Neil Jordan directs Isabelle Huppert, Chloë Grace Moretz and Maika Monroe in this stalker thriller where a nice girl befriends the wrong lonely lady.

This is exactly what I want from a Friday night thriller. Stock female roles given quirk by gifted actresses. All three leads are stellar. Moretz has a sweetness – her appealing normal body and doll like face selling the paranoia and peril. Monroe nails the bad girl best friend role… you count the minutes until her fodderish death… then something else, something not quite so cliched happens with her. And Huppert can do these unhinged witch parts in her sleep. Watching her skip out a little ballet after a murder or calmly injecting a spurting wound is nowhere near as creepy as her turning up at your restaurant and dissing the wine list. Jordan’s visuals are lush, he even gets to evoke his fairy tale back catalogue… this NYC set rattler owes as much to Little Red Riding Hood as his breakthrough In the Company of Wolves did 35 years ago. A tight little throwback.

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Wolfgang Petersen directs Brad Pitt, Brian Cox and Eric Bana in this epic yet truncated retelling of Homer’s The Iliad.

Golden yet lifeless. Big yet distracted. First time I watched this at the cinema I couldn’t get my head around Brad Pitt’s torso. I was definite it had been CGI’d on. This time I got the Classics degree commentary track treatment from my wife. I know all the changes to the text now… which Gods are missing… which battles lasted ten years rather than four minutes. I feel so educated, I also feel like I wanna watch Clash of the Titans instead. Orlando Bloom is a pussyhole in this… all this massacring, thousand ships trouble because he was a pussyhole. You have problems when the only sympathetic character in your entire production of hundreds is played by Rose Byrne. A hit in its day I guess this is only really of interest now as the forerunner to Game of Thrones. The same writing team reworked George R R Martin’s series of books the way they adapted Homer here. A soapy concoction of stoic duty, rapes, face-offs, plotting tyrants and pretty boy swooning.

5

Jonah Hill directs Sunny Suljic, Olan Prenatt and Na-kel Smith in this teen drama about an awkward kid becoming accepted by a group of skaters.

Yeah, this got me. Not the funniest, nor most intellectual teen movie made yet it hits a seam of truth beautifully and works that seam gloriously for its easy to digest running time. Hill captures all the doubt, hurt and conflict of trying to fit in with kids who don’t know who they are when you definitely don’t know who you are. These kids are united by skating… the drinking and the hanging out are what convince though. Hill gives us the tribal joy of rolling down a street lane together, the pain of realising how difficult it is for kids to articulate jealousy and loneliness. We get glimpses of alcoholism, self harm and poverty… not in an afterschool special finger wagging way… just to add to the reality. There’s a melancholy that overrides the nostalgia, a foul mouthed inarticulacy that smothers any scripted wit. It is film that will make you laugh out loud, wish you were there, wish you weren’t. It might well be the Dazed and Confused for this generation. It might well be almost as fine a piece of filmmaking as that genre pinnacle.

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Vincenzo Natali directs Nicole de Boer, Maurice Dean Wint and David Hewlett in this sci-fi puzzler where a group of strangers wake up in a geometric cell maze full of booby traps.

Proof that great sci-fi cinema can make its limitations its core strength. Natali recycles the same set over and over, making it seem like an endless existential curse. Our leads have to decide which of six hatches to climb through next… is the next room safe? Does it lead anywhere? Do any of them lead anywhere? The cube design is rich… industrial yet functional. The screech and clanks of the hatches plus the iconic glowing wall panels all add to the oppression yet also embellish a rich fantasy setting. Sure the cast are basic, but they get across the escalating tensions and theories of exposition adequately enough. It makes for a tense, jerkingly gory thriller, one that is enjoyably rewatchable despite its singular set. Neat.

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Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer direct Jason Clarke, John Lithgow and Sonia Maria Chirila in this remake of the Stephen King tale about a family who moves onto land with the unholy powers of resurrection.

A vast improvement on the first godawful stab at adapting this King bestseller. It is creepier, superior in its acting talent and playful in it twisty tweaks especially in the final third. That’s still not to say this update is entirely worthwhile. It is a story whose horrors lie in the imagination of the reader and visualising the revulsion and moral turmoil of its players will never have the same effect as what is left unshown in the book. Many King novels lend themselves to cinema, it is probably time to accept Pet Sematary is just not one of them.

5

Drake Doremus directs Felicity Jones, Anton Yelchin and Jennifer Lawrence in this romance about a couple, clearly in love, separated by immigration laws.

Directed so as to be a collage of “real” understated moments, this oscillates between powerfully affecting and bitty. The cast is winning, though it is hard to have too much sympathy for Yelchin’s Jacob when he pines for Felicity Jones while having Jennifer Lawrence as his emergency back-up. This feels more recognisable on the whole than most Hollywood romances.

6

Billy Wilder directs William Holden, Don Taylor and Otto Preminger in this POW drama where a low level racketeer is suspected of being a snitch to the Germans by his bunk mates.

A very bleak look at POW life, slightly camouflaged by the witty dialogue and some daft broad comedy moments. It doesn’t entirely shake loose of its stagey source material as a feature film. William Holden’s Oscar winning lead turn is exemplary though.

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Abel Ferrara directs Harvey Keitel, Victor Argo and Paul Calderón in this week in the life of an irredeemable cop who takes and deals coke, is getting deeper in the hole with his bookies and has to solve the rape of a nun… a case that mirrors his own drug and faith fuelled perversion.

What starts out as transgressive and visceral, quickly becomes very one-note. Harvey does some drugs. Harvey gets nude. Harvey wanks at two girls he pulls over. This was a bête noire on release, a cult film accessible just when I was getting into less mainstream cinema. I was unimpressed by it at 13 and see little value in it at 39.

5

Rob Bowman directs Christian Bale, Matthew McConaughey and Izabella Scorupco in this apocalyptic fantasy movie where dragons have driven modern humanity to the brink of existence.

London has become a dragon’s nest. US military skydivers think they have a way of killing them. Christian Bale just wants to keep his orphanage of very clean children out of the firing line. A film that was always going to be a better poster and trailer. The production design owes a lot to Alien3; sackcloth and industrial gothic. Hell, the score even steals the starbeast’s brass section’s urgent wail. And if it just stuck to physical looks then it would be an adequate actioner. The dragon effects are ropey though. McConaughey chews some scenery for the longueurs when the wispy polygon threat toddles off away from the narrative. And then it never really gets going. The finale feels particularly limited and truncated. Probably best you just imagine where this concept could go in your head for 90 minutes rather than sit through this passable grim fudge.

5

Frank Capra directs Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur and Lionel Stander in this tale of a small town eccentric who inherits a fortune and has to move to the city.

The thing about Capra is he goes dark really quick. For the first hour this a daft comedy, where much of the humour comes from straight talking everyman Cooper outwitting various wiseguys and corporate sharps. Then we get into the ‘socialism would help people’ message (admirable) and the courtroom drama to destroy our quirky, affable hero. Like It’s A Wonderful Life or Mr Smith Goes to Washington the lows our protagonist are pulled down to feel almost distastefully manipulative. Capra really tries to break his heroes, torture them with the very idea of themselves, before offering them or us any kind of quick redemption. I’m not sure Passion of the decent man holds up as entertainment these days quite so well.

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