The producers of Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House must be on their knees thanking Donald Trump for giving chilling relevance to Peter Landesman's workaday account of how Watergate mole `Deep Throat' exacted his revenge on the Nixon administration. There was a danger this well-researched, but dramatically inert saga would have been overshadowed by Steven Spielberg's The Post, which recently revisited the story pretty much definitively told by Alan J. Pakula in All the President's Men (1976). But, by sacking former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe just a few days short of his retirement, President Trump gave hot-button status to the subject of upsetting a previously loyal jobsworth who knows where the bodies are buried.

On 11 April 1972, 203 days before the US presidential election, Mark Felt (Liam Neeson), the Deputy Associate Director of the FBI, is summoned to a meeting with White House staffers John Dean (Michael C. Hall), John Mitchell (Stephen Michael Ayers) and John Erlichmann (Wayne Père). They ask how President Richard M. Nixon would go about persuading Bureau chief J. Edgar Hoover to relinquish the post he has held for nearly four decades. They point out that both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson had wanted to remove him and hint that Felt could be rewarded handsomely for his advice. But he reminds them that he has spent 30 years passing snippets of information on key public figures like themselves for Hoover to store in his secret files. Felt reassures them that these details of their professional and private lives remain entirely safe, but the point is made that they could easily be leaked if the need arose. 

Felt himself goes home to party with his wife Audrey (Diane Lane) and another couple, who tango the night away, as the booze flows. But, whatever difficulties he might have in his home life, he remains on the ball at work. Thus, when Hoover dies 178 days before the election (on 2 May), Felt has Ed Miller (Tony Goldwyn) - the Deputy Assistant Director of the Inspections Division - destroy the secret files before they can be seized by Assistant Attorney General L. Patrick Gray (Marton Csokas). He is appalled, therefore, when Nixon appoints Gray as Hoover's successor and rival G-man Bill Sullivan (Tom Sizemore) delights in Felt's failure to secure the top job, as he had done much to derail his career after he had sent compromising photographs of Martin Luther King to his wife. Felt welcomes Gray to the Bureau and warns him that he will have to earn trust as an outsider. But he also promises to remain loyal, as long as Gray remembers that the FBI is a proudly independent body and not a political football.

Audrey is furious that Felt has failed to land the top job after she has made so many sacrifices to support his career. She reels off the number of times they have had to move house and mentions the many friends she has been forced to leave behind. But Felt refuses to resign until he feels the Bureau is in safe hands. 

With 133 days to go to the election (17 June), Felt is awoken in the night with the news that there has been a burglary at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate building in Washington, DC. It quickly becomes clear, as Angelo Lano (Ike Barinholtz), Charlie Bates (Josh Lucas) and Robert Kunkel (Brian d'Arcy James) start to investigate, that the thieves have connections to the Committee to Re-Elect the President and Felt orders his lieutenants to say nothing to anybody in the administration about what they know. He also tears Gray off a strip when he sees Dean in his office and reminds him that he works for the FBI and not Nixon. 

When Nixon tries to find a new job for Sullivan and Gray orders Felt to close down the inquiry after 48 hours and concentrate on the terrorist activities of the Weather Underground, he has a clandestine meeting with Time magazine reporter Sandy Smith (Bruce Greenwood) and asks him to light a fire around the edges of the story, as he simply wants to warn off the White House so that the FBI can be left alone to do its job. On returning home, however, he sits in his daughter Joan (Maika Monroe)'s bedroom and flicks through her Weather Underground literature before promising Audrey that he will go against the rules and use Bureau records to track her down, as she has been missing for over a year. 

Shortly afterwards, Bob Woodward (Julian Morris) and Carl Bernstein publish their first story on the Watergate break-in in The Washington Post. Panic sets in at the FBI because they suspect somebody is leaking information and Felt urges Bates, Miller and Lano to tighten security. However, Gray is also trying to gain access to all of the files pertaining to the case and pressurises Kunkel into passing them over after reassurances are made that Felt is in the loop. He isn't and he dupes Gray into betraying his duplicity and warns Kunkel that his first duty is to the Bureau and not its chief. Felt also reminds Dean that the FBI does not take orders from the Oval Office and intimates that any attempts to use Sullivan to unearth information will be frowned upon.

