowl to tick-off her prissy Bible Studies teacher, and the subject of an attempted rape...all within the first half hour.

I've heard arguments that these major conceptual changes are intended to give the key female characters emotional and psychological depth. Really? Then why is their interpretation so firmly hooked on their sexual representation? Lazy and cynical.

Unsubtle. Obvious. A shoddy and cynical appropriation of a classic story by people who clearly did not understand what made that story so enduring and effective.

That said, it is beautifully shot. Though the cinematography lacks the ethereal quality of the '70s movie, it all looks quite splendid. Pity about everything else.

I had great expectations of 'Roanoke'. Mixing a genuine American mystery - the disappearance of the Roanoke 'Lost Colony' in the 1580s - with the tropes and trappings of contemporary docu-drama and reality television seemed like a promising conceit.

What a pity the final product - especially in its latter stages - proved to be such a tiresome mess. After establishing an intriguing dynamic between the 'real' characters and their on-screen dramatised incarnations, the last few episodes descended into a genuinely tiresome hunt-and-slash format. The reason why slasher movies and visceral horror movies are so short is that the blood-and-thunder shock- factor diminishes VERY quickly. It's just NOT sustainable, dramatically, over successive episodes.

The dreadful array of 'English' accents presented by several cast members is also worthy of comment. Kathy Bates is a fine actress - one of the best - but her 'Butcher' was largely incomprehensible: inflections varying from Manchester, Yorkshire, Newcastle and Cockney. Utterly inconsistent, and unintentionally comic. At least her vocal stylings can be put down to her being a good actress PLAYING a bad actress. The same 'excuse' presumably applies to Wes Bentley - who appeared to be vocalising a Monty Python character. The same cannot be said of Sarah Paulson, whose accent though BETTER was still unconvincing. The word-salad provided by the earnest London fan in Episode 10 topped them all - a virtual tour of the UK, phrase by phrase. Evan Peters, on the other hand, wasn't bad. Not altogether convincing, but at least consistent. this is a popular show in the UK and many dramatic scenes were utterly spoiled or reduced to comedy by the blathering nonsense coming out of some of the actors' mouths. I can only imagine that the silly 'contagious Foreign Accent Syndrome' sub-plot on Murphy's other show, 'Scream Queens' is a reaction to audience response to this avoidable distraction.

The weakest season, so far. Must do better.

I'm sure it's been asked many times before...but who on earth told actor Greg Bryan that he was doing a Geordie accent?

Re-watching this episode, recently, I was astounded that this verbiage was allowed to go on screen. If anything he was attempting - very VERY poorly - to adopt a Glasgow accent, not one remotely similar to that of Newcastle. As a Glaswegian it reminded me of the awful gabbling normally adopted by tourists who believe that they can 'do' a Scottish accent.

American viewers - check out the internet for reactions to Bryan's performance.

Producers, Glasgow and Newcastle may LOOK comparatively close on a map, but they are actually in different COUNTRIES, and are utterly dissimilar. That's really rather insulting to your UK fans.

The plot of this episode was fairly lightweight, rather like much of this final season, but it would have been...okay, had it not been marred by the terrible performance of Mr Bryan, which made it cringe-inducing.

Big Highsmith fan, so it was a given that I'd go to see 'Carol', adapting her tale 'The Price of Salt'.

Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara are very good, but perhaps just a little too mannered in their performances - Blanchett, particularly - for the subtle emotional brutality of Ms Highsmith's tale to translate. When Cate's emotional guard, and the veneer of '50s sophistication slips, she's superb. We see more of Mara's back-story, and the narrative is far more tilted toward her than it is the titular big-name, which allows her the opportunity to develop a more emotionally honest and credible characterisation.

Her film. She grows, Carol...doesn't.

'Crimson Peak' is a love story.

Not your average Gothic romance, true, but Benicio (ed Guillermo, obviously)del Toro's love affair with every detail of that literary genre, which included gleeful nods to the Brontes, Walpole and every crumbling crenellations and mist-shrouded moor in between.

It is capably handled, superbly designed – something we can expect from the merrily macabre Mexican – and is quite possibly the most beautiful film I've seen this year. He also knows how to light Mia Wasikowska, who looks positively luminous.

Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain give good support, and it is a testament to del Toro that (as with his other films) the design and special-effects don't swamp the performers...too much. Sentiment, intrigue, blood, passion and dreary mist-shrouded northern landscapes. This boy knows his Onions,

Justin Kurzel's 'Macbeth' looks glorious, and the composition of each frame is an aesthete's delight.

