This week a brave girl joins forces with three magical guardians to track down her missing astrophysicist father in an otherworldly adventure and an emotional young woman is held against her will in a mental health facility.

UNSANE

Seeing is deceiving in Steven Soderbergh's hallucinogenic mind trip for a traumatised data analyst, who sees the menacing face of a stalker everywhere she turns.

Scripted by Johan Bernstein and James Greer, Unsane is shot entirely on a smartphone and generates sparks of claustrophobia from the restricted screen framing and occasional blurring of images as characters race around dimly lit corridors.

Visuals are intentionally murky, reflecting the gloom that descends upon the stricken heroine as she is separated from people she loves and the security of her home environment.

In his capacity as director and editor, Soderbergh loosens his usually firm grasp on the film's quickening pulse as boundaries between reality and nightmarish imagination blur with violent consequences.

Shaky handheld camerawork has a verite, improvised quality akin to a fly-on-the-wall documentary rather than a studio-financed psychological thriller.

Stockport-born actress Claire Foy convincingly casts off the pomp and ceremony of her award-winning role in The Crown to play Sawyer Valentini, who has moved from Boston to Pennsylvania to escape the barrage of text messages of a mentally unstable admirer called David Strine (Joshua Leonard).

Human interaction is limited to clipped conversations with work colleagues, anonymous hook-ups in bars and reassuring telephone calls to her concerned mother (Amy Irving).

Always looking over her shoulder, Sawyer searches online for support groups for victims of stalking.

She is directed to Highland Creek Behavioural Centre, where trained staff will apparently diagnose the best course of action.

"I'm alone in a strange city and I never feel safe," she sombrely confides to one counsellor.

Filling in a series of forms to complete her treatment, Sawyer is shepherded into the depths of the facility, where she discovers that her hastily scrawled signature has condemned her to a living nightmare.

"By signing this, you've consented to voluntary commitment," tersely explains nurse Boles (Polly McKie).

Sawyer is forcibly relocated to a dormitory with other patients including nice guy Nate (Jay Pharoah) and live wire Violet (Juno Temple).

As she queues for medication, Sawyer is horrified to discover that another nurse bears a spooky resemblance to David.

Could he have cunningly infiltrated Highland Creek or has she finally lost a hard-fought battle with delirium?

Unsane sacrifices deep and satisfying character development to explore the freedom that smartphone technology grants an Oscar-winning filmmaker, who can now get uncomfortably close to his protagonists in confined spaces - both real and imagined.

Foy sports an impressive accent and affects a series of compelling facial expressions that run the gamut of confusion, terror and steely indignation.

Once the script commits itself to revealing whether the terror is only in Sawyer's muddled head, tension dissipates and we're left with a freewheeling piece of genre filmmaking that unsettles but never chills.

A WRINKLE IN TIME

With its impassioned, tub-thumping messages of self-belief and individuality, A Wrinkle In Time is certainly not A Waste Of Time for the target audience of peer-pressured teenagers, who are force-fed an airbrushed version of "reality" on social media channels.

Nor is director Ava DuVernay's picture the emotionally rich call to arms that it earnestly strives to be, hamstrung by gaping plot holes, inconsistent characterisation and a steadfast reliance on swathes of digital effects to propel the narrative towards its syrupy conclusion.

Fantastical realms crammed with otherworldly flora and fauna, reminiscent of James Cameron's mega-blockbuster Avatar, provide an eye-popping backdrop to a 13-year-old girl's painful coming of age during a madcap time-travelling quest to locate her missing father.

The pacing is frenetic, in part to distract from loopy logic, which results in an exhausting 109 minutes of style over meaty, heart-tugging substance.

The glittering jewel in the film's wonky tiara is 14-year-old lead actress Storm Reid.

With a deftness beyond her years, she beautifully captures the awkwardness and aching vulnerability of her heroine, who constantly questions whether she possesses the strength to achieve her otherworldly destiny when she is repeatedly driven to tears by barbs from her neighbour Veronica (Rowan Blanchard), queen bee of a catty coterie of popular girls.

