Shalini Langer

A busy mother who is “always late from work” now doesn’t have to bear just guilt and a disgruntled husband. Other Mommy tells us her dispirited child could also invite into their home “a corrupted energy looking for a host from another plane” to fill the “gap” in her heart. That’s one way of describing the creature that is haunting the Martins, comprising daughter Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), Mommy (Jessica Chastain) and “Daddo” (Jay Duplass). Though they act like no other normal people haunted before perhaps have, such as coolly stopping by for burgers at a strip mall as they discuss how to “kill it” in front of their child, after having just seen one of their closest friends (Arian Moayed) ripped apart by the “thing”.

Explaining the theory on which Facebook’s News Feed is based, Mark Zuckerberg once said: “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” What he didn’t say was that Facebook algorithm could well determine what seems closer – your front yard or Africa. ‘We’re way past making friends,’ as The Social Reckoning’s tagline says. Way past, that is, The Social Network, whose Zuckerberg was about to found Facebook, and who was this mesmeric awkward, brash, nervous genius who may not have got many likes, but whom you could not scroll past.

“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.