No Kung Fu Panda, but Dark Minds has teenage kicks galore

The jump from the world of animation to live-action can be a difficult one for film-makers but it’s a transition director Jennifer Yuh Nelson, best known as the director of Kung Fu Panda 2 and 3, makes with modest aplomb with The Darkest Minds (12A) ★★★. No one, however, could say she was exactly breaking new ground.

Set in a dystopian near future where 98% of young teenagers have been killed by an unknown ‘adolescent plague’, it’s a tale of the 2% who survive. They emerge with special X-Men like powers which means the adult world is very frightened of them. Which is why they are herded into camps and put to work.

Until one day, a small group escapes and goes in search of a teen army led by the legendary ‘Slip Kid’.

It’s very derivative and takes a long time to get going, but it does just about get there, helped by attractive performances from Amandla Stenberg and Harris Dickinson.

We’re used to multistranded films based around a single event. Now director Ken Marino, and screenwriters Elissa Matsueda and Erica Oyama, rework the genre with Dog Days (12A) ★★★, weaving a tangle of inter-connected LA-based stories around… the therapeutic value of dogs. At nearly two hours it’s incredibly long for such a lightweight offering but does have an attractive cast, a deeply sentimental streak and a certain furry charm.

Hot on the heels of last week’s Damascus Cover comes another period spy thriller set in Eighties Beirut.

The Negotiator (15) ★★★is definitely a step up, with a stronger cast, led by Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike, above, and a more polished screenplay, from Bourne franchise writer Tony Gilroy, about a former diplomat (Hamm) called in to negotiate when a CIA chief is kidnapped.

Like the 2014 original, Unfriended: Dark Web (15) ★★ unfolds entirely on a laptop screen, with Matias settling down to some multitasking on the second-hand laptop he’s acquired. But who was the last owner? Let’s just say finding out was too nasty for me.