Having established that Attorney General Mitchell could well be involved in the Watergate case and deduced that there may be enough evidence to link Nixon, Felt battens down the hatches and attempts to conduct business as usual. A montage of news clips and chat show interviews brings us to 45 days before the election, when a terrorist attack is made in the Pentagon. Despite being concerned that Joan might be involved, Felt orders a crackdown on the group and Miller and Bates are sceptical about using such old-fashioned methods to solve a very modern problem. Meanwhile, Gray receives a demand from Nixon to close the Watergate investigation so that Mitchell can announce that the president has clean hands and can focus on his election campaign without having to keep looking over his shoulder. 

Coerced into standing on the podium as Mitchell and Dean close the inquiry and clear Nixon of any wrongdoing, Felt is furious when the Democratic Party accuses the FBI of participating in a whitewash and failing to show moral leadership in a time of crisis. When Gray mentions Joan while showing him a speech he is going to give to deny FBI collusion, Felt snaps and contacts Woodward with information about the relationship between former Treasury lawyer Donald H. Segretti and Alex Shipley, the assistant attorney general of Tennessee, who had been hired to spy on the Democrats. For added atmosphere, he makes the call from a payphone outside a laundromat on a rainy night and then meets Woodward in an underground car park. He ticks him off for not making enough of the story and the reporter complains that he is drowning in detail. So, Felt goes on the record to clarify matters and, with 29 days to go before the election on 7 November, the Post accuses the White House of conducting what amounts to political warfare.

Under orders from the West Wing, Gray addresses the agents on the case. Felt makes a big deal of defending Lano and Bates gives him a sideways glance that suggests he knows that Felt is up to something. Gray appeals for the honour of the Bureau to be upheld in calling for someone to betray the Judas in their midst. But no one comes forward and Kunkel and Bates are transferred to St Louis and San Francisco respectively, as Gray tries to distance them from sensitive information. 

On Election Day, Nixon wins a landslide and Felt goes drinking with Bates and Miller. He says something unguarded about putting sick bodies out of their misery and Bates is only prevented from asking an awkward question by Miller's stare. A few days later, Gray comes to Felt's office to inform him that he is under suspicion of being the source of the leaks and he orders secretary Carol Tschudy (Wendi McLendon-Covey) to have his office swept for bugs. He also meets with a CIA agent (Eddie Marsan), who lets him know that his boss is going to be fired for not nailing Felt quickly enough and hints that the CIA and the FBI will always scratch each other's backs before they cosy up to the White House. 

Shortly before Christmas, Gray calls on Felt and they meet in a car outside his house. He reveals that Nixon is going to confirm his appointment as FBI chief and that he intends appointing Sullivan as his deputy. Gray also discloses that the president has ordered a clearing out of the old guard and he apologises for no longer being able to protect him. He reminds Felt that Nixon is afraid of him, but suggests it would be better for all concerned if he delivered the traitor's head on a platter. Rather than play ball, however, Felt gives Smith details of wiretaps and surveillance missions sanctioned by Sullivan on behalf of the administration and he urges Time to publish its story before Gray is confirmed by Congress. Smith warns him that he will bring down the entire house of cards, but Felt is no longer concerned. 

Three months after the election, Gray performs badly at his hearing and admits that Nixon had ordered him to deliver confidential FBI files to the West Wing. Felt listens with quiet satisfaction as the gasps of incredulity prompt the president to dismiss several close aides for their part in the Gray affair. He is even more delighted when he tracks down Joan to a hippie commune and meets his grandson. Joan forgives Audrey for being a bad mom and attends her father's retirement ceremony after 31 years of service. 

His departure is cross-cut with Nixon's resignation speech on 8 August 1974 before we zoom forward four years to Felt giving evidence in a Grand Jury inquiry into civil rights violations by the FBI in the Hoover era. While giving evidence about the campaign against the Weather Underground, he takes full responsibility for a serious of break-ins and refuses to name any of the staff involved. He also jokes that he was in the Oval Office so often during this period that people began to suspect he could be Deep Throat. But the screen freeze frames before he can answer a jury question about whether he was and closing captions reveal that he was convicted of conspiracy for his role in the Weather Underground episode. However, he was pardoned by Ronald Reagan in March 1981, three years before Audrey committed suicide. Felt lived to 18 December 2008, when he died in Joan's arms. Three years earlier, he had told Vanity Fair that he had been Deep Throat. 

