Greenland
Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Starring: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale
Despite skipping cinemas in most of world, Greenland is on the big screen here. It’s a disaster movie about a family trying to outrun a comet bound for Earth. Butler’s John Garrity is with his estranged wife (played by Baccarin) and son as they try to find a place safe from the impending comet collision. Cue familiar scenes of cities being destroyed while people flee.
Mulan
Director: Niki Caro
Starring: Lie Yifei, Donnie Yen, Jet Li, Gong Li
Fans of the original will bemoan the lack of songs and absence of Mushu, the sidekick dragon. Talking animals are very much out and stiff-lipped themes of family, duty and honour are in. The result is a straight-faced affair that reconnects with the ultimate source material – folklore poem The Ballad of Mulan – and delivers on spectacle, but lacks poetry of its own.
Tenet
Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: John David Washington, Robert Pattison, Elizabeth Debicki
Two parts Bond movie, one part hard-sci-fi mind-scrambler, Tenet is a blockbuster with huge ambitions. Christopher Nolan’s films usually come with an envelope-pushing experimental edge, and this one feels like his most lab-coated effort yet. Visual information comes at you in multiple directions in massive action sequences that offer little respite from the brain-bending ideas chucked about.
The New Mutants
Director: Josh Boone
Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Maisie Williams, Charlie Heaton
This plodding X-Men spin-off finally arrives. If not quite an out-and-out disaster, it’s certainly a bit of a mess: the pacing is sluggish, the dialogue often clunky and the climactic showdown has all the visual flair and dramatic force of a bin fire. None of this is the fault of an on-form cast that reads like a who’s who of zeitgeisty young actors: Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy and Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton included.
Unhinged
Director: Derrick Borte
Starring: Russell Crowe, Caren Pistorius, Gabriel Bateman
This road-rage thriller sees Russell Crowe following in a long line of A-listers who have taken a career detour to explore the dark side. His enjoyably OTT performance as a seething maniac is poorly served by the workmanlike plot mechanics that unfold around it. Juicy as it is, it’s the only story in an otherwise by-the-numbers B-movie that makes for a fun but deeply forgettable watch.
