Mindscape (aka "Anna") (2013)

The high-concept sci-fi is really just a contrivance, the only thing separating this movie from a more run-of-the-mill whodunit with Mark Strong's "memory investigator", a man able to piggybank along in people's memories, really just a Hercule Poirot who might otherwise have to simply interview those involved in a mystery involving a housebound and hunger-striking teenager (another eye-roll-inducing contrivance), a family secret, a murder, schoolyard bullying and mistaken identity.

★★☆☆☆

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The Nun (2018)

The Conjuring series continues the backward extrapolation of its horror mythology with this prequel to the prequels providing even more answers to the questions no-one was asking about its demons, to date the evil possessors of dolls, children, houses, dreamscapes, the charmless Warrens and now, in this episode (not so much a film as a litany of jump scares flimsily strung together), the possessed is a nun in a convent in 1952 Romania who can bury an exorcist in a box in a moment flat but is reduced to impotent bell-ringing when another wants to dig him up, similarly lickety-split.

★★☆☆☆

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The Final Girls (2015)

Purple Rose of Cairo-ing a group of teen cinema-goers into a movie called 'Camp Bloodbath' seems a roundabout way to pay homage to the 80s slasher flick, and even more convoluted is making one of the teens the daughter of Camp Bloodbath's late lead actress because, really, wouldn't this be a more effective "love letter to the 80s slasher flick" if it just concentrated on presenting the sorts of things that actually happen in 80s slasher flicks?

★★☆☆☆

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The Bling Ring (2013)

Sofia Coppola's movie based on a Vanity Fair article about a spate of celebrity home robberies that occurred across Calabasas, California in 2008, is a breezy work of 86 minutes that presents the thieves, a gang of petulant fame- and fashion-fixated high schoolers, in their own superficial light, as wilful narcissicists who rifle through celebrities' private homes and personal belongings in the same way they browse glossy magazines or click through the TMZ website.

★★★☆☆

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