This movie is cinematic depression. Not that it makes the viewer feel hopeless, worthless and low in energy. But what the audience watches is a hopeless, worthless and low energy movie.

Putting aside Brandon Lee's ability to stir..feelings..in generations of teenage Goth girls who have discovered the 1994 movie every week since it came out, The Crow as a media property has a simple formula. It is a tale of vengeance, redemption and the supernatural told in a style that drips with atmosphere.

The film makers know the formula but can't agree on the mixture weights. The result is a movie that has all the parts of the formula mixed up in the dullest way you could think of.

Eric & Shelly have chemistry. The film displays signs of a pulse when after their nonsensical rehab experience, they spend the summer doing drugs, having sex and making music. FKA twigs looking like a vulnerable doll in one long shot while Bill Skarsgard towers over her radiating love. In that shot you believe them. But then she is murdered and it stirs little in him. What's on screen isn't someone who is heartbroken. It's a annoyed person. The emotional peaks in the movie have been flattened and boredom is what remains.

This is a movie about bored people. The villain is a malignant presence who encourages the worst in people. He's bored. He has a right-hand woman who does his dirty work for him. She's bored. The representation of the wizard in the Campbellian mono myth appears to provide supernatural aid to Eric and help him cross the first threshold into adventure. The wizard is bored. They're all just marking time. Cinematic. Depression.

Eric returns from purgatory to revenge his slain love. So far, so Crow. But he's still the same awful fighter who can't throw a proper punch as he was when he was human. That's clever and it could have been hilarious but because the movie needs to drip with atmosphere, that atmosphere being muted and grey boredom, the filmmakers go nowhere with a good idea.

I'm a big fan of tight 100 minute mid-budget movies. Funding constrains the running time, which in turn tightens the script. But 40 minutes in I considered the opportunity cost of spending another hour on this movie. In the end it turned out to be a waste of 100 minutes. If you are a goth girl, a reformed one or know one spare yourself and others this tedium and watch the 1994 movie again. It became a classic action horror picture for a sub-culture. This movie is only fit for the digital landfill.

I liked it. This is a well-made popcorn horror movie. It is not interested in big ideas. It's about tension. Alien was a movie about skilled labour in a claustrophobic jump scare-filled small space with a monster. Aliens brings in corporatism, adds a larger space and more monsters. Prometheus is about the elite, their ideas and what it means to not be one of them in David's case. Set between Alien and Aliens, Alien Romulus is about the working poor and their life that is already horrific.

Rain and her friends are unskilled labourers with a flicker of hope but no future. Stretching humanity across the galaxy is a dirty job. Rain et al. are part of the underclass stuck digging in the dark as others float through the stars. With the deck stacked against them, and their only currency being the energy of their youth, when opportunity floats into orbit they go for it.

In a cast of dead young people walking, David Jonsson's Andy the synthetic stands out. Jonsson is vulnerable, empathetic, pragmatic and cold all in one scene. It's an impressive acting performance and he becomes another memorable Android in the Alien franchise. The rest of the cast do serviceable work. Cailee Spaeny sells Rain's original sin well in an early scene.

This movie relies on physical effects and practical ship models. It's all gorgeous to look at. Things have a sense of size and heft. Landing bay doors are huge. The monitors are Cathode Ray Tubes. The fonts used on screen are from the 70s. Internal communication screens have a VHS playback look and everything people interact with is a button or a handle. No swiping here as this is a gear porn and dripping slime movie. Things seem to be used and dangerous.

The main danger, of course, is the Alien. It all goes to hell exactly like it has gone to hell in every previous movie. There's a countdown to ratchet up the tension, face huggers come in waves and the endoparasite Xenomorph stalks the cast. There's a third act development you knew was coming but may not have seen developing like this. I found that development jarring but it worked fine as it was already set up.

Go into this expecting call backs to decades of Alien movies and nothing else. You'll enjoy it too.

It isn't that this movie is terrible, it's that it gets boring. The Borderlands series is darkly irreverent. It's gory in a visceral "ewwwhhh" and laugh way. It's funny in a "well this will hurt" way. The movie has none of that. It's Borderlands with the life rung out of it.

Yes it has the colourful character design, eater eggs and the 1080p CGI makes Pandora look like the dusty trash pile it is. But just as the CGI falls apart if you look at it in 4K the characters and nods to games are shallow too.

