Great effort, ish. Well done for persevering. Re the sci-fi film, you need wordplay for the last four letters, but “in” equates to “at”, so the last two letters are the normal abbreviation for Arabic.
We finally got there, helped by the conversations in this thread. Thank you everyone. A very enjoyable crossword. Daughter 2 (in her early 20s) helped us as we set out on it and was quickly intrigued and involved. Daughter 1 is already doing cryptics from a variety of places. Rather proud of that. Thanks Maskerade!
My wife has only recently joined me doing the crosswords (when she's finished the sudoku). Quite often she gets the answer and then I tell her why she's right! Teamwork.