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.

Paul Greengrass drama The Uprising was supposed to be a historical epic about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 – but a strange new campaign has inserted a surprising figure

Nobody likes to have the full plot of a movie spoiled before they’ve even seen it. However, sometimes this can be taken to the extreme. Take the new Paul Greengrass movie, The Uprising, for example. It is two weeks away from its US release and not only does nobody know the plot, but nobody seems to know what it is even about. Seriously, nobody at all. The film’s distributors just spent yesterday squabbling in public about whether Robin Hood was in it or not.

Here’s what we know so far. Initially, all the trailers and promotional materials made The Uprising look like a film about the Peasants’ Revolt that tore through England in 1381. And this was very exciting, since the revolt was a thrilling moment in history that has been bizarrely underserved by Hollywood over the years. Most exciting of all, though, it sounded like it fit exactly into Greengrass’s wheelhouse: full of action and realism and political awareness.