Almost half a century after it first broke, the Watergate scandal remains compelling, even in a frustratingly flat and cumbersomely titled retelling like this. Given that Ridley Scott, Tom Hanks and Jay Roach list themselves among the producers and that Landesman had made such a solid job of chronicling the chaotic hours following the JFK assassination in Parkland (2013), it comes as something of a surprise that he struggles to invest this insider account with sufficient pace and tension. Part of the problem lies in the depiction of Mark Felt as an unflappably impassive company man, as this leaves Liam Neeson with little room for dramatic manoeuvre as the prototype whistleblower. It hardly helps that Landesman veers between clumsy exposition and assumptions of prior knowledge in the sketchy delineation of the secondary characters. Consequently, those around Felt at the Bureau and those opposing him from inside the Oval Office are often confusingly indistinguishable, while key players like Sandy Smith and Bob Woodward barely register. 

Despite working from books by Felt and John D. O'Connor, Landesman fails to make the most of the subplot involving Diane Lane, whose performance has reportedly been much truncated. Clearly, daily dealings with a mentally unstable spouse and the search for a runaway daughter would have taken a huge emotional toll on Felt, as he battled to save his job and preserve the integrity of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But they are so negligibly handled that they become an unwelcome distraction from the main storyline. The loyalty issue involving Miller, Bates, Kunkel and Lano and the ferocity of the rivalry with Sullivan are also fudged, although Marton Csokas makes the most of the underwritten role of Pat Gray. 

On the technical side, David Crank's production design and Adam Kimmel's photography are sombrely adequate, which Daniel Pemberton's score attempts to compensate for the lack of suspense. But such dogged attempts to convey the murky nature of events deprive them of authenticity. Thus, while this would make for acceptable late-night viewing on television, it lacks the insider nitty-gritty to pass cinematic muster.

While there have been a handful of prequels centring on fictional serial killers, such as Mick Garris's Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990) and Peter Webber's Hannibal Rising (2006), the origins biopic is a rarer beast. Adapted by director Marc Meyerss from an acclaimed 2012 graphic novel by John Backderf, My Friend Dahmer draws on the artist's recollections of the Bath, Ohio classmate who went on to murder 17 young men, some of whom he consumed. It makes an intriguing companion piece to David Jacobson's Dahmer (2002), if only because lead Ross Lynch will be familiar to most for his work on the Disney series, Austin & Ally. But this stands on its own as an earnest attempt to examine the internal and external forces that turned a relatively normal kid into a psychopath. 

Riding alone on the school bus home, Jeffrey Dahmer (Ross Lynch) notices a bearded jogger through the window, along with the carcass of a dead cat. Having greeted his mother, Joyce (Anne Heche), Jeff heads out with a bin bag to collect the cat and shows a couple of passing classmates how he dissolves dead animals in acid in the shed at the bottom of his garden. As his father, Lionel (Dallas Roberts), is a chemist, he has a ready supply and Jeff asks if he can get hold of anything stronger over dinner, When his younger brother, Dave (Liam Keoth), complains that the chicken isn't properly cooked, Joyce suggests a new house rule that everybody eats their mistakes. 

She has only recently spent time in a mental institution and Lionel is determined to prevent her from finding a job and leaving the boys to fend for themselves. With his blonde mop, outsized glasses and slouching walk, Jeff is a target for bullies at school and John `Derf' Backderf (Alex Wolff) is most put out when he is forced to work with him in the biology lab. But Jeff is more interested in the specimen jars and steals a small rodent for his own experiments. However, Lionel is disturbed by the amount of time his son spends shut away and he confiscates his samples and demolishes the hut. He tries to atone by buying Jeff some dumbbells, in the hope he will bulk up and gain the self-confidence he needs to be more outgoing. But, while he works out and plays trumpet in the school band, Jeff remains a solitary soul, as he tries to come to terms with his homosexual crushes and his fixation with bones. 

