There’s no question about whether you should see The Odyssey, it’s the cinema’s most irresistible offering this year. The masses are flocking to a big budget fantasy-action film, while the high-brows are dying to know how Christopher Nolan has mangled Homer’s epic. By luck or design, the movie has arrived at a quiet time when there are few must-sees, so its current box office blitz was hardly unexpected.

The Odyssey and The Iliad are the foundational texts of the western cultural tradition - a tradition currently being trashed in universities, as the Classics are being replaced by departments of Popular Culture. Although students allegedly prefer Taylor Swift to Plato, it seems that Homer is more popular than ever. Perhaps there’s some glimmer of recognition that all those characters with capes and leotards in the superhero films, owe their initial inspiration to the Greek myths and legends.

As for Homer himself, we have no reliable historical knowledege, only the stories of the ancient world that tell us he was a blind poet. We don’t know if such a person really existed, or if his two great epics may have been the work of several different authors. What we do know is that the poems were composed between 750 - 650 BCE and transmitted orally. The first film adaptation had to wait until 1911, when three Italian directors squeezed most of the story into a mere 44 minutes. No subsequent version has been so economical, with filmmakers making their own choices about what may be left out. One recent version, Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024), concentrated solely on Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, omitting all the fantastic events of the ten-year voyage home – and saving a fortune in special effects.

By scrimping on the monsters, gods and witches, The Return transformed Homer’s story into a psychological drama of a man traumatised by war, wondering if he could ever be reaccepted by his family and his kingdom. It was a far cry from Mario Camerini’s Ulysses (1954), in which a swashbuckling Kirk Douglas worked his way with gusto through a full cast of monsters and vamps.

The greatness of the Odyssey is that it sustains many different interpretations. It’s essentially the story of a soldier returning from a brutal war of ten years, taking another decade to finally arrive home. Odysseus is a king on the island of Ithaca, but he has lost the best part of his life fighting on behalf of his Greek allies. In war he was known as a brilliant strategist, credited with the stratagem of the Trojan Horse which brought about the downfall of Troy. In the aftermath, he is struggling to regain his bearings.

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When a film has been remade six times over the past six years, in six different countries, it must be tapping into something significant. But what? In 2020, Catalan filmmaker Cesc Gay, released The People Upstairs, an adaptation of his own hit play. In the years that have followed, we’ve seen versions from Italy, Switzerland, Russia, France and South Korea. Now the United States has gotten into the act, with The Invite, directed by Olivia Wilde.

I haven’t seen the full World Cup procession of remakes, each of them tweaked for a local audience, but it’s clear the adaptability of the story owes much to its economy of means. It’s essentially a piece for the theatre, requiring nothing more complex than four actors in a room. In this version, a brief preamble in which we watch a disconsolate Seth Rogen leaving work and cycling home on a tiny bike, is only by way of setting the scene. All the drama and comedy springs from the verbal interaction of the four main characters.

There is an entire sub-genre of films about dinner parties, from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) To Babette’s Feast (1987), to The Menu (2022), and dozens of others in which the drama and comedy are crucially dependent on a single set piece. The Invite is an unusually lean example of the type, as dinner is never actually served.

No-one who feels a night at the cinema is complete without a car chase or a martial arts contest need feel concerned about the limited scope of this story, which is engrossing from start to finish as layers of social masquerade and self-defence are peeled away. When the lights go down, we have a taste of what will follow with a witticism by Oscar Wilde (no relation to Olivia): “One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.”

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Barely a month ago, the Trump administration released a new tranche of documents relating to UFO sightings. This act of “unprecedented transparency” was widely perceived as the latest Weapon of Mass Distraction in the President’s arsenal. Although millions of documents from the Epstein files have been kept under wraps, Trump was willing to astound us with government secrets about extraterrestials.

The result of course, was a big nothing. No new evidence, no startling revelations, just the same fuzzy photos of mysterious objects in the sky, bright lights and tall tales. The lesson may be that everyday life under Trump has become scarier and more unpredictable than any dark fantasies about creatures from outer space.

This is the unspoken subtext in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, which is ostensibly about revealing secrets of alien visitations the US government has kept locked away for decades. If it’s more dramatic than the non-event of the document dump, that’s because this is a tale about the alarming overreach of the state rather than an exposé of extraterrestial knowledge.

