THE SNOWMAN

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Chloë Sevigny
Writers: Hossein Amini, Peter Straughan, Søren Sveistrup
Director: Tomas Alfredson

*** THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS ***

Boozy Norwegian cop Harry Hole (Fassbender) is spending most of his days investigating the contents of a vodka bottle when the case of a missing woman drags him from the sidelines and back to what he does best - solving really horrible crimes. And this one looks like it's going to be particularly horrible if the instincts of his new colleague Katrine Bratt (Ferguson) turn out to be correct...

After the recent Flatliners, here's another movie which takes an exceptional cast and strands them in a plodding, by-the-numbers thriller which manages neither to excite nor chill. Yes, there are some gory moments and the plot does contain a bunch of ideas which are conceptually unpleasant but it's all delivered in such a perfunctory way that you'll probably be checking your watch long before the killer is revealed.

Fassbender's excellent but his detective is saddled with the type of crime genre baggage we've seen all too often - he's something of a maverick, he can't sleep, he hits the bottle whenever he's got a spare moment, his previous relationships have been disasters but he's still in touch with his most recent ex and her son, and so on, and so on.

Even so, these well-worn character beats could still have been given fresh life through the writing but the script goes through the motions to a frustrating level and even its attempts to wrong-foot its audience are half-hearted at best. To give an example: Ferguson's new addition to the police department is obsessed with the case - hold on, could she be hiding a secret? Hmm. Guess.

Elsewhere, Sevigny - playing twins - is given virtually nothing to do twice and the flick ultimately blots its copybook by casting J.K. Simmons and then reducing his role to what is almost an extended cameo. His character should arguably be casting a huge shadow over the story but considering his potential for being a major suspect in the investigation there are huge chunks of The Snowman where he doesn't even figure in any sort of discussion.

At almost two hours in length, you'd think The Snowman would cram in the twists and turns, rack up the suspects and pile on the bodies. Unfortunately it doesn't do any of those, lumbering along to a ho-hum confrontation between cop and killer which puts those Harry loves in jeopardy. Even the climax is botched, with proceedings apologetically grinding to a halt as the enterprise literally gets itself on to thin ice, having been there figuratively for about ninety minutes previously.

The one thing at which The Snowman did succeed is that it made me want to go to Norway - the scenery's undeniably beautiful. As for everything else, I wasn't quite prepared for just how underwhelming it would be given the talent involved. What could have been an exhilarating Scandi-noir slay ride through the snow ended up as an unrelentingly dull trudge through a slushy mess.

FLATLINERS

Starring: Elliot Page, Diego Luna, Nina Dobrev
Writer: Ben Ripley
Director: Niels Arden Oplev

*** WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS ***

In the wake of a personal tragedy, medical student Courtney (Page) becomes obsessed with what happens after the moment of death to the point that she's more than willing to recreate those conditions by having her heart stopped and then being resuscitated moments later. Courtney quickly finds colleagues who are similarly ready to push the boundaries for the sake of science and career enhancement. What could possibly go wrong?

Rather than being a remake of the 1990 Joel Schumacher flick this sets itself up as a continuation of the story, drafting in Kiefer Sutherland as a senior doc who may or may not be the same guy from the previous movie (it's never made clear, which I actually kind of liked, except... well, I'll get to that later). Continuation or not, it's still a bunch of defibrillator-happy would-be docs who don't think there's much wrong with crossing to and from the other side until the spooky stuff drifts in about halfway through.

Good cast as well. Elliot Page does smart, intense and focused while still being sympathetic, James Norton manages to be likeable as resident booze/drug hound and shagger Jamie and Diego Luna gives good furrowed brow as Ray who rapidly becomes the voice of reason as his mates fall over themselves to be the next one who's temporarily snuffed out. Rounding out the crash cart club is Marlo (Dobrev) who is a driven young woman with a dark secret and Sophia (Kiersey Clemons) who is a, er, driven young woman with a, er, dark secret.