As the new term begins in autumn 1977, Jeff shocks his classmates by feigning a convulsive fit in the locker corridor. Derf laughs at him with buddies Neil (Tommy Nelson) and Mike (Harrison Holzer), but they are sufficiently impressed by his display to invite him to sit at their table during lunch. Indeed, Derf even suggests that they start a Dahmer Fan Club and offers to become Minister of Propaganda by drawing his antics. The quartet starts `doing a Dahmer' whenever the opportunity arises, while Jeff disrupts a library lesson by making moaning noises. When Penny (Katie Stottlemire notices how Derf keeps sketching Jeff, she asks if she could pose for him. But Jeff insists that he could draw her and gets her to lie down on the classroom floor (while the teacher dozes on his desk) and draws a corpse outline around her in red crayon.

When the gang calls round to the house, however, Jeff keeps them outside, as Joyce has started to show symptoms of her old anxiety and he is too embarrassed to let them see her. When Derf does get inside, he is taken aback by her mania and beats a hasty retreat. He is also alarmed when Jeff slices open a fish that he has told him to throw back when they go angling together and when he does a Dahmer in the grocery store where Derf works as a bagger. Consequently, he suggests that they restrict their epileptic activities to non-adult situations, although he is wholly in favour of Jeff photobombing the pictures that Neil takes of the different leisure clubs for the school yearbook. 

Jeff keeps watching the bearded jogger from the bushes at the side of the road and is dumbstruck when he turns out to be Mike's GP, Dr Matthews (Vincent Kartheiser). He is equally shocked when class stoner Figg (Miles Robbins) accompanies him to the woods to cut up animals with his pocket knife and he produces his father's revolver and begins playing Russian roulette. Refusing to have anything to do with guns, Jeff keeps hold of the knife and uses it to dissect the next bit of roadkill he finds. 

During a school trip to Washington, DC, Jeff finds himself sharing a motel room with the only black kid in his class, Charlie Smith (Dontez James). As they watch TV, Jeff wonders whether their insides are the same colour and Charlie looks at him askance. The next day, Jeff calls the White House from a payphone and astonishes his friends when he tells an aide (Lauren Rhodes) that they are from the school paper and would love to look around. They bump into Vice President Walter Mondale (Tom Luce), who asks Derf, Neil, Mike and Penny what they want to do when they leave school, When Jeff says `biology', Mondale clasps his hand and wishes him well. 

On arriving home, Jeff is crushed to discover that Lionel has moved into a motel, as he can no longer cope with Joyce's shifting moods. However, the jolt prompts him to book an appointment with Dr Matthews and he rather enjoys the experience of sitting in his underpants and only becomes self-conscious when he is asked to lower them for a hernia check. But his pals notice that Jeff is becoming increasingly reticent around them and wonder whether they are exploiting him for their own amusement after Mrs Woodward (Maryanne Nagel) uses a black marker to obscure his face in the yearbook pictures. 

Having continued to trap squirrels and collect carcasses, Jeff lures a dog into the woods and prepares to slit its throat with Figg's knife. However, he loses his nerve and steals from Joyce's purse in order to buy booze. He looks out of the rear window, as his parents bicker over their divorce documents in the motel car park, and returns home to imagine himself spooning on his bed with Matthews's lifeless corpse. But, even though he has withdrawn from the Fan Club, he agrees to a swan song flip-out at the shopping mall and the camera circles him in a slow-motion close-up that suggests this is no longer entirely an act. The watching Derf also feels uncomfortable, as a group of classmates who have paid for the privilege follow Jeffrey (as he now insists on being called) as he jumps on benches, lurches into stores and knocks plates off the tables in a café. 

Neil had refused to witness the event and he apologises to Jeffrey at the school prom. He has asked Bridget (Sydney Meyers) to be his partner, but he has only gone to prove to the others that he could get a girl to accompany him. Consequently, after a half-hearted attempt at a dance, he stalks out and scarfs a burger in his car. But this bid for normalcy comes shortly after he had waited in the bushes with a baseball bat to jump Matthews and he had smashed the bat into a tree on realising that the doctor must have changed his route. 

Barely acknowledging Joyce when she informs him that the divorce has been finalised, Jeffrey creates a shrine to a dead animal in the woods and scares a couple of young kids out for a walk. The rumour around school is that a coven of witches is operating there and nobody links the episode to Jeffrey. He has been left at home alone for the summer, as Joyce (who has not sought custody of her first born) has taken David to stay with her mother. Lionel has given him his red Volkswagen for a graduation present, but Jeffrey continues to trudge along in his inimitable manner and Derf is surprised to come across him on a lonely road late one night. He offers him a lift home and explains that he is going to Pittsburgh to study art. In an effort to leave on good terms, he presents Jeffrey with some of the drawings he has made of him. But he rejects them and insists that he will only forgive him for making him look such a freak if he comes inside for a last beer. 

