FILM: The Hate U Give (dir: George Tillman Jr, 2018)

"Know your worth."

The sadly familiar story of this hit YA novel adaptation becomes a very powerful film, the events surrounding a white policeman unjustly killing a young black man being told through the eyes of 16-year-old Starr, played here in a powerhouse and utterly engaging performance by Amandla Stenberg.   Characters are set up well and the performances are admirable - note Regina Hall's superbly-judged presentation of Starr's mother - and once the initiating event happens the sense of urgency and threat keeps building.  The film creates many raw and affecting scenes, but one audacious and impressive point-making moment in the finale drew a collective gasp from the cinema audience.  Indeed, there is a genuine complexity to the presentation and handling of race issues here, including some thought-provoking reflection on white teenage appropriation of black culture through Starr's school friends.  There are a couple of moments where the film topples into melodrama, and the only real aspect that rings false is the clumsy cinematic use of cool bluish colour grading for the privileged school scenes and golden-dappled washes for Starr's home neighbourhood, but that is a minor gripe.  Of the YA genre, The Hate U Give is a very impressive piece of work.

FILM: Bohemian Rhapsody IMAX (dir: Bryan Singer, 2018)

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"I think it has potential."

If you want the real detail of the Queen story, this film is not the place to look - seek out the excellent BBC4 documentaries.  In spite of its degree of superficiality and glossiness (the middle years and the relative failures get short shrift here), and the difficult production of this long-gestating project, the result is an extremely entertaining and well-made chronological trot through the Greatest Hits catalogue and the key moments of the band's heyday, culminating in a remarkable recreation of the seminal Live Aid performance (in spite of some horribly obvious greenscreening).  In some ways it plays like a bigger-budget Channel 5 biopic, but it is carried by the excellent concert/music sequences (very impressive in IMAX) and a very strong cast.   Rami Malek's turn as Mercury is revelatory, not only in the music performances but also in the dramatic scenes, and indeed the rest of the band members  are also strongly played by Joseph Mazzello (Timmy from Jurassic Park!), Gwilym Lee and Ben Hardy.  Lucy Boynton is a stand-out also as Freddie's long-standing companion.  Moments of self-deprecating humour work well, and the A.I.D.S. issue is handled with some sensitivity, but there are some problems evident: a couple of mawkishly-written scenes undermine their dramatic sincerity, and there is a real tension between telling The Freddie Mercury Story and The Queen Story, but as the two are so intertwined the shift in focus in the third act is understandable.  However, this film is principally about celebrating the music, and in that respect the film is a triumph.

FILM: Halloween (2018) (dir: David Gordon Green, 2018)

"...but tonight, there are so many different possibilities...."

The Halloween franchise is often derided for its sequels, but apart from the two Rob Zombie abominations and the hopeless eighth entry (Resurrection), the films are decent enough for low-budget horrors of their times.  So, two decades on from the acceptable Halloween H20: 20 Years Later we get this new entry which posits itself as a direct sequel to the original 1978 classic (ignoring all the other sequels), is released in cinemas in the actual Halloween month of October and - to this forty-year-long fan - is actually good.  There is plenty of fan-pleasing going on, referencing various movies in the franchise in large and subtle ways, but with the return of Jamie Lee Curtis in this iconic role and owning the screen in every scene, excellent use of old and new score and making Michael a brutal killing force again, the 2018 Halloween is in many ways a bold and surprisingly elegant horror film that is intent on prioritising story and character effectively. There is a real determination to put an actual drama on the screen as opposed to a conventional teen-stalk-and-slash (although the attacks and gore are full-on), and some real cinematic ambition is evident, from the extended controlled use of near-silence that creates wonderful tension in some scenes, to the juxtaposition of the orange-hued warmth of Halloween with a terrific tracking shot of Michael on a neighbourhood killing spree.  Admittedly, this film does not come close to the magnificent purity of Carpenter's original, and with three generations of Strode women jostling for story time the daughter and granddaughter could do with a little more development, but at the end of the day it is always about Laurie vs Michael, and overall this is an unusually well-written, ambitious, successful and enjoyable late-franchise horror film.

FILM: Goosebumps 2 - Haunted Halloween 4DX (dir: Ari Sandel, 2018)

"This is bad, guys.  This is really, really bad."

This disappointing sequel looks and feels more like an ambitious TV episode than a movie.  It seems to lean towards an even younger audience than the first fun film, and subsequently comes across as very simplistic and has little content with which to engage interest.  Whilst there is nothing essentially bad or wrong here, the whole film is simply underwhelming, the best part being the Gummi Bears attack sequence teased in the trailer.  Even Jack Black's return is fleeting and of no real impact or consequence in this sadly unmemorable film.

FILM: Bad Times At The El Royale (dir: Drew Goddard, 2018)

"Well, we are in a bit of a pickle here."

