Film reviews: The Children Act, BlacKkKlansman, Luis and the Aliens and more…

At work she has been tasked with ruling on the case of Adam Henry (Dunkirk star Fionn Whitehead), a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness who is refusing a life-saving blood transfusion in accordance with the rulings of his religion.

Legally Adam is still a minor so she has the power to enforce the treatment against his will, according to the Act of Parliament referenced in the title.

But as he is almost 18, Fiona decides to visit him in hospital to determine whether he made his own decision or is acting out the wishes of his parents (Ben Chaplin and Eileen Walsh). Meanwhile her home life is falling apart.

Fiona is so consumed by her work that she has neglected her lecturer husband Jack (Stanley Tucci).

The childless couple haven’t had sex in 11 months. (He has a diary entry to prove it). With astonishing honesty he informs her he is planning to have an affair with one of his students.

The plot takes a slightly melodramatic turn in the third act when lines become blurred in Fiona’s relationship with Adam.

But this is a powerful and unusually grown-up British drama, tackling issues of individual freedom, life and death, sex and religion.

Thompson makes us feel the weight of these issues with a beautifully judged performance that shows Fiona’s vulnerability, her determination and her humanity.

BLACKKKLANSMAN

(Cert 15, 135mins)

The plot of Spike Lee’s new film is so unlikely that no Hollywood screenwriter could have possibly dreamt it up. In late 1978, Ron Stallworth, the only black detective in Colorado Springs, saw in the classified pages of his local newspaper that the Ku Klux Klan had launched a recruitment drive.

Intrigued he wrote them a letter pledging to “further the cause of the white race”. Before long he is on the phone to the leader of his local chapter and discussing his new membership. Clearly a black face would raise eyebrows at a cross burning.

So Stallworth teamed up with a white detective who would play him at any face-to-face meetings. Unsurprisingly Hollywood snapped up the rights to the story shortly after Stallworth published his 2014 memoir.

Jordan Peele, the US comic who directed Get Out, was once attached to the project, so it seems the initial plan was to play the story for dark laughs in the vein of ice-skating drama I, Tonya.

It could also have worked as a gritty police procedural. But it doesn’t take long to see how Lee is going to attack the story – with a sledgehammer. The movie opens with a comedy sketch from actor and Saturday Night Live’s Donald Trump impersonator Alec Baldwin playing a hapless white  supremacist who keeps fluffing his lines while shooting a recruitment film.

His racist language is shocking, though the skit is not especially funny and has no connection with the story. But it perfectly sets the tone for Lee’s film. For the next two hours this fascinating true story will be swamped in broad satire, boundary-pushing racist language and on-the-nose Trump-bashing.

After Baldwin’s sketch and a baffling clip from Gone With The Wind, Lee finally gets to the plot. We begin with Ron (played by John David Washington, Denzel’s son) signing up for the police. After suffering racist abuse from a bad cop he falls in with nice guys Jimmy (Michael Buscemi) and Flip (Adam Driver).

Ron’s first undercover assignment is to infiltrate a Black Power rally to inform on activist Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins). Lee allows us to savour the rhetoric of Ture’s speech but he doesn’t explore Ron’s conflict of interest. There he falls for student activist Patrice (Laura Harrier).

Then he finds the newspaper ad and persuades Flip to meet the Klan. Lee paints the racists with the broadest of strokes. They are paranoid, frequently drunk and almost certifiably stupid. In case we miss the point they pointedly talk about “making America great again”.

And in case we’ve still missed the point, real-life grand wizard David Duke (Topher Grace) talks about running for public office. Ron and Flip think this is hilarious. American voters aren’t that stupid, they tell each other.

There are some well-crafted moments of suspense but Lee’s style deserts him for long stretches. There is an excellent, nicely shot sequence in a nightclub but scenes in the police station feel lifeless.

