Chronicle

This found-footage mashup of X-men and Akira is another meeting of low production values and teen movie cliches, the kind where the low budget is a means to break into the mainstream rather than break out. Its premise of alien-artifact-sourced

Lockout

This could have been a lot better. The trailer makes it look pretty funny, and it is, but something went wrong from script to screen. Most obvious among its oopses are the hamfisted digital effects. Highly ambitious action set pieces

Attack The Block

Ewokish chavs on bicycles save their corner of the world from something toothy and belligerent out of Ben10.  Like many movies about wayward youth it resolves with the protagonists’ reintegration into society, but in doing so discounts any special vision

Source Code

Up until it starts trying to justify it’s underlying science, Source Code looks for all the world like a classy, economical sci-fi thriller. But it’s unclear whether it’s us or the writers who never quite grasp what they’re talking about,

The Hunger Games

This best selling US tweeny book franchise gets a lot less love than Harry Potter did. Other than the cast there’s little to distinguish it from a sci-fi channel production. Nevertheless, the Survivor/Big Brother/Battle Royale template proves an enduring recipe

Prometheus

The crew of the starship Prometheus are roused from cryo-sleep to ask the big questions. Who are we? Why are we here? Yes they’re really asking those questions. None of them seem to know who anyone else is or why

Melancholia

This appears for the first hour to be a good old fashioned Bunuel-style thrashing of the bourgeoisie and everything it holds sacred, with rogue ops courtesy of rampaging bridezilla, Dunst. Then Melancholia’s orbit tightens into an understated spiral of high