Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City (2021)

Moments from the games are brought to life and strung together with more concern for perfectly realised game haircuts, weapons, and cosplay outfits than for telling a coherent story, so this reboot, after so many Milla Jovovich movies,  feels like it false-starts right the way through to at least the halfway mark before an unwarranted denouement (a live-action reenactment of that train-carriage bossfight that players of the game will remember).

★☆☆☆☆

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#Alive (2020)

Yoo Ah-in, who was so good in Burning as Lee Jong-su, essentially repeats the performance here playing Oh Joon-woo, the same gormless kid gaping dumbly at a set of circumstances beyond his comprehension - here, a cannibal zombie onslaught in an apartment complex - and it really is this and the performance of his costar, Park Shin-hye as a fellow survivor in an apartment across the way, that help overcome several cheats in the script - zombie hordes who suddenly aren't a threat at a door, for example - and elevates this slight string of zombie survival set-pieces into something human and affecting.

★★★☆☆

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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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Arctic (2018)

Imagine the Robert Redford character in All Is Lost on a sled, not a yacht, travelling across expanses of snow, not ocean, and having encounters with polar bears, not sharks, in a more contrived survival struggle - this movie compounds disaster upon disaster in an unlikely and ultimately unnecessary way - and you've got this beautiful-looking, extremely well-acted but very familiar man-versus-nature thriller starring Mads Mikkelsen.

★★★☆☆

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The Mountain Between Us (2017)

Like Cupid's bow, a plane crash, a broken leg, starvation, dehydration, and the smell that comes from not having washed for three weeks bring two strangers stranded in the mountains closer together in this woefully scripted but easy-to-watch romantic drama, the best thing of which, not counting smoking hot Idris Elba, is the title which much more succinctly than the movie encapsulates both the differences that separate the strangers and the shared traumatic experience that unites them.

★★☆☆☆

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