Venom

Despite their critical and financial success, Sony's first Spider-Man spin-off doesn't attempt to follow either the tone or the scope of the company's recent collaborations with Marvel. Refreshingly free of aggressive, multi-tiered world building, Ruben Fleischer's Venom instead resembles the kind of superhero feature made in the late 1990s - the three-act mutants that passed for comic book adaptations before Blade hit and showed everyone how to really do it. Venom recalls a time when comic book branding was less important than whichever star actor you could attract to a project - Tom Hardy's casting reaching for a kind of reassurance and bankability almost entirely absent from modern superhero fare.

Venom then is best enjoyed as a throwback, a comic book film that sees its titular property as a jumping off point (one that can steered towards exciting motorbike stunts) rather than a conceptual millstone. Routine, but built in a way that we are no longer accustomed to. Hardy up front, giving the kind of twitchy, physical performance that's closer to a larger-than-life, Schumacher-era, Batman villain than the earnest enthusiasm of Tom Holland's web-head. Although likely completely unintentional, it's interesting to note a few similarities between Venom and Hiroshi Watanbe's 1986 OVA, Guyver: Out of Control. Both revolve around an alien bio-armour that invades every level of a person's experience, wrapping their fracturing body in a black sludge that takes an invasive, basically sexual, interest in its host. Conflict in Fleischer and Watanabe's features also revolve around a similar kind of corporate clash - a big business expert submitting themselves to a colder, crueller creature on their way to a showdown with a discombobulated amateur.