Let's be honest, the performances are not the problem here. This is a prime example of talented actors left high and dry by the material, which starts out mildly intriguing but just ends up being unrelentingly bloody silly. Yes, the first half of the movie was reasonably engaging to me, partly because I was wondering how exactly the new movie would deviate from the old one. Well, not nearly enough as it turns out, which is a shame.

Once the supernatural element kicks in, Flatliners degenerates into a series of tedious jump scares you'll see coming a mile off. You want creeping down dark corridors, pulling back curtains, that sort of thing? There's loads of that. Mind you, at least this doesn't fall back on a scene set in a morgue. No, hold on, it does. And even that isn't nearly as frightening as it should be. Eventually we do get to the payoff after what seems like a couple of weeks but it's just as much of an anti-climax as the one employed by the previous incarnation of this movie.

Also, if Kiefer Sutherland is the same guy as the previous movie, how come he's not as suspicious when things go totally awry about an hour in? His character's thinking appears to be: "Hmm, fatal unexplained accident. A room of students, each of whom seems to be concealing something. Okay, not going to investigate that. After all, it's not like I got up to anything weird when I was a medical student... oh, there was that thing where I got my mates to kill me so I could see the afterlife but hey, no one else is going to try that".

Flatliners plays its frankly ludicrous plot developments with an admirably straight face but in the end it fails to engage as either a drama or a shocker. Aside from a mild surprise 70 minutes in it's thumpingly predictable and rather than building up to a suspense-filled, high-stakes finish it fizzled out, leaving me thinking "Was that it?". And with no last-ditch shock as a twist, unfortunately that was it. As thrillers go, it can't be saved. Call it. Time of death: 2017.

Don't get me started on the unused, high-tech hospital in the basement either.

MOONWALKERS

Starring: Ron Perlman, Rupert Grint, Robert Sheehan
Writer: Dean Craig
Director: Antoine Bardou-Jacquet

CIA agent Kidman (Perlman) is sent on a mission to London to locate Stanley Kubrick and enlist his services to film a fake version of the moon landing in case the actual Apollo 11 mission fails in that purpose. However, the guy who professes to be Kubrick is in fact Leon (Sheehan), permanently stoned flatmate of Jonny (Grint) who's in financial trouble with some bad guys and sees a quick money-making scheme as a way to get them off his back...

Moonwalkers is a reasonably entertaining film but it's certainly not without its problems. Still, let's start with the positives. The leads are very good indeed, make that very, very good in the case of Ron Perlman. His troubled spook provides most of the best moments of the movie as he wades through 60s hippie culture with an amusing weariness. When he's not slapping people around or blowing them away, that is. If Kidman was played by someone other than Perlman I feel the end product would have suffered as a result.

Rupert Grint, as the slightly dodgy band manager-cum-fake-Kubrick-wrangler, is good value as a somewhat reluctant, thoroughly out of his depth wannabe wheeler-dealer and I didn't spend the film thinking of that Weasley kid. Sheehan, as the uber-flaky Leon, gets to play the broadest comedy in the piece and his constant ineptitude under pressure could have become annoying but I was left chuckling a fair amount of the time, especially at his interpretation of Kubrick (not really a spoiler, but it's several miles off).

The period detail is generally spot on too, although there's a point at which you feel the 1960s props are just being shoehorned in to sequences. Occasionally the effect is one of drowning in the decade. Did they have a job lot of these things which they felt they should use? Sometimes less is more. I'm not going to point out that poster of The Who in Jonny's place may actually be from the 70s. Oh, I just did. I may be wrong.

It's an action/comedy, that I can't deny. There are some rather nicely choreographed fights and shootouts and I did laugh at various points along the way. The problem is that the two elements work against each other, so you're presented with scenes bordering on farce sitting alongside flashes of startlingly nasty and gruesome violence. Also, Kidman's suffering from flashbacks about what happened in a previous mission to 'Nam and although his hallucinations of burned villagers are chillingly memorable they belong in a different movie entirely.

