Dirty Pretty Things (2002)

When Okwe, a cleaner at The Baltic Hotel in London, discovers a human heart in the blocked lavatory of room 510, he embroils himself in a grubby urban crime drama and in doing so comes to realise the extent of the bind he and his fellow illegal immigrant workers are in and just how much the city will take advantage of them, the dirty pretty things servicing the systems that fail them.

★★★☆☆

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Secret In Their Eyes (2015)

This is a thriller about a 13-year-old murder case reopened by a retired FBI agent but the plot of the superior 2009 Argentinian original has been convoluted with some stuff about terrorism probably meant to add contemporary richness but which in fact just muddies the main story, and while Chwetel Ejiofor and Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts are fine, the movie is not the same without Ricardo Darin's shrewd face and sparkling eyes adding some humanness to the grim subject matter.

★★★☆☆

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Salt (2010)

It's every bit as exciting and fun as The Fugitive except that in the place of suspected wife-killer Dr Richard Kimble is Angelina Jolie's Evelyn Salt, a likeable woman married to an arachnologist, on the run from Government agents who believe her to be a Russian spy; under pressure she certainly appears to be as resourceful and as acrobatic as a Bourne operative - but an American or a Russian one?

★★★★☆

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12 Years A Slave (2013)

This is gruelling viewing based upon the memoir of Solomon Northup, an African American of New York State who really was kidnapped in 1841 and enslaved on Louisiana cotton plantations for 12 years, and his story, presented with rich period detail, will make you shake your head in dismay.

★★★★☆

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Doctor Strange (2016)

Marvel's latest superhero origin story is a grown-up version of Harry Potter - Hogwarts is a Kathmandu cult, Dumbledore is Tilda Swinton reprising her roles from The Beach and Vanilla Sky, Voldemort is a barely seen cosmic darksider called Dormammu, the spells are "coding", the cloak of invisibility is a cloak of levitation of unexplained sentience, and the special effects are repetitive Inception-style city-shifting ones.

★★★☆☆

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