Shalini Langer

It doesn’t matter if it ain’t broken, trust good red-blooded Americans to try fix it. If it is in the larger direction of the Middle East, don’t bother keeping them away. Here, Tucker (Zachary Levi) and his gang (Wes Chatham, Jake Choi, Augusto Aguilera, Quincy Isaiah) fly into the embers of a US intervention gone south in, first, Afghanistan, and then Iran. In Kabul, it is 2021, as America is making a hasty retreat in the face of a resurgent Taliban. In Iran, in a lucky or unlucky (depending on your geographical location) break for the film, the war is still not on the horizon. However, the Revolutionary Guards are villainous enough to justify Tucker’s excursion.

At 160 minutes, this film is double the length it should have been. At one and a half monsters, it had just the right number, before becoming greedy. Writer-director Na Hong-jin, whose films combining horror and thrills have had both commercial and critical success, overplays his hand here. So much so that even charismatic actor couple Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander have to make do with crumbs, hidden under make-up and prosthetics. Hope begins very promisingly, as Beom Seok (Hwang Jung-min), police chief of the town on which the film is named, is called by his cousin Sung ki (Zo In-sung) to investigate the sudden appearance of a dead and badly mutilated bull in the middle of a lane, amidst fields. Sung Ki has gathered his “boys”, that is other men with a lot of time and dubiously procured guns on their hands like him, anticipating that what they are looking at is a monster that will need hunting.

In its rebooted form, the DC Universe has been doing some interesting things – tinkering with the format of Superman to give it a different tone, giving a kickass Supergirl who holds her own, and now making the first standalone feature film on a minor character from the Batman comics, Clayface. It’s a surprisingly winsome outing, with the origin story of the antihero staying close to the dingy, shabby, forgotten parts of Gotham City, and from all that, creating a character you are rooting for till the end. The script was originally written by Mike Flanagan – who is having a moment with his Carrie TV series – with Hossein Amini (Drive) stepping in later. If their decision to keep it simple, with no grand superhero-like flourishes, serves the film well, the credit also goes to Tom Rhys Harries in the titular role of Matt Hagen/Clayface, whose sharp, rugged face is handsomely craggly and feels disarmingly innocent. He switches modes as required of his character, but an essential earnestness remains about him of a boy who has risen from the worst part of town to Oscar’s glitzy heights.

With 190 episodes over seven series, Shaun the Sheep is among the longest-running animated series on British and German television, with the characters around for over 30 years. In all that time, the sheep have hardly changed. It is a remarkable success given that the stop-motion animation involves no dialogue; its animals don’t talk and its humans only utter unintelligible words. The Beast of Mossy Bottom underlines why, as directors Steve Cox and Matthew Walker pull off a wholesome entertainer, which is simple, straight and touching, without having pretensions, or songs-and-dances, about being anything else.

In this film, the way to a father’s heart lies literally through a whale’s stomach. Literally. As if Austin Abrams wasn’t put through enough hell in the recent Resident Evil, he returns for Whalefall, adapted from a book, where he spends 90% of the time being tossed around in the belly of a beast which is a sperm whale. It’s an ambitious project for sure, and director Brian Duffield is seriously committed to it, not giving us a break from all that could lie in that giant mammal’s insides, from digestive acids to the remains of things swallowed up by it, to a lot of other floating and hanging stuff that it’s best left to one’s imagination. What it boils down to is Abrams’s Jay being squeezed multiple times between sinewy, slithering, throbbing walls and – you guessed it right – surviving.

A busy mother who is “always late from work” now doesn’t have to bear just guilt and a disgruntled husband. Other Mommy tells us her dispirited child could also invite into their home “a corrupted energy looking for a host from another plane” to fill the “gap” in her heart. That’s one way of describing the creature that is haunting the Martins, comprising daughter Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), Mommy (Jessica Chastain) and “Daddo” (Jay Duplass). Though they act like no other normal people haunted before perhaps have, such as coolly stopping by for burgers at a strip mall as they discuss how to “kill it” in front of their child, after having just seen one of their closest friends (Arian Moayed) ripped apart by the “thing”.

Explaining the theory on which Facebook’s News Feed is based, Mark Zuckerberg once said: “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” What he didn’t say was that Facebook algorithm could well determine what seems closer – your front yard or Africa. ‘We’re way past making friends,’ as The Social Reckoning’s tagline says. Way past, that is, The Social Network, whose Zuckerberg was about to found Facebook, and who was this mesmeric awkward, brash, nervous genius who may not have got many likes, but whom you could not scroll past.

“I don’t read novels one can get at an airport,” declares Lowen (Dakota Johnson). Which is her way of saying that her books are “not popular”, but that they need not be. This is after she has taken up the offer to ghost-write for one very popular writer (Verity, played by Anne Hathaway) because, well, who doesn’t need money? As you may have guessed by now, neither does much writing in this latest Colleen Hoover book to be made into a film. When Lowen does find herself behind a computer, she is mostly rubbing her face or stretching or sighing. She also fills up a room with handwritten notes, laid out across couches and carpet, as part of her “process”.