Feeling uneasy in the darkened house, Derf makes his excuses and sees Jeffrey clutching a baseball bat in the headlights, as he reverses out of the drive. After spending the night drinking, Jeffrey takes some beers from the fridge and heads off in his VW. He sees the shirtless Steven Hicks (Dave Sorboro) hitching after attending a concert and offers him the chance to keep partying. As the vehicle merges into traffic, the scene fades and a caption reveals that Dahmer took his first victim home on 18 June 1978 and confessed to taking 17 lives when he was arrested in July 1991. 

Flipping the nostalgia that Richard Linklater mined in Dazed and Confused (1993) and taking the high-school rite of passage into its darkest territory since Gus Van Sant's Elephant (2003) and Antonio Campos's Afterschool (2008), this is a mercifully unsensational account of the troubled youth of one of America's most notorious killers. Played by Ross Lynch with a sombre taciturnity that allows Meyers to empathise with the geeky Dahmer without ever excusing him, the inexorable descent into murderous insanity is thoughtfully placed in a context of domestic dysfunction, institutional indifference, peer exploitation and sexual suppression. Yet, by focusing exclusively on the months before Dahmer's first crime, Meyers and Backderf avoid having to identify when and where the grim fascination with bodies, bones and death originated and why it eventually manifested itself in such pitiless and gruesome brutality. (They also bend the truth in places, hence the opening caption `Based on a true story'. Dahmer and his pals only got to watch Walter Mondale working, for example, and didn't get to meet him in person).

Clearly Backderf's relationship with Dahmer has left its scars and Meyers deftly picks up on the fact that family members and classmates alike will have pondered on their own associations since he was caught and beaten to death in prison in 1994. Thus, while Lynch dominates the picture, the ensemble playing is creditably oblivious to the disturbing thoughts raging behind his placid facade. Alex Wolff and Tommy Nelson standout as the nerds who boost their own stock by cruelly playing Svengali with the largely unsuspecting Lynch, who seems happy to have someone to tag along with after years of awkward isolation. But it's clear from the climactic scene in Woolf's car that Jeffrey is very much on the periphery of his own clique, as he has no idea about his friend's plans for the future and it's only when he sees the cartoons of him as a messed-up superhero that it conclusively dawns on him that he has been the butt of the joke rather than a key perpetrator. 

Besides the 360° shot during the mall escapade, Daniel Katz's camerawork is steadily unobtrusive, as it picks up on the superbly judged details in Carla Schivener's costumes and Jennifer Klide's production design (although it helps enormously that Meyers was able to film in Dahmer's childhood home). The choice of period music is well complimented by Andrew Hollander's score, while Coll Anderson's sound mix subtly hints at the cacophony intensifying in Dahmer's brain. But there's nothing kitschy or gimmicky about this unsettlingly compassionate portrait of a psychotic as a young man. Indeed, it's the mundanity of Dahmer and his milieu that makes his hideous fate all the more chilling.

Not that long ago, it seemed likely that an emerging talent would be branded `the next Evan Rachel Wood'. But, since earning a Golden Globe nomination for her lead performance in Catherine Hardwicke's Thirteen (2003), Wood has struggled to achieve a major breakthrough on the big screen and has enjoyed greater success with such TV projects as Mildred Pierce (2011), for which she received an Emmy nomination, and Westworld (2016-). She provides a reminder of what a fine actress she is, however, in Allure, the feature debut of Carlos and Jason Sanchez, the sibling Canadian photographers who are renowned for their dramatic large-scale images and holographic video installations.

First seen having an unsatisfactorily abrasive sexual encounter with a blindfolded stranger, thirtysomething Evan Rachel Wood works for father Denis O'Hare's cleaning company in an unnamed North American city. On being hired by new client Maxim Roy in a leafy suburb, Wood makes awkward small talk with her 16 year-old daughter, Julia Sarah Stone, who is a talented pianist. Noticing the Nirvana poster on Stone's wall, Wood admits to getting goose pimples at the thought of seeing the band live and shows Stone her bare arm. 

