Arts & Entertainment

Ignore that PG rating and keep your kids far away from this vile animated faux-comedy. Beneath its trippy surface lurks an insidious philosophy hazardous to impressionable minds. ‘The Emoji Movie’ rolls its eyes at thought, waving the flag for the decay of attention spans. The sarcastic plot is set in Textopolis, a soul-numbing world that exists within a smartphone’s messaging app. It looks like an ugly knock-off of the elegant human brain design in ‘Inside Out’, with apps substituting for various neighborhoods and emojis filling in for emotions. The owner of the phone is young Alex, a nice kid we don’t really get to know. We instead follow the blah-faced ‘meh’ emoji, Gene (voiced by ‘Silicon Valley’ star TJ Miller), whose unlikely capacity for expression threatens the existence of his shrug-centric universe. In order to become a normal, functioning meh before Alex erases his phone, Gene joins forces with the avatar of a rogue hacker, Jailbreak (Anna Faris), as well as the upbeat emoji Hi-5 (James Corden), on a dangerous journey to the Cloud.  A game of Candy Crush and a cruise down Spotify are among the trio’s excruciatingly simplistic adventures that leave you alarmed about the filmmakers’ perception of human intelligence. Throwing in a ‘Casablanca’ reference and some lip service to feminism (‘Did you know female emojis could only be brides and princesses once upon a time?’) doesn’t really help in a movie that only wants to dumb us down. If you have to sit through it, rem

While Warner Bros tweaks its superhero stories and Universal tries to launch its Dark Universe of monsters, one horror franchise has mushroomed successfully under the radar. This prequel to 2014’s ‘Annabelle’ – itself a spin-off from ‘The Conjuring’ – somewhat explains the genesis of the series’ supremely creepy wooden doll. Anthony LaPaglia plays an improbably prosperous dollmaker in the 1940s, and Miranda Otto his wife: the soon-to-be bereaved parents of seven-year-old Bee (Samara Lee). Twelve years later, still devastated, the pair open their home to a kindly nun, Sister Charlotte (Stephanie Sigman, the polar opposite of the scary sister in ‘The Conjuring 2’) and six orphaned girls in her care. Quicker than you can say, ‘Don’t go near that doll’, things are going bump in the night and doors are opening and closing on their own. ‘Annabelle: Creation’ is well performed, but the rhythm of the scares feels slightly off. Characters scream when they should be quiet and whimper when they should scream, and it blatantly steals the rocking-chair gimmick from ‘The Woman in Black’. That said, it is still terrifying – a monster this grotesque will always be unsettling – but director David F Sandberg sometimes fumbles the slow build. While it’s better than ‘Annabelle’ it’s nowhere near the main ‘Conjuring’ films. Maybe they’ll have better luck in the next spin-off, ‘The Nun’, coming to cinemas in summer 2018.

With the eight-book ‘Dark Tower’ series, Stephen King created his own ‘Lord of the Rings’: an epic, sprawling dark-fantasy saga that for years seemed unfilmable. That suspicion is now confirmed by this weak supernatural stew, which eliminates much of the author’s imaginative myth-making. On screen, ‘The Dark Tower’ serves up a generic, half-baked scenario no different to a slew of YA films in which young, wide-eyed protagonists discover their connections to a hidden fantastical world. The rich narrative tapestry that King wove over the course of his novels has been reduced to a plot (credited to four screenwriters, including director Nikolaj Arcel) that could have been written on a napkin over lunch. Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor) is a creative 11-year-old New Yorker who’s been doing drawings of his recurring visions of a parallel universe in which a gunslinger, Roland (Idris Elba), pursues a demonic, black-clad sorcerer named Walter (Matthew McConaughey). Once Jake finds his way into Roland’s realm, the gunslinger reluctantly takes the boy under his wing and they travel through assorted alternate dimensions, with Walter on their tail, because Jake is the key to a vague apocalyptic scheme. Attempts by Elba and McConaughey to, respectively, lend gravity and menace are choked off by their roles’ simplistic characterisations and, in Elba’s case, some very awkward fish-out-of-water gags when Roland hits Manhattan. The film is not poorly made. Its production values are suitably lush

If you’ve been craving a female spy to lead her own espionage flick (like Rebecca Ferguson’s British agent in ‘Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation’ but with more screen time) you’re in luck. ‘John Wick’ co-director David Leitch’s ‘Atomic Blonde’ might be over the top, bloated with plot and heavy on neon-lit visuals, but it will satisfy your appetite for a female action heroine. Allow the icy, unconquerable Charlize Theron – who proved her action chops as Furiosa in ‘Mad Max’ – to escort you through a labyrinth of Cold War machinations in a movie filled with high-wire fights, high fashion and no-strings-attached sex. Just don’t call her a bitch (as one character learns the hard way). It’s 1989 and the impending fall of the Berlin Wall is our backdrop as we follow British agent Lorraine Broughton (Theron, with killer shades and a wobbly accent) through a faux-complicated spy narrative. An undercover mole has been murdered and a top-secret list threatened. As part of her assignment to infiltrate a Russian intelligence network, Lorraine is paired with unflappable Berlin station chief David Percival (James McAvoy) and falls into bed with a double-crossing seductress (Sofia Boutella). Meanwhile, a distracting second timeline features a CIA spook (John Goodman) interrogating a bruised Lorraine in a slow drip of flashbacks. Not everything adds up: ‘Atomic Blonde’ could do with a dash of cheeky Bond humour, and it relies excessively on Theron’s charisma, while the obvious soundtrack