For those who ever wonder if soccer scoreboards, or score-line captions on TV, can ever be made to reach three figures, consider the match between AS Adema and SO l’Emyrne, two teams in Madagascar, in 2002. It ended 149-0, but that was only because of an on-field protest. (They were all own goals.)
The crime novels of Jo Nesbø are rampaging Nordic psycho-operas. The author's Oslo detective Harry Hole is a lofty alcoholic who takes an outrageous pummelling in his pursuit of deranged serial killers. His many adventures fill the crime shelves in bookshops with their fat spines in flashing yellow upper case, but until now he's been kept from the screen.
When Ridley Scott returned to his hideous intergalactic monster with Prometheus five years ago, he brought with him a new panoramic vision encompassing infinite space, several millennia of time and the entire history of human existence. With Alien: Covenant, he makes a more modest proposal.
Picture, if you will, a spacecraft loaded with 2,000 hibernating colonists. They are en route to a distant planet called Origae-6, but the voyage is interrupted when the ship (it’s called Covenant) is battered by a blast of cosmic radiation. The emergency wakes the crew, and you might find yourself thinking “why am I watching Passengers again?” Anyway, while they’re repairing the damage, they intercept a strange radio broadcast – very strange indeed, since it’s John Denver singing “Take Me Home, Country Roads”. They find it comes from a nearby but unknown planet, where conditions are remarkably Earth-like.
For no very good reason, other than that it would be really boring to go back into cryogenic frozenness for the seven years it would take to get to Origae-6, mission commander Oram (Billy Crudup, pictured right) decides they’ll go to the new planet instead. But if you were cryogenically frozen, you wouldn’t be aware of how boring it was, surely? No matter. His second-in-command, Daniels (Katherine Waterston, pictured below), thinks this is a bad idea. She is proved right.
Scott has promised, or threatened, that he’s lining up another six Alien movies after this one, which is perhaps why it feels like a rather minor instalment before the interesting stuff happens further down the line. Quite a lot of Covenant is just boilerplate – the hibernating travellers, the flight down to the unknown planet’s surface (which looks uncannily like the equivalent sequence in Prometheus), the discovery of the ominous dead city spattered with ossified corpses, and of course the certainty that you-know-what is going to appear before very long.
The saving grace is not one but two mischievous turns by Michael Fassbender, who reprises the silky-smooth and infinitely treacherous synthetic David from last time, and also plays Walter, Covenant’s in-house droid. Fassbender delineates the two with skill, camping up David with further Peter O’Toole impersonations (there’s even a scene mimicking his rendition of “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” from Lawrence of Arabia), while Walter is more sincere and earnest. Learning from the slippery David, the designers deliberately made Walter less scheming and devious, and he probably wasn’t programmed to expect the outrageous robo-erotic sequence where David teaches him to play the flute.
Walter does his best to save his human charges from the horrors that lie in store, but it’s a big ask. One of the other familiar riffs looping away here is the hopeless unpreparedness of the humans for the inevitable onslaught, now so wearisomely routine that it’s impossible to feel much sympathy for the victims. The part where David invites Oram to take a look inside an Alien pod (“it’s perfectly safe, I assure you”) prompts hilarity rather than terror. Besides, since the threat on the new planet can take the form of microscopic spores entering the ears or the nose, the humans are little more than sacrificial ducks in a row.
Before we reach that familiar moment when survivors try to take off while pursued by Aliens, we get to see a few species variations, some of them created by creepy David in his private Frankenstein’s laboratory. The moment where a soft-porn shower sequence between consenting crew-members turns into a bloodbath suggests that Sir Ridley wasn’t taking this one entirely seriously. Six more? Must we?
Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander fell in love in real life while making The Light Between Oceans, which lends an extra dimension to a morose period weepie that needs every bit of excitement it can get. Reminiscent of the laboured celluloid romances of a bygone era that could once have starred Robert Taylor, the film is as vacuous as it is pretty, and if director Derek Cianfrance cut some of his stars' lingering glances, it would have the added virtue of being short.
As it is, 132 minutes is a long time for a movie whose narrative more or less demands that the audience is several steps ahead of the game. Adapted from the 2012 book of the same name by the London-based Australian novelist M.L. Stedman, the film might benefit from a bit of self-awareness as to its hoarier aspects: one can imagine Todd Haynes having a high old time with it.
But in a break from the bristling intelligence of his career-making Blue Valentine, this latest effort finds Cianfrance going all po-faced on us. Only the belated entrance into the action of Rachel Weisz (pictured below), playing the real mother of the child whom Vikander's luckless spouse and parent has brought up as her own, brings the much-needed juice - not to mention respite from lines like "you still have a light inside of you". 
The narrative - ripe for parody - finds Fassbender playing a battle-scarred survivor of World War One who finds the calm he has been looking for in a job as a lighthouse keeper in a rural Australian outpost. Any thoughts of him idling the decades away humming "Waltzing Matilda" to the gulls are soon routed by the appearance of Isabel (Vikander), who knows a thing or two about war's ravages, having lost two brothers to combat.
