‘Nightcrawler’ is no ‘Taxi Driver’, and Lou while a reflection of our full and empty times isn’t really a product of it.

THE height of dramatic tension in ‘Interstellar’ involves two spaceships competing to dock onto the same space station. That’s how cerebral Christopher Nolan’s latest film is. That’s after he has taken a swirl through a twister of a wormhole, but before he rolls into the unfathomed depths of a blackhole. And while other filmmakers would be content imagining just one other world, he gives us three — with own skies, gravity, surfaces, and climates.

“GOD works in mysterious ways,” says Chloe (Thomson) right at the beginning of Left Behind. Indeed. Otherwise what explains this dud of a film based on, what some Christian circles call, ‘the Rapture’?

…in comparison to The Conjuring — with its fantastic cast of actors and its sub-text of research and years of pain — Annabelle pales.

For, if there are two sides to every story, few are held as dear as in a marriage — both of which the book perfectly understood. The problem always was going to be how to translate its gradual transitions as well as unexpected twists onto the big screen. In that, Flynn, also the screenwriter, couldn’t have asked for a better director than David Fincher, the clever exponent of tense relationships, misogynist protagonists, orchestrated violence, and people living double lives (Se7en, Fight Club, The Social Network, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo).

Deliver Us From Evil, after a taut, thrill-filled start, goes slack, gory and repetitive till finally ending in an over-the-top, extended exorcism that leaves us none the wiser on what the fuss was all about.

What can you say about a film that so swears about its cerebralism as to discuss sickle cell anaemia at some length, and then picturises a disturbing sequence of a 14-year-old being admired by two sexual predators against an astonishingly and unironically sunny number?

Readers of the book have praised the film for being better than it, and there can be few greater compliments. However, Ball’s biggest achievement is letting us see the children at the heart of this coming-of-age story.

The film itself could do with some bit of tightening, but while they are on screen, it’s a pleasure to watch each one of them. Particularly Aniston, who once again shows that she clearly understands what she represents and how to make the most of it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt part doesn’t have the chills of the cannibal Elijah Wood, Alba’s pouts have clearly outlived their usefulness, the 3D is entirely pointless, the voyeurism even less disguised now, and there are no little girls who need saving to connect this film to any normal human emotion calling for a normal human response.