SHORTCUTS

Insidious: Chapter 2: Three years after Insidious introduced movie-goers to the Lambert family and its troubling connection to the spirit world, the stars and film-makers have reunited for another instalment. The sequel picks up where the first story ended, but it has enough scares, laughs and a story of its own to stand alone. ★★★ The Bling Ring: A modern-day cautionary tale about youth run amok. Based on the story of a group of Los Angeles teenagers who cased, then robbed the homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and other celebrities, it taps into the same fears and voyeuristic horror that have characterised teen problem movies throughout the decades. ★★★

NEW RELEASES

Captain Phillips: A taut, finely crafted, superbly acted maritime thriller tells the true story of Captain Richard Phillips and the 2009 hijacking by Somali pirates of the US-flagged MV Maersk Alabama, the first American cargo ship to be hijacked in 200 years. ★★★★★

ON CIRCUIT

Thor: The Dark World 3D: The Marvel superhero drama lurches from Wagnerian sturm und drang to flippant self-parody in a disconcerting style. Alan Taylor makes a valiant attempt to balance the action set pieces with humour and depth of characterisation. He is helped by Tom Hiddleston’s sleekly malevolent performance as Loki, a more engaging and complex figure than Chris Hemsworth’s monosyllabic Thor. ★★★ The Butler: Forest Whitaker plays Cecil Gaines, who was born a sharecropper’s son in Georgia, goes to Washington in the 1950s and serves eight US presidents as a White House butler. But building a heroic film around Gaines requires Herculean effort, which director Lee Daniels doesn’t quite manage. ★★★ Baggage Claim: This breezy, cheesy, uneven romcom stars Paula Patton as a flight attendant who’s desperate to get married. To secure a ring, she goes through humiliation, pain and illegality to bumping into ex-boyfriends. There’s so much wrong with this film, it’s all the more surprising when things go right. ★★★ Austenland: Keri Russell’s neck does most of the heavy lifting in Austenland, and if you pay attention to its many undulations, you might just make it through this embarrassingly juvenile comedy without groaning aloud. ★★ Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa: If you liked the Jackass television series and its movie spin-offs, you’ll probably love this. Starring Johnny Knoxville, Bad Grandpa is a loose sequence of hidden-camera pranks centered on the antics of an octogenarian. ★★★ Salinger (Documentary): Director Shane Salerno has an admittedly tricky obstacle in making this documentary about the intensely private author JD Salinger. ★★ The Family: There’s not much to laugh about in Luc Besson’s dark comedy, a plodding film which follows a former mob boss who winds up in France in a witness protection programme with his wife and kids. ★★ Killing Season: This film is not entirely worthless, but it’s not good. As a genre film, it’s too ambitious; as an art film, it’s too obvious. It deals with genocide, the ethical compromises which are made in combat, and the lingering effects of wartime decisions . ★★ Riddick: Cheesy, silly and often violent, this sci-fi action movie with Vin Diesel reprising his role as the titular antihero is also a lot of fun. ★★★ About Time: Richard Curtis mixes familiar boy-meets-girl ingredients with time-travelling magic realism in this enjoyable movie. ★★★ Gravity: This 3D sci-fi action adventure about two astronauts not only delivers on its promise of a wildly entertaining space adventure, it also becomes a groundbreaking addition to a genre already defined by films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. ★★★★★ Jobs: At the risk of damning with faint praise, it should be noted that Ashton Kutcher is not a disaster in Jobs, the biopic of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. But, the film is so thick with Jobs’s career highlights and lowlights that there’s little room for insights into what made this private man tick. ★★★ Diana: This biopic is not awful enough to be an enjoyably kitsch train wreck. ★★