28 Days Later (2002)

Even though the zombie action here is tried-and-true - an apparently lone survivor stumbles across other survivors, they argue about what to do, and eventually agree to seek out the source of radio-broadcast messages about a safe haven -  director Danny Boyle keeps things stylistically and visually fresh with rapid, rabid zombies - not the slow-moving hordes - and a gritty British rock aesthetic, right from the start, for example, pairing anti-establishment thrash with frenzied scenes of a virus breach at a research lab before cutting to a lengthy sequence of unnerving silence as Cillian Murphy wakes in a hospital in a completely deserted London.

★★★★☆

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Anna (2019)

I think what Luc Besson intended was another slick, smart, minimally-plotted sexy violent spy thriller like 'La Femme Nikita' and its American remake 'The Assassin' with Bridget Fonda, but 'Anna' is a far cry from those movies with its woeful acting, laughable casting, terrible editing that makes the fisticuff action look like tai chi. and a story told via choppy-changey timehops that you know are just an attempt to try to disguise how wafer-thin and ridiculous the story is (a globe-trotting supermodel-slash-spy brings the KGB and the CIA together with a kiss each).

★☆☆☆☆

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A Quiet Place II (2020)

The start takes audiences back to "Day One" when the extremely sound-sensitive creatures first land on Earth, an arresting sequence that has debut director John Krasinski demonstrating Shyamalan-at-his-best flourishes, but long before the audience is satisfied with this backstory and before any point to it is established, the movie abruptly gives way to three concurrent story threads in the present, post-the original movie, in which three different characters simply walk heel-to-toe on three different sand tracks to three different destinations, hardly enthralling and full of directorial looseness, with the alien threat along these boring paths not much more worrying than if, say, you were hiking in an area inhabited by wild dogs (but wild dogs that, although certain to appear at each significant landmark, only turn up in ones or twos, never more, irrespective of how much noise you make).

★★☆☆☆

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Red Lights (2012)

Occam's Razor is the philosophical principle which states the simplest explanation is often correct, but the most banal and laughable explanations can also be correct as demonstrated in this precursor to Now You See Me that swaps the Four Horsemen's magic tricks for the paranormal feats of Robert De Niro's spoon-bending Simon Silver, a Uri Geller type who commands large sums of money for tickets to his arena spectaculars and Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy's duo of Occam's Razor-spouting CSI: Supernatural investigators are the ones getting super worked up about his feats.

★☆☆☆☆

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Red Eye (2009)

A hotel manager on a red eye flight sits beside a creep and finds herself the lynchpin of his pretty harebrained assassination plot, in this Wes Craven thriller that doesn't make much of the potential of its midflight setting - couldn't the creep just have staked out the hotel or intercepted the hotel manager in, say, a taxi instead?

★★☆☆☆

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Transcendence (2014)

"Johnny Depp is a brilliant scientist who uploads his conscience to the internet and becomes all-powerful" is a winning science fiction film pitch but the resulting movie is less winning with the film opening a loooong time before Johnny Depp's brilliant scientist uploads his conscience to the internet, so there's a hohum wait for audiences as the pitch is set-up and then, too soon after things start to get interesting, the movie moves into its third act when the all-powerful A.I. is suddenly not so all-powerful, allowing an awkward hurry-let's-find-a-way-to-end-this conclusion.

★★★☆☆

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