The Darkest Hour begins like a Hostel sequel, with two pairs of Ugly Americans (including Into the Wild’s Emile Hirsch and Juno BFF Olivia Thirlby) meeting cute at the hottest club in Moscow. Then the lights go out, the sky starts falling, and suddenly we’re watching an extra-hokey 3-D remake of Brad Anderson’s plenty-hokey-as-it-is Vanishing on 7th Street. Instead of an invisible menace that turns you into a pile of laundry, we get wispy, glowing, semi-visible space phantoms that burn you into a cloud of ash. Great care has been taken to transform Moscow into a deserted urban wasteland. That effort might have been better expended on lending the survivors a glimmer of personality – or otherwise distinguishing this aftermath-of-the-invasion snoozer from the various Syfy Network Original Movies it unfavourably recalls.

AA Dowd

From Time Out New York

Dir Chris Gorak, Category IIA, 89 mins, opens Jan 12