LONGLEGS no stars

 This hugely overpraised horror film sacrifices suspense and shocks for a nonsensical plot about a serial killer though it would appear it's the Devil who takes centre stage. It says he gets the best tunes but it's unlikely any of his tunes here will chart. "Longlegs" is nothing more than a pretentious and self-consciously arty horror movie with a woefully one-dimensional performance from Maika Monroe as the FBI agent on Longleg's trail.

If the film has a plus side you could say it's very attractively photographed and the casting of an almost unrecognizable Nicholas Cage as the serial killer gives the film a certain OTT liveliness but the psuedo-supernatural element and all that business with the dolls scuppers the film. Whatever happened to the good old bad old days of the likes of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" when serial killers were serial killers and devil dolls were devil dolls and never the twain met. Mostly a load of codswallop.

THE GIRL WITH THE NEEDLE **

 Horror movies come in all shapes and sizes and there's no denying that black and white Nordic art-house movies, by their very 'look', can often be classed as horror movies particularly when set in the past and dealing with what we might call 'grim' subject matter.  Magnus von Horn's "The Girl with the Needle" qualifies on all accounts from the superimposed faces and silent screams of its pre-credit sequence to its attempted abortion with a needle in a Turkish bath and that's before we even get close to the film's real horrors; the ghost of Bergman is never  far away.

Karoline, (Vic Carmen Sonne,  excellent), is a young seamstress whose husband comes back from the Great War with most of his face missing while she's pregnant by her employer who drops her like a hot potato. She is saved from a botched abortion by Dagmar, (a terrific Trine Dyrholm), who seems to be running some kind of black market adoption agency and who takes Karoline under her wing but this so-called act of kindness isn't what it seems.

The horrors inherent here are the horrors of trying to survive in a cruel world in which survival doesn't seem like an option. This is the grimmest of morality plays in which every image feels like a slap in the face. It might look amazing but as we come to realize just how terrible the actions of these people are the further we withdraw from them and from the movie itself. As I said, horror movies come in all shapes and sizes.