Every Secret Thing (2014)

You have to wonder at the atmosphere within the home of husband and wife authors David Simon and Laura Lippman: he wrote that rivetting but grim-as-grim true crime brick Homicide, and she is the author of over twenty detective novels, including the bleak one upon which this movie is based, about a detective (Elizabeth Banks) investigating a case of baby abduction that puts her back into contact with two kids, now adults, who seven years prior were charged, like the boy killers of real-life James Bulger, with the kidnap and murder of an infant - a sobering plot (and dinner-table conversation in the Simon-Lippman household, one presumes) given it is more interested in probing baby killer psychology than having fun with mystery reveals.

★★★☆☆

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Charlotte's Web (2006)

A young girl befriends a piglet and, er, saves his bacon and then a spider befriends that piglet and, er, saves his bacon, in this animatronically enhanced, treacly film version of the beloved - but for me, even as a kid, mystifying - E B White children's book: what is it the humans think is happening and why isn't it Charlotte who is celebrated?

★★☆☆☆

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War of the Worlds (2005)

Dakota Fanning screams alot when she needs to be quiet and is struck dumb when she needs to scream, but rather than feed her to the alien pods that have taken over the Earth, Tom Cruise valliantly carries her through this big budget Spielberg film version of the H G Wells novel, which includes an extended Hitchcockian basement scene and many scenes like those in Signs (2002) in which the human drama fills the foreground and the horror of an alien invasion takes place in the often unseen or only partially seen background.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS