Fancy a trip to the cinema this weekend? here's our guide to the new cinema releases...
X-Men: Apocalypse (12A) Empire, Odeon **
TOO many kooks spoil the broth of director Bryan Singer’s fourth tour of duty with the Marvel Comics mutants, which began in 2000 with X-Men.
Simon Kinberg’s messy script bursts at the seams with tortured characters and subplots vying for our attention, bloating the running time to close to two and a half hours.
It’s a physical ordeal for us, but too little time for X-Men: Apocalypse to do justice to a menagerie of gifted misfits on both sides of a conflict that reduces several capital cities to rubble.
There is dramatic fat that could be trimmed: a blood-spattered interlude involving a face from the past - codenamed Weapon X - is superfluous and the final showdown is played out simultaneously in the real world and inside the connected minds of telepaths.
Unfortunately it’s all likely to induce a headache, as awe and wonder.
Everybody Wants Some!! (15) Empire ****
Oscar nominated writer-director Richard Linklater rekindles a bright flame of nostalgia in this valentine to student life, which exudes the same freewheeling vibe as his seminal 1993 film, Dazed And Confused.
While that picture illuminated growing pains at a 1970s high school, Everybody Wants Some!! zips up its impossibly tight jeans in the autumn of 1980, when a group of hormone-crazed college freshmen and sophomores hope to make their mark on the baseball field.
Linklater’s ear for sparkling dialogue is acute, like when one student snorts with derision at a housemate’s rippling waterbed: “It’s like having sex with a girl on top of a really fat girl!”
The script is a series of bittersweet vignettes in the days before the hormone-fuelled characters are due to attend their first class.
The soundtrack opens to the infectious strains of My Sharona by The Knack, while a deliriously entertaining sequence involves the main cast cruising around campus in a car, singing along to Rapper’s Delight by The Sugarhill Gang on the radio.
“You start poppin’ your fingers and stompin’ your feet/And movin’ your body while you’re sitting in your seat,” chant the actors. We happily oblige.
A Hologram For The King (12) Empire, ABC **
ADAPTED from Dave Eggers’ novel by writer-director Tom Tykwer, A Hologram For The King is a misshapen, muddled yet curiously engaging love story that will draw comparisons to Salmon Fishing In The Yemen.
Forbidden romance blossoms in the arid landscapes of the Middle East, irrigated here by sizzling screen chemistry between Tom Hanks and the luminous Sarita Choudhury.
This is Satellite Dishing In The Next-To-Yemen in tone and intent, and Tykwer ensures that the central character’s existential crisis doesn’t weigh too heavily, courtesy of farcical narrative detours and side swipes at Saudi Arabian culture.
The plot feels like it might blow away in the first sandstorm.
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