Despite tensions dating back to incidents in their past, Wood and O'Hare get along reasonably well. But Stone resents the fact that Roy is such a controlling perfectionist when it comes to her music and hates her for the fact she is planning to sell the house and move in with her latest boyfriend. When Wood finds her crying, she assures Stone that she doesn't have to do what her mother tells her and welcomes her with open arms when Stone runs away from home. Indeed, on their first night as housemates, she claims that it feels as though Stone has always lived there and, following a session driving go-karts, she invites her guest to share her bed rather than bunk down on the couch. Playing it cool, Wood kisses Stone on the mouth before rolling over to sleep and the teenager wonders whether this Wood wants to be more than just friends.  

The next day, Wood is called into O'Hare's office to meet detective Michael Dozier, who is making inquiries about Stone's whereabouts. Wood claims to have no information and when Stone suggests calling Roy to let her know she is okay, Wood makes her feel guilty by claiming she could get into serious trouble for lying to the police in order to protect her. When Stone insists she can explain things to her mom, Wood asks when Roy has ever listened to her and Stone is unsure what to do for the best. 

Following a night of vodka and dope, Wood locks Stone in a basement bedroom while she goes to work. She returns to remind Stone that she will go to jail if she contacts home and she persuades her to obey and trust her, as she is the only person who has her best interests at heart. Having discovered that the police have called off their search, Wood throws herself on Stone's mercy and claims she has been acting oddly because she can't imagine life without her and Stone cradles Wood's head when she bursts into tears. 

Although they have kissed, Stone remains hesitant and resists an embrace when Wood buys her an electronic keyboard. However, she jokes that she is her sugar mamma when they go to a karaoke club, where Wood looks on enviously as Stone chats to a guy at the bar. She becomes even more jealous when she invites wheelchair-bound brother Joe Cobden to her birthday party and he posits forming a rap band with Stone. Wheeling him out to the car, Wood tells him to stop pretending he's black and gets into such a rage when he suggests that she finds a girlfriend her own age that she lays into Stone for ruining her special day. Desperate to avoid offending her, Stone cuddles Wood after headbutts the door and sinks to the floor muttering an abject apology. 

The next morning, Stone packs a bag, but can't bring herself to board the bus. Instead, she returns home through the autumnal leaves and allows Wood to seduce her in bed. However, she winces when Wood gets a little rough and is uncertain what to do when she rolls off her and turns her back. Wood seeks release in another anonymous encounter in a motel. But the stranger is in cahoots with her last pick-up and he creeps into the room while they are having sex and assaults her. Distraught at the state of his daughter's face, O'Hare drives her back to the motel to collect her car. He vows to kill the men if he ever catches up with them, but Wood tells Stone that her father had beaten her after she had resisted his advances. She urges her lover to go to the police, but Wood insists on keeping things in the family, only to have a blazing row with O'Hare when she ducks out of the weekly works' outing to dine with Stone and he hopes that she hasn't been stalking again.

Hurt by Wood's decision to quit, O'Hare calls to the house he bought her to apologise. She's less than pleased to see him and tells Stone to finish her meal while she talks to him on the doorstep. He tries to apologise for his misdeeds and Wood can't understand why he has chosen now to rake up the past. However, she is furious with Stone when she comes to the door and spits on O'Hare in calling him a pervert. Wood bundles her inside, as O'Hare shuffles away regretting his poor sense of timing. But Wood blames herself for the mess and bawls on the bed when Stone tries to console her. 

The next night, Wood and Stone peel off their tops and cling to each other on the sofa. However, when they go to swimming together, and the lights go off in the pool, Stone takes the opportunity to grab her boots and a cardigan from her locker and rush into the street. Powerless to stop her, Wood calls on O'Hare as the Christmas snow starts to fall and informs him that she needs to be alone for a while. He understands and wishes her well and a smile plays across Wood's lips as she drives towards her fresh start.  

There's been a number of abduction dramas of late and the Sanchez brothers offer few insights that haven't already been explored in the likes of Markus Schleinzer's Michael (2011), Jennifer Lynch's Chained (2012), Lenny Abrahamson's Room (2015) and Ben Young's Hounds of Love (2016). They make effective use of Emmanuel Fréchette's disorientating interiors and have cinematographer Sara Mishara employ shallow focus to reinforce Stone's confinement and Wood's lack of foresight. But their screenplay carelessly marginalises both Roy's search for her daughter and the police investigation, while it makes it far too easy for the volatile Wood to become obsessed with a vulnerable ingenue and for her to convince this seemingly intelligent teenager (who barely knows her) that she is the answer to all her problems. 

