BEN IS BACK (15, 103 mins) Three stars

The return of a recovering drug addict to the fold throws festive preparations into disarray in Academy Award-nominated writer-director Peter Hedges' sensitively observed drama.

Anchored by powerhouse performances from Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges, Ben Is Back explores the devastation wrought by addiction on various members of a fractured New York family, who are divided about whether to support a wayward teenager after a litany of painful relapses and mistakes.

The film's emotional heartbeat is the seemingly unbreakable bond between a fiercely protective mother and her 19-year-old son, who repeatedly pushes away his biggest supporter for fear of letting her down. Again.

"If you really knew me, you'd be done with me," Lucas Hedges' conflicted child tells Roberts' lioness during a night-time journey of self-discovery, which occasionally strains credibility as Peter Hedges' picture glides towards its tearful final reckoning.

A nicely calibrated script doesn't short-change the two leads including a stand-out sequence at an addiction support group meeting, where Ben publicly apologises for the pain he has inflicted on his loved ones while his mother sits silently behind him, tears welling in her eyes.

Ben Is Back traverses similar rocky territory to Beautiful Boy, albeit without graphic scenes of drug-taking.

Holly Burns-Beeby (Roberts) returns from Christmas shopping with her level-headed daughter Ivy (Kathryn Newton) and six-year-old son Liam (Jakari Fraser) to find her oldest child Ben (Hedges) standing awkwardly in the driveway.

He has come home for Christmas, apparently with the blessing of his sponsor from the sober living house where he has been receiving treatment and support for addiction.

While Holly is delighted by the unexpected family reunion, Ivy fears Ben will fall from grace and she telephones her stepfather Neal (Courtney B Vance), who races home to remonstrate with his wife.

She agrees to personally take charge of her boy for Christmas.

"You do not leave my sight because, for the next 24 hours, you are mine," Holly warns Ben.

Tensions inside the tinsel-laden Burns-Beeby home detonate when the family returns from Midnight Mass to find someone has broken into the house and taken the family's dog.

Neal lays the blame squarely on Ben's shoulders and the young man heads into the night flanked by Holly to make amends.

Ben Is Back is an actors' showcase and Roberts and Lucas Hedges excel in fraught exchanges.

The mystery of the dognapping provides a loose framework for writer-director Peter Hedges to explore dynamics between family members and test their resolve to breaking point.

He has a sharp ear for snappy dialogue and gives the impressive ensemble cast the time and space they need to convincingly plumb the depths of their characters' inner turmoil.

FISHERMAN'S FRIENDS (12A, 112 mins) Three stars

A true-life story of musical success against the odds inspires director Chris Foggin's feelgood fish-out-of-water drama comedy.

Scripted by Nick Moorcroft, Meg Leonard and Piers Ashworth, Fisherman's Friends takes considerable artistic licence with the remarkable rise of eight men from Port Isaac in Cornwall, who signed a record deal in 2010 and became the first traditional folk act to land a top 10 album in the UK charts.

The group subsequently performed for the Queen at the 2012 Jubilee celebrations and brought their haunting sea shanties to the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.

The men continue to raise funds for charity and released a fourth collection of bawdy songs last year, punningly titled Sole Mates.

Foggin's film trawls for the essence of the crabs-to-riches fairy tale and delivers a decent haul of laughter and sentiment interspersed with foot-stomping musical performances.

Some of the cast's Cornish accents are, frankly, lost at sea and a lukewarm central romance across the cultural divide is hastily engineered to provide the film with one female voice to counter the macho posturing.

London-based music executive Danny (Daniel Mays) heads to Cornwall on a boozy stag weekend with his boss Troy (Noel Clarke), colleague Driss (Vahid Gold) and boorish groom-to-be Henry (Christian Brassington).

Their drunken antics on paddle boards lead to a lifeboat rescue manned by local fisherman Jim (James Purefoy) and his pals.

"Once you cross the (River) Tamar, you're not in England any more. We're land apart," explains Jim, who is fiercely proud of his Cornish heritage.

During their time in Port Isaac, the stag party witness locals singing sea shanties in the harbour and Troy jokingly suggests Danny should offer the swarthy fishermen a record deal because their repertoire is "copyright-free songs".

Danny falls hook, line and sinker for Troy's prank and records Jim, Jago (David Hayman), Rowan (Sam Swainsbury), Leadville (Dave Johns) and the rest of the group in a local church, where acoustics are perfect.

