Cannes film festival
The choreography is impressive as people are hurled through walls, thrown off rooftops and otherwise beaten to a pulp, but the editing is frenetic and the characters cartoonish

Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City – once the most densely populated place on Earth – is the perfect movie setting: a Piranesian labyrinth of squalid high rises and dark, cramped alleys, teeming with crooks, lowlifes, addicts and impoverished families running small businesses, legit and otherwise. This 1980s-set action epic lovingly, meticulously recreates the notorious neighbourhood (which was demolished in 1994), but sadly, the backdrop is more interesting than the story.

At heart it’s a tale of a Chinese immigrant caught between rival gangs. Street fighter Chan Lok-kwan (Raymond Lam) is initially scammed by local triad boss Mr Big (a cigar-smoking caricature from veteran Jackie Chan sidekick Sammo Hung). Chan retaliates by stealing a package and, after a great bus-top chase scene, he stumbles accidentally into the Walled City, a no-go area for Mr Big’s goons as it’s ruled by local boss Cyclone (Louis Koo). As well as running a barber shop, and smoking like a chimney even though he is dying of a lung disease, Cyclone rules over the giant slum like a benign dictator, collecting rents but also looking out for its citizens and maintaining some kind of order. He and the rest of the Walled City community take Chan under their wing, and this hard-working orphan starts to feel at home for the first time – until a highly unlikely twist of fate puts all the factions on a path to all-out gang warfare.

The grimly effective 2008 home invasion shocker gets a strange semi-remake that sucks out all of the suspense

In a genre in which innovation is increasingly resigned to the furthest outskirts, there’s something almost admirable about just how staggeringly redundant The Strangers: Chapter 1 is, early contender for 2024’s most pointless horror movie. It’s the third in a series that should have stopped after one, a reboot that’s more of a remake but sold as a prequel while also acting as the start of a new trilogy, an over-complicated attempt to squeeze new life out of old IP. The 2008 original, which starred Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman as a couple menaced by three masked invaders, was a short, sharp shock to the system, a bare-bones exercise in drip-drip suspense made scarier by its cold, motivation-less villains (“Because you were home”).

There was a stark, naturalistic nastiness to it, closer to Michael Haneke’s Funny Games than most of the silly genre dreck being churned out at the time and so while the film was a commercial win for Universal, it didn’t lend itself to easy extension. A troubled decade of false starts finally led to 2018’s sleekly made yet maddeningly scare-free sequel Prey at Night and now six years later, with rights moving over to Lionsgate, we have a new trilogy, ambitious in concept if nothing else. The three films are all set to be released within a year, an expansion of a world that worked best on the simplest of terms, a perfect example of unnecessary bloat at a time when we’re surrounded by it. It’s the era of 10-hour TV seasons that could be 100-minute movies and prequels to stories answering questions we never cared to ask and with yet more to come from the worlds of Harry Potter, Twilight and Lord of the Rings, why not stretch a tight 85-minute shocker into a multi-film franchise?