Bird Box (Susanne Bier, 2018)

Ah, another European film director whose career has gone downhill for years takes the Tinseltown zloty to make a big-budget sci-fi film. Hollywood is really running out of apocalypse scenarios by now, and the suicidal mass hysteria communicated by eye contact here has the sense of dredging the bottom of the barrel. This might not be the case if the pandemic could be used to serve better as a metaphor for the pernicious blight of viral media, or if something was made of the set-up where Sandra Bullock's lead character starts off as a reclusive visual artist (the vital importance of being able to see etc.). But first the standard survival horror boxes are ticked off - including the gleeful raid on a supermarket while the nasties lurk outside - and then, completely unforgivably, the logic of the menace is done away with, since it was invisible supernatural beings after all. Bullock then runs around shouting a lot at her two kids (who she calls just 'boy' and 'girl' in some ridiculous reversion to pseudoprimitivism), there is a completely unexplained leap from them being trapped in the city to safety in a sylvan setting and finally a denouement that makes just as little sense. Shyamalan's much-panned jumble The Happening, which this decides to copy, having no other ideas of its own, was actually a far more coherent and unsettling work than this sorry affair.

3/10

Ghost Stories (Andy Nyman & Jeremy Dyson, 2017)

Recalling classic British portmanteau horror films like Dead of Night or From Beyond the Grave, Ghost Stories has a professional debunker of supernatural incidents challenged to disprove three extreme cases. All three short tales are strong on atmosphere and chills, always holding something back where modern horror usually just goes straight for the jugular. The support by Paul Whitehouse as a spiky night watchman and Martin Freeman in a more pivotal role is also an asset. But the stories are also quite unsatisfying in themselves, since none of them reaches a conclusion, cutting off just pre-climax, and there's no sense that these are unsolvable mysteries either, being easy to put down as the fevered imaginings of individuals. It takes a closing chapter to tie it all together and while this starts off in decidedly wobbly fashion, there is dramatic closure at the end. It's not to be listed among the heights of the genre, since it could really have done with a tighter edit, but it's worth lauding nevertheless for its mood and ambition.

6/10

Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009)

Wes Anderson converts Roald Dahl's children's novel into a different kind of beast where Dahl's dark undertones are replaced with a breezier, if still sardonic, air that the director just can't help injecting into all of his cabinet of curios. George Clooney is a great choice to voice the titular anthropomorphic fox, his deadpan delivery adding a layer to the stop-motion character as he comes up with scheme after scheme to fight the evil human farmers who seek to wipe his family out and the rest of the voice cast, from the regular Anderson cadre to the likes of Michael Gambon and Meryl Streep, help flesh out the host of animals too. It's a tad too whimsical to really engage the emotions - a charge often levelled against Anderson - but the wit and invention are impeccable and the puppet-driven animation is the real star, utterly eclipsing any of its digitally-generated competitors with its craft and texture.

7/10

My Cousin Rachel (Roger Michell, 2017)

The second big-screen adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's mystery-romance novel, My Cousin Rachel is told from the perspective of Philip, an orphaned young man, now heir to the wealth of his deceased cousin, beset with doubts about the manner of his cousin's passing. The doubts are focused on his beguiling widow, the Rachel of the title, and Philip is soon inexorably smitten with her. The story then proceeds to play out pretty much to a gothic formula, and accordingly even the end doesn't come as much of a surprise, but the dialogue is sharp and the interplay between Sam Claflin as the naïf and Rachel Weisz as the possibly deceitful widow is a delicately poised dance.

6/10

Los Últimos Días (David & Àlex Pastor, 2013)

When it comes to apocalypses, what's your flavour of choice? The nuclear holocaust option, zombies or aliens? Or, if you prefer something more scientific, an ecocatastrophe or a killer virus? The Last Days goes down the latter route and sadly forgets to make it at all credible: the world population is stricken with an epidemic of agoraphobia so intense that it kills those who venture outside the buildings they're cooped up in. And then, three months in, society has of course already gone Mad Max-feral, as it always will. The visuals of a ruined and deserted Barcelona are impressive, but the daft plot is strictly join-the-dots and without a stronger premise, there's little here to make the effort or expense justifiable.

4/10

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Tim Burton, 2016)

Tim Burton, a genius of the fantastical in the '80s and '90s, has now survived on the good will of his fans for almost as long as M. Night Shyamalan, albeit that the body of work he had accumulated was considerably more substantial and that there have been enough upward blips in the decline since then, such as 2007's Sweeney Todd to sustain hopes of a possible return to his mercurial past form. But this isn't one of them.
Asa Butterfield, in search of the truth of what happened to his grandfather back in 1943 and ending up there himself through a time portal, at a home for children with supernatural talents, is as thankfully off-centre as he was as a child actor, now playing the teenage protagonist. The support of the arch Eva Green as the matron of the home, as well as a seriously OTT Samuel L. Jackson, sporting yet another daft hairstyle as the villain after the kids' eyes, i.e. the key to immortality, are stable foundations to build on too. But that isn't enough. Jane Goldman's script can't get past being a derivation of Harry Potter and there's neither the sense of menace nor timing required to make it tick. In short, it's actually quite tedious, which is something you'd never have thought a Burton film could be.

5/10