Also, I know it's a movie set in the swinging 60s but did we really need a visit to another rambling bohemian pile whether another orgy is taking place and another group of naked women are wandering about? Actually, the visit to the rambling bohemian pile does wring some laughs out of Jonny's choice of director for the fake lunar footage, a guy called Renatus whose only previous celluloid outing - an experimental work which took YEARS to complete - is predictably pretentious but still made me smile.

There's also a whiff of "Lock, Stock..." about this, the plot could easily be described as a "caper" and for me this has exactly the same issue as Guy Ritchie's flick - it can't balance the comedy and drama as effectively as it aims to. It does throw in a couple of disposable gangs (wasting the great James Cosmo in the process, both figuratively and literally) for Jonny to avoid and for Kidman to take on and by the end it may not have quite got to the point where it's thrown in the kitchen sink but it's used most of the other stuff around it.

That's not to say Moonwalkers is a waste of time. Far from it. Perlman is always watchable and if you can laugh at a character discovering that someone has taken a shit on one of their records then you may enjoy this more than I did. The comedy's a little too wacky and the violence a little too unpleasant given the context, but there's just about enough to enjoy on balance and it's an interestingly flawed pic.

THE BELKO EXPERIMENT

Starring: John Gallagher Jr., Tony Goldwyn, Adria Arjona

Writer: James Gunn

Director: Greg McLean

In a high-rise office block just outside Bogotá, Colombia, the employees of the Belko Corporation are about to have a very bad day indeed as an unknown voice suddenly announces over the PA system that they're about to participate in a game which boils down to a drastically simple choice: kill or be killed...

After a breezy introduction which sets up the main characters and the appropriate office politics rather nicely, The Belko Experiment gets down to its blood-soaked business long before it can be project managed out of existence (I can say this, I've been a Project Manager). People lose their heads - literally - when the first target isn't reached, the ante is upped, sides are taken.

At the centre of the mayhem is your average office schmo Mike Milch (Gallagher Jr.), a guy who just wants to get by and please as many people as he can even when there's worker genocide on the menu. His girlfriend Leandra (Arjona) isn't quite as accommodating when faced with the prospect of random, splattery, cranium-exploding death but she's positively tree-hugging compared to colleague Wendell Dukes (John C. McGinley turning the psycho dial up to 11) whose initial, barely concealed sociopathic tendencies give way to hacking people to bits with meat cleavers faster than you can say "That guy's got a meat cleaver".

Running a tight 89 minutes, The Belko Experiment doesn't dally too long with discussions about who has the right to live, who's on the list to die and who has the right to play God in this situation. As with almost all business discussions anywhere ever, any debate is generally curtailed before it gets anywhere, but this time it's by another announcement requesting that more people have to be bumped off. At its core this isn't a film which is going to let itself get bogged down in moralising, it's a stripped-down, gory thrill ride and it delivers some startling, wince-inducing violence at regular intervals (UK readers, there's a very good reason why it's rated 18). Some of this violence involves, yes, office supplies. I'll never look at a sellotape dispenser in quite the same way again.

This is all carried along by a rather impressive cast and, for the more cine literate out there, trades somewhat upon knowledge of the performers' previous roles. For instance, Michael Rooker. Got to be playing a murderous nutjob, right? Well....just watch the movie to find out. Elsewhere, Tony Goldwyn scores as a calm, calculating boss who may just be about to take all of his rational decision-making processes to the Nth degree, Sean Gunn is amusingly annoying as Grade-A stoner Marty and Melonie Diaz fits the "surely they can't kill her, can they?" role of new starter Dany perfectly.

It's not an unfamiliar set-up and the usual questions are there (for instance, will the office nice guy suddenly snap and start killing people?) but this takes an approach which is fresh enough to shake off most of the potential clichés. James Gunn's script - yes, that James Gunn, about to unleash the second Guardians of the Galaxy outing - is brutally efficient, dispensing some killer one-liners as the bodies pile up. The final moments, not to give anything away, are an absolute hoot and a rather fitting way to round things off.