Bit of a problem, there, as far as I'm concerned, as it slowed the pace of the film enormously.

Michael Fassbender is quite superb, and the always reliable Paddy Considine and Sean Harris likewise, but the lingering languor with which (in particular) the highland landscapes were handled diminished momentum, and – with it – the domino-effect sweeping paranoia evident in the play, and with it, the cascade of Macbeth's decline into madness. It also, more seriously, lessened the impact of Lady M's transition from ambitious pragmatist to despairing sentimentalist. Without that emotional evolution that sea-change in their characters CAN'T take your breath away in the way that it should.

That said, I could look into Mm. Cotillard's eyes for a month without blinking, so I can't blame Kurzel for lingering his lens on her.

An artistic success, visually, a spectacular performance from Fassbender, but otherwise...meh! Oh, and THE LEAST imposing Malcolm. EVER.

'The Revenant' is visually stunning. Looks fantastic, and both landscape and action scenes are handled with genuinely cinematic flair.

Unfortunately, the narrative doesn't do anything or go anywhere unexpected. Our relentless revenger, Mr DiCaprio, starts off gnarled and surly, and ends the same way. Similarly, Tom Hardy's villain is clearly an irredeemable villain from his first grumblesome grunt. The nearest we get to character development comes through the portrayal of the young Captain in charge of the trapping exhibition - and his fate, too, is telegraphed.

Leo is good, as is Hardy, but they are caricatures - I've seen both give many much more complex and nuanced performances, and don't really see why THIS revenger-greatest-hits should get them so many gong nominations. It's a commonplace revenge flick with Art-house sensibilities.

I wanted to like 'Dads' Army'. I really did. It features some of my favourite British character actors, and brings to the big screen one of my favourite TV shows.

Unfortunately, it's awful from start to finish.

The slapstick is over-done and unsubtly telegraphed, the pacing uneven (verging on the near comatose, at times), the cinematography unimaginative, and – unforgivably, given the wealth of material they had as inspiration – the script is unbearably weak.

Bill Nighy and Tom Courtney look unutterably bored, and Bill Paterson barely seems to have noticed that the camera is rolling. Michael Gambon and Toby Jones are clearly trying to make the best of a bad job, but they are aping the characterisations and physical mannerisms of Ridley and Lowe...and I expect better - MUCH better - from actors of their calibre.

Awful. If they upped the pace and spent less time trying to add needless detail to the characters' back-stories (did we, for example, really NEED to see the good Captain's wife? – she had much more comic worth as an off-screen gorgon!) it might have been bearable.

It isn't.

Stupid boys!

It's big, it's bold, and it's brassy. It has the same sassy, one- liner heavy scripting which have become integral to the cinematic Marvel Universe. It allows Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr to face off and explore the issues of duty, conscience and culpability which underpin their characters. In that regard it is not unlike 'Batman Vs Superman'.

LIKE the recent DC flick, it would be far better - dramatically speaking - if the writers thinned-out-the-herd and dispensed with the franchise-fodder padding. The Black Widow, Bucky, Rhodey, T'Challa and The Falcon serve a dramatic purpose. Ant-Man, Hawkeye and other Avengers, less so - and Spidey's appearance seems like a heavy- handed way of re-booting a franchise the studio has lost faith in.

It's not a bad film, and it has a lot to tickle the fan-boys' funny bones - the Scarlet Witch/Vision romance, for example - but it could have been tighter and more satisfying if the padding and some of the humour had been dropped - much as :Batman Vs Superman' could have been improved if it wasn't so damned earnest.

Most unforgivably, it's an action sequel which demands that the viewer be familiar with the major story-arcs of the Captain America, Iron Man and Avengers franchises. If you don't know Ant-Man from his solo flick, fine - but the heavy-handed Infinity Gem references are tangential to the Cap story...they bog things down, when letting Bob and Chris growl at one another (something they do well) would serve the story better.

The influence of The House of Mouse is clear - there being huge sections of the flick which should have 'TOYS AND ACTION FIGURES AVAILABLE FROM THE Disney STORE' subtitled, throughout. I shall re-watch 'The Winter Soldier', tonight - a far more satisfying drama.

