War for the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2017)

The reboot series continues with the same director as last time around, and that continuity proves to facilitate far greater depth than in previous outings. Of course, the motion capture effects are even more astounding than before, which is fairly important since the majority of the screen time is taken up by the apes. But there is serious content in the storyline too, with intelligent real-world parallels to be drawn as the beleaguered apes attempt to rescue their fellows from a concentration camp run by Woody Harrelson playing a fanatical  racist colonel, with obvious echoes of Ralph Fiennes's sadistic camp commandant in Schindler's List. The comparison is not a spurious one, and neither is the plot so pat as to provide equivalents among the humans to the inevitable 'good Germans' in WW2 films, with the only decent human a mute girl adopted by the apes. For once, this is actually a franchise that has justified its continuation.

7/10