Film, Reviews

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

21 Aug 2008

Fresh from the critical and commercial success of his Oscar-feted Spanish horror-fantasy Pan’s Labyrinth, Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro returns to Hollywood with a second blockbuster adaptation of Dark Horse Comics’ cult supernatural title. A…

The Wackness

21 Aug 2008

COMEDY/DRAMA Jonathan Levine’s follow-up to the surprisingly good horror film All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is another voyage into nostalgic romanticism and teenage growing pains. This time Levine is pining for his lost youth with a film set in 1994…

Ben X

21 Aug 2008

Mock-documentary Ben X introduces us to teen Asperger’s sufferer Ben. Moving backwards and forwards between his so-called life of bullying and high school torture and his escape into online role-playing games, the film’s doom laden narrative is led by…

College Road Trip

21 Aug 2008

Aiming for the generational conflict of Freaky Friday, director Roger Kumble’s family-comedy-drama focuses on trust issues between high-flying teen Melanie (Raven-Symoné) and her over-protective father, police chief James Porter (Martin Lawrence). When…

The Strangers

21 Aug 2008

THRILLER/HORROR Even in 2008, sleeper hits (low budget, low forecast films that become box office hits) still happen. Take writer-director Bryan Bertino’s taut thriller The Strangers which cost ten million dollars to make (a paltry amount in today’s…

Also Released - Film

21 Aug 2008

Babylon AD (12A) 90min •• Post-apocalyptic thriller starring Vin Diesel as Russian mercenary Toorop who is escorting a very special woman (Michelle Yeoh) to China. This woman carries inside her the possibility of a spiritual future for all mankind.

Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame

21 Aug 2008

DRAMA Teenage Hana Makhmalbaf, the youngest of the Iranian filmmaking family that comprises famous father Mohsen (Kandahar), mother Marzieh (Stray Dogs) and sister Samira (At Five in the Afternoon), follows in the footsteps of her relations to make a…

Get Smart

21 Aug 2008

After the financial/emotional excremental woes of Evan Almighty and Dan in Real Life, comic Steve Carell shores up his career with a safe property: Peter Segal’s tent-pole blockbuster revamp of 1960s spy spoof Get Smart. Maxwell Smart (Carell) is an…

Mad Detective

21 Aug 2008

THRILLER ‘Apply emotions to investigate!’ is the motto of the mad detective at the centre of Johnny To and Wai Ka-fai’s follow-up to 2003’s My Left Eye Sees Ghosts. The an unfortunately-named Inspector Bun (Ching Wan-lau) is a police investigator…

My Name is Sabine

21 Aug 2008

DOCUMENTARY As an actress, Sandrine Bonnaire has worked with some illustrious French filmmakers including Maurice Pialat, Agnes Varda, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol. Her Name is Sabine, her own impressive directorial debut, is an intimate and…

Somers Town

21 Aug 2008

DRAMA Shane Meadows’ seventh feature takes its title from the working class residential area situated between London’s Euston and King’s Cross railway stations. Originally financed by Eurostar as a short film to promote the service’s new terminus at…

Step Brothers

21 Aug 2008

COMEDY ‘Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream’ is the George W Bush quotation which opens new Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers. Such crude expression sets the tone for a sporadically funny but generally gross comedy in…

The Lion in Winter

21 Aug 2008

DRAMA Still looking good 40 years on, this bawdy, witty chamber piece confined within a medieval French chateau revolves around King Henry II’s obsession with choosing an heir to his throne, and the efforts of his scheming wife Eleanor of Aquitaine…

The Producers

21 Aug 2008

COMEDY Mel Brooks’ classic and surely – with full respect to High Anxiety and Blazing Saddles – his greatest film still stands up brilliantly forty years on. For those unfamiliar with its plot, we meet a rapacious Broadway producer (Zero Mostel) and…

Trouble In Mind

21 Aug 2008

CRIME/DRAMA ‘A little bit of everybody belongs in hell’ say Kris Kristofferson’s former cop, a man who’s recently served time for killing a mobster. Then there is Keith Carradine’s man on the make who changes his image from country boy to androgynous…

Under the Bombs

21 Aug 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE This piece from former documentary maker Philippe Aractingi speaks loudly of his own artistic origins in reportage. In it, a mother returns to Lebanon at the end of the Lebanese-Israeli war of 2006 in order to find her son, who has…

