Blu-ray

There’s just something about the spectacle of watching big robots punching each other that makes most grown men regress back to their 12-year old selves. The unbelievable success of the Transformers films with those of us old enough to know better is a case in point.

The Beyond is more than just ‘yet another’ Italian splatter film. It’s the highpoint of Lucio Fulci’s career in the horror genre, a terrifying mix of mysticism and visceral horror that proves even more pessimistic than the director’s earlier City of the Living Dead. Catriona MacColl stars as the inheritor of a rundown New Orleans hotel, whose efforts at getting it up and running again are undermined by an escalating series of inexplicable and extremely violent occurrences.

Despite being stuck with less than half the running time of the acclaimed 1979 BBC adaptation, this bigscreen version of John le Carré’s novel does a remarkable job of condensing the tricky plot into a two-hour movie experience. Helped out by an astonishing cast of some of the UK’s brightest acting talent (Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth and many more), it’s a gripping tale of intrigue and deceit. And even if the resolution doesn’t quite deliver the impact you might expect, the journey to get there is utterly flawless.

Taking a leaf out of Harry’s Potter’s spell book, the final Twilight novel has been split into two movies. This wouldn’t necessarily have been a problem – except this instalment barely has enough plot to justify 45-mins of screen time, let alone the best part of two-hours!

When a young girl (Bailee Madison) is forced to move in with her father (Guy Pearce) and his new girlfriend (Katie Holmes) in a spooky old home they’re restoring, she isn’t exactly thrilled by the idea. But things get even worse when she starts hearing voices calling her name and seeing little creatures running around the building.

Clichés are not necessarily a bad thing. There’s a good reason why some ideas are reused over and over again. Ultimately, it’s all about how you can make a cliché work for you.

Joseph L Mankiewicz’s 1963 historical epic cost a spectacular $44million to make (the equivalent of around $300million today) and in the process almost brought studio 20th Century Fox to its knees. Unfortunately, the film’s tortuous production is a more entertaining tale than the one Cleopatra itself serves up. Okay, it’s not a bad film, just a rather average one – which isn’t really what you want from such a ridiculously costly endeavour.