Mystic River (2003)

Director Clint Eastwood's Best Picture Oscar-nominated Mystic River is simply a Boston-set police procedural, really, which makes all the solemnity, all the anguish of the story - all the blue-grey bleakness - and the fact an investigation that takes a matter of days to resolve is couched in twenty-five years of trauma context, a bit much - certainly once the movie ends and you know who killed Katie Markum, the daughter of ex-convict Jimmy Markum (a Best Actor Oscar-winning performance from Sean Penn) the question will have crossed your mind why so much trouble was taken to tell what is essentially a coincidence-heavy episode of Law and Order.

★★★☆☆

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Howard The Duck (1986)

As with the more recent Ted and Ted 2, the basic tenet of Executive Producer George Lucas' infamous box office bomb seems to be that a furry or fluffy creature doing human adult things like smoking cigars, drinking beer, and bar brawling is funny, but this Marvel comic-inspired movie about a 3 foot 2 inch and - except for his pink skin eyelids - frozen-faced duck alien who somehow ends up trapped in Cleveland, is so mundane that a more suitable title would have been Howard The Turkey or HowAwful The Duck.

☆☆☆☆☆

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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.

★★★★☆

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