The Running Man review – Glen Powell sprints through fun update of Stephen King future-shock sci-fi satire

Full-tilt chase sequences, a punk aesthetic and a sugar-rush soundtrack, means there is plenty of enjoyment to be had as Edgar Wright goes back to King’s original 1982 novel Edgar Wright, that unstoppable force for good in cinema, has revived the sci-fi thriller satire last seen in 1987 with Arnold Schwarzenegger; it now stars Glen Powell and is adapted directly from the original 1982 novel written by Stephen King under his “Richard Bachman” pen-name, a futurist nightmare set in that impossibly distant year of 2025. The resulting film is never anything but likable and fun – though never actually disturbing in the way that it’s surely supposed to be and the ending is fudged and anticlimactic. Yet there’s plenty of enjoyment to be had. Wright accelerates to a sprint for some full-tilt chase sequences; there’s a nice punk aesthetic with protest ’zines being produced by underground rebels; and Wright always delivers those sugar-rush pop slams on the soundtrack, including, of course, the ...

Limbo review – hardbitten outback noir with a compassionate heart

Simon Baker plays a ruined cop investigating a cold-case murder in this tough, sandblasted thriller that coolly lays out the racism and discrimination the Indigenous population face

Indigenous Australian film-maker Ivan Sen brings to Berlin a terrific outback noir, a cold-case crime procedural that he has written and directed – and also shot in a stark monochrome, which makes the vast skies and cratered earth of South Australia’s abandoned opal mines look like another planet.

The setting is the town of Umoona, where a grizzled cop arrives, broodingly listening to a Christian talkshow on the car radio, and checking into a place unsubtly called the Limbo Motel, where his room is a bizarre stone grotto, apparently repurposed from one of the disused mines. This is detective Travis Hurley, played in careworn, weatherbeaten style by Simon Baker – very much resembling Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad. Hurley is a former drug squad officer who has become addicted to heroin; his superiors have quite clearly given him this hopeless job in the middle of nowhere as a means of getting him out of the way. His ostensible task is to reopen a 20-year-old case: the unsolved disappearance of an Indigenous woman. This was casually and incompetently investigated by white officers at the time, who were concerned only in getting a confession from (any) Indigenous man.

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