The Banished review – cultish terrors lurk in the Australian outback

The folk-horror wave opens an Aussie branch in this shrewdly splintered tale of a city girl returning to her roots where chthonic menace awaits Weirdos in animal masks, summary executions, rituals that envelop you in a strange sense of predestination; thanks to the folk-horror crowd, you can’t go for a country walk these days without expecting to stumble into some uncanny pagan savagery. This Australian thriller subscribes unquestioningly to all of the above tropes, but its delicately splintered narrative and feel for outback disorientation and dismay mark out a distinctive trail – until it disintegrates to the point the film can only turn in circles. Prodigal city girl Grace (Meg Eloise-Clarke) comes back to her home town in the bush to search for her missing brother David (Gautier de Fontaine), who saved her from their abusive father. Nosing around this depressing outpost, she hears rumours of a mysterious commune out in the wilderness drawing in local vagrants and drifters. Her un...

Ghosted review – dreadful big star action comedy deserves to be ignored

Chris Evans and Ana de Armas make for a chemistry-free pairing in Apple’s catastrophically misfiring mockbuster

It’s easy to see the commercial allure of Apple’s pre-summer mockbuster Ghosted, the package: a snappy buzzword title, an idea from the Deadpool team later fleshed out by some Marvel writers, a big, sexy star pairing proved on screen twice before, an action-comedy-romance hybrid designed to appeal to the widest possible audience. One can only imagine the enthused high-fives that took place in some cold, pristine LA boardroom when it was given the green light. But it’s utterly impossible to see the appeal of Ghosted, the movie, a staggeringly, maddeningly atrocious heap of increasingly boneheaded decisions that will act as depressing documentation of just how rotten things got in the current oversaturated streaming landscape.

Ghosted is content dictated by algorithm at its absolute, industry-shaming worst, so carelessly and lifelessly cobbled together that we’re inclined to believe it’s the first film created entirely by AI. It’s almost avant-garde in its all-consuming awfulness, made with sheer contempt for the usual base staples one expects from a movie, head-shakingly shambolic on all fronts. It’s smug elevator pitch over plot – a guy gets ghosted by a woman who ends up being a secret agent – and while the early inevitable trailer scenes that take us to the end of this logline are bad enough they’re nowhere near as bad as what follows. Chris Evans plays Cole, a farmer slash history academic slash plant obsessive who meets Ana de Armas’s mysterious art curator Sadie one day at the farmers’ market. After some truly painful banter about plants, they decide to go on an impromptu date, the kind that cuts to them in an art gallery with her beaming “Oh my God, I love Monet!” or the pair next to the tower of Lincoln books and her noting “Sounds like you love Lincoln!”, crushingly bland meet-cute dialogue that removes us from their journey before it truly begins.

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