London Has Fallen, Truth, Hitchcock / Truffaut and more: This week's new movie releases reviewed

You can see our review of the week's biggest release, the Coen Brothers' Hail, Caesar!, here (short version: we liked it, with reservations).

But what else is out this week? Friday's new releases include a newsroom thriller, a Gerard Butler action sequel, a Richard Gere drama (yes, another one), a Hitchcock documentary and a psychological horror mystery.

LONDON HAS FALLEN (15)

A sequel to 2013's Die-Hard-in-the-White-House thriller Olympus Has Fallen, this cheaper, nastier follow-up sees thuggish Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) having to protect his Presidential best buddy (Aaron Eckhart) once again when a terrorist unleashes a devastating attack on London during the Prime Minister's state funeral.

Combining shoddy CGI explosions, poorly staged, repetitive action sequences and an openly racist, jaw-droppingly jingoistic script that feels like it was written by Donald Trump, this is further let down by a spectacularly charmless performance from Butler, whose character seems to genuinely enjoy stabbing people. Come back, Jack Bauer, all is forgiven.

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TRUTH (15)

A perfect companion piece to the Oscar-winning Spotlight, this gripping newsroom procedural focuses on 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett), who came under fire during the 2004 election when conservative supporters questioned the validity of the evidence in a report on George Bush's military record.

Blanchett delivers a driven, fiery performance as Mapes and Robert Redford is superb as veteran news anchor Dan Rather, while credit is due to writer-director James Vanderbilt (adapting Mapes's book), who manages to turn the minutiae of a paper trail into a compelling drama, even when the real-life outcome of the story is widely known.

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HITCHCOCK / TRUFFAUT(12A)

Something of a must-see for Hitchcock fans, director Kent Jones' fascinating documentary explores the cultural impact of the eight-day interview that critic-turned-filmmaker Francois Truffaut conducted with the Master of Suspense in 1962.

Using a combination of home movie footage, film clips and audio, Jones traces the circumstances that lead to the encounter and takes us through the interview itself, before devoting the second half of the movie to a series of enthusiastic talking head contributions from the likes of David Fincher, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and, of course, Martin Scorsese, each of whom offers thoughtful analysis of Hitchcock's lasting cinematic influence.

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TIME OUT OF MIND (15)

You wait ages for a Richard Gere drama and then two come along at once. Hot on the heels of last week's not-very-good Gere vehicle The Benefactor comes this refreshingly unsentimental tale from writer-director Oren Moverman, in which the twinkly-eyed former Pretty Woman star plays a homeless man bumming around the streets of New York.

Using disorienting framing techniques, a stripped-down script and a remarkable sound design consisting entirely of overheard, out-of-shot conversations and street noise, Moverman creates a starkly realistic, documentary-like atmosphere and Gere responds with an immersive, lived-in performance that ranks among the actor's best work. Great final shot, too.

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GOODNIGHT MOMMY (15)

Co-written and directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, this deeply creepy Austrian chiller takes place in an isolated country house where a mother (Susanne Wuest) is recovering from cosmetic surgery with her face wrapped in bandages. Meanwhile, her twin sons Elias and Lukas (Elias and Lukas Schwarz, comfortably joining the ranks of cinema's scariest twins) become convinced that she's not who she says she is and decide to take matters into their own hands.

Expertly paced and superbly acted, this is a genuinely disturbing mystery horror that goes to some extremely dark places, marking Fiala and Franz out as future talents to watch.

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