Oh, and the high point of the screening I saw had nothing to do with what was on screen - as a five-year-old in his Cap outfit marched boldly into the auditorium and ordered the audience to be "At ease!" When a dozen or so of us saluted back and said "Aye, Captain!" he burst into a fit of the giggles. Ha!

Over the past few months I've heard all manner of comments about how 'Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice' is 'The Showgirls of Super-Hero movies'. Not so: as long as 'Green Lantern', 'The Spirit' and (Gods help us) 'Catwoman' live on in our cultural memory, the bar for truly dire hero-flicks will remain quite exceptionally low.

It's...not that bad.

It lacks the thoughtful aspect of 'Man of Steel', and the messianic allegory of that film is continued a little too heavy handedly, here - even down to the film's Easter release (sent from his Daddy in the sky and raised as one of us, he dies to save us from a baddie identified - albeit fleetingly - as 'the devil', only to inevitably return...in the sequel.)

That said, the performances are very good, and Ben Affleck's grizzled Batman/Bruce Wayne is excellent. Deserving of his own solo flick, I think. He does 'angry' very well.

For comic geeks like myself there are obvious nods to 'The Dark Knight Returns', 'Doomsday', 'Trinity', 'Public Enemies', 'Batman: Year One', 'Batman: Earth One' and a host of individual tales (including the dystopian Batman issue #666). Gadot makes an excellent Wonder Woman, and some of the fight scenes are quite beautifully staged.

Two things let it down...annoyingly, but not irredeemably. Firstly, there's the unsubtle teasers for the imminent movies featuring Aquaman, The Flash and Cyborg. This franchise-fest slows the narrative, when it needs to maintain momentum, and seems woefully contrived.

More annoying is writer David S. Goyer's inability to write a superhero script which DOESN'T involve the sudden third-act appearance of a monster/machine-which-will-end-everything. The Blade flicks, Batman Begins/Dark Knight Rises...all spend ages developing believable personalities and motivations...then throw it all away in an unnecessary effects-fest.

Grrr, Mr Goyer, Grrrrrrrrrrr!

Many of the plot issues, particularly with regard to the 'magic bullet' and Bruce Wayne's back-story are properly fleshed out in the 'Ultimate Edition'...which provides a more coherent narrative, and should have been released in cinemas.

Being a fan of the great man, I had a funny feeling I was going to like Jay Roach's biopic, 'Trumbo' – focussing on the writer and activists experience of the Blacklist during the House Un-American Activities witch-hunt s of the 1950s.

A few critics have complained that the tone is a little elegiac, and the protagonist just a little too ready with the pithy one-liners and put-downs of his enemies to be credible – but, most of the stingers attributed to him, here, ARE well recorded (some of them by Hedda Hopper – cattily rendered, here, by Helen Mirren- and other right-wingers, to whom they were directed).

Byan Cranston is excellent – in turns inspiring, passionate and utterly unbearable. Supporting turns by Michael Stuhlberg, as the morally conflicted Edward G. Robinson, John Goodman as the barking- mad and gleefully unbowed Frank King, and Alan Tudyk as Dalton Trumbo's sometime front and conspirator, Ian McLellan Hunter are excellent – it's just a pity that the always excellent Diane Lane isn't given more to do.

A scrapper who was poorly treated by the industry he worked in, and stylishly subverted that system and helped bring an end to the injustice he and so many of his colleagues endured – this is a nice tribute to a VERY talented man.

I know a great many younger film-buffs who will be genuinely astonished by this account of American movie history – and by the background of many iconic films and actors.

I enjoyed 'Spotlight'. It's a nicely-paced character driven ensemble drama: a slow-burn investigative tale which heaps outrage upon outrage, and builds to an indignant peak before asking the audience a few stern questions about culpability and individual moral responsibility. 'If you tolerate this...', and all that jazz!

It also gives Michael Keaton his best role in years, reaps a rare understated but powerful power from Liev Schrieber, and enjoys fine supporting turns from Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdam and John Slattery.

A satisfying piece, and Tom McCarthy's best since the excellent 'The Station Agent': the guy knows how to get the best from his cast.

Yup, I enjoyed it. Would probably have enjoyed it more, mind you, if I hadn't been distracted – just a little – by an elderly lady two rows in front of me, complaining loudly that it was 'All lies!' every five minutes! I'm sorry, dear lady, if you are offended by the film, but even the Boston Diocese admitted that this stuff went down, pretty much as represented on-screen.

