Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (James Gunn, 2017)

Diminishing returns begin to kick in with this sequel, largely because it diverges so little from the formula of the first instalment. Hence, it's still witty enough and full of irreverent fairground thrills, following the motley crew adventure away to a non-stop retro soundtrack and Kurt Russell turning up as Quill's long-lost dad to ham it up shamelessly as some kind of god, but also beset with one of those interminable genre-obligatory end sequences where everything gets blown up, to the point at which you start clock-watching and thinking about what to do next with your day. Naturally, there'll be another one too because they make money and they're harmless fun, but a little more characterisation really wouldn't go amiss; here, the thing on screen with the most charm by far is the animated twig who can only say "I am Groot".

5/10

Life (Daniel Espinosa, 2017)

Neither fish nor fowl, Life takes the setting of Gravity on the International Space Station, and then superimposes Alien as the crew, as unwisely as in any horror film, decide to play around with a Martian microorganism until it turns into a tentacled monster and tries to kill them all. The initial realism does not serve the idea of an exponentially growing, intelligent predator that isn't bothered by a vacuum at all, and the film consequently becomes the usual checklist exercise in second-guessing the order in which the various ethnicities and genders on board are bumped off. A smart twist at the very end just isn't enough compensation.

5/10

ARQ (Tony Elliott, 2016)

Time loop stories are a sci-fi staple, easy to do with just a bit of attention paid to continuity, with even a basic plot powering itself once revved up. They are, in other words, a bit of a cheat: you can assemble something that will hold the audience's attention just because everyone likes playing I-spy with minor divergences. To make one exceptional, however, you need to put serious amounts of hours in at the corkboard with pins and string to map out the timelines. ARQ doesn't pay much heed to that requirement, slapping on whatever deviation from the rules that suits it by virtue of having an arcane machine (the titular generator of limitless power in the lead character's basement, in the midst of a war-torn near future with a global energy crisis) serve as a MacGuffin to steamroller over anything that demands a logical explanation as a home invasion by men after money replays again and again. It's diverting enough, but makes sure to steer well clear that might possibly confuse the average Joe.

5/10

Veronica (Carlos Algara Alejandro & Martinez-Beltran, 2017)

Confusingly, both this Mexican thriller and a Spanish film by the same name came out at the same time: this one is to do with a retired female psychiatrist who agrees to treat a young woman with an undiagnosed trauma at her house in the mountains. The relationship between the two soon turns twisted and sexual, and then, having promised so much more with the foreboding mood it set up to begin with, sails directly into cloud cuckoo land. Doubtless, the directors thought that they were making some kind of homage to Hitchcock with all the twists and psychological references they lay on, but what they have actually created is no better than an off-the-shelf slasher.

4/10

Circle (Aaron Hann & Mario Miscione, 2015)

50 people representing a broad swathe of society wake up standing in a circle in a black room, and find that not only can they not leave their spots, but that one of them will die every two minutes. Then they come to understand, even as their numbers dwindle, that they can all vote for the next to die.
The nefarious premise is incredibly simple, and leads to all kinds of possibilities, most of which the script explores with gusto even if not always with finesse: racial and sexual differences come out, political factions form and the motives for altruism get questioned almost as often as selfishness is exposed. It's rough around the edges, but the sheer premise and what it gets right in the taut execution nevertheless make for quite edge-of-the seat viewing.

6/10

Free Fire (Ben Wheatley, 2016)

An arms deal in a warehouse goes awry very quickly amidst macho posturing and all the characters spend the rest of the film shooting lumps out of each other. And then more lumps.
It's all very easy for the director to deflect criticism of the casual and continuous violence under the cover that it's a pastiche of Tarantino, but Tarantino pastiches himself and Reservoir Dogs, from which this lifts the end scene and expands it into a whole film, not only had substantially more wit but made sure we knew that being shot hurts like hell. Here, in a misguided attempt at turning it all into Grand Guignol comedy, being hit by a bullet is just an inconvenient setback. The whole film is a more serious setback in the career of a promising, idiosyncratic director: it's worrying that his first film obviously made for the U.S. market (after five leftfield British ones) is so unambitious, wholly lacking any personality.

4/10

El bar (Álex de la Iglesia, 2017)

So, the murder mystery template of a suitably assorted bunch of strangers brought together in a confined environment has been tried and tested to serve horror and sci-fi too, by simultaneously giving us some kind of cross-section of society and therefore also people who don't know or trust each other, and this is what The Bar goes with in brisk style, with people trapped inside a bar near the centre of Madrid after a few people going outside its doors are abruptly shot by someone unseen. This could go in several different directions, but when you know that the director has hardly diverged from a preoccupation with horror ever since his 1993 debut, Acción mutante, it's hardly a surprise when he starts knocking over his pawns with glee and it turns properly schlocky. The feeding on current paranoias about terrorists, disease epidemics and - a particularly Spanish one, this - distrust of the government add some topical flavour, but like its characters it ends up wallowing in the sewer before too long.

5/10