The Day after Tomorrow

This jaw-dropping disaster movie makes director Roland Emmerich's previous outings feel like expensive dress rehearsals. For all their epic destruction, his previous features Independence Day and the lacklustre Godzilla are damp squibs compared to this astonishing, cautionary tale. Rooted loosely in scientific reality, the film piles on the Hollywood excess to deliver a US-centred thrill-ride in which global warming abruptly pushes the planet into a new ice age during one incredible worldwide superstorm. Though there's a human element, focusing on climatologist Dennis Quaid's cross-country journey to Manhattan to rescue his trapped son, Jake Gyllenhaal, it's the weather effects that take centre stage. Putting aside the anticlimactic conclusion, this is cinema as pure spectacle, as tornados, flash floods, hurricanes and snow demolish cities including LA and New York. Never mind that the dialogue is frequently laugh-out-loud cheesy and the performances are often melodramatic, what counts here is the enormous entertainment factor.