TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON
Dir: Michael Bay. Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro

Wanna see what $250 million looks like on your TV screen? Here it is. Big, loud, dumber than a sack of chickens and undoubtedly thrilling.

X-Men reimagined the Cuban missile crisis; Watchmen included a moon landing gag. Transformers 3 expands on that in a cracking pre-credit sequence which posits that the 1960s space race was in fact a mission to retrieve crashed alien technology from the moon.

It's a great opening, but as it happens, largely unimportant, as this film is about one thing: giant robots fighting. And, for the first time since Avatar I'm happy to take my hat off and say ‘Thank The Dude for 3D!'

Not that I watched it in 3D. But the arrival of the medium has completely changed how this film looks in comparison to the first two.

The first (and second) Transformer films were a blur of quick cutting, a headache-inducing frenzy, where the average shot must have lasted less than two seconds. But that doesn't work in 3D. So here we have extended shots, and the transformers transform in long single takes. It looks great. A ‘sky-gliding' sequence during the climax is truly spectacular.

The film, of course, is a complete mess, hampered by the astonishingly annoying Shia LaBeouf, introducing absurd cameos from the likes of John Malkovich, and ramping up undeserved emotional climaxes. It's totally disjointed and drainingly long.
But that action – damn!

Tucker & Dale Vs Evil is not the most sophisticated of films. But sometimes sophistication can be overrated. It's certainly pretty funny, especially for horror fans who will enjoy the constant referencing. Coming on like a typical teens-on-holiday-meet-nasty-rednecks outing, the overarching joke is that the titular hillbillies who so scare the visiting college kids are likeable innocents, while the escalating bodycount results from misunderstanding and accident. The funniest bits are in the trailer but the central duo are immensely likeable and the film has an amiable vibe. Between the bloody killings it's actually quite sweet.

Trust is a slow-burning cautionary tale about the dangers of young teenage girls using the internet. Because, in case we aren't reminded frequently enough, they can meet nasty predatory men posing as kids in chat-rooms. And, while this covers no new ground, and looks rather like a TV Movie Of The Week, the presence of Clive Owen and Catherine keener as concerned parents adds a touch of class. Told with sledgehammer subtlety, this will confirm everyone's worst fears, but there is an emotional honesty to the characters' reactions as the fallout from the incident tears apart the family.

There have been more than a few recent films which place a disparate bunch of people in a room and then pit them against each other in some way. It's a cheap option. The Killing Room expands the scenario slightly by approaching it through the lens of newly-hired observer Cloe Sevigny and tying it to America's notorious 1970s MK-Ultra mind control experiments. Here we have four people in a room and a bunch of people observing them. The reasons they are there are slowly revealed and, depending on your suspension of belief and patience, you'll find it either a tense psychological thriller or a contrived bore.
I quite liked it.

Quarantine was a remake of Spanish horror outing REC. But while REC2 was a direct continuation of the first film – expanding the backstory - Quarantine 2 is a standalone venture and breaks from the POV camera of the others. Here a commercial plane is forced to land after a passenger flips out. The assembled group find themselves confined to an isolated terminal as they succumb to the zombie-like infection (‘human rabies!') and become crazed killers. It's not actually too bad, assuming originality and character development mean nothing to you. Part 3 probably awaits.