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Today marks the start of another Sydney Film Festival, a venerable institution now in its 73^rd year. I’ve been going since my student days, and have always tried to attend opening night, the award presentations, and whatever screenings I could catch. This year I had to ask about opening night and was told that all the seats were allocated. As for film tickets, the media department had decided to prioritise journalists who were doing interviews with guests.

It’s slightly ironic that the opening night feature is an Australian documentary called Silenced, which looks at human rights lawyer, Jennifer Robinson. I would have liked to see and write about this film, but for the time being I’m silenced.

My mistake this year was to complacently assume the SFF is interested in critical responses. It seems the new hardline marketing strategy is to minimise criticism and maximise PR. I’d be very surprised if any of the interviews conducted with guests contain a single harsh word about a featured film. Most interviews are love-ins, often written by journos who have simply swotted up beforehand.

I could speculate further about this new policy, but as the SFF is patently uninterested in reviews it makes more sense for me to return the compliment and write about a feature that’s not part of the line-up. The pick of the festival will get a run at local cinemas, as happens with the best features from the year’s national film festivals - which leads me to Mascha Schilinski’s The Sound of Falling, a highlight of the 2026 German Film Festival.

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When you’re the richest woman in the world, it’s only to be expected that someone will make a movie about your life. When you’ve capped a long and illustrious career with the kind of public scandal that keeps the tabloids in business, there’s little chance the inevitable bio pic will be admiring and respectful. In the wake of a 2023 Netflix documentary series called The Billionaire, The Butler and the Boyfriend, French director, Thierry Klifa, saw the potential for a black comedy based on the last years of Liliane Bettencourt (1922-2017), the woman at the helm of L’Oréal cosmetics.

The Richest Woman in the World is consistently entertaining, but more likely to make you gasp rather than laugh out loud. Isabelle Huppert, formidable as ever, plays the wealthy protagonist, Marianne Farrère, head of the Windler Group. Marianne is a cool customer, the supreme ruler of her family company. Her husband, Guy Farrère (André Marcon) is content to play a secondary role, while everybody else in the boardroom recognises that Marianne’s word is law.

The matriarch’s sovereignty is so complete she seems bored with the business. She has little time for her daughter, Fredérique (Marina Foïs), a self-styled writer and musician whose lifestyle depends on the corporation and her husband’s seat on the board. For Marianne, entertaining government ministers, attending cultural events and attending to public relations are all slightly tiresome chores, undertaken dutifully but without enthusiasm.

Everything changes during a shoot for a luxury magazine (called Selfish), when Marianne encounters the flamboyant photographer, Pierre-Alain Fantin (Laurent Lafitte). Unlike everyone else, so deferential in her presence, Pierre-Alain respects no-one and nothing. He’s loud, camp and abrasive, deaf to any opinion but his own. He tells Marianne her outfit is all wrong and supervises while she goes rifling through her wardrobe. Marianne is delighted by the boorish treatment, and even more pleased by the photo spread.

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It’s a rare to discover a blockbuster movie is better than expected, but that’s the case with The Devil Wears Prada 2. It’s not exactly The Godfather 2, but it’s one of the few sequels that outshines the original. I’m not saying it’s a timeless classic of the cinema, merely that it’s sharp, entertaining and surprisingly topical. When one thinks of the luxury-brand trash served up in the Sex in the City movies, it’s clear that director, David Frankel, has set his personal bar a lot higher.

It’s still the story of a high-end fashion magazine, with all the clothes, accessories and celebrity cameos, but there’s a genuine attempt to connect with the Zeitgeist in a way that transcends the gloss and glamour. One can imagine scriptwriter, Aline Brosh McKenna thinking: “What’s the difference between the magazine business in 2006, when the previous film appeared, and today?

The answer is that the glossy magazines have been virtually strangled to death by digital platforms. Publications that were slow to embrace social media and cement their online presence have struggled to survive, no matter how venerable the brand. At the same time, media ownership has fallen into the hands of unscrupulous multi-billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, who will forever be known as the man who gutted one of the world’s most respected newspapers, The Washington Post.

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Cinema Reborn is a unique Australian film festival that screens newly restored prints of classic films. Like a lot of film buffs I’ve been volunteering my services every year, introducing a movie. This time it was, William Wyler’s The Heiress. In acknowledging the cinema as an art form for all time, not simply a venue for new releases, I’m running that address as this week’s film column.