Still, even in provoking such a rare and adverse reaction – the lady was asked to leave – 'Spotlight' appears to have been very successful in ENGAGING the attention of its audience. Which is, perhaps, the point.

'Suicide Squad' is, it has to be said, a bit of a mess.

Not the out-and-out car-crash many reviewers claim, to be fair, but a prime example of a film made by committee. 'Hey, guys', you can imagine some Exec ejaculating with cynical glee 'Smart-arse, mis-matched teams with lots of comic one liners and post-modern comic- culture references work for Marvel Studios...let's try THAT!"

Enter Will Smith playing...um...Will Smith. Hello, CGI Croc - revelling in his grotesquery. Hey, putting Scarlett Johansson in a leather cat-suit worked...so put Margot Robbie in a ripped t- shirt...no, even better, a ripped WET t-shirt...will be EVEN BETTER! And the '70s soundtrack thing from 'Guardians of the Galaxy'...yeah, we'll do THAT, too.

This is, essentially, David Ayer trying to make a DC movie in a Marvel style...without really understanding why those films work.

All down to character, Davey. 'Suicide Squad' tries to do too much all at once. Katana, Croc, Boomerang and Enchantress are pretty much undeveloped one-note characters who exist only to make overlong CGI fight sequences just a little bit longer. Viola James' turn as Amanda Waller is nicely nasty, but unlikeable – which is, admittedly, kind of the point of her character, but it makes it difficult for viewers to see her rescue as A Good Thing.

What the POINT of Enchantress and her 'machine' was remains a mystery, possibly because Cara Delevigne's performance is so oddly out of step with everything else in the plot. Jay Hernandez tries hard to be the moral centre of the story, but all his effort is wasted: he's essentially ONLY there to give the CGI guys something else to do to pad-out a weak plot. Smith is good, but under-used. A solo outing for his character might be a better option.

The big surprise, for me, is Jared Leto. His wild-card Joker is interesting enough – including elements of Ledger and Hamill, but sufficiently divergent from both to remain original, and to be genuinely unpredictable. No obvious chemistry with Robbie, but a character which could – and most likely WILL – be effectively developed in Affleck's forthcoming Batman film.

'Jason Bourne' is a perfectly serviceable actioner, marginally elevated above the usual shoot-em-up fare by Paul Greengrass's direction and his ability to blow the **** out of everything without losing focus on character.

That said, it's marginally less successful in doing this than his and Damon's other Bourne outings, largely because there appears to be very little new that can be said of our hero's journey to rediscover his identity and come to terms with his tortured past.

The new tweaks to the origins of Blackbriar and Treadstone seem forced, and the sneering villainy of Tommy Lee Jones (too similar in terms of characterisation and motive to Brian Cox in 'Supremacy') and Vincent Cassel (a pale imitation of Karl Urban in that same sequel) verges on the arch.

The unsuccessful 'Legacy' has been sidelined, so this appears to be a clearing exercise....removing extraneous characters and plot details from the first trilogy and providing a potential new adversary (though a woefully underdeveloped one) in Alicia Vikander.

Fun, but too few surprises to maintain my interest, I fear, for the inevitable sequels.

First off, it's great to hear Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, Tara Strong and others from the '90s Animated Series reprising their roles. Pity it wasn't with better material.

The script is, to put it kindly, uneven - occasional snatches of Moore's original dialogue jarring badly with Brian Azzarello's. This is the biggest problem with this piece. Azzarello writes like Azzarello, and Azzarello's OWN stuff (his crime and mob stories especially) is excellent - but his tinkering with other peoples' stuff is dire. His fleshing out of this story - almost all of the first half the film is an unnecessary prologue which objectifies Barbara Gordon/Batgirl and defines her purely in terms of her relationships with male characters - is unsubtle, and misses the point of the original piece. If I hadn't seen Azzarello's name on the box-cover I might have thought Frank Miller was involved!

There is, of course, an element of objectification in the original story, as the brutalised Commissioner Gordon is forced to look at naked images of his paralysed daughter. This was shocking in '80s comics, and is still unsettling and unpleasant...which was rather the point: We should be uncomfortable. We should be outraged. As far as The Joker is concerned Babs IS an object. A means-to-a punchline. Collateral damage. He presents her damaged, naked form to her father BECAUSE it is so wrong that, by his reckoning, it MUST drive Gordon insane. We recognise, though, that the villain's skewed objectification of her is wrong, and, though driven to the edge, Gordon remains sane. It's a messy, brutal plot-twist which outraged many at the time, but it SHOULD outrage us.

