Surrogates (12, 85 mins, Walt Disney, DVD £15.99/Blu-ray £23.99).

Stars: Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, James Cromwell, Rosamund Pike, Ving Rhames, Jack Noseworthy.

DOCTOR Lionel Carter (Cromwell) oversees a future in which humans use robotic doppelgangers to carry out day-today tasks. When his son is murdered, seemingly while connected to a surrogate, the scientist asks FBI Agent Greer (Willis) and his partner Jennifer Peters (Mitchell) to apprehend the man responsible, Miles Strickland (Noseworthy), who is in possession of an ‘overload device’, which literally fries the brain of the surrogate and its user. Greer’s robotic helper is damaged and the cop is forced to re-enter the real world and contend with his estrangement from his wife Maggie (Pike). Surrogates is a futuristic action thriller with an intriguing premise, which is clumsily executed by director Jonathan Mostow.

Aliens In The Attic (PG, 82 mins, Twentieth Century Fox, DVD £19.99/Bluray & DVD Combi-pack £28.99)

Stars: Carter Jenkins, Kevin Nealon, Gillian Vigman, Ashley Tisdale. Voices of JK Simmons, Thomas Haden Church, Kari Wahlgren, Josh Peck.

TEENAGE swot Tom Pearson (Jenkins) heads to a lakeside retreat with his father Stuart (Nealon), mother Nina (Vigman) and sisters Bethany (Tisdale) and Hannah (Boettcher plus his uncle and three children. Four aliens land intent on recovering a device from the basement of the Pearsons’ holiday home. They take remote control of anyadults using electrical darts shot into the necks of the victims.

Thankfully, these devices have no effect on children and the resourceful youngsters realise they are all that stands in the way of mankind’s destruction.

The Invention Of Lying (12, 96 mins, Universal DVD £19.99/Blu-ray £24.99)

Stars: Ricky Gervais, Louis C K, Jennifer Garner, Jeffrey Tambor.

LOWLY screenwriter Mark Bellison (Gervais) lives in an alternate reality in which everyone instinctively tells the truth.

Facing financial ruin he nervously tells a porky at the bank, asking for 800 rather than the 300, and begins to exploit deceit for personal gain with best friend Greg (Louis C K) and the lovely Anna McDoogles (Garner). Sadly the script’s mean-spirited plot means the project is starved of big laughs. Co-written and codirected by Matthew Robinson, Gervais’ new comedy is an unnecessarily crude subversion of polite social mores, littered with cameos from the likes of Stephen Merchant, Christopher Guest and Edward Norton.