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Reading about the golden years of Hollywood might be a good preparation for the next installment of Jurassic Park. The heroes of this era - legendary directors such as Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and William Wyler - had to routinely defend their artistic turf against the rapacious assaults of apex predators such as Sam Goldwyn, David Selznick and Harry Cohn - the big studio executives who controlled the purse strings and held the contracts. These moguls were perpetually at war with star directors who had very precise ideas about what they wanted from a film.

Wyler, often singled out as Hollywood’s most “celebrated” or “acclaimed” director, had to fight every inch of the way with the studio bosses when making many of his best-known films. If it wasn’t the studios, it was the Hays Code, in force from 1934-1968, which demanded that movies reflect a puritanical type of “American values”.

With The Heiress of 1949, Wyler enjoyed a lttle more leeway than usual. His previous movie, The Best Years of Our Lives, about a group of former servicemen returning to civilian life after the war, had been a smash hit, but it had finally worn out his patience with Sam Goldwyn. Tempted by the promise of creative freedom he had thrown in his lot with Frank Capra and George Stevens in an independent production company called Liberty Pictures. It was a venture that died almost before it began, with the box office failure of Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life convincing its director that going it alone was a recipe for financial disaster.

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Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), is the kind of novel every bookish teenager once felt compelled to read. Less than 70 pages, it’s not much of a commitment, but it leaves an indelible impression. I read the book at high school and have returned a couple of times since. Unlike much of the literature consumed in one’s teens, Camus’s novel feels just as striking when read at a mature age.

Often known as The Outsider in English, following Stuart Gilbert’s translation, (no longer considered the standard), it’s as disturbing today as it must have been to readers in the 1940s. Part of its impact comes from Camus’s bare, unembellished prose, inspired by Hemingway, but it’s also a philosophical novel, viewed as one of the key works of existentialist literature.

Existentialism, a leading intellectual current in the years following World War Two, is not much spoken about nowadays, perhaps because we’ve internalised its insights so successfully. To say that humanity is alone in a Godless universe, and if God does exist, he doesn’t care, probably describes the beliefs of most people in the western world, who go through their lives with scarcely a thought for the hereafter. We may tolerate all forms of religious belief and feel religion is vaguely a good thing, but for most people God no longer plays a central role in their day-to-day existence.

Those who practice some form of faith would reject existentialism, and always have, but it’s no longer a matter of urgent debate. Most of us today are existentialists without even knowing it, which is why many viewers will find that François Ozon’s film of Camus’s novel touches parts of the psyche which have lain dormant for years.

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At a time when Donald Trump is threatening to destroy “a whole civilisation” in the Middle East, The President’s Cake, puts us on the ground during those days of the early 1990s, when the United States was applying the squeeze to Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, following his attack on Kuwait. Hasan Hadi’s directorial debut reveals the price paid by ordinary people when a superpower imposes crippling sanctions and military strikes on a nation already suffering under a corrupt, brutal regime.

What’s most wonderful about this movie is the way Hadi frames his narrative through the experiences of a nine-year-old girl named Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), who draws the short straw at school and is given the onerous task of baking a cake for Saddam’s birthday. It’s as if we are watching a bizarre quest, with this stubborn schoolgirl going in search of ingredients in the big city, overcoming one obstacle after another.

For us, baking a cake might not sound like an earth-shattering responsibility, but when the teacher tells you that failure to produce the goods may result in the torture and victimisation of your family, it takes on a sense of urgency. What makes it even worse, was that in Iraq at the time, sanctions had made it difficult to obtain the bare necessities of life. Eggs, flour, sugar and baking powder were in short supply and selling for high prices.

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“Grace” is a concept that has inspired volumes of theological literature, so it’s a brave director that takes it up as the theme of a movie. Paolo Sorrentino, one of the most accomplished filmmakers at work today, doesn’t lack the courage or artistry to weave a story around an abstraction, taking it into the most unlikely of settings: the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome, the official residence of the President of the Republic.