Setting Babs up as the sex interest of both the Batman (like a sloppy co-ed with a crush on her teacher) and of a disposable Joker- lite villain in the first half of Azzarello's script means that she is objectified by characters and audience alike, and this alters our reading of her as the tale develops.

I wanted to like 'Ghostbusters'. I have no problem with a female cast, and the hateful comments directed at the actors and director on social media in the months leading up to release made me want it to at least be a passable comedy.

It isn't. It REALLY isn't.

The script is flabby and repetitive, the characterisation charmless (Kristen Wiig particularly), and what gags aren't lifted from the original are painfully telegraphed (especially those relating to Wiig's letching after dopey Chris Hemsworth).

The original had a sharp script, excellent and distinctive characters and sufficient style and sass to be remembered - and repeatedly referenced in other media - three decades later. This was (mercifully) fading from memory thirty MINUTES after I left the cinema,

'Star Trek Beyond' is...okay.

It looks great, and there are the requisite nods to old continuities (and to ol' Leonard Nimoy), but this series - though fun, and certainly capable of being enjoyed without knowledge of what (boldly) went before - always seems to be hog-tied by its dependency to the original series.

We get a little more of the barbed-but-affectionate Spock/McCoy relationship which worked so well in the OS, but the main divergence from the same-old is that Kirk remains...for once...without a lady.

I like these new films, and they are set up in such a way that risks CAN be taken with characters. It's a pity they generally AREN'T. A pity, too, that young Anton Yelchin had so little to do, this time around.

Reboots trouble me, Unless they can improve upon or engagingly reinterpret the characters and ideas contained within the source material they are, at best, creatively worthless.

David Yates 'The Legend of Tarzan' successfully reintroduces the Lord of the Apes to live-action cinema with much of his Burroughs origin and supporting cast intact...but largely eschewing the patronising racism and sexism of that author's early tales (which are fun...but replete with the ignorance and prejudice of their era).

The death of Kala and our hero's relationship with Mbonga are very well handled for fanboys. The action scenes are impressive, but the CGI doesn't swamp the plot or characterisation.

Alexander Skarsgård (more of a Doc Savage than a Tarzan, physically) and Margot Robbie look good together, Sam Jackson is effective as....Sam Jackson, and Christoph Waltz is delightfully vile. The plot is full of holes, but...well...that's what sequels are for.

'Blair Witch'. Hmmmm. A Curate's Egg of a flick, if ever there was one. 'The Blair Witch Project' didn't quite kick off the spate of 'found-footage' horrors which still dominate the low-budget schlocker market – properly speaking that would be 'The Last Broadcast' (great idea, poor execution – but it has a lot to answer for. The Producer's strategy of staging stunts to genuinely terrify their actors was very effective, and produced an energy which conveyed itself to early audiences. Arguably the most interesting aspects of the whole shebang was the evolution of the back-story in the various 'Curse of the Blair Witch' and Rustin Parr mock-u- mentaries. In my view the original film is improved enormously by familiarity with these.

'Blair Witch' seemed to be an intriguing proposition.

On the surface this film is much more polished affair. The idea of using the same found-footage approach but with more advanced modern filming techniques, and possibly adding to the mythology – and resolving the mystery of what happened to the original cast/characters – seemed promising. Sadly the film will be a disappointment for anyone expecting something new. The scripted material is often stilted ("You look exactly as I remember you!" "There's...something out there!"), and occasional gross-out make-up effects, though mildly sickening (their main purpose, I'd warrant), actually slow down the action.

The film's biggest narrative crime, though, is it's attempt at narrative coherence. The original worked because much of the chaotic oddity of the second half of the narrative was NEVER explained. This was found-footage – the only hint as to the fate of lost students - which was unsettling precisely because of its LACK of context or resolution. There WERE people, remember, who bought into the 'True Story' hype, at the time. Here...well...here we have head-cams, drone-cams, tree-mounted cams, cam-cams (how quaint!), all cutting together in a polished manner, and yet never managing to be edited together in such a way that we discover what's going on. How this footage is assembled and why film from cameras which were pointing in just the right direction to reveal who (or what) was up to mischief, is never addressed.

What initially seems like a more polished technical presentation is actually proved to be far less inventive and engaging than the original. Also, nothing new is added to the mythology, and the promised big-reveal of What Happened To Heather NEVER happens.

