Tomorrowland (12A) ***
Director Brad Bird teams with charismatic leading man George Clooney for this ambitious epic. But for all its visual flair the movie's found wanting.
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The director who made The Incredibles and Ratatouille during his time at animation house Pixar - moved into live action with the entertaining Mission: Impossible, Ghost Protocol.
His latest is certainly not lacking in scope or scale, but the storytelling's simply too muddled to really resonate despite the best efforts of Clooney and his young co-star Britt Robertson.
She's actually the lead in the movie as Casey, a young woman who's inherited her fascination with all things space-related from her ex-NASA employee father.
The discovery of a pin depicting the letter T gives her visions of another world every time she touches it and she becomes fixated with finding out more about this fascinating and futuristic place.
Clooney's character, Frank, knows more about this place - Tomorrowland - than he is willing to reveal. A scientist and inventor, he experienced this place before things went badly wrong. He has no intention of returning there but comes under the scrutiny of Casey, who has other ideas.
The film is frequently entertaining but stumbles badly in its execution, especially in the latter half. I'll give away no more of the plot but suffice to say the busy blend of sci-fi, thriller, romance and road trip means that there an awful lot going on to engage with.
The story at the heart of it all feels a little lost as a result. Yet the movie is daring in its concepts and ambitions and the two leads make for good company. Watchable, but - given the level of talent involved - a tad disappointing.
Poltergeist (15A) ***
Poltergeist is one of those typical Hollywood horror remakes - perfectly adequate and pretty unnecessary. A strong cast do their best with this reboot but there's a crucial lack of real scares. Unless you have a fear of clowns, that is.
”‹Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt bring their likeability and reliability as Eric and Amy Bowen, who move with their three kids into a slightly shabby neighbourhood when they get a house at a discounted price.
But their middle child, the nervy Griffin, immediately starts to become spooked by things that go bump in the night. His fears are dismissed as anxiety by his parents.
But things turn nasty when the youngest starts to communicate with mysterious forces via the family's television and some toy clowns start acting all peculiar.
The original Poltergeist movie served up effective frights, many of them from the script of co-writer Steven Spielberg.
This has been described by the studio involved as a contemporary update of that film and there are certainly plenty of gadgets used in the telling of the tale. Other than that, it's hard to see the point - though Jared Harris is fun in support as a ghostbuster tasked with helping the family.
