Leslie Felperin

At heart, it’s a story that shows no clear ending yet, and Noam makes for a fine guide to this purgatory.

More persuasive is the testimony from the half dozen men we meet, who bravely discuss their pain and distress while the cameras roll.

A syrupy stream of EDM-style pop in assorted languages fills in the spaces where people aren’t talking, but ultimately it’s all too bland and banal to even be offensive or annoying.

The film is at its best when it homes in on the literary criticism – bringing in articulate readers of the text such as novelist Jay McInerney, who details the effort that went into making it look thrown together in a matter of weeks.

Bring tissues for a doozy of an ending that will have everyone bawling in the aisles.

Through it all we see Richard O’Brien himself, sometimes jamming on a guitar and dropping crisp bon mots, right up to the end when he gets just a little bit weepy thinking about it all. Adorable.

The cast’s enthusiasm, especially that of Coolidge and Murray who are willing to play the most loathsome of people, makes up for a lot.

Kudos are due to supervising editor Mark Becker and his team, who never put a splice wrong. That deft level of craft is maintained throughout, while the aching musical bed by contemporary composer Nico Muhly adds just the right tone of plangent despair tinged with hope.

It doesn’t quite lasso the bronco, but the ambitions of writer-director Tony Tost’s yarn are ambitious and interesting, and he has at least assembled a cracking cast to tell it.

It all feels like the film is setting up for nested tales within tales, but instead the layers don’t go that deep. Nor does the film offer up much in the way of thematic substance beyond love (between women) is grand, men are mostly bad, and matriarchal societies are better than patriarchies.

The end result is a nifty ethical puzzle about balancing the needs of individuals versus those of the community. Still, it’s best not to take the plot too seriously given the wild implausibilities that come into play in the third act.

It’s the audacious austerity of Farsi’s film-making that really makes the material sing.

The action sequences, which are what made the original Sonja so indelible (especially since Nielsen had Arnold Schwarzenegger as a co-star), are a bit more rote. But someone somewhere must have done a punch-up on the script, because every now and then a reasonably witty quip arrives out of nowhere before the dialogue reverts to faux medieval speak.

What saves this from being just best-of list bait for upmarket film critics is the sincerity of the performances, especially from the core trio of Wu, Lee and Panna, each of whom projects a profound loneliness that’s never more apparent than when they’re in the middle of a crowded place. Which, this being Singapore, is just about everywhere.

It plays as pseudo-feminist horror for viewers who don’t really like women, or, for that matter, men. Or people of any gender. It’s all curdled but not in an especially interesting way, although there is no denying that Thorne has a basic charisma that holds the screen, and Ryan Phillippe is well cast as a grouchy cop whose agenda doesn’t mesh with Clare’s.

At least Sweeney has good enough comic timing to make the thinly written dialogue sound vaguely amusing; he’s also adept at making his many reaction shots exaggerated just enough to tickle without descending into outright mugging.

Here is a cheap-ass knockoff of Ocean’s Eleven starring John Travolta that makes the Soderbergh film look like something by Andrei Tarkovsky or Ingmar Bergman.

At least the makeup and the gore effects are competently executed, making the ensemble look like blood smeared meat-puppets on a rampage.

For all its playfulness, there’s an intellectual heft to A Useful Ghost that exerts its own gravity.

At least Pacino doesn’t seem to be taking any of it seriously as he phones in an uncharacteristically low-volume performance whose most distinguishing feature is the Mitteleuropean accent that makes him sound as if he’s reprising his performance as Shylock from The Merchant of Venice.

To knock its sentimental failings would be like kicking a puppy – and there are actual puppies in the film just to ensure it snags the heartstrings. Resistance is futile.

We’re invited to laugh at the characters gently but The Uninvited never goes for all-out satire and is all the better for it, even if the last act is overly neat.

It feels confident, inventive and as grippy as duct tape throughout.

This works well just as simple drama, directed and performed immaculately, and as a glorious promise of films to come from Lin.

The film is to its credit much more interested in psychology rather than tech, and the fine lines between avarice, rage and impotence that make the capitalist world go round.

This low-key oddity has the potential for some proper horsepower given the odd but intriguing casting of Peter Dinklage and Shirley MacLaine, but it never manages to build up much comic or dramatic speed – much like Dinklage’s electric scooter, his main mode of transport throughout.

One might be tempted to describe West as rocking her huge natural hairdo, but rocking doesn’t do justice to its glorious volume; it is practically a supporting character in its own right, and one that calls to black heroines of yore, such as Pam Grier’s Foxy Brown and Tamara Dobson’s Cleopatra Jones back in the 1970s. Furthermore West has a nice way with a quip and has presence to spare, so while the script doesn’t exactly stretch her acting range, she holds the screen.

Movements are very fluid, but expressions limited and there are buckets of cartoon gore, in a deep ruddy red that recalls mass-produced tonalities of fake Persian carpets.