Solitary (UK 2020: Dir Luke Armstrong) NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2020

When Isaac Havelock (Johnny Sachon) wakes up he's in a small, self contained chamber. The only other occupant is Alana Skill (Lottie Tolhurst) and he has no idea where he is. The room's single porthole gives a clue; they're both 150 miles above earth in a space capsule.

It's the year 2044 and both Isaac and Alana are prisoners, sentenced by the court not to a prison sentence, but transportation; a form of punishment originally discontinued in the UK in the 1850s, but reintroduced to deal with a population explosion and a dying planet. They are both part of the Samsara project, which uses prisoners to colonise and populate other worlds, easing the pressure on earth's resources. But there's a problem: the ship with which they were due to dock and continue their journey has exploded, and their capsule, along with a number of others, is currently drifting loose with no way for central control to bring it back to earth.

This is the core premise which Armstrong uses to build his movie, essentially a character study of two different people, thrown together and dependent on each other for survival. Of course the fact that they're both criminals means that the co-operative process isn't smooth sailing (although Isaac's past reveals him to be a man more sinned against than sinning). The craft's only other occupant is an invisible one: Eva, the onboard computer, with a voice that sounds like every automated banking service you've ever used (and cursed). External contacts are restricted to ground control, who intermittently messages them, a media company who want the skinny on what's really going on and who was responsible for the ship exploding, and the occasional call to Isaac's ex.

London in 2044: just on of the impressive effects in Solitary

Solitary, which started off life as a short film, is a sedate piece. In his debut feature Armstrong chooses slow story development over a flashier quick edit approach - often a fallback for directors working with limited set resources - and most of the movie comprises Isaac and Alana bickering within the constraints of their small capsule, and exploring various moral dilemmas and their own culpability; in fact the sci fi element is little more than a macguffin to create the background for their interactions. But Armstrong, whose background is in sfx, creates a very convincing London skyline twenty four years in the future, and also a backdrop of space and the IT within the capsule, which distract nicely from the limits of the small set.

While there are other cast members, largely included to flesh out Isaac and Alana's backstories, this is essentially a two hander (three if you count Kathryn Vinclaire, the voice of Eva) and Sachon and Tolhurst both do well with a script that is serviceable but never remarkable. Solitary isn't overly flashy, and its human concerns, favoured over spectacle and bombast, make it ideal for a small screen watch. It's to the director's credit that he managed to complete the thing during lockdown too.

Inspired Pictures will be releasing Solitary across multi-platforms and in all major retailers on Monday 31 August.

Invasion Planet Earth (UK 2019: Dir Simon Cox)

Imagine. You're a filmmaker, maybe not in the first flush of youth. You've had one not very well publicised feature made years ago, but you have a project within you so ambitious in scope that it becomes an all consuming passion. But you have little resources, financially or technically, at your disposal, to realise the vision. So what do you do?

If you're Simon Cox, you crowdfund, you find some willing investors, and you learn how to achieve the effects you want onscreen yourself. And you exercise patience. A lot of patience. But boy was it worth it.

In the movie's 1980s prologue, a young boy, Tom, is glued to a TV show called 'Kaleidoscope Man' (the original title of the film, dropped when the director thought it might be too confusing). He dreams of being a superhero and saving the world - hold that thought.

Flash forward to now; Tom is all grown up (Simon Haycock) and things aren't going so well for him. He's still getting over his father's death, and Tom and his wife Mandy (Lucy Drive) also recently lost a child. Their heartbreak is slightly relieved when Mandy, a teacher, tells Tom that she's pregnant. "This is our new start," she tells him optimistically. So you know things aren't going to go well.

Later that day Tom, Mandy and various others in the town, including the local priest, are subject to the same weird hallucination; of apocalyptic scenes, explosions and burning cities. The vision is over as quickly as it began, but leaves all the witnesses shocked. At school Mandy tells the children the story of Noah and the ark. Tom is a doctor who works at a care home, managed by Claire Dove (Toyah Willcox, who gets to sing the end theme song too), which provides support for people with a range of mental health problems, and which is facing closure by the Council. Among the patients are Harriet, an angry woman with a narcissistic personality disorder (Julie Hoult), Floyd, a paranoid schizophrenic (Danny Steele) and manic depressive artist Samantha (Sophie Anderson) whose wild paintings include a representation of a mushroom cloud, part of the same hallucination experienced by Tom and the others.

The aliens strike in Simon Cox's Invasion Planet Earth

As if the hallucination was an early warning, it's not long before the real invasion comes to town. Amid the 'War of the Worlds' style devastation (the city of Birmingham, where the film was shot, mercifully survives, as does New York City, which is also toast in the film) a gigantic, three pronged spaceship dispenses hundreds of smaller harvester craft who, instead of decimating all of the population, hoover them up, transporting them into pods in which they are trapped, but still alive. Tom, Harriet, Floyd and Samantha seem to be hive mind linked, sharing each other's darkest fantasy nightmares: after the attack the group find themselves stranded on an alien planet. "This isn't home, is it?" asks one of them, and they'd be right. But their abandonment isn't random, and as the oddly assorted group slowly bond in the face of adversity, they become aware that others may be about to give them a higher purpose, particularly Tom, who may final realise his superhero dream.