Also Released - Film

14 Aug 2008

Star Wars: Clone Wars (PG) 98min •• Emperor Palpatine, Count Dooku and General Grievous are poised to rule the galaxy. The universe rests in the hands of the daring Jedi Knights led by Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi along with brand-new heroes like…

Gimme Shelter

14 Aug 2008

DOCUMENTARY (E) 91min (Warner Home Video DVD retail) The second Maysles brothers documentary to be given a new lease of life on DVD in so many months, Gimme Shelter is by far their most contentious film, and arguably the most tragic film ever made…

Mark Allen

14 Aug 2008

After getting himself a cat, Allen decides to explore the relationship between humans and their pets, and finds himself in deeper than expected when he dons a dog suit to attend a party. Plus he's got pictures of cats in hats and goats with scary eyes…

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

14 Aug 2008

FARCE/ROMANCE (PG) 91min Opinionated, unemployable London governess Miss Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) has just lost another job. Dumped by her agency and homeless Miss Pettigrew manages to worm her way in to the house of American wannabe starlet…

Salesman

14 Aug 2008

DOCUMENTARY (E) 91min (Eureka DVD retail) The first of two recent DVD debuts for seminal documentaries made by the Maysles brothers, Salesman is the non-narrated account of four Boston door-to-door bible sellers. Made in 1968 and shot in black and…

Tropical Malady

14 Aug 2008

DRAMA/FANTASY (12A) 118min (Second Run DVD retail) Thai architect, artist, writer and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has made a handful of experimental documentaries and fictional films that are so wayward and quirky in structure that they…

Wild Child

14 Aug 2008

ROMANCE/COMEDY (12A) 98min ‘What is this, Hogwarts?’ exclaims bratty Californian kid Poppy (Emma Roberts, niece of Julia) on her arrival at a genteel girls boarding school in England, ruled over by tough-but-fair headmistress (Natasha Richardson).

You Don’t Mess With The Zohan

14 Aug 2008

COMEDY (12A) 112min Anyone who tries to understand Middle Eastern politics based on the contents of an Adam Sandler comedy deserves all they get. Despite his good intentions he bites off more than he can possibly chew in this, his new comic opus. For…

Also Released - Film

7 Aug 2008

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (12A) 111min • Chunky, old-fashioned explorer Rick O’Connell returns, and this time he’s off to check out the catacombs of ancient China. Joined by his son Alex (newcomer Luke Ford), wife Evelyn (Maria Bello) and…

Angel Face

7 Aug 2008

THRILLER (PG) 91min (Blackhorse DVD retail) Otto Preminger’s complex and clever 1952 film noir about how salt of the earth ambulance driver Frank (Robert Mitchum) becomes mixed up with femme fatale Diane Tremayne (Jean Simmons) is certainly something…

Best of the 15th Raindance Film Festival Shorts

7 Aug 2008

SHORTS (15) 100min (PIAS DVD retail) Cottoning on to the fact that in the future the best film festivals will probably take place online and from the comfort of our own homes, those good people at Raindance have put together a best of DVD. The…

Death Defying Acts

7 Aug 2008

ROMANCE/THRILLER (12A) 97min Freely mixing historical fact with fictionalised biography, this Brit-Aussie co-production turns on a fascinating premise: a battle of wits and wills between world-famous escapist and sceptic of all things supernatural…

Elegy

7 Aug 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE (15) 112min Philip Roth, arguably America’s greatest living writers (and certainly one of the major chroniclers of middle class ennui), hasn’t been well served by adaptations. Goodbye, Columbus (1969), Portnoy’s Complaint (1972) and The…

Elite Squad

7 Aug 2008

THRILLER (18) 114min Between the wars the French anti-democrat, arch monarchist and writer Georges Bernanos wrote that: ‘The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.’ Foreseeing France’s defeat…

Married Life

7 Aug 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE (PG) 90min Suburban America, 1949. President Harry S Truman has just unveiled his Fair Deal plan and the People’s Republic of China is in the process of being born. As befits his business class status, mild-mannered Harry Allen (Chris…

Never Back Down

7 Aug 2008

ACTION (15) 108min (Momentum DVD retail/rental) Never Back Down isn’t meant for high analysis, it’s basically a film of hot young teens punching each other. The plot to string these acts of violence together is so basic it hardly warrants a mention…

The Fox and the Child

7 Aug 2008

FAMILY/ADVENTURE (U) 92min Luc Jacquet’s follow-up to March of the Penguins has a title which sums up the film’s content precisely. The Fox and the Child is the simple story of a giggly eight-year-old French child (Bertille Noël-Bruneau) who strikes…

