Shalini Langer

“I don’t read novels one can get at an airport,” declares Lowen (Dakota Johnson). Which is her way of saying that her books are “not popular”, but that they need not be. This is after she has taken up the offer to ghost-write for one very popular writer (Verity, played by Anne Hathaway) because, well, who doesn’t need money? As you may have guessed by now, neither does much writing in this latest Colleen Hoover book to be made into a film. When Lowen does find herself behind a computer, she is mostly rubbing her face or stretching or sighing. She also fills up a room with handwritten notes, laid out across couches and carpet, as part of her “process”.

A man and his dog walk across 58 miles of Alaskan wilderness, fighting a heart attack, plane crash, injury, bears, wolves, drowning. David Ayer and Brad Pitt collaborate for the second time, after Fury, for this unlikely film about a bond between a retired US Special Forces Sergeant Major and his combat scout dog. A bond that has been forged during one of those indistinguishable and bloody tours of duty that America keeps rushing into. The PTSD that follows afflicts not just James (Pitt) but also Odin, and the two are spending time now in a part of Alaska that is even more isolated than the rest of it. They have no company but each other — barring a visit by a mysterious retired gold miner played gamely by Simmons.

Writer Ali Hazelwood is a romantic novelist and a neuroscientist, a kind of bond that is hardly organic. The Love Hypothesis, the film based on her bestselling novel by the same name, mixes together the same chemicals. The couple in question, and the people in their lives, walk the rarefied corridors of Stanford. She is a PhD student, he is a professor, and they do top-of-the-line work such as detecting pancreatic cancer. However, barring the lab coats, some mice, a few beakers and mentions of molecules, chemicals and controlled experiments, this could be a love story from anywhere, any time — though, because Hazelwood knows this territory, the science part looks and sounds genuine.

You can’t pull a rabbit out of a hat every time. Sometimes, all you can do is pull out hair. In 1998, Sandra Bullock was still awash in the success of the Speed films and gathering up more, while Nicole Kidman was already a big star. Besides, their joint film Practical Magic wasn’t even much of a critical or commercial hit – though it has had a better afterlife. However, clearly a lot of people, the two actors now lying on either side of 60 included, thought there was some power left in the old spell to rustle up a Part 2.

In a world where ever-new oligarchs, from oil to tech, run the world, who cares for a peasants’ revolt 700 years ago? So, doff hats to Paul Greengrass and Andrew Garfield for lending their weight to this film about the 1381 uprising, widely considered the first populist rebellion in England. But, uprising does not mean uplifting. Shot in bleak greys offering little by way of colour, on the muddy grounds or the cloudy skies, or the person of its characters – who are dressed uniformly, but for the royals, in clothes made of worn, torn sack material – The Uprising is often hard to see or follow.

If five words capture the spirit of this Resident Evil, they have to be these: “What is this sh*t now?” Constantly hurtling and hurting, bustling and bursting, this adaptation of that much-filmed video game lives up unapologetically to its legacy. And, it happens to be quite a joy(stick) ride with Zach Cregger (Barbarian, Weapons) steering a very good Austin Abrams through a new-virus-outbreak hell. Abrams is Bryan (Weapons), a courier guy delivering medical supplies, usually organs for donation. He enters a hospital while on the phone with his girlfriend, who we realise has just discovered she is pregnant. Bryan keeps talking of “false positives”, enough for that conversation to fall apart in an argument.

When a regular-Joe film is titled just Fall, you can be pretty sure it will be about a rise. When it is followed by a Fall 2, you can swear by it. The first Fall released to decent success in 2022, and achieved some bigger highs via social media reels. In that, two best friends climbed up a desolate TV tower to bury their grief, and encounter heartbreak and vultures. Fall 2 substitutes the tower for a fictional Mount Kwan in Thailand, but can’t resist the grief, betrayal or vultures still, with an over-the-hilltop ending that suggests our survivor is headed for Fall 3.

On paper, this should come easy to screenwriter Simon Farnaby, with the Paddington movies and Wonka behind him, and Enid Blyton’s beloved The Magic Faraway Tree book series the source. But magic is hardly as easy as a fruit picked off a tree. It is either there, or it is not. And the more this film juggles its many British thespians, two known faces in Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy, and a very modern message about a childhood lost to electronic devices, the less and less it seems magical.