Wer wenn nicht wir (Andres Veiel, 2011)

Let this film lay the German obsession with the Baader-Meinhof Gang to rest. If Not Us, Who? does spare us another full exploration of the addled middle-class lefty terrorists and thereby any fear that they will be depicted as revolutionary anti-heroes, as they veered dangerously close to being at times in 2008's Baader Meinhof Complex, by concentrating almost exclusively on the earlier years of Baader's eventual girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, and her partner of the time.
They are quite clearly pathetic figures, carrying far too much baggage to do with their parents' actions in the war years and finding a childishly inadequate outlet in free love and political ranting. This much is good, and at least gives credence to the notion that the director is burying their whole tribe's ethos. But there is also so little to empathise with in them that the film eventually suffocates under their self-involvement.

5/10

Chernobyl Diaries (Bradley Parker, 2012)

Hot on the heels of The Darkest Hour, another batch of young Americans head for the slaughter in the spooky former Soviet Union, the outcome this time somewhat more predictable as they will insist on sneaking into Chernobyl where there be mutants, of course. Oren Peli, the director of the thoroughly meh Paranormal Activity, is behind the script, but one of the mutants or indeed main characters would also have had sufficient brain activity for the task. It all ends in screamy tears and only the eerily decayed Hungarian and Serbian locations chosen to double for the disaster site stand out.

3/10