65 (Scott Beck & Bryan Woods, 2023)

That's 65 million years ago, and an stronaut from another planet with a cargo of passengers in cryogenic suspension crashes on an unknown planet, which we are promptly told with a caption is actually Earth in the past. Only one of the passengers has survived, a truculent girl, and the pilot takes this as reason to persevere to try to get to the escape vessel that crashed some distance away. This means making their way through a primordial jungle full of dinosaurs out to eat them.

That's all there is in terms of plot, and there isn't much in the way of dialogue beyond the monosyllabic either. Adam Driver is utterly wasted in the role, apparently having opted for the route of a quality actor doing a simple-minded sci-fi flick just as Adrien Brody did with Predators. How the protagonists are near-future American humans in our Cretaceous period in their speech, mannerisms, technology and even dress isn't explained in the slightest, nor does the film bother with any other attempts at cohesiveness or logic either. Only the utterly preposterous premise, the conjoined hope of it being played out to some meaningful surprise finale and the presence of Driver made me persist to the end. I wouldn't recommend that anyone else bothers.

4/10

A Haunting in Venice (Kenneth Branagh, 2023)

Branagh's third outing as Hercule Poirot shifts Agatha Christie's lesser-known source novel Hallowe'en Party to the telegenic setting of Venice, as the jetsetters' other popular choices of the Orient Express and Nile have already been used, and sees the detective coaxed out of self-imposed retirement by a crime novelist acquaintance to investigate a local 'unsolvable' mystery. This involves the past death of the daughter of a former opera singer at her huge palazzo, a seance there on Halloween and the usual array of guests with chequered backstories to suspect once murders inevitably start occurring. Nothing new so far then, but playing with the eerie possibility that the house is actually haunted, and the fresh challenge presented by that to Poirot's analytical mind, does add a nice twist.

Diverting, but Branagh really should start considering handing the directorial reins to someone else. The pacing is uneven and the logic of the plot has more cracks in it than the walls of the palazzo.

6/10

Alien: Romulus (Fede Álvarez, 2024)

In space, no one can hear you yawn. Not that horror hack director Álvarez pays any heed to this in the seventh film of the Alien franchise, which features even more screaming and running around than ever before. It's chronologically set between the iconic first and second films, exploiting the gap in the timeline so that its young band of protagonists, boarding an abandoned space station to escape the shackles of their company contract as indentured miners on a remote colony planet, can be blissfully unaware of the existence of any alien threat and duly walk straight into mortal danger.

As also is customary these days, the reliance on sensory overbombardment by gore and CGI soon becomes a burden too, so it's interesting to note that the most interesting detail and actorly performance is that of the disembodied head of an android identical to Ash, the covert antagonist of the first film, replicating the likeness of the late actor Ian Holm with his family's blessing and, unlike the botched recent digital recreations of the appearances of key actors from the first Star Wars film, avoids taking us into the uncanny valley too, although being not quite human in the first place must help.

Scott and Cameron did both give the film their stamp of approval, but that's no surprise either, as rather than violating their works, it emphasises their quality even further.

If only the saga would end there, but not only is an Earth-bound TV series is the works, but even Scott, at 87, is unwisely contemplating one more go.

5/10