Locke (15, 85 mins, Lionsgate Home Entertainment UK)

IVAN LOCKE (Tom Hardy) is a family man with a devoted wife Katrina (Ruth Wilson) and two teenage sons. As a construction foreman, Ivan is supposed to be channelling his time and energy into an £11m project in Birmingham that could make or break him. Instead, he abandons the building site to speed to London to the bedside of co-worker Bethan (Olivia Colman), who is about to give birth to their child. Travelling at terrifying speed down the M6 and M1, Ivan races through the night to witness his offspring emerging into the world, sacrificing everything he holds dear for that one extraordinary moment.

En route, he must telephone his deputy Donal (Andrew Scott) to remotely supervise the work and explain to his family why he has abandoned them on a night they were supposed to be watching football together.

Set within the claustrophobic confines of the lead character’s car, Locke is a riveting one-hander, which unfolds largely in real time. Hardy expertly conveys the anguish of a man who is dismantling the foundations of his cosy existence.

Transcendence (12, 119 mins, Entertainment In Video)

DR WILL CASTER (Johnny Depp), a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, and his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) hope to create a machine with sentience. Extremists called RIFT (Revolutionary Independence From Technology) oppose this advancement and shoot Will with a polonium-tainted bullet.

Doctors give Dr Caster a month to live, so Evelyn suggests Will continues his work by uploading his mind to a super-computer.

Their colleague Dr Max Waters (Paul Bettany) urges caution. Will infiltrates every hard drive on the planet, as his thirst for knowledge intensifies.

Dr Waters joins forces with fellow academic Joseph Tagger (Morgan Freeman), FBI agent Donald Buchanan (Cillian Murphy) and military man Colonel Stevens (Cole Hauser) to create a virus that will corrupt Will and protect mankind from his insidious influence.

Transcendence is a ham-fisted sci-fi thriller, which imagines the consequences of an artificial intelligence running amok in the digital realm. The high-brow concept of Jack Paglen’s undernourished script is at odds with the whizz-bang pyrotechnics that director Wally Pfister is asked to deliver, ultimately starving the film of jeopardy. Depp’s lifeless performance suggests a robotic doppelganger was hired to take his place while Hall and Bettany are tortured and tearful.

Tarzan (PG, 94 mins, Entertainment One)

JOHN GREYSTOKE (voiced by Mark Deklin) ventures deep into the jungle with his wife Alice (Jaime Ray Newman) and their young son to search for the impact site of an ancient meteorite. The Greystokes’ helicopter crashes, killing everyone except the young Greystoke heir. He is rescued, raised by apes and rechristened Tarzan. As an adult, Tarzan (voiced by Kellan Lutz) encounters humans once again when beautiful environmentalist Jane Porter (Spencer Locke) arrives in the jungle with William Clayton (Trevor St John), the Machiavellian CEO of Greystoke Energies. He also seeks the elusive meteorite and its limitless power.

Tarzan is a slick yet unsatisfying computeranimated reworking of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s fictional ape man that struggles to marry the legend with a subtext about mankind’s unsustainable depletion of the earth’s resources. Don’t be misled by the colourful visuals and early scenes of comical monkey business. This adaptation isn’t a cutesy caper – tragedy stalks every frame and a couple of sequences could be too scary for the very young. Lutz beats his chest on cue and Locke essays a spunky heroine.