Several lingering glances over a prolonged lunch lead to - well, you know - and before long Tom and isabel are man and wife, only for fate to deal her a cruel blow via not one but two miscarriages. And yet, just when Isabel seems destined to succumb to despair, a boat washes up on the shore, bringing with it a dead man and a very much alive, squawling infant girl. Suddenly there's God so quickly, as Blanche DuBois might have said, except for the emergence of Hannah (Weisz), the child's real mum, whose arrival on the scene recasts the movie as a study in morality: Tom and Isabel don't see eye to eye as what to do with Lucy once her actual mother forces a day of reckoning.
Weisz's energy seems to belong to a different film. Elsewhere, one thinks for instance of what the Mike Leigh who gave us Secrets and Lies might have done with the ensuing moral maze and the primal emotions that get unleashed. Instead, Fassbender retreats inward - the performance is recessive to a fault - while Vikander aims for the jugular, the two rarely suggesting on screen the passion that was reportedly aborning off it. We are treated to the requisite picturesque longshots and dewy close-ups, and yet the thing never connects. Instead of reaching for a tissue, I was checking my watch.
Overleaf: watch the trailer to The Light Between Oceans
It's getting mighty crowded in the superhero lounge. After the underwhelming Batman v Superman and the overwhelming Captain America: Civil War, here's the X-Men posse back on the warpath, once again under the bombastic helmsmanship of Bryan Singer.
If you saw The Social Network, for which Aaron Sorkin wrote the script, you will recognise the type also on display here – a hugely driven, arrogant genius who is emotionally illiterate. In The Social Network it was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg; in Steve Jobs, it’s the co-founder of Apple.
A couple of years ago there was a television documentary about Steve Jobs which wafted much smoke up the sainted iHole. A variety of famous fanboys wept over the curve on the iPhone 3 and simpered at the kleptocratic takeover of the music industry. Never mind that Jobs was reportedly short of redeeming features. A documentary has no obligation to supply drama. A feature film is another story. The makers of Steve Jobs have their work cut out finding something plausibly nice to say about a driven egomaniac who tells anyone who’ll listen that he’s changing the planet.
The first feature written and directed by John Maclean, the former Beta Band keyboardist, is a Western comprised of late-genre tropes and references – but one that’s fresh and sincere. It’s knowing and affecting, unlike Django Unchained.
The question of the Macbeths’ dead child is one of those Shakespearean quandaries, like Hamlet’s age, Iago’s cuckolding and Beatrice and Benedick’s earlier dalliance. How much do they really matter? In this new film version of the Scottish play, it’s all about the back story. Everything – Macbeth’s disdain for death in battle, Lady Macbeth’s descent into somnambulant madness – hinges on the loss of a child.
Frankly, the idea of a female superhero flying solo at the front of a modern movie is becoming a bit of a joke. Despite there being a Wonder Woman film in the pipeline, that this relies on the success of "Batman vs. Superman" (both of whom have had their fair share of reboots) is disheartening. But going into an X-Men film there’s always the hope of both sexes having gripping storylines - a trend we’ve also seen play out in Captain America: The Winter Soldier - so step forward Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique. In a film that’s all about righting past wrongs you can't do much better than casting an Oscar-winner with a multimillion-dollar franchise under her belt right at the centre of your movie.
If the 60s-set X-Men: First Class was Mystique’s coming-of-age, then its sequel Days of Future Past (which sees Bryan Singer return to the helm) is her reckoning, with the chance for a peaceful future resting in her hands. When Mystique is given the chance to undo a destructive decision, thanks to the power of time travel, she is once again forced to wrangle with her beliefs and allegiances.
We meet Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen), who are firm friends in the near future, just as a vast swarm of sentinels approaches their hiding place. They come up with a last ditch attempt to save the world by sending Wolverine's consciousness (Wolverine is played once again by Hugh Jackman, who never seems to age) back to his 70s body, in a Back to the Future / Terminator 2: Judgement Day type mash-up. It's the era of the Nixon administration, with the president playing a key role here and, before you look it up, no Nixon is not played by Steven Van Zandt from the E Street Band (aka Silvio in The Sopranos) in prosthetics - it's actually Mark Camacho.
Of course Wolverine needs some help so he is tasked with assembling some old friends: a younger Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) who is constantly high on junk - well, a serum that allows him to walk but strips him of his telepathic power - and the soon-to-be Magneto, Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender, pictured above right) who has been imprisoned deep below The Pentagon, accused of assassination. And so, we are taken on a prison break mission with the addition of young whippersnapper Quicksilver (Evan Peters from American Horror Story) whose super-speed power is introduced in one of the most inspired and fun moments of the film. It's a comic slow-mo scene that plays out to Jim Croce’s "Time in a Bottle" and works just perfectly.
The fallout from the revolution plays nicely into the 70s setting, with many of the mutants in personal turmoil and suffering from raw wounds. Charles and Erik are at a stale-mate, sparring with one another over the sadness and regret of fallen comrades, which fits in perfectly with the film's Vietnam War backdrop. Fassbender and McAvoy excel at delivering bitter blows and heightened emotions, yet still manage to keep a twinkle in their eye when delivering fan service.
X-Men: Days of Future Past is convoluted and some of it doesn’t make sense but it’s a complete blast from start to finish thanks to a fine cast, good sense of humour and Fassbender spouting James Brown lyrics at random.