Live Action Moana: Same Old Story Again

Moana (PG, 115 mins)

Rating: Three stars 

Verdict: Pointless remake

There are flickers of warmth in Moana, Disney's latest live-action adaptation of one of its own hit animations.

The $200million question (the picture's reported budget) is whether this is enough to overcome the sense that we as an audience are being suckered by yet another exercise in precision-tooled charm.

That's the cynical view, but then Disney hardly bother to conceal the fact that their overwhelming priority is to generate dollars, not to dispense pleasure.

The 2016 Moana was a colossal success, critically as well as commercially. The live-action version duly replicates it almost shot by shot, line by line. 

It offers precious little originality, next to nothing we haven't seen and heard before in animated form, with CGI rather than drawings deployed to bring us the story's cute piglet and comedy chicken.

So, hard as the Polynesian chief's daughter Moana strives to bring back the missing heart of the goddess Te Fiti, which will restore her blighted island to its former lushness, this movie's real essence is the chase for bucks.

On the upside, young Australian actress Catherine Laga'aia is a find in the title role (however dispiriting it is to hear her speaking with an American accent when her Antipodean vowels were right in the first place). 

Engaging and charismatic, she forges a lively chemistry with the mighty Dwayne Johnson, who plays the character he voiced in the animated film (and in the 2024 sequel Moana 2): the narcissistic demigod Maui.

The folk in Disney's bells-and-whistles department do a very nice job of making Maui's tattoos move, which must have been much easier to animate, so there are some solid reasons to see this film, but only if you know nothing of the original. 

If you do, you will wonder why they bothered to make a replica… except insofar that you won't wonder at all.

Evil Dead Burn (18, 110 mins)

Rating: Two stars 

Verdict: Grotesquely violent

 Why bother to make another film in a horror franchise that stretches all the way back to Sam Raimi's 1981 film The Evil Dead? 

Well, they still make money. Lots of it, actually. And Evil Dead Burn might be the goriest and most insanely violent of any of them, which is just how some people like it.

In truth, it barely bothers with a plot. A French woman called Alice (Souheila Yacoub) has married into a cursed family who live in a spooky house. 

That's basically it: the springboard for a series of murderous rampages that become almost comedic in their increasing preposterousness.

There are hardly any scares or chills; it's just gross-out supernatural mayhem with chainsaw decapitations and worse, containing flashbacks to what the director and co-writer Sebastien Vanicek treats as regular, commonplace, non-supernatural violence, committed against Alice by her 'hot-headed' husband in a restaurant kitchen.

Earlier this week, by the way, the chairman of the public inquiry into the 2024 Southport attack which left three little girls dead declared that society 'is confronted with a growing challenge from violence-fixated individuals'. 

But never mind that. Evil Dead Burn opens on Friday in cinemas everywhere.

Rosebush Pruning (18, 97 mins)

Rating: Two stars 

Verdict: Shallow satire

Rosebush Pruning is about another dysfunctional family, and there's violence here too, not to mention suggestions of incest. 

It's a dark psychosexual satire about extreme wealth, in the same vein as Ruben Ostlund's Palme d'Or-winning Triangle Of Sadness (2022) although nowhere near as mischievously sharp.

The ever-excellent Tracy Letts, credited only as The Father, plays a blind, demanding patriarch, whose grown-up children – three sons and a daughter – are encouraged to lead worthless sybaritic lives.

They all live in modernist splendour in Catalonia, having moved there from New York City. 

There are strong echoes of the TV series Succession in the warped relationships between the siblings, but Rosebush Pruning is nothing like as good as that, either.

Indeed, it's a thorough waste of considerable talent, although the casting of Callum Turner as one of the pampered rich sons at least brings a tiny hint of art imitating life, given Turner's extravagant Sicilian wedding to pop star Dua Lipa recently, which reportedly outraged the Palermo locals by shutting down parts of the city.

Turner plays Ed, with Riley Keough, Lukas Gage and Jamie Bell as his siblings Anna, Robert and Jack – and Elle Fanning as Jack's girlfriend Martha, who rather like poor Alice in Evil Dead Burn finds that she has stumbled into one heck of a troubled family.

And that's even before we discover a bizarre secret about The Mother (Pamela Anderson), apparently savaged to death by wolves.

In fairness, Karim Ainouz's film, written by Yorgos Lanthimos's collaborator Efthimis Filippou, is tremendously stylish on the eye, yet commensurately disappointing on the mind.

Also showing 

Forget Harry and Jude, this is England's top double act 

As you may be aware, and while I can't speak for the other home nations, this is a weekend to take enormous pride in England and Englishness, and to find joy, perhaps even hope, in one of the greatest of all English double acts.

Football, what football? I'm referring to the re-release of Aardman's 'claymation' masterpieces A Grand Day Out (1989) and The Wrong Trousers (1993), which long before any of us had heard of Kane and Bellingham turned cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his faithful dog Gromit into national heroes.

To mark 50 years since Aardman's first production as a professional animation studio, all their classics are returning to our cinemas this summer. 

The first of them was A Grand Day Out (U, 23 mins, HHHHH), in which, you'll doubtless recall, our resourceful pair find they've run out of cheese so build a rocket to fly to the Moon (which is of course made of the stuff). 

Had they chosen to go to the corner shop instead, maybe we'd never have heard of them.

As for The Wrong Trousers (U, 30 mins, HHHHH), I remember Nick Park, the genius behind Wallace and Gromit, telling me what a royal equerry once told him: that at Sandringham on Boxing Day 1993, Prince Edward rounded up all the family – 'even Princess Margaret' – and made them watch it on TV. 

There came a further royal stamp of approval when Camilla told a group of schoolchildren that Wallace and Gromit were her husband's 'favourite people' in the world. 

And now they're back on the silver screen in a cracking (and blessedly brief) double bill.

No matter what happens in the World Cup on Saturday, I'm already over the (Wensleydale-flavoured) Moon.

All films are in cinemas from Friday.