The Exorcist: Believer

With a watchable reboot of Halloween already under his belt, director David Gordon Green turns to another landmark horror with this well-meaning sequel. Taking his lead from William Friedkin's iconic 1973 film, Green ignores previous sequels and the TV show, focusing on the lives of widower Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr) and his 13-year-old daughter in suburban Georgia. When she and her best friend go missing, only to reappear with diabolical personalities, a familiar pattern emerges that compels believers and sceptics alike to seek a supernatural solution. Green peppers proceedings with visual cues and Easter-egg nods to the original film, not least when a refrain from Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells announces the return of Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil. Doubling the demonic evil with a pair of ethnically diverse, obscenity-spewing teenagers should have increased the shocks, but this occasionally jump-scary homage fails to break any new ground. Instead, it feels as if it has come too late, arriving in the wake of countless franchises (The Conjuring, Insidious) that have already bled Friedkin's classic dry.