Poltergeist 

Director: Gil Kenan, Starring: Sam Rockwell, Rosemary DeWitt, Jared Harris, Cert: 15A, Running Time: 93 minutes

You’ll remember a movie from the early 80s called Poltergeist which was written by Steven Spielberg and directed by Tobe Hooper, who is probably best known for the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre and a good TV mini-series based on Steven King’s Salem’s Lot.

That Poltergeist was a fairly controversial success, with the rumour mill churning out whispers that Spielberg was supposed to have taken it over while they were shooting. The film did well at the box office and inspired two sequels, the latter one coming out as far back as 1988. 

The original focussed on a family that moved into a house in the suburbs which was invaded by ghosts who communicate with one of the three children through a TV set. The rebooted version, which is out this weekend, tells pretty much the same story, except that the family’s economic circumstances have deteriorated due to the father’s loss of his job and this forces them into taking the house in the first place and subsequently to stay in it.

There are several well-staged setpieces in Poltergeist – a tree, a weeping willow, seems to come to life, there is a tense incident with a power drill – but overall, it is disappointing to realise that the movie has more in common with audience-goosing spookers like Insidious and Sinister than the original and while it has the backing of a major studio and a decent middle-range budget, it doesn’t make much of them.

Sam Rockwell and Rosemary DeWitt bring personality to the early sequences but Jared Harris as a psychic with a bad Irish accent does nothing for it.

Tomorrowland: A World Beyond 

Director: Brad Bird, Starring: George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Britt Robertson, Cert: 12A, Running Time: 130 minutes

Tomorrowland, which is based on an area of Disneyland that features imaginative visions of the future, stands out as one of the few major films of the summer that is not derived from a comic book or is a sequel, prequel or reboot.

Set in the past and the present, it focuses on two characters who possess inventive inquisitive minds. In the 60s, young Frank Walker dreams of perfecting his design for a rocket pack which would help him to fly and while on a visit to Disneyland he meets a young android ambassador who leads him into a secret exhibit that opens into a parallel dimension.

In the present, a tomboy named Casey lives in Florida and hopes that she can keep NASA from scaling back its space programme, both because she wants to explore the universe and because she doesn’t want her engineer father (Tom McGraw) to lose his job. Her life changes when she finds a strange decorative pin that transports her, too, to the eponymous Tomorrowland. Here she meets a grown-up version of Frank Walker (George Clooney), an aging, embittered recluse and part of the story’s intentions is to show us how she helps him to rediscover his hope and his interest in the future.

It is around this time that the movie begins to explain its mysteries and the explanations aren’t particularly original or satisfying. Tomorrowland develops into a familiar chase story, leading to some awkward narrative twists and some typical Disney sermonising. But pretty visuals make it worthwhile, nonetheless, and nobody can do a chase in Hollywood right now like Brad Bird, who created some dazzling and dizzying sequences in Pixar’s The Impossibles. A sequel to that is his next venture.