LOOPER
Dir: Rian Johnson - Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt.

Looper is a time travel movie, and like all clever time travel movies the less you know the more fun it is. And it really is fun. It's that rare special beast – a sci-fi action thriller, smart, tough, and with real emotional weight.

The set-up goes something like this: Joe (Gordon-Levitt) is a 'looper”. It is 2044. 30 years further into the future time travel exists and is illegal, though is used by the mob to send hit victims back to 2044 to be killed and disposed of by loopers. It's a neat, if cold-blooded, arrangement for Joe until his next target is his older self from the future (Willis). Complications occur and spend the rest of the film multiplying.

Gordon-Levitt had an early movie lead in writer/director Johnson's striking debut, Brick, and with a few prosthetic enhancements makes a good young Willis, and there are strong turns from Blunt and Jeff Daniels. It really is a pleasure watching a film like this, so confident and accomplished. Like all time travel flicks it doesn't pay to think too closely about the dynamics, but this is so well (and knowingly) done you won't even care.

Grindhouse is still alive and well in the shape of The Baytown Outlaws a gleeful romp through a violent world of redneck killers, corrupt sheriffs, crazy bikers and psychotic drug dealers. From the lurid colour palette to the extravagant shoot-outs and clear revelling in eccentricities, this – surprisingly – doesn't involve Tarantino, Rodriguez or Roth, but the influences are obvious. Not that it's a bad thing, as the film's concentration on retro confederate culture stands it apart as lacking in any social value – uncompromising B-movie silliness.
And it's been a week of sequels for me, film franchises that stagger along, after all but ardent fans have lost interest and well after everyone's lost track of how many have come and gone.

Despite the return of the series original stars, I was less than excited by the prospect of Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning. So far the innumerable forgettable sequels have only been dead ends. Things open brutally as a man (Scott Adkins) watches his wife and daughter killed in a home invasion – by none other than the Muscles from Brussels, Jean Claude Van Damme! So the guy wants revenge, has amnesia, and is attacked by a Super Soldier from a secret army led by Dolph Lundgren. But nothing is as it seems... It's an impressively vicious thriller, different in tone from previous entries and perhaps even absurd enough to be destined for cult status, though Dolph and Jean Claude's contributions are brief.

Resident Evil Retribution also sees a return, this time from original director Paul W S Anderson (or was he back last time as well? I forget). It's more of exactly the same – extravagant visuals, zombies all over the place and a plot as confusing as it is simplistic. Milla Jovovich still fits the tight black leather and does the wire work with determination. This will please fans of the video games since it runs, even more than previous efforts, exactly like a video game, with various 'levels”, each with a different look and a 'boss” to defeat. A very guilty pleasure, if that.

Hellraiser: Revelations, however, makes both of those efforts look good. Since the first two films this franchise has been sinking with each instalment. This is the ninth and does nothing to redeem things. Even, Doug Bradley, famous for playing chief villain Pinhead, declined to return. Word is that the film was rushed through so The Weinstein Company wouldn't lose the series rights. It involves a couple of miscreants who disappeared in Mexico (messing with things they shouldn't have) then suddenly return to their family with the horrendous Cenobites and much death and destruction in their wake. Not a good situation, not a good film.