Iko Uwais directs and acts in the story of a band of elite soldiers who must rescue a group of researchers taken captive in the jungle

Can an elite team of soldiers rescue a band of innocent hostages from a bunch of mean old terrorists? Yes, probably, since there are few (if any) action movies in which the hostages are wiped out and the terrorists win. Not to be confused with the Extraction action franchise starring Chris Hemsworth as a mercenary named Tyler, nor with action thriller Escape Plan: The Extractors, starring Dave Bautista as a prison security expert named Trent, this is an Indonesian action thriller in which actor/director Iko Uwais plays a soldier named Timur. The film was actually called Timur originally, but there’s no denying that The Extractor is a more commercial title (unless you are particularly interested in the medieval Mongol khanates) and will attract more viewers to this tale of hostages, heroes and long-ago childhood friends.

In some ways, though, the rebrand is a shame, because the new title suggests the film is more generic than it is. While the basic plot, in which a bunch of researchers are taken hostage in the jungle by an armed group of wrong ’uns, is hardly unique, there are sequences in the film that stand out from the direct-to-video action content mill. In Indonesia, timur means “east”, where the sun rises, and it carries the connotation of hopefulness. That softer feeling in the original title is a key part of the film’s identity, which includes sentimental flashbacks to the childhoods of various characters whose lives have taken tragically different paths. (Can you imagine a world in which a terrorist and a soldier knew each other as children? The Extractor can.)

There’s a committed performance from a spunky Adria Arjona in the Guest director Adam Wingard’s decent B-movie but it’s missing some sharper weaponry

There’s something rather fascinating about an indie director who heads to the A-list before returning to their roots, a wider skillset and different perspective gained for better or worse. Working within a stricter system – the tiniest of choices being agreed upon by the largest of committees – can often be a creatively crushing experience that we’ve heard gruesomely detailed by many who survived it but the expansion of what one is allowed to technically do with a bigger budget can also be instructive and enriching. The dream scenario is bringing back the good and allowing the bad to inspire new work that makes the most of how unshackled one again now is.

There are plenty of examples of how this hasn’t worked. Neill Blomkamp following Elysium and Chappie with chintzy low-budget horror Demonic (easily his least effective film although since opening his own AI “studio” I imagine the worst is yet to come), Marc Forster following Quantum of Solace and World War Z with a blind Blake Lively film that, ironically, no one saw while Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck went from the greatness of Half Nelson to the blandness of Captain Marvel to the headache of Freaky Tales. But then we were also gifted with the hometown intimacy of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma after he came back from space for Gravity and Hogwarts for the Prisoner of Azkaban while Karyn Kusama brushed off the nightmare of Æon Flux with the brilliantly creepy dinner party thriller The Invitation.

From dialogue so hokey it could be printed on a tea towel to mind-numbing storylines – how can a glossy take on John Grisham’s novel about a fiery law graduate be so tedious?

The Rainmaker was once merely an average film about lawyers starring Matt Damon. Now, thanks to the magic of television, it’s a below-average series about lawyers starring a man who looks like Matt Damon. This is one Milo Callaghan, whose jawline suggests a certain mettle, but whose acting suggests much woe. Or at least a fitful unease with the role in which he finds himself. Accordingly, he drifts around this 10-part John Grisham adaptation with the air of a man who has forgotten what he came into the courtroom for, certain only that whatever it was, it was not a drama that compels him to say things like: “Ah just wanna be a lawyer.”

Callaghan plays Rudy Baylor, an ambitious South Carolina law graduate with a social conscience and a thirst for justice. Rudy wants to make a difference but dammit if his fiery temper don’t keep conspirin’ to screw up his plans. The huffing greenhorn is even late for his first day at prestigious law firm Tinley Britt, having spent the morning hurling his mom’s lunkish boyfriend around the garden (“You think ah’m gonna let you keep leechin’ off ma mother? Gnyaaarrr!”).

A father and son must team up to find a serial killer in a cheaply made and increasingly uninteresting thriller

It’s not as if Robert De Niro’s choices have improved all that much since the nadir of the mid-2000s (last year did see him crop up in a Scott Eastwood-led actioner and The Alto Knights) but there’s something specifically rubbishy about his latest that transports us back to that particularly cursed time. The Whisper Man, a film as openly stupid as its title would suggest, could have been released in between the evil clone horror Godsend and imaginary friend thriller Hide and Seek, the kind of bottom-tier project that offers the actor a nice big cheque and the audience a nice little nap.

It’s a familiar pile of B-movie schlock – serial killers, missing children, bumps in the night, more imaginary friends – and there is some initial junky fun to be had as we wonder just where it all might be headed. I was hoping for a destination a little more deranged or vaguely surprising, the film making a silent promise that we’re hurtling toward somewhere wildly unexpected before dumping us in a ditch instead.

In spite of capable performances and deployment of hygge, gothic and Nordic noir elements, you’ll search for a feasible plot or a character insight in vain

Adapted from the 2017 novel by Anna Ekberg (actually a male writing duo), this thriller from Denmark chucks in a bit of everything into the mix: hygge lakeside melodrama, manor-house gothic, and Nordic-noir corruption. But this franticness can’t disguise that it’s a dopey and facile thriller that, despite capable performances, plumbs neither its characters’ depths nor hits thematic pay dirt. It also merits a stiff investigation from the plotting police.

Despite amnesia that leaves her unable to remember her life prior to running an idyllic Norwegian rural cafe, Louise (Natalie Wolfsberg Madueño) is gearing up to get hitched to crime writer Joachim (Pål Sverre Hagen). When a tourist approaches and calls her by another name, she is sufficiently shaken to take a DNA test; it confirms she is actually Helene Söderberg, a Danish shipping heiress presumed dead, with a husband and son back home. Originally found stowed away on a cargo ship, she handed over an ID card – for Louise Anderson – which the authorities accepted. Now wanting to reclaim her identity, she pitches up on the capacious doorstep of company executive Edmund (Claes Bang), her former partner.