NorthWest (15)

Directed by Michael Noer

3/5

Former Danish documentary film-maker Michael Noer’s second feature film returns to Nordvest, a deprived neighbourhood in Copenhagen.

Employing non-professionals Gustav Dyekjær Giese and Oscar Dyekjær Giese as two brothers who seek to graduate from street crime to enjoying the fruits of their more successful peers.

The problem arises when they try to avoid the middlemen — who herald from the Middle East — and impress on their clients that they’re a better prospect by invoking the notion of the gangster family being loyal to their own.

And, as every family knows, there’s nothing worse than sibling rivalry and temptation can prove the undoing of the plans of avaricious mice and men.

Significantly, some consider the Scandinavian model as being somehow more socialised.

This is quite remarkable given the history of Scandinavian film, not least the Dogme movement inspired by Lars Von Trier who’s confounding the critics with his grotesque surrealism.

Jeff Sawtell

Hercules (12A)

Directed by Brett Ratner

4/5

Assuming the posh critics would pan Hercules in the manner of the US, the distributors tried to avoid pre-screening critical commentary.

Such is the absurdity of the system. It’s a sword-and-sandal saga that had all but the pretentious aesthetes splitting their sides.

The secret? Surround muscle-man Dwayne “the Rock’ Johnson in the eponymous role with a crowd of great British character actors delivering cracking lines inspired by Steve Moore’s graphic comic.

Central to it all is John Hurt hamming it up as an an ambitious empire builder with the the ever-excellent Peter Mullen as his sadistic sidekick and Ian McShane who steals the show playing a useless oracle.

Others in this hysterical epic include the raffish Rufus Sewell, Reece Ritchie as ambitious story-embellisher and Ingrid Bolso Berdal as an Amazonian archer.

With great battle scenes directed by Brett Ratner and a scabrous script by Ryan Condal and Evan Spiliotopoulos it’s a glorious return to morning matinees.

Jeff Sawtell

The Purge: Anarchy (15)

Directed by James DeMonaco

3/5

A year on after the first Purge the premise remains the same — 12 hours in which people can commit any crime with impunity — but different characters as the action focuses on the poor and disenfranchised on purge night.

While the original Purge was based in one home in an affluent suburb, this one explores what is happening on the streets in the poorer areas of the city.

Writer/director James DeMonaco again shines a spotlight on the unhealthy US love of guns and the individual’s right to bear arms. 

Citizens’ right to purge is merely a government ruse for population control and the elimination those on the poverty line.

Although just as tense and nerve-racking as the original this sequel is more blunt and brutal and contains some interesting twists.  

While the poor are fighting for survival the rich are paying them to attend their at-home-purge gatherings or having them rounded up for their depraved hunting parties.

It is a sombre but thought-provoking sequel.

MARIA DUARTE

Who is Dayani Cristal? (12A)

Directed by Marc Silver

4/5

It is a sobering fact between 150 and 250 illegal immigrants die in the US frontier desert every year and yet little attention is paid to them as the news headlines always seem to be only about those that get eventually in. 

This powerful documentary — produced and starring Gael Garcia Bernal — gives these people a much needed voice by humanising them and their plight.   

The film starts with the discovery in 2010 of an anonymous body in the Arizona desert bearing the mysterious tattoo Dayani Cristal.

Through a series of interviews with the authorities, family and friends we slowly learn who this man was and through a dramatisation, in which Gael Garcia Bernal re-enacts his journey from Honduras to Mexico, you discover how and why he ended up dead in the desert.

It is a gripping and painfully heart-breaking tale in which the reconstruction and interviews are interwoven seamlessly and set against a haunting score.

Around 2,000 Hispanic migrants — men, women, children and the elderly — have died in the desert in the last 10 years and as one official in the film points out, what number does it have to reach before the US government takes notice and subsequent action? Quite.

Maria Duarte