As Danny spends quality time in the close-knit village, he nurtures a crush on Jim's daughter Alwyn (Tuppence Middleton), whose primary concern is her daughter Tamsyn (Meadow Nobrega).

The jaded executive cannot remain in Cornwall forever.

When the time comes to court record labels, the fishermen don sunglasses to resemble "Reservoir Sea Dogs" and accompany Danny to the bright lights of London.

Fisherman's Friends hauls up a familiar catch of friendship, betrayal, redemption and self-analysis, shot on location in picturesque Cornwall.

Mays brings a likeability to his world-weary corporate lackey, who is gifted a new lease of life through personal ties to a band that values community and tradition before celebrity and fortune.

Supporting characters are sketched in broad strokes, diminishing the emotional impact of one scene that brings the villagers together in a time of sombre reflection.

THE PRODIGY (15, 92 mins) Two stars

A psychopath lives to slay another day by possessing the body of a cherubic eight-year-old boy in director Nicholas McCarthy's hoary horror.

Propagated in the same blood-soaked ground as The Bad Seed and The Omen, The Prodigy delivers a few cheap jolts as it pits a distraught mother against her demonic moppet in present-day Philadelphia.

A couple of memorable moments, like the boy's babysitter (Elisa Moolecherry) removing a large sliver of glass from her foot after she walks into a trap laid by her young charge, are fleeting diversions from a conventional and pedestrian plot.

Pacing is uneven - the plodding narrative accelerates without warning through gore-smeared interludes - and characterisation is weak, starving us of strong emotional ties to the central figures as they make sense of their dire predicament.

Orange Is The New Black star Taylor Schilling works tirelessly to add emotional depth to her stricken parent that isn't on the pages of Jeff Buhler's script.

Meanwhile young co-star Jackson Robert Scott lasts considerably longer here than he did as ill-fated Georgie, who chased a paper boat into a storm drain in the chilling remake of Stephen King's It.

Horror fans, hungry for a stylish and original jaunt into the unknown, will have to look elsewhere for skin-crawling satisfaction.

Serial killer Edward Scarka (Paul Fauteux) dies in a hail of police bullets at a secluded Ohio farmhouse.

His death coincides with John Blume (Peter Mooney) and wife Sarah (Schilling) welcoming their first child into the world hundreds of miles away in Pennsylvania.

"He's perfect!" they gush, staring into the different coloured eyes of their son.

The boy, Miles (Jackson Robert Scott), exhibits disturbing behaviour from an early age and speaks fluent Hungarian in his sleep.

When he turns eight, the youngster temporarily slips into a fugue state and attacks a classmate with a wrench.

"Sometimes when I leave my body, bad things happen!" Miles whimpers to his shocked mother.

In desperation, Sarah takes her boy to psychologist Elaine Strasser (Paula Boudreau), who refers the Blumes to Arthur Jacobson (Colm Feore).

He is an expert on reincarnation and believes little Miles could be a vessel for a tormented soul.

Sarah is initially reluctant to digest Arthur's outlandish theory but Miles' destructive outbursts force the mother to contemplate the possibility that she is sharing her home with a displaced spirit.

Her frenzied quest for answers leads to Edward Scarka's intended final victim, Margaret St James (Brittany Allen).

The Prodigy telegraphs its grisly intentions and doesn't deviate from a well-trodden path of predictable shocks.

The fate of the family's dog is sealed before its first bark.

At 92 minutes, running time feels bloated and a protracted finale could be trimmed for expediency without diminishing the lacklustre impact.

Also released...

WHAT MEN WANT (15, 117 mins)

A talented woman in a male-dominated arena magically learns the inner secrets of her macho competitors in a raucous comedy directed by Adam Shankman, which gender-reverses the tomfoolery of the 2000 comedy What Women Want starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt.

Sassy sports agent Alison Davis (Taraji P Henson) has worked hard to earn a promotion but she is passed over for a male colleague to the dismay of her office assistant Brandon (Josh Brener).

Alison commiserates with gal pals Olivia (Wendi McLendon-Covey), Ciarra (Phoebe Robinson) and Mari (Tamala Jones), who invite a psychic called Sister (Erykah Badu) to share her foresight with the group.

During the session, Alison drinks a cup of pungent tea and then heads to a nightclub, where she hits her head.

When she regains consciousness, the sports agent can hear the innermost thoughts of every man around her.

Alison realises she can exploit this newfound ability to outwit her rivals in the office and sign basketball's rising star, Jamal Barry (Shane Paul McGhie).

