Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (Wes Ball, 2024)

The Planet of the Apes reboot franchise reaches its fourth part, and ominously this time the director is the hack behind the Maze Runner trilogy, which was a yet another poor cash-in on the success of The Hunger Games.

300 years after the death of Caesar, the first intelligent ape, apes in scattered settlements dominate Earth, while the few remaining humans are mute scavengers. So, pretty much the set-up of the 1968 film when the astronauts arrived there, and the film milks references to the source for all they're worth, the protagonists even naming a young human female they come across 'Nova'. The chimpanzees are peaceful and the gorillas are violently aggressive, the lead character Noa being one of the former, on a quest to get back to his clan and finding an ape labour camp ruled by a megalomaniac bonobo instead.

While it succeeds in making the motion-capture ape cast engagingly real, the bare-bones plot in no way justifies the film's running time of nearly two and a half hours and no amount of pant-hooting and CGI leaping around can cover that up. This franchise has to end now.

5/10

1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019)

Two soldiers are tasked with delivering a message to a frontline unit about to attack the Germans, but in fact walking into a trap Prompt delivery of the message could save 1,600 British servicemen, so they cut through hazardous no man's land, a waste of barbed wire, craters and corpses.

Not too many modern war films deal with the First World War since its relentless, mindless meatgrinder progression leaves no room for tactical masterstrokes, daring missions or even moral high ground. This means that the key theme can be contemplations of futility instead of any pressure to slavishly work through historical events in order. 2017 achieves this ably, and as ever, the luminous photography of Roger Deakins is truly astonishing.

8/10

1408 (Mikael Hafström, 2007)

A writer whose sole topic is supposedly haunted locations checks into a New York hotel, insisting on staying in a room in which 56 people have died suddenly and bizarrely over the years. The hotel manager fails to dissuade him and subsequently the writer's sanity in the titular room degenerates rapidly under a constant bombardment of lifelike hallucinations. Nor does the viewer soon know either what is meant to be real or what is nightmare, and a succession of false endings ensues, with no certainty of wheteher he is still in the room or outside.

It's no surprise to learn that, being about a hotel room possessed by a malevolent presence and a protagonist driven insane by it, the original story was penned by Stephen King. While nowhere near as nuanced and accomplished as The Shining, it does succeed at generating scares effectively, and John Cusack's strong performance as the writer, initially cocksure and then terrified, is a big asset.

6/10

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (David Yates, 2022)

The Harry Potter prequel trilogy reaches its conclusion, and not a moment too soon. The megabudget on impressive FX and sets is really the key selling point, because the cursory storyline of Hogwarts going after the villain Grindelwald, Mads Mikkelsen now replacing Johnny Depp in the role without any explanation doesn't justify the running time of well over two hours. As usual, wands, surely the crappest weapon in sci-fi or fantasy. are wielded endlessly like ersatz guns and there are more weird and wonderful mythical creatures to behold. But it's a terrible waste of good actors and time. Surely even the kids are bored by now.

4/10

After the Flames: An Apocalypse Anthology (Velton J. Lishke, Johan Earl, Ronald J. Wright, Alexander Gordon Smith, Radheya Jegathevar & D.W. Hoppson, 2020)

Seven short mini-budget films by six directors, sharing the vague theme of a post-apocalyptic world. The cause of the end of days ranges from zombies to cannibals, alien invasion and the destruction of the entire planet. The stories are framed by being presented as told by a bunch of kids sitting around, in campfire fashion, trying to impress each other. The framing device is actually more entertaining and better scripted than the films themselves, which come up with nothing of great invention or import. This is a shame because without money to back it up, indie cinema is wholly dependent on ideas.

4/10

The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021)

Dev Patel stars in an adaptation of the 14th-dentury poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain setting out on a quest to gain honour and knighthood by facing the supernatural being of the title and his own reciprocal decapitation. He is beset by numerous challenges on his journey, from thieves to a saint, a talking fox and lecherous nobles.

As it is based on a poem, the plot scarcely fills the back of a napkin, and so it's padded out to over two hours by moving at a glacial pace with a sparsity of dialogue and sumptuous images. It does try to say something about the vain futility of striving for heroism, but takes its sweet time to do so. Unconventional, but certainly not unmissable.

5/10

Operation Mincemeat (John Madden, 2021)

Based on the true story of an elaborate plot by British intelligence to fool the Germans into thinking the Allies were about to invade Greece instead of Sicily in 1943, this is a war film and espionage film not based on the ground where the fighting takes place, but in the offices where the planning is done. A corpse is found and given a full false identity, to be dumped off the Spanish coast with fake documents to substantiate the target of the assault. Colin Firth leads as the officer in charge of the operation, duty-driven and constantly anxious about its success.

There was a risk that it could have ended up feeling stagebound, but the complex story and dry wit of the dialogue put paid to that. That, and the novelty of seeing how much wars are actually decided behind closed doors instead of through pyrotechnics and blood.

6/10

Deadpool & Wolverine (Shawn Levy, 2024)

This was bound to happen as the various franchises of the MCU get fused, bringing the X-Men in along with rogue elements such as Deadpool by utilising the multiverse concept introduced in Doctor Strange. So real-life chums Reynolds and Jackman, both playing their unkillable hero characters, get to rib each other on screen for two hours while seeking to save the timeline in which the latter's death in Logan has sparked off the impending end of that reality.

This being essentially a third instalment of the Deadpool series, it means that no opportunity is passed by to play with breaking the fourth wall, the leads referring to each other's actual film careers, the studios bringing all of the MCU together and any other character in previous Marvel films. It's both campy fun on a meta level and very tiresome. There are glaringly obvious parallels with how Family Guy continually takes the piss out of Fox, its parent company, and you may put up with it out of goodwill towards the actors as well as the freshness of a superhero film just ridiculing the ludicrousness of all productions coming from the same stables, but this is also no way to go ahead in the longer term.

6/10