Flightplan (2005)

Jodie Foster plays a mother searching an inflight jumbo passenger plane for her missing daughter while the passengers and crew members around her believe she is delusional and doesn't actually have a daughter on the plane or anywhere, in this 'nobody believes her' thriller that takes Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes from a transEuropean train and puts it 35,000 feet in the air, but this turns out to be a much lesser film than that classic on account of it taking itself way too seriously, because the movie reveals its underwhelming hand too early, because the plot doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and lastly because early scenes suggest a stark, dreamlike unreality which makes all that follows hard to care about.

★☆☆☆☆

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Orphan (2009)

It is a pity the makers didn't manage this thriller's entirety as well as it manages its surprise ending because although the ending is a good one (it had the cinema I was in on its feet, causing a huge uproar), the story that precedes it about Esther "The Bad Seed" orphan girl who has a wee behavioural problem, is humorless and arduous and even at times tiresome.

★★★☆☆

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