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"Free Fire" is the latest effort from UK renegade director, Ben Wheatley, following his - to be frank – masterwork, High-Rise, from 2016. Free Fire follows two different groups (one lead by Cillian Murphy, the other by an electric Sharlto Copley) as they trade cash for guns. Things of course go awry and flies jump in to the ointment with frequent regularity. I saw this with a special Q and A with Wheatley, and he told us that over the course of filming they had fired 6000 rounds of ammunition in total. It shows: Free Fire isn't going for class. It's grimy, it's dusty, it's caked in rubble and the soundtrack, occasionally - in between all the gunfire - actually has some music in it. At its best, Free Fire feels like a silent movie: It's slapstick before and after artillery. It's a real treat in the way that at no point does it really let up. It's a constant. It's a sugar rush for grown ups. This doesn't feel like a film you can pause and go and make a phone call in between. Once you've started, you strap in and you finish it. The one place setting brings up obvious similarities with Reservoir Dogs – which does bring me to the lack of characterisation in Free Fire; Tarantino somehow managed to make us feel for a bunch of colours. Wheatley, however has left it gapingly open. Backstory obviously isn't what the director was going for here, but we'd certainly feel the wounds more so if we knew a little history about these nuts – with that said, maybe a better comparison would be to John Carpenter's The Thing… Overall, Free Fire will be like nothing else you see this year (ooh, and the last shot of the film is an utter treat), so go and see it before Ben Wheatley is offered some ma-hoossive Sci-Fi budget by Fox or even Disney. @JonnyJonJon1

Poltergeist is one of those scarier cult movies that you might stumble upon late at night and end up watching the whole thing. Do it. Because it's one of the better 80s horror's that you'll find.

We open on a television set, as the American national anthem plays and we see out the end of the broadcast day. Already it's a weirdly creepy film, and the national anthem hasn't been as haunting as this since Hendrix. Set in a quaint little American neighbourhood, kids play, guys drink beer and watch football. With a hand from Spielberg, the town looks like a carbon copy of E.T., but instead of a misguided little alien (the two films were released within weeks of one another) there's something much worse coming for our suburban American family as their house is taken over by ghosts.

With a good cast, including JoBeth Williams in a Sigourney Weaver/Carrie Fisher-esque mother/wife role and Heather O'Rourke as the horror-trope creepy/cute child it's decent stuff. But it is Craig T. Nelson who heads the family and leads the cast as the spot-on average man. He's not particularly smart, or even attractive (joking about his gut in the mirror at one point), but here he is perfect as the hauntings worsen, staying strong and believable as the loving father and husband throughout.

With some fantastic effects, Poltergeist harnesses both practical (One scene involving a reflection in a mirror is a Scanners-rewind-as-many- times-as-possible-type moment) and digital effects (many scenes remind us of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, another Spielberg classic) to really get the fear in to us and which, for the most part, still look excellent today.

The one noticeable downside is the pacing. I'm not usually a stickler for this, but just after the sixty minute mark that the film seems to sag: While more (arguably interesting) characters are introduced, it slows the pace down to a crawl and leaves the film bland and - worst of all - not that scary. It's not really until the last twenty-five or so that the film starts running again, perhaps even saving the whole picture.

Poltergeist is one of those kind of movies that you'll watch, then realise that this is the film that you've been quoting all those times without knowing. Paving the way for (much lesser) scary pics, and referenced time and time again in the likes of the earlier Treehouse of Horrors, Poltergeist is like an art-house Paranormal Activity, a true gem which should be viewed (and enjoyed) as many times as possible before the inevitably terrible remake arrives...

Twitter: @JonnyJonJon1

Predators, a belated sequel to Arnold Schwarzenegger's third best film (-- not an insult, the man made lots of incredible movies), stars Adrien Brody as a grizzled mercenary on an alien planet as he and a ragtag team of other brutes try to survive against the aforementioned Predators.

This film could have been great. An impressive-enough cast with lots of possibly interesting characters against the odds: these odds being one of the better antagonists in Sci-fi film history. It's just a shame that while this film tries to riff on anything and everything that made the original '87 Predator brilliant comes off here as theft, as it borrows and homages too often. Without giving anything away here, this film changes a few key details from the original film but really does just use the exact same plot, taking it as its own and changing the characters from unwitting soldiers to unlikeable mercenaries. Whereas this idea is supposed to be a momento, a love letter to the first film, it instead plays out as lazy here (I was astonished to see that there's even a beat from the first Alien Vs Predator movie!), and while this isn't a remake or a "re-imagining" - or whatever words a Hollywood exec might use - it does, however, appear as one.

Adrien Brody is an awful casting choice. This is a man who is a Wes Anderson regular - not someone who dispatches monsters for fun. And Brody spends the whole movie doing his best Christian Bale/Batman impression while elsewhere none of the other characters seem to grow or evolve as people, which is draining as they aren't particularly likable to start off with; each of them seeming to have some kind of assassin/criminal backstory to them. Danny Trejo, a perfect example, is gruff and no-nonsense Mexican-Drug-Cartel-Type here, playing it almost like he was in preparation for his Machete character (and by the time the credits finally roll you get the horrible realisation: Robert Rodriguez produced).

There are positives here and there; the Predator itself is impressive for the most part and the film is welcoming in its violence, something that seems so rare in film these days. The scenery is lush and there are lots of cool angles from a technical point of view.

Overall, Predators will do. But it's exactly that mentality that makes it so very disappointing. While the Xenomorph Alien has done its best to kill the Arnie memory and Predator as a whole for good, "Predators" adds very little to the franchise and treads far too close to the original. It really is sad to see the lack of creativity with such pulpy and already-proved source material.

@JonnyJonJon1