Invasion Planet Earth is certainly not without its problems. Cox's idea for the movie dates back to 1999, and it was planned for production many times over the next twenty years, before finally being completed at the beginning of 2019. As a result the story lacks a little in cohesion - at times it feels like a DIY Lifeforce. Some of the effects sequences are better than others, and the big screen release it's about to get will show this up which may not go down so well with audiences used to more polished, and way bigger budgeted SFX movies.

But let's stand back a moment from those quibbles and take a look at what we have here. Cox has pulled off an amazing feat: an exciting ID4 style alien invasion movie with a real heart, and a payoff that provides hope among the onscreen carnage. He has assembled a credible cast who keep things very grounded and therefore believable, with special mention for Simon Haycock, a square jawed but fallible hero. Yes it does on occasion have the feel of a Sunday teatime TV series, but that's not a criticism: H G Wells's 'War of the Worlds' was as homespun as you like (it was the movie adaptations that removed the home-counties-in-peril atmosphere of the book) and in some ways Cox's film retains that domesticity, while adding in some very Arthur C Clarkean concepts. That's not to say that Invasion Planet Earth doesn't have spectacle: Cox reckons around 900 people were involved in the central alien attack sequence. And you have to admire a director whose tenacity had him learning special effects skills - yes the compositing on screen is mainly Cox's work - raising all the finance for the movie and even co-writing the end theme song, although praise is also due for Benjamin Symons' dramatic score. Excellent work all round.

Invasion Planet Earth is released in UK Cinemas from 5th December, Digital Download from 16th December and DVD from 30th December

High-Rise (UK/Belgium 2015: Dir Ben Wheatley)

While Ben Wheatley remains one of this country's more interesting film directors, his decision to take on the 'unfilmable' JG Ballard novel 'High Rise' where others have failed (adaptations by Bruce (Withnail &I ) Robinson and Canadian director Vincenzo Natali are just two of the past attempts to bring it to screen life) seems like a step too far, or a mis-step at least, on his CV.

The first problem with High-Rise is the source material itself. Ballard was a great writer of ideas, but not necessarily a great novelist. The central theme of the book - that of a building which because of its very size, structure and capacity for anonymity facilitates a swift and comprehensive breakdown of the moral codes of those living within it - is also its main theme, applied again and again in the text. It's an allegorical one at that. Literary allegory does not generally transfer well to film, so the repetition of the theme of societal breakdown in the events on screen soon tires. It's a bit like ordering a three course meal at a restaurant where all the courses are the same. What Ballard did achieve was the sense of scale involved, from the design of the building with its vast mid floor shopping and leisure facilities, to the sheer numbers involved in the high-rise riots. Wheatley simply doesn't have the budget for this - his sets look cheap and some of the CGI is just plain poor.

There is also the issue of the film's setting. Wheatley has side-stepped the problem that, in today's world, the war in the high-rise would not have remained self contained because of social media, by locating the film in an imprecise mobile phone-free 1970s and in an unspecified place (not necessarily London, where the book was based). While this move solves a lot of issues, it raises others. The film's rather mocking recreation of the decade that fashion forgot - all hipster trousers and floral tops - has already been done to death in shows like Life on Mars and a myriad of movies from Boogie Nights to The Look of Love. There's nothing new in the look of High-Rise, and Wheatley has failed to achieve the uneasy mix of brutalist settings and garish costumes in Kurbick's 1971 movie A Clockwork Orange, a film which hangs around this one like a ghost.

Wheatley's films have to date been relatively small affairs formed from the director's own ideas, about odd, often unlikeable people living fraught lives while events unravel around them. Although that could also be said to be true about High-Rise, this is a different type of film for him. First it's a relatively faithful adaptation of a novel. It has a much bigger cast with some star names, and a wider if cost-restricted canvas (perhaps the combined wages of Tom Hiddleston, Elisabeth Moss, Jeremy Irons and Sienna Guillory didn't leave a lot over for the production budget, which is a shame because their roles could equally have been taken by unknown actors, so - deliberately- bland are their performances). Amy Jump's script, so good in A Field in England, feels trapped in Ballard's leaden prose, and that dark and subtle humour which has been a common and successful element of Wheatley's past movies has been sacrificed for some fairly deadly one liners and visual 'gags' lifted straight from the pages of the book.

High-Rise is also a mess. The book's depiction of the gradual rise of the madness in the building has been traded in for a montage scene about half way through the film which transforms the residents from mild bickerers to sex crazed savages - we then get a further hour of 'action' which is neither exciting nor particularly shocking (David Cronenberg's 1975 movie Shivers, also inspired by Ballard's book, managed this so much better). In the Q&A I saw accompanying the film Reece Sheersmith was complaining that much of his role as Steele, the crazed dentist, was dropped from the final cut. While I know that this happens when editing films, nevertheless I do not consider this a good sign.

Finally I suppose 'High Rise' remains an unfilmable book largely because many years have passed since its publication, and the original prescience of its subject matter is now normalised. We have high rises all around us these days. Government housing policy mixes the rich with the less rich, with developers building separate entrances for the 'haves' and 'have mores' without any obvious signs of resident wars breaking out. In our capitalist times such accommodation polices aren't seen as segregation but rather opportunity. So Wheatley's film is too little too late, a toothless romp with little to say, overlong and uneven, and, yes, rather low-rent.