Notwithstanding these flaws and (despite solid turns from Stone and O'Hare) the sketchiness of the secondary characterisation, the brothers are able to count on the excellence of an actress with the nous to recognise a plumb role when she sees one. In her youth. Wood appeared in such similarly themed pictures as Marcos Siega's Pretty Persuasion and David Jacobson's Down in the Valley (both 2005) and she pushes the largely impassive Stone's buttons with sinister precision, as her single white female slips unsettlingly between cool calculation and emotional fragility. Consequently, the predator always seems to be as much a victim as her captive and it says much for the potency of Wood's performance that, no matter what dysfunctional her arrested adolescent behaviour becomes, audience sympathy remains with her throughout.

Finally, this week, older children with holiday time on their hands might like to seek out Anders Walter's debut feature, I Kill Giants. Adapted by Joe Kelly from the 2008 graphic novel he wrote with Ken Niimura, this has much in common with JA Bayona's interpretation of Patrick Ness's bestseller, A Monster Calls (2016). But it's also possible to detect echoes of Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are (2009) in a dark fantasy that examines childhood traumas with an honesty and sensitivity that is only spoilt by a final descent into sentimentality. 

Fifth grader Madison Wolfe lives with older siblings Imogen Poots and Art Parkinson in an unnamed town on the New Jersey coast. Forever wearing a pair of bunny ears as a tribute to her spirit guide, the bespectacled Wolfe spends her days playing Dungeons and Dragons and testing the poisons she makes to protect the town from the giants who live in the woods. While Poots struggles to hold down a job and care for her sister, Parkinson has little time for her eccentricities and they argue when she pulls the plug on the noisy video game that she detests because it requires such little imagination to play. However, things take a turn for the better when Sydney Wade arrives from Leeds and appears to be on Wolfe's wavelength. 

Taking Wade to her beachside sanctuary, Wolfe explains about the various forms of giants (while the visuals cut away to a stylised CGI montage of rampaging behemoths) and urges her new friend not to be frightened because evil types like the titans have not been seen in ages. She also tells her about `Coveleski', a secret weapon named after an old Philadelphia Phillies baseball player that she keeps in the embroidered bag slung over her shoulder. However, she parts by warning Wade not to get too close to her because she lives a dangerous life and she can't be responsible for her if a giant strikes.

Prompted by the flight patterns of the birds she spies with her telescope, Wolfe heads into the woods to lay a trap for the giant she fears is on the prowl. She spots it through the trees and crashes off her bicycle into a puddle. But the monster isn't fooled by her plan and she is spooked that night by a voicing calling her name from the darkness. Following a falling out with Wade during a PE lesson, Wolfe is summoned to see Saldana, who is keen to find out more about her in the hope of getting to the bottom of her erratic behaviour. However, Wolfe is good at keeping her defences up and she leaves without revealing anything about herself. 

Pleased to get an apology from Wade, Wolfe is about to slip it into her bag when it emits a pinkish red light and she falls to her knees in the corridor. Convinced the town is in imminent danger, she asks Wade if she wants to be a coward or a warrior and the pair run off in the direction of the forest. She puts a pin prick of Wade's blood on a wooden cross to protect her and makes her say a magic spell. But problems begin to mount up when Wolfe punches Saldana for prying during a therapy session and then drives Wade into the orbit of class bully Rory Jackson by accidentally giving her a black eye. When Poots lectures her sister for getting her dragged out of work when her boss is looking for any excuse to fire her, Wolfe runs away as dusk draws in and she feels insecure at the very moment she needs to be strong. 

Overlooking Wolfe lashing out in the hope of connecting with her, Saldana asks her about giants and whether she truly believes she can keep the town safe from an attack. However, Wolfe gets into a panic and runs down to the beach to find Jackson and her sidekick ripping up the trip ropes she has hidden under the sand. She glares at the sheepish Wade and reaches into her bag to brandish Covelski. But she is shocked to find that it has diminished in size and looks no more menacing than a seashell on a stick. Sensing her opportunity, Jackson punches Wolfe on the nose and her glasses fall on to the sand as she is subjected to a beating. 