Still, Valorie Currie gets to be cute and twitchy...so there was at least SOMETHING to keep me entertained.

Tate Taylor's 'The Girl On The Train' is a very nice piece of work.

A few of the emotional nuances of Paula Hawkins' book are lost (difficult to translate visually), but the intricate weaving of alternate perspectives and no-linear narrative is retained.

A tight script, a great ensemble cast - Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson and Haley Bennett are uniformly excellent as the three principals, and the mighty Allison Janney gives fine support. The unreliability of perception and memory with regard to self is used to good effect in Blunt's twitchy turn as our titular heroine, though it's Bennett, I think, who really captures the emotional disconnectedness both characters manifest. A clever, adult, character-driven piece which deserves re-watching.

John Michael McDonagh's 'War On Everyone' is great disappointment after 'The Guard' and 'Calvary'.

There's a line early in the script, as two toked-up minor villains peruse a porno, where they complain that the medium has eschewed action for plot: "Without a good script, you ain't got nothing!' This film HAS a good script...or a least the makings of one, and the occasional sizzling one-liner...but it's nowhere near as smart or sassy as it clearly thinks it is.

It's let down woefully by leaden plotting, unlikable characters and very little chemistry between the leading players. Michael Peña's coarsely erudite character is excellent with his screen spouse, Stephanie Sigman - and the film wold have benefited greatly by more of their repartee - but there's no such spark between him and Alexander Skarsgård.

Serial mumbler Caleb Landry Jones minces his way through what COULD have been a memorable role as the main villain's camp henchman - the script seemingly required to mention that his character is American at every opportunity: just as well, you'd never have known, otherwise.

Also, sadly, when the thin plot becomes just too threadbare, the easy Boom-Boom, Bang-Bang option is deployed, too easily and too frequently - in fulfilment of the earlier Porno Prophesy, it seems. Tessa Thompson is beguiling and tries very hard to make the best of a bad job, and is the only redeeming feature of this tired mess.

'The Infiltrator' is a slick piece of work, which suffers a little from the real-life protagonist's influence on undercover-cop dramas on film and TV over the past three decades. Many of the tricks employed by real-life protagonist Robert Mazur in taking down Pablo Escobar's drug-trafficking and money-laundering network in the '80s are familiar to us as tropes of this niche sub-genre ever since Michael Mann first used him as a consultant on 'Miami Vice'.

Art imitates life, providing a facsimile of life, in infinite recursion. What makes the film effective is Bryan Cranston's turn as the titular hero, though the narrowness of focus on the conflicted Mazur does leave Diane Kruger, John Leguizamo and, most notably, Benjamin Bratt somewhat isolated, and in need of character development. They are defined almost exclusively in terms of their specific relationship with Cranston – a shame, as a greater scope and more expansive historical context (one gets the impression, on occasion that this has been a conscious strategy to avoid classification as a period piece) might have turned a good, solid thriller – for all my gripes, still better than most crime dramas we've seen of late - into a genuinely great film. Cranston's performance is worth the ticket price by itself.

Y'know how sometimes the remake of a film can, if not actually improve upon the original - though, arguably, 'Scarface' does just that - take a different approach to the story of characters which is equally engaging, or sufficiently different to make the revamp justified...but not SO different that all it has is a titular connection to the original? Scorsese's morally skewed 'Cape Fear', for example.

Well, 'The Magnificent Seven' ISN'T one of those films. Not blindingly awful - Denzel is engaging as ever, and Chris Pratt plays Chris Pratt like no-one else can - just...pointless. It suffers by clearly having been designed by a committee.

"Hmmm", some twelve-year-old studio exec has thought. "Westerns aren't ethnically diverse...so lets have a black star...but never actually register for more than a fleeting moment that he's a black man in prejudice-ridden 1870s America. A Native American, too...but let's not dwell on the irony that he's helping the townsfolk protect the land they stole from HIS people. Oh, and there were a lot of Mexicans in the original....but they're a political hot-potato, right now 'cos of Trump...so ONE will do, even although he doesn't appear to have any distinctive character traits, other than BEING a Mexican (a violent, rapacious one, at that...The Donald would be SO happy!). Oh, and we're clearly missing the Asian market...so how about an oriental knife-flashing Ninja type. THAT's not a stereotype, at all!!'

