SUPER 8

Dir: JJ Abrams. Starring: Elle Fanning, Joel Courtney, Kyle Chandler.

I'm a big fan of J J Abrams though I never got into Lost. But TV's Fringe is a blast and his ‘reboot' of the Star Trek franchise was about as good a Star Trek movie as I could ever have hoped for. Here he's teamed with producer Steven Spielberg for a film that has more than a few echoes of the early Spielberg canon.

Set in 1979, this has teens racing round on bicycles and discovering the alien that all the adults are looking for. Sound familiar? Only this one isn't the cute cuddly ET type, it is big and scary and escapes from an overturned train that narrowly misses the teen ensemble as they spend their summer making a movie.

This is expert filmmaking and you can tell right from the start as a brief but revealing montage shows that young Joe, the film's hero, has lost his mother in a workplace accident. For while the film is about alien adventures, it keeps its eye firmly on the mental state of its young protagonists. They are a likeable bunch, strongly reminiscent of the Goonies crew – the fat one, the cute one, the one who can't stop setting things on fire – and the group dynamic is believable.

The alien, when finally revealed, brings to mind the creature in Cloverfield (another J J Abrams project) and was, I thought, a bit of an anti-climax, but the film has enough heart and skill to attract viewers of any age.

Director Kevin McDonald pits Roman against Scot (or Caledonia's ‘savage tribes' as the cover has it) in The Eagle. Set in 140AD, it has Channing Tatum as a new Roman commander in Britain determined to discover what happened to his father and 5000 troops, the ninth legion, which disappeared completely during a planned Scottish invasion 20 years earlier. Reclaiming family honour and the titular emblem are the orders of the day and to this end Tatum heads north with only Jamie Bell's slave for support. Torn between pulp and seriousness, this misses both marks. It's also too long, badly paced and clichéd. And the characters are dull.

It's finally here! Eight movies down the track and the war everyone's been talking about since the Boy Wizard With The Scar first checked in to Hogwarts has arrived. The last couple of films – well made though they were – felt like treading water as Harry and his pals hung around at school and 'important” things happened elsewhere. But the battle's finally on and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt2 provides wizarding action and satisfying character arcs all round. One could quibble that the final battle is rather messily directed – where's Peter Jackson when you need him? – but this ticks all the boxes fans require of the series.

Faces in the Crowd has one of those stories that only happen in the movies. A woman (Milla Jovovich) is attacked by a serial killer. She survives but is left with the rare neurological condition ‘face blindness', making her unable to recognise faces: every time she sees someone their face changes, which must have seemed like a clever visual idea. Unfortunately that's all that's clever about the film. Actors are constantly switched, but the inane dialogue remains throughout as do illogical plot contrivances allowing the killer to stalk her at vacuous length.

Richard Attenborough's strikingly cold-blooded turn as petty thug Pinkie Brown in the original film casts a long shadow over this new take on Graham Greene's Brighton Rock. Sam Riley's take on the character is a little flat in comparison, but switching the action to 1964 – the mods and rockers riots, c.f. Quadrophenia – works well and Pinkie's faux-courtship of the young waitress who has witness him committing murder is suitably creepy. The likes of Helen Mirren, John Hurt and Andy Serkis add a touch of class and the period is recreated immaculately. The pacing is fairly ‘European'.