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baseball references, Fences, which also outstays its welcome, is likely to struggle to win over audiences here.
It’s hard to know what’s more controversial about Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (15A) ★★★★ – its subversive anti-war message or the high frame-rate 3D in which it has been shot. Seen in a suitably equipped cinema, it looks simply astonishing, with the Ultra High Definition 120fps footage making Peter Jackson’s 48fps format for The Hobbit look like… well, a rather long, dull walk in the Shire.
Mind you, the degree of realism will terrify actors, although it’s interesting to see Steve Martin, Vin Diesel and an impressive Garrett Hedlund all rising to the occasion.
Newcomer Joe Alwyn plays Billy, a young GI who’s been officially declared a hero of the Iraq War and brought back to America with the rest of his platoon for a morale-boosting media tour culminating in a half-time appearance at a highprofile football match. But all is not what it seems, as a series of flashbacks begins to reveal.
The Space Between Us (PG) ★★ turns out to be a reworking of teen-weepie The Fault In
Our Stars, only this time with, er, added real outer space.
It’s difficult to know who looks more unhappy – Asa Butterfield as the first teen to be born and raised on Mars or Gary Oldman as the supposedly charismatic space entrepreneur who sent him there. A wretchedly uneven effort.