Oblivion
Tom Cruise, Andrea Riseborough, Olga Kurylenko - Dir: Joseph Kosinski

Oblivion was the first of several to hit cinemas in the year of sci-fi (Elysium, After Earth, Colony, Gravity, et al) and was duly slammed by just about everyone going. Reviewing it on the small screen seems a little unfair. The film is undoubtedly flawed, but it also has much about it that is good.
It's certainly a very good-looking film, making excellent use of its otherworldly Icelandic scenery (you may recognise some of it from the start of Prometheus). Throw in some cool futuristic hardware and various relics of a now-wrecked Earth and you have an interesting landscape.
Story-wise, Cruise and Riseborough are just about the last people left on a post-apocalyptic world, overseeing the final removal of the planet's water for the new Earth, now located on a moon of Saturn. But, as it turns out, there are others still kicking around, led by the reliably dignified and knowledgeable Morgan Freeman. Then a space ship crashes containing the cute woman Tom has been dreaming about, and all sorts of reality is revealed to be...not so real after all.
The main problem is the wandering screenplay, which goes on for way too long and tries to be too smart and arty, robbing the climax of suspense and excitement while making the various plot reversals confusing. Even as you watch it you think 'this could have been so much better...”

The current Hollywood adage that everything goes better with a little ‘Rock' fails completely with GI Joe 2: Retaliation. Putting Dwayne ‘The Rock' Johnson into the Journey To The Centre of The Earth and Fast And Furious franchises provided a breath of fresh air. Not so here. The First GI Joe film was pretty naff but looks like a veritable masterpiece beside the second, which dispenses with the fun bits (the groovy suits, the silly weapons) and tries, totally unsuccessfully, to be a bit more 'serious”. There are a couple of good action scenes, and a disinterested Bruce Willis climbs on-board as the 'original” GI Joe. Dire.

I'm always on the outlook for something weird, and hopefully wonderful, and Sushi Girl, despite its R18 for 'sadistic violence” (which I'm going off) looked the ticket. And indeed it is, ripping gleefully through a Tarantino-littered landscape with its unique identity intact. The titular girl is the naked and fish-adorned centrepiece at a dinner where four crims 'welcome” a fellow thief back from jail. He did six years after their failed jewellery heist. The jewels are still missing and things get fractious quickly. Think a cross between Reservoir Dogs and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, but not so good.

Lenny and Abbott are garbage men to the stars in Beverly Hills. They're proud of what they do: they're 'in the industry”, albeit behind the scenes. This is Hollywood Trash - called Garbage in America - and the two likeable schlubs find themselves enjoying the mixed blessings of minor celebrity after finding Cuba Gooding Jr's Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Jerry McGuire at a rubbish dump. There are some low-rent celebrity cameos – Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, William Baldwin – and the whole thing wanders around in a laid-back manner as the pair fall out over Lenny's dreams of stardom.

Valhalla Rising is a bleak austere film from Nicolas Winding Refn, who recently found commercial success with Ryan Gosling in Drive. His follow-up to that, Only God Forgives (also with Gosling) has received extreme, and not necessarily positive, reactions. Clearly those who object to its obtuseness are unfamiliar with the director's back catalogue as both Bronson and this are stylised, difficult films. This stars the great Mads Mikkelsen as One-Eye, a mute and possibly mythical warrior who treks around striking (Icelandic again?) landscapes in 1000AD while the film ponders, mainly wordlessly, mankind's emerging humanity. Or something. Rigorous, if not exactly fun.