Now some of this would be excusable if half these characters had a back-story. Ethan Hawke has a potentially interesting riff on Robert Vaughan's jittery death-rattled mercenary, and Vincent D'Onofrio's quirky Jack Horne hints at an intriguing tragic history, but neither is particularly developed. hat said, they are still MORE fleshed out than any other characters, save for Denzel Washington's Chisolm, onto whom a wholly unnecessary revenge sub-plot is half-heartedly grafted.

All of the original seven are, to some extent, either idealists or characters in need of redemption. They are all Western archetypes - but the reason archetypes WORK is that they are universal. THESE seven are just...clichés.

All you NEED to know about Yul Brynner's principled gun-for-hire, Chris, in his bond with Steve McQueen's drifter, Vin Tanner, is summed-up in the wonderful Riding Shotgun On A Hearse: willing to bring Hell down on themselves and everyone else to bury a dead Indian, scorned by the prejudiced 'civilized' townies. They do what's RIGHT, according to morality rather than law or social convention. The link between Washington and Pratt is a formulaic bar-room shoot-out. Dull. A wasted opportunity - but typical of this cliché-ridden dross.

Oddly, the plot of the original film is entirely dropped, in favour of an artless re-hash of the key elements of 'High Plains Drifter' (break out the red paint an' the dynamite, kids!), and although the bland score hints at cues from Bernstein's gloriously rousing soundtrack, they wait until the end credits before a rather limp arrangement of the iconic theme kicks in.

That's a BIG tune, boys and girls...and you didn't earn it.

Crap. Watch the original, instead. More fun. More emotional connection. Just...better

Shearsmith and Pemberton's quirky, dark and grimly comic tales can be something of an acquired taste. Often elements of the grotesque and blackly comic seem to be present merely on account of their capacity to shock...because they are expected by their fan-base, familiar with 'The League of Gentlemen' and 'Psychoville'.

This is different.

This is VERY different.

Alternating between the bizarre and the mundane, the romantic and the surreal, this is a gloriously layered, unsettling retrospective of the peaks an troughs of a woman's life which gloriously wrong- foots the audience's expectations at every turn. Is it a nightmare, where Dream Logic reigns? Is our heroine going mad? Elements of 'Jacob's Ladder' are employed as the audience becomes aware of the nature of her experience just as she does. The hints are all there, and watching the show again, recently, reinforced my appreciation of the subtlety of the piece: the significance of Bocelli's recurring 'Con te partirò', SHOULD be obvious, but isn't...until the final frames, as Sheridan Smith looks directly into camera. Utterly heartbreaking.

Mr Shearsmith and Mr Pemberton...well done, indeed, gentlemen. I can only agree with some of the other reviewers on IMDb that this was the best 30 minutes of television I have seen for a very long time.

The cast is excellent too, of course, but this piece belongs to Sheridan Smith, a performer with exemplary comic timing and a natural command of tragedy - a rare combination. It's an irony that such an extraordinary talent's most engaging characteristic is her apparent ordinary-ness: we relate to her far more than any of P&S's brasher creations.

It continues to surprise me that this woman is not a major star, internationally.

If Whedon's films have a fault it is that he tries just a little too hard to give his audience more bang for their buck. Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a major problem: indeed in episodic TV drama it is an advantage. Characters are fully-rounded and developed. The Fanboys (and girls) have their appetites for their favourite heroes fully sated. In a self-contained feature, though, this can occasionally be a burden.

I liked 'Age of Ultron'. I'm a comic-geek and a film-buff, and I think the integration of supporting characters from the 'Thor', 'Captain America' and 'Iron Man' franchises (some of whom are going to become more prominent as Downey and Renner explore other projects) was amusing. The major achievement of the first 'Avengers'movie it that it made these franchises cohesive. But if the reaction of some of the viewers grumbling in the aisles at my screening are anything to go by, it can also make for an over-busy narrative for the uninitiated.

The big guns are all good. Downey and Hemsworth dominate, but everyone gets their chance to shine (and quip). Spader's voice work as Ultron is maybe just a little arch, but it suits the tone of the movie, and Bettany's Vision provides an interesting counterpoint to all the hysteria. The dialogue is great: though some of the one- liners were verging on being just too-cute...almost a parody of a Whedon script. But busier.

The movie's biggest redeeming feature is clearly Whedon's love for his characters, and that's what stops this being just another splashy special-effects flick...but it's greatest failing is that characters, relationships and the group dynamic are oddly left hanging...at least until the NEXT episode.