Ridley Scott’s muddled Alien prequel is, essentially, a remake of the original film with a far higher budget, a thick coating of pseudo-science, and a screenplay that seems to be cobbled together from a dozen different drafts.
This month, Turner Classic Movies is putting a spotlight on politically themed films. A mere coincidence as the presidential election season reaches its peak?
This year’s second live-action version of Snow White re-imagines the fairy tale as a dark, rain-lashed, mud-spattered epic, full of siege engines, burning villages, and all sorts of borrowings from the work of Tolkien and C S Lewis.
An intensely moving documentary, set in the extraordinary lunar terrain of Chile’s Atacama Desert, where the “translucency of the sky” was ideal for the country’s impressive, 1970s astronomy programme.
If not quite at the level of Wallace and Gromit’s were-rabbit adventure, Aardman’s latest stop-motion feature has its own charm, not least in the figure of its leading man, the Pirate Captain.
Back in the mid noughties, you couldn’t move for marching and dancing penguins, so there’s something vaguely out-of-date about this Jim Carrey kids book adaptation.
One of this year’s most gripping films, A Separation is a courtroom drama, Iranian style.
The closest Chris Weitz had previously come to the father-son dynamic at the heart of this affecting immigration drama was in the Hugh Grant vehicle About a Boy, before he was seduced by franchise riches in The Golden Compass and New Moon.
The global economy’s in ruins, so, figures Tom Hanks, what every-one needs is a perky recession tale about a wholesome soul, Larry, who knuckles down and makes the best of it.
It’s not as fun as the 2008 original, but this high-kicking sequel to Jack Black’s breakout CGI cartoon is a better film.