The Amateur (2025)

Run-of-the-mill rogue agent stuff not made any more engaging - in fact, it is all rendered a bit daft - by the fact Rami Malek's hero is a hastily trained amateur - a data geek working deep in the bowels of CIA headquarters who takes it upon his pasty little self to track down and kill the terrorists responsible for killing his wife, in outlandish ways that are laughable given the smug way he glibly enacts these logically impossible booby traps.

★★☆☆☆

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John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)

With a plot about as sophisticated as a Spy Kids movie, film-sets that resemble the painted polystyrene walls of a laser tag night-out, and role-playing action of the sort you might see offered up by overzealous bachelor party paintballers or DnDers running around in capes or three-piece suits and elocuting words like "Parabellum" (say it as you swirl wine in a chalice), this tiresome third in the John Wick series dares to be even worse than the previous two cartoons: a Fanta-grade (thanks, Laurence Fishburne, for that punctuation) string of gun- and knife-fantasists' wet dreams with lethargic fight-scene choreography (we all love Keanu Reeves but think of the flat-footedness of Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull..) and compound this lethargy with the nerdy flamboyance of cape-twirling and gunplay to classical music, plus insistent we-want-this-series-to-go-forever universe-building and a troubling unerring nonchalance from everyone in the face of, well, endless face-knivings, plus - the worse thing - a dismaying promise of even more prepostrousness to come.

★★☆☆☆

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Contagion (2011)

In Deep Impact, another global panic disaster movie with an all-star cast, it is a meteor hurtling towards Earth that, threatening human extinction, leads the world's population to act in extraordinary ways (including holding a lottery for a limited number of life-preserving prizes), but here in Contagion, it is a new strain of virus - something like the coronavirus - that wipes out millions, starts a global panic, and launches the scientific race to find a vaccine, and even though we've seen it all before in Deep Impact and Outbreak and others, it is gripping stuff ripped from today's newspaper headlines.

★★★★☆

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Event Horizon (1997)

More Hellraiser than Alien, this horror (not scifi) movie from director Paul W S Anderson really does make space travel feel like time spent stuck in a hellbox, especially given H R Giger, not ergonomics, has informed the design of the ship and chaos, not sense, governs the shouty, gory events on board.

★☆☆☆☆

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Passengers (2016)

** SPOILER ALERT **

A ripper sci-fi premise (a man's hibernation chamber malfunctions and he wakes up on a spaceship 90 years ahead of schedule) offers the potential to explore lives off-course and the human response to the abject loneliness of deep space isolation, but instead a glossy Hollywood romance takes place, only to be squandered by two things - plotting as full of holes as the breached hull of a spaceship, and the last-minute introduction of a "come back alive" machine.

★★☆☆☆

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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

Zack Snyder opens this with the trauma of Bruce Wayne's childhood - a backstory no-one needs to see, not now, not again - and from this tired start it is clear he has approached his job of launching DC Comics' Justice League franchise like an overzealous fanboy wanting to include evvveeerything, mashing together Nolan's Dark Knight series with his own 2013 Henry Cavill Superman movie and ending up with a monstrous, laborious, not-fun-at-all Justice League origin story that briefly features a personality-free Wonder Woman and an overly familiar Lex LuHeathLedgZuckerbergJokethor...surely jumping straight into an already assembled Justice League-proper movie would have been more fun than this!?

★★☆☆☆

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Man of Steel (2013)

This frenetic but enjoyable instalment of the Superman franchise has Superman looking more like Wolverine than ever before - muscly, hairy, and fearless - and features dizzying but thrilling action sequences only slightly marred by the sight early on of Russell Crowe riding a Jar Jar Binks-style dragonfly around Krypton.

★★★☆☆

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