Shame Steve McQueen’s second picture is a brutally compelling insight into sex addiction and depersonalisation, foregrounded by an extraordinary performance from Michael Fassbender. *****

Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, an attractive thirty-something executive living in New York, who is established from the outset as suffering from sex addiction. In the beginning Brandon confines his compulsions to porn, one-night stands and prostitution within a prison of routines – although his boss may  be starting to see into his insalubrious lifestyle declaring that his computer ‘hard-drive is filthy’. Everything begins to change when Brandon’s estranged and dysfunctional sister Sissy(Carey Mulligan) turns up at his flat to stay and causes his destructive lifestyle to unravel.

Although Shame deals with a central character who is addicted to sex, this is not an ‘issues’ movie; sex addiction is not the subject matter of the film – Shame is more a bleak insight into a dehumanised modern world.  With thematic links to his first picture, Hunger(2008), Steve McQueen again focuses on the pain, suffering, incarceration and endurance of the human body, but despite the amount of flesh on show, Shame’s  tortured antihero is tormented far more by what resides beneath the surface. Brandon appears to be following a path reminiscent of Freud’s “death drive” where his addiction to sex is paving the way closer and closer towards the death and destruction of the organic self in favour of something completely inorganic and inhuman. Conflating sex and death also invokes la petite mort or "the little death", an idea describing a post-orgasmic death-like torpor that seems to be reflected in the central character's complete physical and mental lassitude and apathy towards his hollowed out environment. Ultimately this loss of humanity is expressed through the loss of intimacy that is explored devastatingly as Brandon’s porn addiction numbs away his ability to interact with the real world. One particularly effective thread sees Brandon attempting to form a relationship with a woman he seems to be developing genuine feelings for, but one with whom he is unable to perform with sexually because his emotions and sex are so far removed from one another. McQueen masterfully conveys Brandon’s shame and embarrassment through shooting  bleakly detached and clinically lit environments where the central character is often stooped in a thanatosis-like state.

Shame is comprised of an effervescent dialogue of images where speech is often substituted for raw expression. Brandon catches the eye of a young woman in the carriage of the New York subway and their sexual attraction is played out as a conversation of gestures and minute facial expressions that, as an audience member, is both an intensely voyeuristic experience and perversely intoxicating to watch. The same can be said of a scene where Sissy sings New York, New York at a bar in its entirety which causes Brandon to be moved in a way that seems so genuine, personal and private that it's almost too powerful to watch; but it is the extraordinarily understated nature of Fassbender’s riveting performance that always draws you in to the fractured disposition of his character, despite how alienated he often seems to be.

Runner Runner **

This empty-headed gambling thriller stars Justin Timberlake as Richie Furst, a student at Princeton funding his master’s degree  by promoting an online gambling site to students. However, after losing all his money playing online poker, Richie attempts to track down Ivan Block(Ben Affleck) who owns the lucrative gambling  empire  in Costa Rica, but Furst is quickly becomes seduced into Block’s decadent lifestyle. It aspires to be Wall Street except its ‘money corrupts’ subject matter is so vague and limp that all it ends up saying is that online gambling is ‘really contemporary’ .  Furthermore it seems to be a rip off of the similarly dumb, but far more entertaining film  21, which starred Jim Sturgess as a College student trying to pay off his tuition by counting cards in casinos. Whereas that film had Kevin Spacey as the slimy antihero, Runner Runner gives us a soggy Ben Affleck performance and an utterly ludicrous - but sometimes watchable - generic thriller narrative. 

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For **

When Robert Rodriquez and Frank Miller's Sin City opened in 2005 it was a flashy, sleazy pulp-noir revenge film with a striking, but crucially distinctive, comic-book visual aesthetic. A Dame to Kill For expands upon the existing narrative of Sin City whilst offering a new set of stories occurring in time frames before and after the first film.

