Alien: Homunculus, more like. A glossy, shambling, earnest, misguided film. It's best ideas are constrained by being an Alien film, but are not original enough to stand alone without the set dressing provided by the franchise.

I can't justify rating this any lower because it does hit highs - David Johnson is superb as Andy, the creature and setpiece design are both superb.

Ultimately though, Romulus is not as evocative as the original Alien, and winds up instead using references…

Nobody runs away from home anymore.

My parents, their partners, my aunts and my uncles. I hear from them all of how they left to work abroad as teenagers, how they fled home out of desperation, need or just boredom. They tell me they roamed the countryside for days at a time.

I hear too about the wonders that directors like Hayao and Hidetaka Miyazaki found in the countryside as children, I hear from family about how the world used…

An uneven film whose climax comes too early and ends with a bit of a whimper.

It's gorgeously shot with a brooding and oppressive tone, with a sense of angularity to its composition that really boxes you in - cinematographer Andres Arochi is definitely on my radar after this one.

Actually an appreciably well crafted film all round, in the mechanical sense at least - the dialogue is both lived in and ornate, (with Kiernan Shipka in particular just going…

Watching the Boy and the Heron feels like reliving a difficult time from childhood.

You don't quite remember how things happened, the details are hazy. The nightmares are vivid. Narratives blur together, stopping and starting jarringly. It's not a film that coalesces neatly, but that's honest, true to its themes of loss, war, chaos and creation. It's remarkably successful in evoking not the feeling of being a child, but the feeling of remembering childhood.

It's also Ghibli's most visually arresting…