Wade takes Wolfe home, but makes the mistake of putting her to bed in her upstairs room rather than in her curtained-off den in the basement. Thus, Wolfe wakes in a state the next morning and tiptoes across the landing the shut the door leading into her mother's old room. She goes to see Saldana at her home and meets her husband (Noel Clarke) and infant daughter before running into the woods convinced that everyone is going to die. When Saldana and Wade call on Poots to see if Wolfe is okay, the latter sneaks into her den and listens to an old cassette recording that the young Wolfe made with her mother (Jennifer Ehle) about how Harry Covelski earned the nickname `the Giant Killer' after helping defeat the New York Giants three times in five days during the 1908 season. 

Angry with Wade for betraying her, Wolfe hides out at the board game store and storms off when Wade tracks her down. As she leaves by a rear alley, a giant corners her and warns her that she lacks the power to defeat the foes that are massing in the woods. Yet she manages to lure on creature to the disused train siding and locks herself in the cab of a shunting locomotive to generate the electric current to render the monster harmless. Back in her den, Wolfe prays for Coveleski to return to its former glory and wonders what she can do against the onslaught if she's unarmed. 

That night, a storm brews up over the sea and Saldana goes in search of Wolfe to remind her that there are no giants and that she is merely raging against the illness that has felled her mother. But Wolfe is in no mood to listen and makes for the beach for a final showdown. She finds Wade injured on the sand after trying to stop Jackson from destroying Wolfe's defences after being humiliated by her at school. However, she makes Wade take shelter in her hideout while she confronts the gigantic titan that rises from the waves with the restored Coveleski. Yet, as she strikes a blow that brings the monster to its knees, it informs her that it has come for her rather than her mother and it snatches her up and wades back into the water, as the winds and waves rush around them. 

But Wolfe isn't ready to perish and she floats up from the depths and returns home to climb the stairs and snuggle on the bed beside her dying mom. Ehle is pleased to see her and holds her close, as Wolfe apologises for finding it so hard to cope with reality. Shortly after returning to school, Wolfe gets the news that Ehle has passed away and she leaves her pink Coveleski bag on the coffin to protect her. Unable to sleep that night, she wanders into her mother's room and sees the giant standing on the foreshore to check that Wolfe is okay. She thanks the creature for its kindness and reassures it that humans are often stronger than they think. Turning away from the window, she climbs into Ehle's bed and settles down to sleep.

Having put so much work into establishing a credible sense of place and a disconcerting mood around Wolfe's quest, Kelly and Walter fritter much of it away in a final reel that not only feels anti-climactic, but also unnecessarily mawkish and manipulative. It's clear from the outset that the giant hunt is a coping mechanism and viewers are left to ponder the source of Wolfe's emotional fragility. But the revelation will leave many wondering how long she has been hiding behind her defences and why it has taken the school and the doctor treating Ehle so long to realise how traumatised she has become. 

The Coveleski aspect of the storyline is neatly done, even though it's not entirely clear why Wolfe's nerdiness would encompass both century-old baseball legends and gaming myths. Nevertheless, the 14 year-old plays the part with a quirky mix of vigour and vulnerability that makes one wonder why Hollywood doesn't base more rite-of-passage sci-fi and fantasy pictures around girls. She is ably supported by Wade and Jackson, although their characters are as sketchy as those played by Poots and Saldana, who seems decidedly slow on the uptake for a trained psychologist (albeit one who used to manage a small hedge fund). Interestingly, Wolfe's brother is almost completely marginalised, along with Saldana's husband and the school principal (Don Wycherley) and the only male who makes much sense is the titan voiced by John Boyle.

Given that the end credits run for around eight minutes, it's safe to say that a good deal of effort went into the post-production phase. But Susie Cullen's production design and Rasmus Heise's photography draw the audience into the world of the film and manage to keep the focus on the humans after the superfluous `history of giants' cutaway. which deprives the sighting of the first monster in the woods of much of its impact. Fans are likely to be split over whether Walter has done justice to his source. But one suspects the sudden emotional shift will alienate aficionados and newcomers alike, which is a shame, as Wolfe deserves better.