It may not be the most subtle of movies out there right now but if you can hang on to your lunch The Belko Experiment is easily one of the most entertaining and for this horror fan it was something of an unexpected treat. Also, it's nice to see director Greg McLean right back on gloriously gory form after trying, but not quite succeeding, to generate scares from the disappointing possessed rock snorefest The Darkness.

FREE FIRE

Starring: Cillian Murphy, Brie Larson, Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer
Writers: Amy Jump, Ben Wheatley
Director: Ben Wheatley

In 1978 Boston, Justine (Larson) is brokering an arms deal which will see Vernon (Copley) and his associates selling a cache of machine guns to a group representing the IRA. Firstly Vern doesn't have the specific type of machine gun which Chris (Murphy) and his colleagues were expecting and then an unexpected conflict between one member of each party turns the situation from bad to much, much worse...

The antithesis of many a choreographed bullet ballet, Free Fire doesn't have people twisting acrobatically through the air, shooting enemies with deadly accuracy. It doesn't have a bunch of characters who shrug off gunshot wounds with a grimace and supernaturally limited physical impairment. No, shots go high and wide on a regular basis and those that do hit their mark cause serious pain for their targets.

As the shootout wears on the cast becomes ever more grimy and soaked in claret, some of them reduced to an agonising crawl as they attempt to reach their goal. Even at this point the protagonists are still cracking wise with each other and the barbed comments fly just as regularly as the slugs.

After the trippy, multi-layered delights of High-Rise some might view this latest from Ben Wheatley as being relatively straightforward and perhaps even a little lightweight. Nonsense. This is both bloody and hilarious, continually reloading with a ready supply of cracking dialogue executed with relish by a cast to die for.

It may be a trifle churlish to single out a performance for special mention as everyone in this is very, very good but for me Sharlto Copley steals the piece as the swaggering, spectacularly gauche Vernon who brings the chuckles and the cringes in equal measure. Sample behaviour from Vern: suggesting that Justine goes to retrieve something mid-firefight because "nobody will shoot the bird". He's amusingly awful throughout.

Let's be honest, there isn't a duff performance here. Hammer is excellent as the unruffled Ord, whether he's trying to reason with the increasingly excitable Vern or stopping to light up a joint in the midst of the chaos. Wheatley regular Michael Smiley is as thoroughly watchable as ever and Brie Larson makes sure that it isn't just left to the blokes to kick arse.

The run of excellent Ben Wheatley/Amy Jump movies continues with the smart, slick, Seventies-set shenanigans of Free Fire. It's brash, breezy (at just 91 minutes) and brilliant. Bravo!

WOLVES AT THE DOOR

Starring: Katie Cassidy, Elizabeth Henstridge, Adam Campbell
Writer: Gary Dauberman
Director: John R. Leonetti

It's 1969 and the Summer of Love is in full swing. Before returning to Boston, Abigail (Henstridge) is thrown a low-key leaving party at a swanky house in the California hills by her heavily pregnant friend Sharon (Cassidy). The festivities are soon curtailed as the house is visited by four psychotic strangers...

The opening of the movie points out that it's "based on a true story" and the major plot points are very close to the events of the actual Manson family murders that took place around the time. The main characters in the film share their first names with the real-life victims. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, Sharon is pregnant.

If Wolves At The Door were a completely fictional home invasion thriller there would be things to commend it. The leads play the material well, Henstridge in particular is very good indeed and even Campbell, despite being saddled with a distractingly wonky Eastern European accent, comes across as sympathetic and likeable. Technically it's well made and the director knows how to rack up the tension - the first seven or eight minutes, set in a different location the night before the main story begins, are a nicely-judged exercise in escalating panic (there's a phrase to quote out of context on a poster).

My own specific problem - and you may be able to get past this, but I can't - is that I'm not sure I want to watch something that's so closely linked to a tragedy that's still affecting the living to this day and to have it retold as quite a glossy shocker left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. The violence is downplayed quite a bit - some of it happens off-screen, one murder can only be seen in the reflection of a television screen - which on one hand shows a decent amount of restraint but doesn't make it any less horrible, especially if at the back of mind you're, like me, thinking "this actually took place".