Meanwhile, she bolsters a fledgling romance with a sexy bartender called Will (Aldis Hodge).

HARVIE AND THE MAGIC MUSEUM (U, 87 mins)

A boy musters his courage to save friends and family from an ancient evil in a Czech computer-animated adventure co-directed by Martin Kotik and Inna Evlannikova, which has been dubbed into English.

Harvie is fanatical about computer games and he hopes to impress his absent-minded father Mr Spejbl, who runs the local puppet museum, by gaining admission to the Gamers' Hall of Fame.

Unfortunately, Harvie's Herculean efforts come to naught and his computer is smashed in a heated exchange with his old man.

When the mayor orders the demolition of the puppet museum, Harvie, his best friend Monica and trusty pooch Jerry tour the bowels of the building and discover an artefact that magically brings the puppets to life.

Suddenly, Harvie has a menagerie of mechanised friends to help him realise his dreams.

However, the museum is under the spell of a Machiavellian Puppet Master, who threaten the safety of Harvie and everyone he holds dear.

GIRL (15, 106 mins)

Victor Polster delivers an award-winning performance as a transgender ballet dancer in Belgian writer-director Lucas Dhont's debut feature.

Co-written by Angelo Tijssens, Girl meditates on gender identity through the eyes of teenager Lara (Polster), who is poised to begin hormone treatment with the unstinting support of her father Mathias (Arieh Worthalter) and younger brother Milo (Oliver Bodart).

They have relocated to a new city as part of Lara's transition so the teenager can attend a dance school and hone her talents in ballet shoes.

Teachers are initially reluctant to admit Lara since she hasn't been dancing on pointe for years like the other students.

However, the teenager is determined to prove the naysayers wrong and she works harder than her peers to prove herself while she contends with growing pains and changes to her body.

BENJAMIN (15, 83 mins)

Stand-up comedian and author Simon Amstell pilfers from personal experience for his second feature in the director's chair, which contrives a bittersweet romantic comedy on the streets of London.

Benjamin (Colin Morgan) enjoyed critical success with his debut film but he is plagued with self-doubt as he prepares to unveil his follow-up, No Self, at the London Film Festival.

Socially awkward best friend Stephen (Joel Fry), who is failing to make waves on the stand-up comedy circuit, pledges his support to Benjamin as the film's premiere approaches.

During a night out to escape his insecurities, Benjamin becomes transfixed by handsome musician Noah (Phenix Brossard) and sparks of romance kindle something deeper.

Alas, Benjamin's self-destructive streak threatens to undermine the relationship before it has begun.

THE FIGHT (12A, 91 mins)

Released: March 15 (UK, selected cinemas)

Award-winning comic actress Jessica Hynes makes her directorial debut with a hard-hitting drama about a mother who must stand up for her children in a world where bullying and intimidation are rife.

Care worker Tina (Hynes) dotes on the infirm and vulnerable in Folkestone, where she has raised a family with her supportive husband Mick (Shaun Parkes).

It's a stressful job and Tina relies on workouts at the local gym and self-help podcasts to keep her volatile emotions in check.

When Tina learns that her oldest child Emma (Sennia Nannua) is being bullied at school by classmate Jordan (Liv Hill), she frets about the best course of action to protect her flesh and blood.

Meanwhile, the stricken family prepares to welcome another mouth to feed: Tina's father Frank (Christopher Fairbank).

UNDER THE SILVER LAKE (15, 139 mins)

Writer-director David Robert Mitchell, who sent chills down the spine with his creepy psychological horror It Follows, scratches the underbelly of present-day Los Angeles in a perplexing thriller which echoes of David Lynch.

Disenchanted 33-year-old Sam (Andrew Garfield) is fascinated by a mysterious woman called Sarah (Riley Keough), who makes a splash in the swimming pool at his apartment complex.

No sooner is Sam smitten by this enigmatic stranger than Sarah vanishes without trace.

Without any solid leads, Sam embarks on a quest to unravel the mystery of Sarah's disappearance, which ensnares the loner in a web of intrigue, corruption and diabolical deception.

Mitchell's film is simultaneously available to stream on MUBI.

FILM CHART

1. Captain Marvel

2. Fighting With My Family

3. The Lego Movie 2

4. Instant Family

5. How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

6. Green Book

7. The Aftermath

8. The Kid Who Would Be King

9. Bolshoi Ballet Live: Sleeping Beauty

10. Alita: Battle Angel

(Chart courtesy of Cineworld)