Although the retro-futuristic visual style still has a vibrant and immersive quality - the problems this time around is that the stories simply aren't very engaging enough and the central tale, which involves the titular 'Dame to Kill For', is particularly dreary and overlong. The most enjoyable elements involve Joseph Gordan-Levitt's cocky, charismatic gambler, Powers Boothe reprising his role as ruthless Senator Roark and Mickey Rourk's likable tough guy 'Marv'. However, the first film was perversely enjoyable because it was so detached, empty and heartless and this time around it somehow attempts to deal with the human motives of the violence in a completely stodgy and ineffectual way. There was something cold and methodical about Sin City's linear portmanteau sub-Pulp Fiction structure but A Dame to Kill For's more modern inter-cut/interwoven style is at once distracting and totally uninvolving - even the trashy hard-boiled, noir-inflected voice-over, which always stepped over into melodrama in the first film, now sounds leaden and risible.

X-Men: Days of Future Past ***

This X-Men prequel-sequel to Matthew Vaughn’s 2011 film X-Men: First Class is a tale of time-travel and apparent alternate universes. Director Bryan Singer(who helmed the best of the previous X-Men movies) and screenwriters Jane Goldman, Simon Kinberg and Matthew Vaughn all bring a sense of substance and vibrancy to what could’ve been just another superhero franchise movie.

The film opens in a dark apocalyptic vision of the future where an ongoing war between mutants and humans has led to widespread destruction. State-of-the-art robots called Sentinels have succeeded in wiping out most of mutant-kind, but on a remote outpost, Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto,(Ian Mckellen) plan to send Wolverine’s consciousness back in time to 1973. They intend to stop a train of events involving Mystique(Jennifer Lawrence) and  Dr Trask,(Peter Dinklage) a government scientist who pioneered the Sentinal technology and used Mystique’s shape-shifting mutant abilities to refine the efficiency of these killing machines. Once you get over the clunky Terminator/The Matrix inspired tech-enslaving-futuristic-robot-time-travel-exposition-set-up, the experience is infinitely more enjoyable.

Wolverine(Hugh Jackman) wakes up in the 1970’s with the mission of convincing the younger Professor Xavier(James McAvoy) and Magneto(Michael Fassbender) of the dark future that will incur unless they try and rewrite their present. The 70’s period setting is not only appealingly evoked but it seems to have been chosen so we can have fun watching the X-Men strutting around with dodgy sideburns, brown leather jackets and bad shirts – in much the same way that American Hustle or even Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy derived its humour from that era – and it does provide a certain levity and charm to what is a rather straight-faced movie.

Singer is sure to utilize the hallmarks of the previous X-Men movies, but whereas before the creative licence taken on the political/historical backdrop has conveyed mutant activity amidst The Holocaust and the Cuban missile crisis, Days of Future Past references the Vietnam war and links Magneto’s metal manipulation abilities to the swerving bullet of the Kennedy assassination – crass, indeed, but it just about gets away with it.

Although the third act is a mandatory CGI setpiece, the most interesting stuff is all to do with the characters and the dialogue, which really is testament to how effectively the actors portray them and how substantially fleshed out the characters are in the script. James McAvoy is compelling as a jaded, disillusioned Xavier and Michael Fassbender is icily charismatic and perfidious as Magneto. As Wolverine begins to assemble his X-Men team there are some truly great moments, particularly when Professor X, Wolverine and Quicksilver try to bust Magneto out of a high security prison cell and Quicksilver, with the aid of his mutant ability to stall time, moves around bullets with his hands in a slow-motion The Matrix-esque gunfight to the sound of Jim Croce singing “If I could save time in a bottle…”

Days of Future Past often feels baggy and unfocussed and the time travel plot is messy and doesn't hold up to much scrutiny. However, the film has a kind of substantial, meaty quality to it, which ultimately prevents the experience from feeling completely flimsy - even in its most ludicrous moments.