At a svelte 100 minute running time the shoe leather scenes here are tight. Characters set out to do something and do it fast. The tedium of that in-between part of the journey is minimal. I enjoy tight running times but there are so many characters and so many potential plot points that none of them get to shine.

The plot is stuffed with threads that are resolved but not satisfactorily. This may have started out as a complicated script during shooting only to be pared back later. However, the audience can only enjoy what makes it to the screen.

Claptrap (Jack Black) and Tiny Tina (Arianna Greenblatt) do good work here. They get memorable scenes. Cate Blanchette and Kevin Hart are good action stars but though Blanchette is the lead at no time did her character arc matter to me. Hart even less and Jamie Lee Curtis's character not at all.

This is a movie that needed more time but only it it had a much better script. The fact it had a poor script meant the short running time was a blessing. But even in a movie with as tight a running time as this I still checked my watch about an hour in.

If you want to see this, watch it at home. And watch it in HD and not 4K, you'll find the discount CGI less offensive on your good TV.

An unfortunate miss. It looks too sharp in that Doctor Who/British children's TV way. The cast doesn't gel and it lacks the dark undertones of the original movie. The absence of delight and absurdity in humour drags the production down. Some of the jokes land. But this is a show about burglars with a cosmic map of time and space on the run from order and chaos. The ambition on screen here isn't enough.

How are the Bandit troop? Bland. For reasons of sensitivity people with dwarfism are extras not leads. I see no reason the Bandit troop could not have consisted of people with dwarfism. It isn't that they're funnier or anything cruel, it's that on screen they are as vulnerable as the lead. The stakes are higher, everyone is in this together. Guile, intellect and bravery are the tools available to the troop to overcome challenges.

I suspect children feel comfortable with an authority figure in their fiction, more so if the subject turns grim. In the 1981 movie Sir Ralph Richardson, as the Supreme Being, was warm but had gravitas. Did the troop steal the map and run into Kevin accidentally or did the Supreme Being orchestrate the meeting? The answer is yes depending on how Supreme you think Richardson is when you see him. Taika Waititi plays the same role here but as an incompetent flake.

While in life the person ill suited to the position can get the big job this need not be the case in fiction. The forces of order and chaos in this situation are not convincing enough. We see too much of Waititi, and Jemaine Clement's Wrongness is more pantomime than evil. Someone laughed at but not feared. The big bad wolf had sharp teeth when it ate Grandma. Kids like their villains evil and the comeuppance swift at the end of a woodcutters axe. Missing that point is the final nail in this series' coffin.

This was the wrong team to handle Time Bandits.

Bruce Timm's Batman Caped Crusader is an iteration on the Dark Deco style of his work on Batman: The Animated Series. This like that show has a villain/monster of the week format but unlike that show Gotham itself is not a character. Bruce Wayne is good, but Hamish Linklater hasn't found Batman's menace yet.

The villains are..okay. I enjoyed the Boris Karloff spin on Clayface. Christina Ricci's Catwoman is an entertaining spend-thrift kleptomaniac. Even more entertaining was her long-suffering housekeeper. If they don't put both of them together again in a second season that would be an unforgivable crime. As for the rest? Forgettable. And in Harvey Dent's case, boring. It feels like we've seen Two Face's origin as often as Batman's.

Harley Quinn has drawn the most ire of the re-interpretations. She's seen as not chaotic enough or sexy enough. Or both. As a character Quinn was at peak popularity during her "Margot Robbie changes clothes on the Suicide Squad runway" phase. Women cosplayed Daddy's Little Monster for months afterwards. But that was the high point. As the character shifted to become less sexual and more zany the interest dropped off.

Harley Quinn here is interesting because she's Harleen Quinzel the way Batman is Bruce Wayne. The energetic psychiatrist is the character she plays, the sadist in the sly looking clown mask is who she is. But here the writers fail to make her a villain. She does terrible things, but only to people the writers want you to believe deserve it. I like the character, but what she does is abhorrent. Harley Quinn is an evil person. The way Hannibal Lecter is an evil person. It doesn't matter if the victims are the rich or the rude. They're still being preyed on by an evil person.

This is a fine watch for those who remember the 1990s series but it gets tedious in the last three episodes. With luck it'll get enough viewers for a second season.