KILL YOUR FRIENDS (18, 103 mins)

Director: Owen Harris

2 stars

Scottish author John Niven has his 2008 novel Kill Your Friends brought to the screen with this spiky but somewhat obvious black comedy. The setting is the British music industry in the mid 90s at the height of Cool Britannia and Britpop, although thankfully we’re not forced to relive those days in too much excruciating detail.

Nicholas Hoult is Steven Stelfox, an A&R man at a record label who narrates to camera to tell us all about the dark goings on within his industry, its emptiness and venality, ambition and ruthlessness. It’s all front and bravado and general lack of competence as young people high on drugs and ego sign bands and try to discover emerging talent without actually having any idea what they're doing.

Stelfox is seeking the role of head of A&R, which might involve the film’s title becoming a literal one (although there aren’t really any friends here to speak of) as he bumps off his colleagues along the way, starting with his main rival for the position, a drug-crazed workmate played by James Corden.

Tonally and structurally Kill Your Friends has clearly taken its lead from The Wolf of Wall St and American Psycho, attempting to do for music industry types what Wolf did for stockbrokers. Everyone is despicable but you can behave however you like as long as you make hit records and make money.

It certainly lays into the music biz with scathing glee, but does so in a fairly unoriginal fashion and without ever really being fresh or perceptive enough; it’s also somewhat shooting fish in a barrel.

There’s a canny bit of casting in having a Hollywood hunk like Hoult in the lead, and he’s every inch the movie star. Most of what he does is with a cheeky wink that means audiences should automatically have more empathy towards him than if he’d been completely vile.

There’s often mileage to be found in having a sociopath anti-hero as the lead, but this is just a bit too grating for too much of the time, seeming to revel in the behaviour without necessarily condemning it.

Not that that is essential for a story like this, and for it to have any sort of impact it has to fully commit to not dwindling into a cautionary tale. It certainly has that in its favour but most crucially it just isn’t funny enough.

BROOKLYN (12A, 112 mins)

Director: John Crowley

4 stars

Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) leaves her home in 1950s small-town Ireland, sailing to the promised land of America in this wonderful dramatisation of the book by Colm Tóibín, with a screenplay lovingly adapted by Nick Hornby.

She has a job to go to and a place to stay, and though she’s happy to be escaping her parochial existence, she’s sad to be leaving behind her sister and mother as she struggles to acclimatise.

There’s a potent but not overplayed sense of melancholy throughout, and Ronan is exceptional, but Eilis’s loneliness is eased when she meets Tony (Emory Cohen), with complications arising when she begins to spend more time with someone from her town (Domhnall Gleeson).

Though largely done on the cheap, which can sometimes rob it of a certain sweep, Brooklyn still looks the part. It’s filled with wonderful character detail, and each player big and small gets room to leave a mark, particularly those at the boarding house where Eilis stays, run by Julie Walters.

Told with warmth and humour and brimming with believable people and situations, Brooklyn is effortlessly emotional without ever coming close to veering into melodrama, a romantic drama of real depth that’s deceptively simple but incredibly rewarding.

HE NAMED ME MALALA (12A, 87 mins)

Director: Davis Guggenheim

4 stars

In 2012, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban in Pakistan after speaking out about girls’ right to education.

Having moved to England, this touching documentary shows her life now, with her amazing family led by her father Ziauddin, a passionate educator and defender of the true nature of Islam.

It’s structurally deft, interspersing her medical travails with doing the publicity circuit and travelling the world speaking about female education, while evocative animation fills in backstory and historical detail.

It’s not the most rigorous or far-reaching documentary in the world, but what’s important is its story of truth and courage and standing up for what is right, and having such an inspirational figure at its centre makes it near-impossible to mess up.

Malala sees herself as an ordinary girl and she’s humorous and humble, but as a worldwide role model she’s incredibly influential, telling like it is or should be with fierce intelligence and fearlessness, and the quicker she’s in charge of the world the better.

SCOUTS GUIDE TO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE (15, 93 mins)

Director: Christopher Landon

2 stars

The zom-com is now a well established sub-genre, but nothing new is added to it with this tame teen caper that by effectively being a Shaun of the Dead tribute act struggles to find its own voice.

A trio of scouts return from a camping trip to discover the town has been overrun with zombies and team up with a shotgun-wielding waitress in order to stay alive, but the set-up is only explored in the most obvious and straightforward ways.

In terms of the zombie stuff it doesn’t really have anywhere to go, hitting repeat on the usual run, hide, narrow escape, bash some undead heads in playlist.

But there are a couple of giggles, while a negligible dose of character work is added with two of the group having become discontent with the scouting life and wanting to be more like their teenage peers.

On the plus side the gore is decent, which helps immeasurably, packed with practical effects while also doing an impressive job of making the computer generated stuff look as real as possible.

As a result there are two or three very good gags, which isn’t enough to hang a movie on but which should more or less keep the post-Halloween hordes satisfied.