After a very messy finale Lee switches to news footage of the racist attack in Charlottesville and Trump’s refusal to condemn the “alt-right”. But the film might have had a wider impact if Lee has resisted grandstanding and allowed Stallworth’s tale to speak for itself.

LUIS AND THE ALIENS 

(Cert U, 86mins)

This year’s disappointing slate of summer children’s films ends with a derivative animation aimed at the under-10s. This German-Danish-Luxembourger co-production recycles elements from far better films such as Monsters, Inc. and Home, teaming lonely 12-year-old boy Luis (voiced in this English dub by Callum Maloney) with three slapstick creatures from outer space.

The wobbly “woopies”, Mog, Nag and Wabo, look a little like Mr Blobby and behave a lot like The Three Stooges. After Luis sees their spaceship crash he learns that they have come to buy a massage gizmo they saw on one of our shopping channels.

He also learns that if they are given a strand of someone else’s hair as a DNA sample, they can shapeshift into other people. Luis’s mother has died and his alien-obsessed father leaves him to fend for himself. But now his principal is threatening to send him to a foster home for troubled children and is heading to their home to interview his father.

So Luis gets one of the woopies to turn into his dad to make him seem like a responsible adult in the interview. Unsurprisingly nothing goes according to plan.

Although the animation is light years away from the films of Pixar and DreamWorks, the slapstick is accomplished enough to keep younger children entertained. But I suspect they will have forgotten about it all by the time they are back at school.

Alpha 

(Cert 12A, 96mins)

There have been plenty of films about a boy and a dog but the makers of this visually stunning survival film have put a new spin on the old formula. This time the boy is a Stone Age hunter and the dog is a wolf. Teenager Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee) finds himself on the wrong end of a bison stampede and is left for dead.

Injured and alone he faces a dangerous trek back to his village through the icy badlands of central Europe.

It gets off to a bad start when he’s attacked by a pack of wolves. Keda wounds one with his stone knife and climbs a tree until the pack disperses. But instead of killing the injured wolf and roasting it on his fire, he makes a revolutionary decision to nurse it back to health.

So, the film would have us believe, began man’s partnership with the domestic mutt. The story is engaging if a little schmaltzy. But dog people will lap this one up.

THE SPY WHO DUMPED ME

(Cert 15, 117mins)

Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon form a decent double act in this middling action comedy.

They play Audrey and Morgan, two rudderless 30-somethings who are plunged into an espionage caper when Audrey’s ex-boyfriend Drew (Justin Theroux) turns out to be a super-tough CIA operative.

When Drew is gunned down in Audrey’s apartment he uses his last breath to task her with delivering a secret package to Vienna. Loudmouth Morgan, left, jumps at the chance to help her uptight best friend and soon they’re being chased across Europe by gun-wielding goons.

Action scenes are well staged and McKinnon gets some very funny lines.

But the two elements don’t quite mesh together. Too often this feels like a straight spy thriller with comic interludes instead of the full-blown spoof that was promised by the trailer.

Bad Samaritan

(Cert 15, 108mins)

Doctor Who star David Tennant embraces his dark side with an enjoyably creepy turn in this pulpy serial-killer flick. He plays billionaire psychopath Cale Erendreich, who starts a dangerous game of cat and mouse with young photographer Sean (Robert Sheehan).

When he is not snapping arty pictures, Sean works as a car valet with partner-in-crime Derek (Carlito Olivero) at an upmarket Italian restaurant in Portland, Oregon.

To boost their incomes they use the sat nav systems of their wealthiest clients to guide them to their homes where they break in and help themselves to valuables.

When the arrogant Erendreich arrives at the restaurant in his Maserati, Sean jumps at the chance to take his car, break into his home and rifle through his belongings. But he gets more than he bargained for when he discovers a woman bound and gagged in Erendreich’s office.

And when he finds what looks like a torture chamber in the garage, Sean realises he is in way over his head.

Erendreich’s deep pockets and array of hi-tech gadgets allow him to run rings around Sean and the police. And the more ridiculous the film gets, the more entertaining it becomes.