The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (12A) ****
Jackson always had the potential to bring this story from Tolkien’s Middle Earth to life, as he dramatically proved with Lord of the Rings.
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But the first two Hobbit films never quite soared, bogged down by excruciatingly slow and deliberate pacing and a lack of real investment in the characters and their dilemmas.
Jackson comes good in this finale, building the tension and the action to dazzling effect in this film which is by far the best of the trilogy.
But there remains a nagging sense that the director should never have squeezed three films out of a source novel that ran to barely 300 pages.
The movie takes off where The Desolation of Smaug ended and you’ll need to have seen the first two films to have any idea what’s going on here.
Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), the Wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and the group of thirteen dwarves led by their king Thorin (Richard Armitage) are on the final, most perilous, stage of their quest to reclaim the lost city of Erebor.
The terrifying dragon Smaug (voiced by actor of the moment Benedict Cumberbatch) is enraged at having been defeated in the last film and is not willing to give up his power easily.
King Thorin has his head turned by the sheer amount of wealth reclaimed by his Kingdom but his choices could lead the Hobbits, Elves and humans into even greater dangers.
And when their old foe Sauron sends a massive army of giant killer Orcs to attack the inhabitants of Lonely Mountain, it quickly becomes apparent that freedom will not come without bloodshed.
It all culminates in a menacing (too menacing for younger children, there are demons and dragons aplenty) and action-packed finale.
Jackson’s relentless padding is still apparent in places, though at 144 minutes this is the leanest of the trilogy.
Black Sea (15A) ****
AN ON-FORM Jude Law heads a great cast in this gritty, tense thriller set deep underwater.
Director Kevin MacDonald (The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void) does a superb job of cranking up the tension in this well-paced drama.
And the movie really builds the sense of isolation and gruelling conditions endured by these characters underwater - claustrophobics may need to have a lie-down afterwards.
Law (adopting a consistently solid Scottish accent) plays a rogue submarine captain in need of work and wealth.
When he hears of the possible existence of a sunken Nazi U-Boat packed with gold at the bottom of the Black Sea, he employs a motley crew of sailors and divers from both the UK and Russia to exploit the stash.
The problem is, the two crews take an instant dislike to each other and begin to compete for a bigger share of the haul - and that’s before the unforgiving environment of the sea bed beings to take its toll.
Much like last month’s WW2 movie Fury, Black Sea focuses on how a brutal environment brings the worst out on the film’s various characters - not a good scenario when you’re trapped in a small space underwater.
Law makes for a commanding performance in what is his best performance in recent years, while MacDonald never lets the pace or the tension falter.
