Nothing immaculate about this cliched conception
THE star of IMMACULATE (16, 88 mins, ★★☆☆☆ is Sydney Sweeney, still only 26 but enjoying a career that seems positively rocket-fuelled. This horror film, though, is a blip on her sharp upward trajectory. It’s not that Sweeney isn’t fine, indeed better than fine, as a devout American nun, Sister Cecilia, who winds up in a spooky Italian convent. But Michael Mohan’s uneven picture relies far too heavily on cliches of religious horror and fails to make the most of its own intriguing premise: that Cecilia might be pregnant with the child of an immaculate conception. Despite its mercifully brief running time, the film outstays its welcome.
■ AT MORE than two hours, THE BEAUTIFUL GAME (12A, 125 mins, ★★☆☆☆ definitely does. I thought director Thea Sharrock wasted her promising source material in the recent Wicked Little Letters, and regrettably she does the same again in this drama about a team’s adventures in Rome at the Homeless World Cup. There really is a football World Cup for the homeless, and it offers great dramatic potential. But this film has an untypically trite script by the accomplished Frank Cottrell Boyce and a weirdly underpowered performance by Bill Nighy as a football manager — almost as if someone has put petrol in a diesel engine. It’s an amiable enough picture, but in football parlance it hits the woodwork rather than the back of the net.
■ BALTIMORE (15A, 98 mins, ★★☆☆☆ is another film worth swerving. It stars Imogen Poots as the posh English debutante Rose Dugdale, who became a murderous IRA terrorist, but it seeks only to understand and empathise with Dugdale and her vile actions.
All films in cinemas now.