Politics is familiar territory for Sorrentino, but most of his protagonists have been thoroughly disreputable, from Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo (2008) to Silvio Berlusconi in Loro (2018). Both those scheming powerbrokers were played by Toni Servillo, a great actor, who has starred in most of Sorrentino’s films. In La Grazia, Servillo finally gets to play a political figure with a scrupulous regard for the law. It may say something about Italian politics that he’s a completely imaginary character.

Servillo’s Mariano di Santo is the President of Italy. Like the hero in Italo Svevo’s novel, Confessions of Zeno, he spends the entire story having one last cigarette, savouring this small act of rebellion against the tyranny of a health program that obliges him to eat quantities of quinoa.

A respected jurist who takes his time considering the pros and cons of any case, Mariano has exerted a steadying influence on the chaos of Italian democracy, having negotiated no fewer than six crises. He’s disturbed to learn that his nickname is “reinforced concrete”, but it’s a tribute to his integrity. Coming towards the end of his term of office, Mariano is hesitating to sign a controversial bill on euthanasia into law and pondering two appeals for pardons. The Italian word for an official pardon is “grazia”.

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If Academy Award nominations were a guarantee of quality, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, with a record sixteen, would be the greatest film of all time. The reality is that it’s arguably not as good as some of the features that never made this year’s shortlist for Best Picture. Sinners doesn’t have the depth or drama of Nuremberg or The Testament of Ann Lee, neither of which found favour with the Academy. The obvious reason for its success is that it’s a remarkable exercise in box-ticking, providing all the political and pop cultural triggers that appeal to the kind of sensibility flourishing in Hollywood today.

The film had a brief cinematic release in April last year, before reverting to home viewing platforms where it can be watched at any time. It may yet get another run on the big screen, although that’s for Warner Bros. to decide. In Australia, Sinners was a sleeper at first release, but its later success represents a triumph of global marketing as it has made inroads with an initially indifferent audience.

The aspects of the movie that appeal to reviewers who have given it a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, are precisely what I saw as weaknesses. Coogler has been praised for the way he has stitched together film genres that seem completely incompatible, making Sinners a blend of musical, horror, drama and social history. As unlikely as the platypus, it’s one hell of a high wire act for any writer-director. To my mind, he doesn’t come close to pulling it off.

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For Ann Lee, the visionary leader of the Shakers, fornication was the express lane to hell. So fiercely were these beliefs enforced, her congregation had to adopt children rather than create their own. For their Church to prosper, the Shakers needed keep making converts among the ranks of sinners. Small wonder the sect has struggled to maintain its numbers. In the mid-19^th century, there were more than 4,000 believers spread across 18 communities, today there are only two professed Shakers, residing in a village in Maine.

This may not sound like a promising subject, but Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet, who gave us The Brutalist (2024), have created a movie unlike anything you will have ever seen before. This time it’s Fastvold in the director’s chair, but as with the previous effort it’s a husband-and-wife collaboration. The Testament of Ann Lee is a bio pic of a remarkable woman, an historical epic, a study of faith and fanaticism, and – believe it or not – a musical.

The story is rigidly structured, proceeding by chapters that show how the Shakers find their origins in Manchester in the mid-1700s, cross the ocean to America, and make a new home in the wilderness of up-state New York. Throughout this journey, both physical and spiritual, the true believers grow progressively more devoted to their religious mission while seeking to avoid persecutions stirred up by their manner of worship.

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Searching for redeeming features in Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, I could only feel grateful the film gave me an excuse to read Emily Brontë’s book for the fourth time. Wuthering Heights, devoid of the coy inverted commas is, without doubt, one of the greatest novels in the English language. Written by a 27-year-old virgin who would die at the age of 30, it’s a book in which sex and death inhabit every chapter. Although the author spent all but a small part of her life in a lonely parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, she left us a tale that is just as strange and powerful today as it was on first publication in 1847.

One of the definitions of a classic is that one may return to it again and again, always finding something new. Wuthering Heights is that kind of book. At the other end of the scale, Fennell’s sexed-up, celebrity vehicle for Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi is the definition of trash.

At the risk of sounding too portentous, I’d go even further. This film is not simply a travesty it’s an act of desecration. It takes what has always been for me, and I’m sure for countless others, a sacred book and turns it into a soulless extended video clip in which everything that Emily Brontë created is systematically vandalised.