Starting like a classic film noir and ending like a Tarantino movie, Drew Goddard employs his pick-and-mix approach that made The Cabin In The Woods so refreshing and interesting and takes the viewer on quite a journey.  Set (mostly) in the late 1960s, and with a killer soundtrack, this is not so much slow-burn storytelling as gently-glowing-embers, as this tale of travellers thrown together at this peculiar hotel unfolds very, very carefully.  The cast is sublime - inevitably, this is the type of material that gives actors like Chris Hemsworth, Jon Hamm, Jeff Bridges and (escaping from the 50 Shades nonsense) Dakota Fanning plenty to work with and to do terrific work, but also very notable are Cynthia Erivo as the working singer and Lewis Pullman as the jack-of-all-trades concierge who both are fantastic to watch here.  Sudden bursts of violence punctuate the almost languorous pacing (and you do begin to fear that a sandwich in the lobby vending machine will get its backstory told at some point), but the trade-offs come in the slow reveals and steady linking of seemingly disparate elements, mis-directions and of course the terrific dialogue and character work on display.  Looking beautiful, this is a long but rewarding film to savour and with which to have patience - taken on those terms, this is a very strong achievement all round.

FILM: Small Foot 3D (dirs: Karey Kirkpatrick and Joe Reiser, 2018)

"Never seen that before!"

Warner Animation delivers an utterly charming and very enjoyable animation with Small Foot, which is imbued with an enthusiastic daftness and real warmth of character.  The semi-musical form works well - the songs are very good - and the film manages to be not only funny but also a rather thoughtful political and social allegory.  Characters are established quickly and effectively, and the voice cast is great, led by a very funny Channing Tatum and James Corden delivering well as Migo the adventurous Yeti and Percy the TV naturalist respectively.  Animation is very strong, with lighting, use of colour and depth of 3D all excellent.  With big ticks in just about every box, Small Foot is definitely one of the stronger children's animations of recent times.

FILM: Johnny English Strikes Back (dir: David Kerr, 2018)

"Simple is my middle name."

It is apt to remember that the Johnny English character started off in a TV advert, as in this third film the few ideas on offer are stretched out painfully thinly to fill a feature film run time.  Occasionally a joke will wander in, often only to overstay its welcome by being pushed to the limit of endurance.  Atkinson does what he does, Ben Miller tries to humanise the enterprise in his reprised sidekick role, whilst Emma Thompson goes big and unsubtle in the Prime Minister role.  With nothing surprising on offer, and everything signposted well in advance, it is a matter of simply getting through to the end of this underwhelming third entry in an uneven franchise.

FILM: First Man IMAX (dir: Damien Chazelle, 2018)

"It'll be an adventure."

First Man starts with a terrifyingly immersive test flight in the early 1960s (especially in big, thunderous IMAX), followed by an equally horrifying personal tragedy, and thus these bold and uncompromising crash jumps in time and emotion set the scene for this utterly absorbing film that tells the story of the Americans' Space Race for the rest of the decade leading to the 1969 moon landing.  Like Whiplash and La La Land both showed, Chazelle is a brave director with a clear vision and moulds the filmic style to achieve his ends, and here the liberal use of close ups and POV shots gives the audience little room for distance or escape.   Ryan Gosling's main strength as an actor is in absolutely inhabiting a character and presenting every heartbeat on the screen unfalteringly, and in First Man he is outstanding as Neil Armstrong, an unassuming aerospace engineer whose profile rises with every step of the space programme.  Claire Foy also gives an equally emotionally honest portrayal of Armstrong's wife, especially with her portrayal of bringing up a family with the uncertainty of her husband staying alive, but there are so many strong performances to admire, including a career highlight from Jason Clarke.  Justin Hurwitz creates an intriguingly diverse score/soundscape that is pitched somewhere between Philip Glass and M83 and plays a significant role in the film's success.  First Man is far removed from the Hollywood gloss often applied to docudramas such as these, and the film truly delivers, from showing the powerful physical efforts of space launches to simple emotional moments, and making the point about what is important to us as the human race along the way.

FILM: A Star Is Born (dir: Bradley Cooper, 2018)

"Always remember us this way."

This powerhouse film sticks surprisingly closely to the 1950s and especially the 1970s versions, but at its heart it is an indestructible love story retold for each generation.  It has been made contemporary in effective ways and has some interesting tweaks on the older takes, and it has slightly less of the slickness of the classic 70s studio product to have a more grounded appeal.   Previously, A Star Is Born has been used to showcase its female stars; here, Bradley Cooper's superb directing skills and on-screen performance is the undoubted star, and he has clearly brought out a truly less self-indulgent performance from Lady Gaga - the couple work so well together here and give excellent performances.    The music and the concert sequences are terrific, and the inevitable ending is given a slightly late-signposted twist that is nevertheless still tearjerking, and the finale takes a bold and beautiful step at the very end of what will prove to be one of the best films of 2018.

FILM: Venom 3D 4DX (dir: Ruben Fleischer, 2018)

"What is wrong with me?"

If ever a movie defined the phrase 'all over the place', it would be this one.  At best it would appear that there is a good body-horror actioner somewhere in here, and there are plenty of moments to enjoy, but too much inconsistency makes it difficult to really engage with.  Some comedy moments are laugh-out-loud whilst others fall flat; the dialogue and storytelling are both largely unsubtle; there are a couple of cracking cinematic action sequences, yet also some flat TV-style presentation; the score is at best oddly eclectic, to be polite...and so on.  As second leads, Riz Ahmed and Michelle Williams are both somewhat wasted but do good work with the material, and Tom Hardy is nothing but enthusiastic and engaging and fits the role well.  There have been suggestions that this was downgraded from an American R to a PG-13 targeted rating, which if it is the case would explain the odd and sometimes neutered product we have here, which is nevertheless not the total car-crash that some critics have said.