SECOND SCREEN

Gore Verbinski’s A Cure For Wellness (18)★★ is weird, wordy and unforgivably long-winded.

It starts off promisingly enough as a well-intentioned pastiche of one of the staples of Gothic horror – young man arrives at spooky mitteleuropean castle unaware of the dark secrets it is hiding – with a fashionable anti-greed message thrown in for good measure.

But it ends – almost two and a half hours, several false endings and a bathful of eels (pictured Mia Goth) later – like a disappointing episode of Scooby-Doo, complete with underground tunnels, strange trolleys and a sinister janitor.

The hitherto promising Dane DeHaan plays Lockhart, an ambitious young Wall Street dealer who is urgently dispatched to Switzerland to retrieve the firm’s chief executive from the hilltop ‘wellness centre’ he seems strangely reluctant to leave.

As you’d expect from the filmmaker responsible for three of the Pirates Of The

Caribbean films, it looks terrific, albeit in an off-kilter way.

Assorted Draculas, Coma and, courtesy of the arrival of a fragile-looking teenage girl,

Carrie all come to mind in a film in which a late scene depicting the attempted rape of a bound and seminaked

young woman is a particular error of judgment.

Like the recent and, to my

mind, overpraised Fences, It’s Only The End Of The

World (15A) ★★ – the latest film from French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan – is also based on a stage play and it suffers from similar faults.

True, the performances aren’t quite as theatrical as they are in Denzel Washington’s picture but it suffers from the same stagey claustrophobia. Louis (Gaspard Ulliel) – gay, a writer and the family’s only success – returns home for the first time in a dozen years to tell his family he is dying. Only he can’t quite get the words out, which, given the way this lot screech on, is not surprising. Only Marion Cotillard catches the eye in this unrewarding subtitled production.

Whose film career is going downhill faster – John Cusack’s or Nicolas Cage’s?

It’s a question that the truly wretched drugs thriller

Southern Fury (18) ★ gives us far too much time to consider.

True, Cusack settles for the lesser role but Cage – sporting a terrible wig, ill-advised moustache and essaying a vocal delivery almost beyond parody as the local Mr Big – gives one of the silliest performances of his fastfading career. He really looks quite ridiculous.

So, you win, Nic… or do I mean lose?