A Comedy of Power

31 Jul 2008

THRILLER (PG) 110min (ICA DVD retail) Veteran French filmmaker Claude Chabrol takes on the story of magistrate Eva Joly’s ceaseless investigation into France’s leading oil company Elf Aquitaine. The inquiry led to a national scandal in 1994 which The…

Before the Rains

31 Jul 2008

DRAMA (12A) 98min Inspired by Israeli short Red Roofs, scripted by the late American Cathy Rabin (to whom the film is dedicated), directed and photographed by Bollywood filmmaker Santosh Sivan, starring Brit Linus Roache, yank Jennifer Ehle and…

Cass

31 Jul 2008

CRIME/DRAMA/BIOPIC (18) 108min Films about football hooligans have resulted in some of the worst examples of British filmmaking in the last ten years – Green Street, Rise of the Footsoldier, The Football Factory have all scored own goals. So it comes…

Flash Gordon

31 Jul 2008

SCI-FI/ADVENTURE (PG) 106min (Optimum DVD retail) Given director Mike Hodges once admitted to an Edinburgh International Film Festival audience that his 1980 blockbuster version of Alex Raymond’s comic strip was made up as he went along, it’s all the…

Man On Wire

31 Jul 2008

DOCUMENTARY (12A) 94min Meet Philippe Petit – French artist, performer and high wire walker. On the afternoon of 6 August 1974, Petit and six accomplices set off for the World Trade Centre in an unmarked van. With forged ID passes and dressed as…

Sarah Silverman - Jesus Is Magic

31 Jul 2008

COMEDY (18) 72min Taboos are there to be shattered, barriers are in place to be broken down and sweary words are there to be bellowed out on prime time television. Sarah Silverman knows all this and has made it her speciality. This rather…

Space Chimps

31 Jul 2008

ANIMATION/COMEDY (U) 80min Crowded out in the summer schedules by WALL-E and Kung Fu Panda, Space Chimps is the latest effort from Vanguard Animations destined to suffer the also-ran status of Valiant and Happily N’Ever After. On the whim of a…

The Dark Knight

31 Jul 2008

SUPERHERO/THRILLER (12A) 152min British filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s revamp of the superhero franchise reaches its apotheosis with this sequel to Batman Begins, a well-imagined, perfectly executed film that combines blockbuster spectacle with indie…

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

31 Jul 2008

WESTERN (15) 180min The third part of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western ‘Dollars trilogy’ receives a new print re-release ahead of its predecessors A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More (their digital re-release comes in September). As stupid…

The Long Day Closes

31 Jul 2008

DRAMA (PG) 81min (BFI DVD retail) Following on from the recent releases of The Terence Davies Trilogy and Distant Voices, Still Life comes the arrival on DVD of what Davies loosely described as the third and final part of an autobiographical series of…

The Love Guru

31 Jul 2008

COMEDY (12A) 86min Aside from his ongoing Shrek and Austin Powers properties, Mike Myers hasn’t come up with a new comedy character in over a decade. Myers claims his latest creation, Guru Pitka, has been honed by comedy-club appearances, but there’s…

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

31 Jul 2008

MYSTERY/SCI-FI (15) 104min Ten years after the first X-Files film, and six years after the end of the series, Mulder and Scully are back and they are together-together. When Scully persuades Mulder to get involved in a case involving psychic priest…

Baby Mama

17 Jul 2008

COMEDY (12A) 99min Each generation gets the Mary Tyler Moore it deserves; as creator and star of NBC’s 30-Rock sitcom, Tina Fey has earned herself the right to be 2008’s funny-girl. And even though writer/director Michael McCullers seems intent…

Batman: Gotham Knight

DVD Review

17 Jul 2008

Intended to fill the gaps between Batman Begins and Dark Knight, Gotham Knights offers us six animated shorts, much in the same way as The Animatrix did for The Matrix. Each story is self-contained and created by a different writer (including Greg…

Film Books Round-up

17 Jul 2008

In terms of wealth of research and weightiness of tome Richard Brody’s biography of Jean-Luc Godard, Everything is Cinema (Faber) ••••, should be a masterpiece. Yet for all its detail Godard remains an enigma, and this seems neither for want of research…

