At The Movies: Leave The World Behind is an unsettling doomsday drama

Leave The World Behind (M18)

138 minutes, Netflix 4 stars

The story: A weekend family getaway to New York’s Long Island is disrupted by a middle-of-the-night knock at the cabin: two black strangers claiming to be owners of the luxe Airbnb are at the door, seeking shelter from a city-wide blackout.

The apocalyptic thriller Leave The World Behind is M. Night Shyamalan’s recent Knock At The Cabin with an upmarket cast.

A testy Julia Roberts and genial Ethan Hawke play the parents to a teen boy (Charlie Evans) and girl (Farrah Mackenzie) opposite Mahershala Ali and Myha’la Herrold as the unexpected father-daughter arrivals.

The acting is top-notch, including Kevin Bacon’s cameo as a survivalist they seek out for help in their desperation. A mysterious cyber attack has crippled their phones and Wi-Fi. Planes nosedive from the sky and driverless Teslas turn kamikaze, although the couple’s daughter is mostly miffed about her inability to binge the 1990s sitcom Friends on her blank iPad.

The Steadicam zooms and pans, making the widescreen disasters as destabilising as the humour.

Just do not ask this eerie dread-dripping parable for an explanation.

Sam Esmail, creator of the techno-thriller series Mr Robot (2015 to 2019), is the director, and he eschews overt messages despite scattered allusions to conspiracy theories, climate change and modern civilisation’s reliance on electronics.

American author Rumaan Alam’s bestseller of the same title was published in 2020, during the pandemic. Fittingly, Esmail’s adaptation is foremost a paranoid chamber drama of two families isolated together by an unfolding global crisis.

Can the foursome with their racial and socioeconomic fault lines survive their mutual mistrust?

The ambiguous closing punchline will almost certainly stir debate.

Hot take: The world is ending, again, and the excellent ensemble and sneaky camerawork combine for a suspenseful contribution to the overcrowded doomsday genre.

Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget (PG)

101 minutes, premieres on Netflix on Dec 15 3 stars

The story: Ginger (voiced by Thandiwe Newton) and American rooster Rocky’s (Zachary Levi) idyll on a human-free island does not last. After a daring breakout in Chicken Run (2000), the couple and their fellow egg-scapees are risking their hard-won freedom and breaking back into Tweedy’s Farm to save the remaining poultry.

Chicken Run was British studio Aardman Animations’ feature debut. Two decades on, the claymation comedy remains the highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time.

Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget by director Sam Fell (ParaNorman, 2013), who succeeds Peter Lord and Nick Park, will not equal that.

The belated sequel, again set around 1950s Yorkshire, is bigger and slicker at the expense of the predecessor’s do-it-yourself charm. But it is not without its own silly gags. Laugh out loud at the laser-firing robo-ducks patrolling the farm that is now a hi-tech processing plant for the world’s first chicken nuggets.

The evil mastermind at the lab-lair is Dr Fry (Nick Mohammed), current husband of old foe Mrs Tweedy (Miranda Richardson).

And among the captives is Ginger and Rocky’s tween daughter Molly (Bella Ramsey): The curious chick had sneaked off to explore what she thought was a fairground, hence precipitating the dangerous rescue operation aided by mother hen Bunty (Imelda Staunton), bird-brained Babs (Jane Horrocks) and veteran Royal Air Force cockerel Fowler (David Bradley).

Their Mission: Impossible derring-do is pure Hollywood and it is the characters both new and returning, each plasticine figurine lovingly hand-moulded, that continue Aardman’s spirit of endearing English eccentricity.

Hot take: One can cluck at the lack of surprises compared with the original hit or simply appreciate Aardman Animations’ still delightful British daftness and its uncovering of the evils behind chicken nuggets.