This supernatural sequel has plenty of nods to 1980s original: BRIAN VINER reviews Ghostbusters - Afterlife 

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (PG-13, 124 mins) 

Rating: ****

Verdict: Huge fun and a worthy sequel

The Power of the Dog (R, 126 mins) 

Rating: ****

Verdict: Handsome and immersive

Ghostbusters came out in the UK in December 1984, with the miners' strike still raging and the Band Aid single Do They Know It's Christmas?, intended to raise funds for famine relief in stricken Ethiopia, about to hit No 1.

That tells us not just how many years have passed, but also how welcome Ghostbusters was in tumultuous times. Its 'irresistible nonsense', in the words of one critic, was a tonic. It was duly a gargantuan hit, and enduringly influential. 

Special effects-driven comedy originated with Ghostbusters and so, for that matter, did the suffix 'busters', especially widespread in the U.S. where 'pricebusters', 'budgetbusters' and even 'nukebusters' became everyday terms.

So the question is: will Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the second sequel following 1989's Ghostbusters II, go gangbusters at the box office? I hope so. I didn't care at all for the 2016 female-led reboot. 

But these too are tumultuous times and we could all do with some cinematic fun, which this film emphatically provides. Slickly directed and co-written (with Gil Kenan) by Jason Reitman, whose father Ivan directed the original and is on board here as producer, it's a blast from start to finish.

First and best of all for its many fans, the 1984 film gets numerous references, raging from the cheekily wry to the thumpingly unsubtle. Remember the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, a logo on a bag of marshmallows that transmogrified into a giant monster? 

Here, there's a glorious sequence in a Walmart supermarket in which a battalion of tiny, squidgy marshmallow men run amok, committing what I suppose might be called mallowcide as they toast each other on grills and leap into blenders.

It's beautifully, hilariously done, well worth the cost of admission on its own (even at 2021 prices), and a reminder that special effects (like the expense of cinema tickets) have made leaps and bounds in 40-odd years. Also, most of the original 1984 characters pop up, though here's a tip and a spoiler rolled into one — you'll need to stay until the very end of the final credits to see them all.

The premise this time is that cash-strapped single mother Callie Spengler (Carrie Coon) is evicted from her urban apartment and forced to take her children, 15-year-old Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), 12, to live in a remote, creepy farmhouse in rural Oklahoma, which she has inherited from her estranged late father Egon (played in the original by co-writer Harold Ramis, who died in 2014 and to whom this film is dedicated).

Sweetly, each member of the family forges a new relationship, easing the difficulties of the relocation. Callie grows close to the children's teacher Mr Grooberson (Paul Rudd) and Trevor to a cool older girl (Celeste O'Connor), but it is science nerd Phoebe (a hugely engaging performance by Grace) who drives the story, and whose friendship with her microphone-wielding classmate 'Podcast' (Logan Kim) is one of the film's chief delights.

As for that plot, you hardly need to know that Phoebe's fascination with her dead grandfather's complex gadgets awakens the malevolent Sumerian god Gozer.

Let's just say that a deliberately preposterous narrative is kept on track by exhilarating effects, excellent performances and whip-smart dialogue. I especially liked Mr Grooberson's assertion that science 'is punk rock . . . a safety-pin through the nipple of academia'.

Academia plays a curious bit part in The Power Of The Dog, writer-director Jane Campion's swooningly handsome, winningly powerful adaptation of Thomas Savage's 1967 novel, about two well-to-do brothers, Phil and George Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons), who run a ranch in 1920s Montana.

Phil is a classics graduate from Yale, not that you'd know it. He is a boorish, spiteful, insecure bully, unhealthily obsessed with the memory of his alpha-male mentor, Bronco Henry. 

George, by contrast, is slow-witted but kind-hearted, and there is a clumsy charm in his uncertain wooing of a local widow, Rose (Kirsten Dunst, Plemons' partner in real life — not that you'd know that, either).

The oppressive atmosphere at the ranch becomes downright toxic when George marries Rose and becomes stepfather to her effeminate son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), giving Phil ready targets for his nastiness.

Rose finds refuge in alcohol, but Peter is more resourceful, and his relationship with Phil gradually moves centre-stage in a film that would have quite a theatrical feel were it not for the sumptuous cinematography (Campion's native New Zealand doubling, magnificently, for the American West).

Cumberbatch is superb (what an unexpectedly good baddie he makes) but Campion deserves most of the credit, for so skilfully immersing us in this dysfunctional family's miserable existence, and showing us how claustrophobic lives can be, no matter how breathtaking the scenery.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife is in cinemas now. The Power Of The Dog has a limited cinema release before showing on Netflix from December 1.

A good shot, but Williams tennis biopic isn't a winner

King Richard (PG-13, 146 mins)

Verdict: Not quite an ace  

Rating: ***

Twenty years have passed since Will Smith played the incomparable Muhammad Ali in Michael Mann's movie, Ali. Now, in another stirring biopic, he plays a man no less driven in the quest for sporting greatness, and no less successful in finding it.

Yet Richard Williams didn't crave greatness for himself. He had a vision for his daughters Venus and Serena, which began to take shape even before they were born.

King Richard tells the extraordinary tale of one man's obsession, of how a pair of tennis superstars were forged in the crucible of their father's white-hot ambition. 

At the end of the film, with Venus (Saniyya Sidney) still only 14 but already flying towards the sporting stratosphere, a series of captions tell us what happened next to her and her younger sister Serena (Demi Singleton). 

But then we already know that. The subsequent credits tell us something much more revealing, that the executive producers of this film were... Venus and Serena Williams.

Their association explains why Richard is presented as a kind of superhero. Maddeningly stubborn, and flawed in other ways too, but a superhero nonetheless. The whiff of hagiography rises from this movie like puffs of chalk from the Wimbledon baseline.

At well over two hours, it is also far too long; if only there were some sort of cinematic tie-break, to stop films going on and on like this. Yet despite those and other reservations, I enjoyed King Richard. 

For anyone who loves sport, it's an irresistible story, even if it could be better told. There are more than a few uplifting moments as Venus and Serena leave behind the shabby public courts of Compton, California, moving to the cusp of greatness.

And Smith is terrific in the title role, nailing Richard's speech pattern, as well as the bandy-legged lope that has been a regular sight at tennis tournaments for the past 25 years.

Yet Reinaldo Marcus Green's film doesn't land nearly as many emotional aces as it should. Doubtless with the sisters' support, it focuses too hard on the warmth of the extended Williams clan, and too little on the challenges they had to overcome, which in a way, despite his pivotal role in their remarkable rise, surely included their own singular father.

A longer version of this review ran in the Mail last month.