Just A Breath Away (Dans La Brume) (2018)

France's contribution to the glut of situational scifi thrillers, in which family members must work together to survive an inexplicable phenomenon (think A Quiet Place, It Comes At Night, Bird Box, The Silence, and perhaps, back in the beginning, The Happening) is the incredibly contrived but entertaining Dans La Brume, (or Just A Breath Away), about a poisonous fog that envelops Paris, leaving only those living sufficiently high up in their apartment buildings alive - when they get the chance, one family does not evacuate the city because their daughter has an autoimmune disease and lives in a hermetically sealed chamber, so instead they dash in and out of the fog trying to make optimal use of a limited supply of oxygen tanks, gas masks and batteries.

★★★☆☆

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The Death of Stalin (2017)

Following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, members of the dictator's Central Committee, who have names but are otherwise indistinguishable in appearance or by their garbled political motivations, gather and swear and call each other 'turd coils' for nearly two hours, in this headache-inducing and laugh-free "hilarious comedy of terrors".

★☆☆☆☆

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Turbulence (1997)

This plane disaster movie throws into its Die Hard-esque Christmas context a gang of ruthless Con Air criminals, a Silence of the Lambs serial killer, a Perfect Storm storm, and laws of physics-defying Flight aerobatics, not to mention a Backdraft cabin fire, a "Here's Johnny" The Shining climax, oh and some turbulence, and despite all this cannot hide the fact it is basically an exceedingly silly mid-air "Someone has to fly this plane!" Flying High.

★★☆☆☆

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Oblivion (2013)

There is something ho-hum about this sci-fi action and it isn't just that Tom Cruise is playing a character named Jack for the third time in his career - a serviceman, he trawls around a desolate future Earth (like the one in Elysium complete with a tetrahedral spacestation hanging in its sky) fixing stuff (like a live-action Wall-E) until one day the woman quite literally of his dreams falls to Earth, raising questions about his past and memories and launching him into a battle for freedom under the command of Morgan Freeman (in dark glasses, looking very much like Morpheus in The Matrix).

★★☆☆☆

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