This Stephen King horror story serves up a tasty treat of jumps and bumps…

The Boogeyman (15, 98 mins)

Verdict: murder in the dark

Judgement:

Reality (12, 83 mins)

Verdict: tense whistleblower story

Judgement:

Like many a night terror, The boogeyman exists in a parallel universe where high beams do not work or are not used.

People go about their daily business on tired old bedside lamps, open refrigerators, or candles—a habit I’d quickly give up if I thought I’d be sharing my home with a child-killing beast that thrives in darkness.

The film is an adaptation of a short story by Stephen King, the senior ghost nuisance. His frequent route to Hollywood brought us Carrie, The Shining and Misery.

We don’t have Kathy Bates or Jack Nicholson here, but a group of C-list actors do a fine job of stringing together the jumps and bangs.

We’re at home with the Harpers: teenager Sadie (Sophie Thatcher), her younger sister Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair, the name of a child actor if I’ve ever seen one) and their therapist dad Will (Chris Messina with graying, bereaved father – of-two beard).

The family is already mourning the loss of their mother when a supernatural twist comes their way.

A sweaty, beady-eyed man arrives at Will’s office unannounced, with a goosebump-pumping tale of how his two children were killed by a shadowy monster.

In 20 minutes we are taken by the deaths of four people, with your man finally hanging by the neck, chez Harper, fifth.

Cue the Boogeyman.

Once unleashed in their home, the horror relies almost entirely on periods of silence followed by loud noises, or faces caught briefly in shadow (turn on that big light!). It does the business. I yelled a lot. But again, slam a door and I’ll beep.

A neat evolution of the vibrating hand-held candle into a dark gang trope is a wireless moon nightlight rolled down a dark hallway. You can guess what it reveals at the end.

While the emotional undertones of familial grief never really get to you, I found that if a plot was hatched to send the Boogeybloke once and for all, I’d punch the air in support and squirm in anticipation. Note to self – a shotgun blast alone won’t do it.

It’s all packed into 98 minutes, so there’s no time to drift away. A line of set pieces comes quickly enough, but once you get a good look at the thing, it somewhat kills the terror. The quick glimpses are always more chilling than head-on CGI.

Arguably just as creepy is the literal FBI procedure Reality. It’s slow stuff, but psychologically sinister.

Director Tina Satter has taken a 90-minute transcript of an audio recording of the 2017 arrest of a US National Security Agency translator, Reality Winner, and dramatized it. So far, so boring.

We start with Reality coming home in her car to find two FBI heavyweights at her door. A dictaphone is clicked, we hear the real voices of the people, we see the waveform wobble and the transcript clicks away on a word processor.

This retelling then kicks off, rigidly holding on to every uh, ah, and stumbling block. And it’s fantastic.

The confusion and the slow unraveling immediately kick in. Why was Reality arrested? What are they looking for? Does she know what’s going on? Did she do something terrible? Will she?

The cold stare of reality (of a mighty Sydney Sweeney) betrays little as the bumbling FBI agents waver between asking mundane questions about her dog and barking spiky, warrant-backed instructions.

A ‘Crime Scene Do Not Cross’ tape is rolled out, but it takes ages for anyone to mention a crime. I was hooked, waiting for every clue.

Josh Hamilton – one of the cops – has perfected the art of the innocent-looking danger. He is dressed like a father going golfing, but even his offer of water is made with eyes that scream violence.

His partner (Marchant Davis) has arms like thighs and fake charm to make your skin crawl.

Slowly the house fills with identikit Bureau men, dressed in the same combination of cargo pants and pastel colored polo shirts.

The house is searched, questions delve deeper into Reality’s work and habits, and eventually an indictment is revealed.

You can see this was first attempted as a play. The hypernatural language really indulges in silences, little actually happens other than peeling back history from reality, and the payoff isn’t as dramatic as you’d like.

At some points my own imagination got way too carried away by gunshots and punches, only to fall back on the extended static dialogue.

But it’s a great performance of slowly rising tension, and the sporadic reminders of the truth of the story (through documentary photos, typed transcripts, and paged redactions) make it stinging with excitement. Reality, it seems, is a movie winner.

Poor Spidey, caught in a web of weak storylines

If you are a Spidey lover I am sure you will enjoy it Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (PG, 140 mins, *)a self-referential beast of a movie.

However, the standard moviegoer finds a long web of confusion and the worst narration.

This sequel has a 4D chess game of a plot; our Spider-Man, across multiple universes, must fight interdimensional Spider-Men to try and stop a character covered in portals to those other universes from killing his father. Less of a miracle and more of a mess.

The animation impressively mixes graphic styles in its different worlds, but two hours and 20 minutes of entertainment doesn’t make it.

Plot swamp aside, lifeless character faces, dead eyes, and flaccid sketch action left me frozen in boredom.

In what felt like two weeks, the previous film in the sequence is swept up, this story is captured, then cut off pre-climax with a “to be continued” promise. . . or should that be a threat.

Fifty years after the death of Noel Coward, an archival documentary, Crazy about the boy (12, 91 min, **) takes us through his life, from precocious upstart (“it was a matter of urgency that I became as rich and successful as possible”) to the waning, tax-evading lord of Jamaica. But it is a curiously superficial affair.

There’s nothing original apart from some readings from Coward, voiced by Rupert Everett and Alan Cumming’s narration that’s way too bright and ‘ITV teatime’.

If you’re a Coward fan, you won’t find anything new here. If you’re looking for a gentle stroll through the obvious, this could be a good place to start.

I’m not sure Bizet would recognize this Carmen (15, 116 mins, ***), billed as a ‘complete reimagining’ of his opera. We are in the US, not Spain, and melodrama is being replaced by raw realism.

Paul Mescal plays Aidan, a former Marine turned border guard in the South who is forced to flee with our Carmen (Melissa Barrera) after a shooting.

Mescal has an excellent, natural but underused singing voice. Barrera doesn’t go much beyond anguished, beautiful expressions. But the flashes of intimate choreography keep things warm and the music (by Nicholas Britell, the man behind Succession’s jingling theme) is welcome when it comes.

You can see that Benjamin Millepied was a choreographer and then a director. It’s visually striking, but expect soft drama for the most part with long, meaningful glances off into the distance, occasionally punctuated by guitar and flamenco.