Moon Rocks For Brains. Apollo 18.

The Blair Witch In Space.  Three astronauts go the moon and get attacked by aliens. Now that would have been a good movie.

Instead we have this boring found footage movie that has stupid monsters - spidery space rock boulders that eat you from the inside out. Eh? What's their natural prey on the moon then? There's nobody interesting to root for and nothing much to say. It's also spectacularly stupid because most of the filmed footage we are watching would have been destroyed at the film's ending - so how was it found?

Dumb as a bag of space rocks.

Spider-Man Grounded.

Andrew Garfield is a terrific Peter Parker and he makes this sweet, likeable teenager a believable nice guy. The High School stuff is really well done but the film takes forever to get into gear and when it does it is hampered by some decidedly average CGI action and a very poor villain. It's questionable whether it was necessary to revisit the origin story yet again but to spend so much time on it was a big mistake. On top of that we have the usual Hollywood guff about absent fathers to give the whole thing some kind of gravitas.

There is some invention, I liked the web used as radar idea but the best parts of the film (where Parker discovers his powers) are rushed, badly thought through and inconsistent. It's not bad but it feels like it's all been done before and done much better.

Avengers Assembly Line

Enjoyable....but whisper it quietly...slightly underwhelming superhero movie that is not as good as the word of mouth or hype surrounding it. What's wrong with it? Well, Joss Whedon for one thing. I'm really starting to think that he is completely overrated after seeing this just after the similarly disappointing Cabin In The Woods. Don't get me wrong, he is good, but smart ass quips, whilst funny, are not dialogue. Here's a little bit with some action, here's a little bit with character, here's a little bit of plot....is not the same as telling a story. Putting it all together is what counts. It felt a bit scrappy to me. For once the CGI is great, The Hulk is well rendered, but I'm just not that excited by endless shots of metallic lizard things popping out of space portals. It is fun and it is well done but I think I was looking for a little more excitement.

Block Rockin' Beats

Joe Cornish (that's Joe from TV's Adam and Joe show) takes the director's seat and writing credits for this entertaining British movie with a B-movie feel. It's the film Predator 2 should have been and has the feel of those fun 80s horror films like Critters, Night Of The Creeps and even early John Carpenter with a bit of The Warriors in there as well. There's lots of fun to be had. Sometimes  it's just not quite funny enough where it needs to be or scary enough either. A promising debut though.

Boys' Own Action

Sean Bean and Danny Dyer as commandos. Age of Heroes has violent action sequences, grunts sticking it to the officers, endless shooting, evil Nazis, training and preparations, plans going wrong, untrustworthy female resistance fighters, blowing things up - I mean, come on, what’s not to like?

This is an unashamedly gung-ho boys’ own war film for the lads without any added levels of irony or revisionist naval gazing. This is a guys on a mission movie and the mission is to entertain. It goes in, gets the job done and pisses off before too many questions can be asked. A guilty pleasure and it runs out of steam at the end but I loved it.