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Chloé Zhao must be a remarkable person to achieve what she’s achieved. Ten years ago, it would have been inconceivable for a Chinese woman to take out Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, for a film in which hardly anything happens. That film was Nomadland (2020), in which Frances McDormand played a woman who had given up a permanent home and made her life in a camper van. It was a vision of freedom snatched from the staggering poverty and inequality that has consumed America’s working classes.

Nomadland came along at the right time to appeal to a politicised Academy still reeling from the depredations of the first Trump Presidency. It had a singularity of purpose that made the other nominations seem frivolous.

Nomadland was Zhao’s third film, her two previous efforts having barely left a trace at the box office. She followed up with The Eternals (2021), a big budget Marvel Comics Universe production that I haven’t seen, and can barely imagine. By the usual MCU standards it failed with the fans, earning a mere US$402 million.

Hamnet, Zhao’s fifth feature, finds her back in the limelight. It was judged Best Motion Picture – Drama, at this year’s Golden Globes, and is in the running for another Oscar or two. Set in the Elizabethan era, it’s a tale of William Shakespeare and his family, told with an unusual degree of intimacy. True to form, it’s also a slow-moving exercise that builds to a shuddering intensity, although the journey takes almost two hours.

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It’s taken me an unusually long time to see Nuremberg, but having finally managed this feat it’d be a dereliction of duty if the film slipped by without a review. Writer-director, James Vanderbilt, has created the kind of solid, old-fashioned movie we rarely see any more. The dialogue is excellent, the characters convincing, and the moral of the story too big to miss. It deals with a heavily loaded moment in history in a way that doesn’t simply devolve into a fable of good versus evil.

This is quite an achievement because for the past 80 years, the Nazis have been Hollywood’s most reliable moral miscreants. What’s more surprising is that Nazism today is undergoing a resurgence, which seems to denote a sickness in our society. At the very least it reveals an alarming lack of historical consciousness in those who act as if the war itself was only a movie.

Vanderbilt noticed this when he found that for his own daughter the events of World War Two had no sense of reality. As the veterans of the conflict and the survivors of the concentration camps disappear, that human connection with history is lost. The most terrible events begin to seem like fiction.

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Park Chan-wook, South Korea’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock, has taken an old American crime novel and turned it into an allegory for our times. When Donald E. Westlake published The Ax in 1997, he was responding to the growing practice of U.S. manufacturers relocating overseas, to places where materials and labour costs are significantly cheaper. This meant bigger profits for the company and its shareholders, but unemployment for local workers. It spelled the death-knell of the ‘good corporate man’ who might have spent his entire life in one industry, working for a single company. Costa-Gavras made an adaptation of The Ax in 2005 that dealt with this dilemma. The new corporate threat that Park explores is the rise of AI, which promises even greater carnage in the workplace.

In No Other Choice, we follow the fortunes of Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a middle-aged manager at a paper factory, who is living the bourgeois dream, with a wife, two kids, and a big house in the suburbs. We realise at once this kind of satisfaction is too good to last, and it’s not long before Manu-su is given his marching orders, following the purchase of his company by an American firm.

What follows is a painful series of humiliations, as Man-su attends workshops in which sacked workers sit around and chant, “It’s not my fault I was retrenched”, or words to that effect. The growth of automation has made the jobs pool contract so rapidly there is nothing on offer, even for the most qualified workers. Having reached the end of his tether, Manu-su arrives at a high-risk strategy to get back in the game.

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By the end of last year, Sang-il Lee’s Kokuho had grossed ¥18.47 billion (A$177 million) at the Japanese box office - an all-time record for a local drama. To put this into perspective, our highest grossing local feature is Crocodile Dundee, at A$47.7 million. OK, the population of Japan may be more than four times that of Australia, but it’s clear we’ve never made anything so wildly popular.

It’s no coincidence that this incredibly popular film deals with Kabuki - a traditional artform unique to Japan. Aussie audiences turning up to see what all the fuss is about are leaving with mixed reactions. For every viewer enraptured by this movie, there are plenty who feel it spends too long showing the actors going through their elaborate routines on stage.

What may have felt boring or confusing to those new to Kabuki, was the main attraction for Japanese audiences, who feel a deep bond with this form of theatre - although one shouldn’t undervalue the quality of the directing, acting and cinematography.