The Purge: Anarchy ***

The sequel to last year’s dystopian horror focuses this time on the street-level carnage of the annual ‘purge night’ – a 12 hour window where crimes as serious as murder can be perpetrated without facing the consequences. This time a mother and daughter find themselves stranded in the streets of Los Angeles where they are prey to a host of bloodthirsty gangs.

The narrative is even more flimsy than its predecessor, but whereas the first ‘Purge’ was a boring film with a compelling premise, the sequel is more satirical, nihilistic and enjoyable. The dystopian wasteland of LA is very sub-28 Days/Weeks Later and the political ideas are conveyed in a clumsier, more obvious way than before, but the central conspiracy idea relating to the cruel upper-class attempting to ‘cleanse’ the weak underclass from society is still engaging.  

Dark House(2014) *

A bafflingly stupid, fright-free horror movie from the makers of Jeepers Creepers.

The preposterous Dark House centres on Nick Di Santo,(Luke Kleintank) a young man who has the uncanny ability to see -through premonition- how someone will die just by touching them. Early on, Di Santo goes to a bar were he finds that his dark ability to ‘see’ death, however disturbing, is a total turn-on for Alex McKenna’s character, Eve, who finds his shrieking and convulsing on a barroom table just totally irresistible. Less interestingly, we learn that Di Santo’s mother is a complete basket case who has been locked away in an asylum for most of her son’s life. As the narrative leaps forward many years, Nick discovers that a house he has been drawing since he was a child is in fact real and may turn out to be the key to unlocking his mysterious past - all the while - a strange fraternity of weirdos communicate through air vents and seek to hinder our protagonist from learning about his deranged antecedence.

Whereas Jeepers Creepers had a certain likable goofiness, nothing in Dark House makes any sense. To say that it is a shambling mess of incoherent horror ideas is to misrepresent just how insipidly boring and befuddling this dreary crockpot of drivel really is. The idea of a character ‘seeing death’ is ripped from the Final Destination franchise and subsequently fudged here – Salva’s movie is at once utterly stupid and aware of its own stupidity, which would mitigate its terribleness if any of the film was in any way scary, funny or indeed entertaining. The real low moments are when a jaded looking Tobin Bell turns up to do a bedraggled Jigsaw pastiche, Kleintank touches a tree and sees dead people and a synchronised troupe of axe-wielding mutants tear through a wooded area - which is meant to be scary – but they just look like the most appalling dance crew dropouts in an undead version of Britain’s Got Talent. Total rubbish.

Wolf Creek 2 *** McLean strives for a more mainstream audience with this horror sequel - but it is superficially enjoyable.

Greg McLean’s original Wolf Creek was a consummately brutal horror film that used the wide panoramic Australian landscape and transformed it into something profoundly empty and bleak. From within this chasmal backdrop came Mick Taylor(John Jarrett), a serial killer that was a dark, satirical pastiche of the Crocodile Dundee – indeed, Jarrett described Taylor as an “anti-Dundee” character when promoting the first film. Much of what was compelling about the original was the sense of realism and tension that was constructed through the scratchy documentary camerawork and the directors strong focus on character development, so when it came to the splatter, you really felt the pain and the whole experience was a lot tougher because so much time had been invested in the onscreen victims.

Wolf Creek 2 begins in a manner that suggests a significant tonal shift has been made between the sequel and its predecessor. Instead of prolonging and sustaining a void-like tension, McLean slices away any character development and pushes his antagonist, Mick Taylor, to the forefront of the drama. The camerawork is slicker and flashier, the gore is nastier and from the film’s opening splattery setpiece, the wheels are set in motion for a blood-soaked thrill ride.

However, it is a much shallower film than its predecessor and it is difficult to ignore the fact that it has lost most of its distinctive qualities in favour of cranked-up, cheap mainstream thrills. Though it is superficially entertaining – John Jarett’s portrayal of Mick Taylor has lapsed into self-parody somewhat and the final act is nonsensical in its weirdness – but it is an efficiently machine-tooled horror sequel.