Terminator Salvation (2009)

Unwisely, the Terminator series takes us for the first time to a time after the apocalyptic Judgement Day (until now, just an occasionally glimpsed bleak potential future our heroes have been working hard to avoid) and suddenly we are learning more than we ever cared to know about John Connor's dreary war against the machines - it is more Transformers with Mad Max stylings than Terminator - and muddying the Terminator formula even more than this is a lead Wolverine character whose uninteresting journey into the future delays the movie we actually wanted to watch which starts twenty minutes before the end.

★★☆☆☆

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American Hustle (2013)

This lively comic "who's grifting who" crime caper with a warm heart opens with Christian Bale's conman carefully constructing a combover to hide an unfortunate male pattern baldness and from there introduces con artists, FBI agents, politicians and mobsters who are all similarly doing what they have to do to survive - not just the high tension/high risk sting at the movie's centre (based on the FBIs actual ABSCAM operation in the 70s and 80s) but their very human frailties, dysfunctional marriages, tricky affairs, dicky tickers and office politics.

★★★★☆

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The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

No Batman movie has ever taken itself quite so seriously as this third episode of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, a long and deadly earnest superhero opera that grows increasingly loud and monotonous as it goes on and on with a booming soundtrack that for almost three hours sounds like it is heralding the rise of the valkyries - your patience will be tested and you'll want to give it all away when suddenly towards the end a final act revitalises things.

★★★★☆

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