Normally I would be complaining about a movie that's so short (it doesn't even make it to an hour and a quarter) but in this case I couldn't wait to get out of the cinema. The source material, for me, isn't the basis for entertainment and the fact that WATD goes for both jump scares and drawn-out suspense sequences just makes it all the more unpleasant to watch. This isn't so much "inspired" by the Manson family killings as it is a reconstruction and in my opinion this crosses a line it maybe shouldn't.

Though there's absolutely no denying the talent on display here both in front of and behind the camera, I find it somewhat troubling when this kind of thing is presented as entertainment. Having said that, I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't go to watch this, just consider yourself forewarned.

LOGAN

Starring: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen
Writers: Scott Frank, James Mangold, Michael Green
Director: James Mangold 

It's the near future. Ex-X-Man Logan (Jackman) is making a living driving a limousine and trying to keep his head down. Hiding out in Mexico near the border, he spends most of his downtime drinking, looking after rambling, nonagenarian Professor X (Stewart) and being a massive pain in the arse to fellow mutant and X carer Caliban (a suitably washed-out Stephen Merchant). However, the claws are about to come out again in a big way as Logan's path crosses with that of young Laura (Keen) who's attracting the attention of some very, very bad guys led by cyborg-handed Pierce (Boyd Holbrook)...

It would probably be fair to say that previous Wolverine-centric outings have missed the mark by some distance but I'm delighted to say Logan redresses the balance and then some. From the opening sequence it's clear that this is down and dirty stuff with f-words and severed limbs littering the first few minutes. It continues in that vein too and the darker, resolutely adult approach results in a film which I believe is the very best from the Marvel stable so far.

True, some of the supporting characters may not be as well-drawn as they could be - Holbrook's baddie isn't given much depth and Richard E. Grant deserves more screen time as the scientist with a particular interest in capturing Laura - but that doesn't really matter as, quite rightly, it's the Jackman and Stewart show and if this is indeed their respective final shot at Logan and Xavier then they've saved their best work for last. Their grouchy, gritty banter is both touching and hilarious and they're the perfect companions for what is essentially a road movie with superpowers and bursts of startling violence.

Oh, the violence. This is a film which is definitely not for children and anyone who's used to the relatively neutered Wolvie from the larger-scale X-Men blockbusters might be somewhat taken aback by the bloodshed on display as our grumpy hero skewers and slashes his way through a series of kinetic action sequences. Newcomer Keen also proves she's no slouch with the claws either, acrobatically taking out various enemies and giving even Logan a run for his money in the gory killings department.

Logan picks up the baton from Deadpool in terms of the new wave of grungier, bloodier superhero stories but in so many ways it couldn't be further from the antics of Ryan Reynolds' wisecracking fourth-wall breaker and even further from the multiplex-friendly, industrial language-light summer smackdowns. This is a downbeat tale where the collateral damage isn't downplayed by means of a spectacular, large scale special effect. Quite the opposite - innocent people die horribly and up close in glorious widescreen, which makes you care more and more as the plot rolls on towards a conclusion fraught with genuine danger.

It would be a shame if Logan were to be dismissed as just another superhero flick because it's clearly so much more than that. Making points about the treatment of outsiders which are especially valid right now, it's a piece of work that delivers all the thrills you'd expect allied to a resonant, emotional gut punch of a final act. The fact that there's nothing to hang around for at the end of the credits is paradoxically something of a bonus as you'll probably want to get some air at the end after going on this journey, that's all I'm saying.

For me - and a lot of other people, I suspect - a Wolverine film of this quality has been a very long time coming but Logan goes a long way to erasing the memory of the previous misfires. James Mangold has given us a comic book movie of rare poignancy, humour and ferocity. Messrs Jackman and Stewart have never been better. You need to see this. It's superb.