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If proof were required that the most successful and popular films are not necessarily the best, look no further than James Cameron’s Avatar series. The three biggest earning movies of all time are Avatar (2009) (US $2.92 billion) Avengers: Endgame (2019) (US $2.8 billion) and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) (US $2.34 billion). With two of the top three highest grossing films (three out of four, if we add Titanic (1997) US $2.26 billion!), Cameron can do no wrong in the eyes of studio executives.

Looking back at what I wrote about the Avatar sequel of 2022, I could virtually reprint that review, changing only a few dates and details. Like its predecessor, Avatar: Fire and Ash is excessively long. At 197 minutes, it’s five minutes longer, but no better at justifying the time we spend sitting in the dark, wondering when it’s all going to end. I’m not reflexively opposed to long films, only boring, self-indulgent ones, and the latest Avatar, like all Cameron’s movies, is a vanity project. Weighed on the scales of overall satisfaction, the brief excitement of the action sequences doesn’t cancel out the deficiencies of plot and dialogue or compensate for the movie’s monstrous pretentions.

As with the previous film, the opening scenes create the disconcerting impression that we’ve arrived somewhere in the middle of the story. Cameron and his co-writers seem to believe the fans have immersed themselves so completely in his fantasy of the planet Pandora and the blue-skinned, two-metre-tall Na’vi, that no introduction is necessary. We don’t need to meet Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the soldier from earth who has thrown in his lot with the Na’vi, or his wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), or the kids, because it’s assumed we already know them. We’re supposed to be acquainted with Spider (Jack Champion), the earth boy who considers himself part of the family; or Jake’s arch-enemy, Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who has been brought back from the dead in the body of another towering, blue-skinned avatar.

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If you’ve ever felt nostalgic about Woody Allen, thinking fondly of his early funny films before he became a social pariah, a 1967 interview with Twiggy may dispel any sentimental twinges. Having burst onto the London scene the year before, Twiggy had ascended to stardom more rapidly than any previous fashion model. Not bad for a teenager from working-class Neasden, who was still struggling to come to terms with the spotlight.

No sooner had she sat down than Allen asks: “Who’s your favourite philosopher?” She rolls her eyes, sticks out her tongue, and replies: “I haven’t got one. I don’t know any. Who’s yours?”

At this point, the tables unexpectedly turn. Allen says, “I like them all… all your basic philosophers.”

“Who?!” demands Twiggy.

“Just all of them,” says Allen.

“I don’t know their names though, do I?” she insists, in her cockney accent. Allen turns to face the camera, looking exasperated, his attempt to embarrass a teenage girl having blown up in his face.

It’s not that Allen didn’t know the names of a whole lot of philosophers, it’s just that he didn’t want to identify himself with any one of them. Or maybe he suddenly realised he was looking like a ghastly, pretentious dick, and wanted to escape. Either way, this was the end of the interview.

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British director, Edgar Wright, says he read Stephen King’s 1982 novel, The Running Man, when he was a teenager. Decades later, he has fulfilled a dream of making it into a movie. It’s the second adaptation of the book, following a 1987 film by Paul Michael Glaser (better known as Starsky of Starsky & Hutch fame) with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role. Although any film with Arnie has its own ineluctable charm, the 1987 version is pretty trashy. It also diverges so far from the novel that it’s largely a different story, which motivated Wright to attempt a more faithful reworking.

By all accounts this is exactly what he’s done, although I wasn’t prepared to read the novel to find out. Stephen King may have millions of dedicated fans, but I find his prose virtually unreadable – which is not to say that his books can’t be successfully adapted for the screen. Hitchcock made classic movies from pulp fiction, and King’s tales have served as the basis for acclaimed features such as Carrie (1976), The Shining (1980), and The Shankshaw Redemption (1994).

Given his proven track record with sharp, original entertainments such as Baby Driver (2017) or Last Night in Soho (2021), I was looking forward to Wright’s take on The Running Man. As is so often the case, a sense of anticipation proved treacherous. Wright has assembled all the desirable elements of a blockbuster sci-fi action film, but the results are strangely uninvolving. As usual there’s a soundtrack packed with classic pop songs, including (inevitably) ‘Keep on Running’ by the Spencer Davis Group. There’s some clever dialogue, no shortage of hair-raising escapes and pursuits, brilliant cinematography and CGI, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching a cartoon.

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