Peter Bradshaw

Extra Geography is an extra treat in the movie world’s school timetable.

What emerges is Rushdie’s courage and his remarkably level-headed, calm and unafraid writerly voice insisting on the primacy of literature, freedom of expression and the life of the imagination.

After a sensational opening sequence, the film gradually unwinds, and the entirety of the third act disintegrates into a shower of small substandard plot points that don’t convince.

There is something glib and overblown here. This film finds itself in a postmodern hole. And what do you do when you’re in a hole?

Forgotten Island is over-controlled and over-determined, a movie that never, or hardly ever, takes its pedal from the metal, never takes a breath or a moment to let its characters come to life. At times it seems to be aping the world of Japanese anime, but without its sense of character or capacity for calm.

Perhaps the truth is that Heretic was, like Boorman’s sci-fi adventure Zardoz with Sean Connery in the crazy red mankini: weird, surreal, challenging, a shapeshifting creature vulnerable to mockery, at once monstrous and terribly fragile.

Heart of the Beast is a bit cheesy and the final moments will test your credulity, but Pitt is the right guy in the right film.

Overall, the movie always looks and sounds perfectly good, though some of the sensibility is lacking.

Maybe this rather familiar subject needs an injection of new ideas that Concessions, however amiable, does not really provide.

It all climaxes in an apocalyptic finale: an enjoyable and macabre family affair.