Sabotage (15, 109 mins)

Sabotage (15, 109 mins)

Director: David Ayer

2 stars

Having Arnold Schwarzenegger back on cinema screens full time during the last year may not have done much to stir box office tills, but his presence has been a reassuringly welcome one.

The Last Stand and Escape Plan may not quite have lived up to some of the classics of his heyday, but they still provided a nostalgic glow for moviegoers of a certain vintage.

His latest role in Sabotage is a strange beast. In tone and style it's far closer to the type of film its director David Ayer usually makes, your End of Watch and so on, than it is to an Arnie film.

It's gritty rather than cheesy, aiming for a sense of action realism we've seen recently in stuff like Lone Survivor.

Other than one rather out of place sequence, it's really not Arnie doing his thing, which makes his casting both one of the film's most interesting elements, and possibly its biggest curse.

Schwarzenegger here plays John 'Breacher' Wharton, leader of a motley crew of Drug Enforcement Agency officers who, with their military-like tactics and massive weaponry, are as much marines as cops.

In what comes across as a somewhat confusing prologue, we join them as they infiltrate a drug den, clinically picking off bad guys as they go. They find a massive stash of cash which they destroy, but only after secreting $10m for themselves.

This raises a couple of questions. Why are they doing this, and how do the authorities know that the missing money wasn't destroyed along with the rest of it?

The other question raised of course, and the one most pressing for Breacher and his team, is what happened to the $10m. Did someone from inside take it or are their enemies up to something?

They find themselves under investigation but before there's really time to start answering these questions, members of his squad start getting murdered.

As played by Sam Worthington, Terrence Howard and others, they're an unpleasant, charmless bunch.All of the performances are turned up to the maximum, with Ayer under the impression that endless swearing passes for banter.

Punchy, skilfully orchestrated shootouts occasionally provide moments of nasty violence that turn the heat up a bit, but the rest is really quite boring.

There's lots of talk about them being a family, but precious little evidence of it, so it's of little consequence when they start turning up dead in increasingly gruesome ways. It's kind of like Predator without the fun.

The arrival of Olivia Williams' cop is a blessed relief from all the machismo and posturing. She's looking into the deaths among Breacher's team, and brings a level of credibility and composure that's otherwise hard to find.

The investigation into who's doing the killings is reasonably compelling, certainly more so than the time we spend within the DEA.

Slightly less convincing is the way she and Breacher team up for one the oddest buddy-cop pairings imaginable; one a classically trained Shakespearean actress, the other a former bodybuilder turned monolithic action superstar.

With Breacher's backstory requiring Arnie to dig deep for rage and grief, he's forced to try to show a range that he unfortunately just isn't capable of.

Because, let's face it, as beloved as he is, Arnold Schwarzenegger is not the world's greatest actor. Now that he's gotten his need to emote out of the way, roll on Terminator 5.

See it if you liked: End of Watch, SWAT, Homefront

Frank (15, 95 mins)

Director: Lenny Abrahamson

3 stars

Domhnall Gleeson's Jon is a bit of a space cadet, writing songs in his head while working in an office.

When a band in town find themselves a man down, Jon gets the chance to play keyboards with them, which leads to him joining the band as they head to a rural spot to record an album.

Much of what follows is the strange but agreeable process of the group trying to make their (terrible) music amid the tensions that exist between them, but the twist comes in the form of their front-man, Frank (Michael Fassbender), who spends the whole film behind a large papier-mâché mask.

Very loosely based on Frank Sidebottom, the persona adopted by the late musician Chris Sievey during the 80s, this is fine for a while, succeeding as a portrait of mental frailty and the tormented artist.

It's weird and funny, with fine performances from Gleeson and Fassbenbder, alongside Maggie Gyllenhaal and Scoot McNairy as the other band members keeping it ticking, but there isn't really anywhere for it to go and it becomes rather aimless after a while.

See it if you liked: Good Vibrations, Control, Last Days

Next Goal Wins (15, 98 mins)

Directors: Steve Jamison, Mike Brett

4 stars

A couple of years ago American Samoa were officially the worst international football team in the world.

Bottom of the FIFA rankings, they'd lost every game they'd ever played and were so rubbish that even Scotland under Craig Levein might have given them a game.

A decade on from losing a World Cup qualifier to Australia by a record 31-0, this cracking documentary picks up their story as they start out on the road to qualify for Brazil.

For a while we get to chuckle at their incompetence, but the arrival of a new Dutch coach is the catalyst for them achieving some belief in themselves, something that happens with a real emotional kick.

Outwith one or two, we don't get to know the players as individuals, but Next Goal Wins is all about the heart and fighting spirit of a team and a country and is consistently engaging.

It's beautifully filmed, the match footage plays out like great drama and you really don't need an interest in football to enjoy it.

The Wind Rises (PG, 127 mins)

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

2 stars

Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki's final film before retirement is a partly fictionalised account of the life of Jiro Horikoshi, who as a young boy has dreams of flight and fantastical creations and grows up to become a top aircraft designer during the 1930s.

Yes, The Wind Rises really is an animated biopic about an aeronautical engineer, and is often as exciting as that sounds.

Filled with lots of blueprints and calculations, it's unlikely to engage any but the keenest children, and it suffers from the usual biopic problem of presenting a series of events lacking in dramatic impetus.

The hand-drawn animation is charming, clean and simple but as storytelling it's all so very formal and stiff.In the background is the threat of war, and a hint of the carnage these machines can unleash, but that and the fleeting moments of beauty aren't quite enough to save it from being really quite plodding and dull.

See it if you liked: Porco Rosso, Grave of the Fireflies, Ponyo