Gifted student Meg (Reid) has shunned friendship since the disappearance of her father Alex (Chris Pine) four years ago during his ridiculed experiments into space travel via a frequency-generated tesseract.

Meg's mother Kate (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) valiantly holds the family together and cares for her daughter and precocious adopted son, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe).

During a walkabout in the neighbourhood, the siblings encounter Meg's classmate Calvin O'Keefe (Levi Miller) followed by three astral seers named Mrs Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), Mrs Who (Mindy Kaling) and Mrs Which (Oprah Winfrey).

This extravagantly attired three-strong chorus reveals that Meg's father is alive in another dimension and they need the children's help to locate Alex before an insidious evil named The It pollutes the universe with hatred, jealousy and self-loathing.

"You just have to find the right frequency and have faith in who you really are," Mrs Which tenderly assures Meg.

Leaping between magical kingdoms, Meg, Charles Wallace, Calvin and their guides encounter a quixotic soothsayer called The Happy Medium (Zach Galifianakis) and a diabolical henchman (Michael Pena) who preys on the children's darkest fears.

Based on Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 novel, A Wrinkle In Time is less than the sum of its expertly crafted parts.

Reid's fearless performance demands we care about Meg and urge her onwards to glory.

Winfrey glides serenely through every frame replete with rhinestone eyebrows, while Witherspoon predicts doom and gloom under her breath because of the children's obvious insecurities.

"They're human, they're very limited," she laments.

So is DuVernay's picture.

PACIFIC RIM UPRISING

Steven S DeKnight makes an inauspicious feature film directorial debut with a soulless and bombastic sequel, which has been crudely bolted together using spare parts from Transformers and Independence Day: Resurgence.

Lorne Balfe's thunderous orchestral score competes with cacophonous sound effects to make us wince in our seats from the opening titles.

The discomfort intensifies when characters open their mouths to spew risible exchanges that pass for dialogue.

The film's gleaming hardware is impressive: hulking, digitally rendered robots cutting a swathe through the toppling skyscrapers of Tokyo with flame-licked swords, or grappling above and below the cracking ice of a Siberian wilderness.

In the heat of battle, it's not easy to recall which human pilots are inside each colour-coded automaton so there is no sense of jeopardy as metallic fists clatter into welded jaws.

When it comes to the software of a malfunctioning script credited to four writers, Pacific Rim Uprising is in dire need of upgrades.

Character development is laughable and pivotal deaths barely register an emotional ripple.

Comical interludes fall flat with a joyless thud, including John Boyega's attempts to wisecrack like Will Smith as the arrogant hero of the hour.

"This face is set up well," he grins self-approvingly.

The same cannot be said for DeKnight's picture.

Ten years after the Pan Pacific Defense Corps (PPDC) unleashed an army of Jaegers - 25-storey tall robots operated by mind-melded human pilots - to defeat gargantuan alien creatures known as Kaiju, humanity has become complacent.

Former pilot Jake Pentecost (Boyega), whose father General Stacker (Idris Elba) gave his life to protect the world, is contacted by estranged older sister, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi).

She implores him to return to the PPDC to head off the threat posed by Liwen Shao (Jing Tian), slippery chief executive of Shao Industries, who intends to replace the current generation of Jaegers with unmanned drones.

Haunted by ghosts of the past, Jake agrees and he mentors a spunky 15-year-old cadet called Amara (Cailee Spaeny), whose family were crushed to death during a Kaiju attack.

An insidious new threat emerges from the ocean and Jake and fellow pilot Lambert (Scott Eastwood) sprint into action while technical geniuses Dr Newt Geiszler (Charlie Day) and Dr Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) identify the aliens' weak spot.

Pacific Rim Uprising is hard-wired with hoary cliches.

Stirring battle cries for humanity to vanquish the otherworldly aggressors are randomly generated from countless better war films.

Screen chemistry between Boyega and Eastwood is inert and a clumsily inserted object of lust for both men, played by Mexican actress Adria Arjona, is painfully misjudged when real-life battle cries off camera are for parity not objectification.

A soap opera coda makes clear that film-makers intend to power up the Jaegers again if the sequel is a success.

Pull the plug now.