Lou Reed's Berlin

17 Jul 2008

CONCERT MOVIE (12A) 85min In 1973, Lou Reed was primed for a stellar pop career, following up the success of Transformer’s glam pop thrills with Berlin, an ambitious rock opera showcasing Reed’s versatile capabilities. But Berlin tanked, both…

Paris

17 Jul 2008

DRAMA (15) 130min Having explored Barcelona in Pot Luck and St Petersburg and London in Russian Dolls, writer/director Cedric Klapisch comes back to the French capital with this sentimental ‘choral’ drama. Romain Duris, Klapisch’s perennial…

Summer Hours

17 Jul 2008

DRAMA (12A) 102min In summer sunshine in the countryside north of Paris it’s the 75th birthday of widowed matriarch Helene (Edith Scob), and attending the celebrations are her three children, university economist Frédéric (Charles Berling)…

WALL-E

17 Jul 2008

ANIMATION (U) 103min Can Pixar do no wrong? On the evidence of the CG animation studio’s ninth feature film, the answer is a resounding no. Once again Pixar pushes the envelope in the field it’s been trailblazing since the early 1980s, delivering…

Also Released - Film

3 Jul 2008

Garbage Warrior (15) 88min ••• Hippie, sustainable housing architect and all round recycling guru Michael Reynolds presents his self sufficiency vision of the future in this absorbing documentary. The film follows Reynolds attempt to make his dream of…

DVD Round-Up

3 Jul 2008

The time has come to celebrate British cinema. Not the British cinema of Hitchcock, Powell and Pressburger, David Lean or Robin The Wicker Man Hardy, but the cinema of subsidies and struggle, the results of which have barely seen the inside of a cinema…

Hancock

3 Jul 2008

SUPERHERO/COMEDY (12A) 91min The writers and director of Hancock take a hyper-powered leaf out of the Mystery Men and Return of Captain Invincible school of heroism with Hancock. Will Smith plays a nihilistic superhero who has fallen out of favour…

Interstate 60

3 Jul 2008

ROAD MOVIE (15) 111min (Scanbox DVD retail) Subtitled ‘Episodes of the Road’, this plays more like an edited version of a primetime US television comedy aimed at teenagers. Written and directed by Bob Gale, comic book writer and regular Robert…

Intimate Enemies

3 Jul 2008

WAR (15) 100min (Contender DVD retail) Will the Algerian war turn the humanist lieutenant at the centre of Florent Emilio Siri’s film into a monstrous shadow of his former self? After being posted to Algeria, Terrien (Benoît Magimel), the…

Jules et Jim

3 Jul 2008

NEW PRINT/ROMANCE (PG) 105min French New Wave filmmaker Francois Truffaut’s third film, made in 1962, was undoubtedly his masterpiece. Set in the 1910s and 20s it is the story of a freewheeling love triangle between alpha female Catherine (Jeanne…

Kung Fu Panda

3 Jul 2008

COMEDY/ANIMATION (PG) 91min In the words of Carl Douglas’ 1974 disco hit: ‘Everybody is kung fu fighting.’ Everybody, that is, apart from overweight panda Po (voiced by Jack Black). He dreams about joining his heroes, the Fierce Five, in butt-kicking…

Mes amis, mes amours

3 Jul 2008

COMEDY/ROMANCE (15) 106min Mes Amis, Mes Amours resembles a Gallic version of a Richard Curtis movie, set in an affluent, quarter of London and peopled by French expats: it’s less a romantic comedy than a sentimental fantasy of city living among an…

Paris Lockdown

3 Jul 2008

GANGSTER (18) 143min (Momentum DVD retail/rental) This brutally efficient, thoroughly gratuitous French gangster film from Frédéric Schoendorffer, director of Scene de Crime and Spy Bound, explores the lives of various gangsters on the make.

Savage Grace

3 Jul 2008

DRAMA (18) 97mins Sixteen years on from his debut, the New Queer Cinema-defining Swoon, Tom Kalin finally makes a return with his sophomore feature, a flawed but nevertheless fascinating examination of dysfunction among the American aristocracy. Based…

The Apartment

3 Jul 2008

NEW PRINT/SATIRE (PG) 125min Billy Wilder’s corrosive 1960 lampoon of corporate America is now so familiar to most people that it barely seems to deserve the time investment that this new print demands. Look again, though, and there is plenty of…

The Graveyard

3 Jul 2008

HORROR (18) 83min (Revolver DVD rental/retail) Michael Hurst’s horror-by-numbers film harks back very ineffectively to the three decade old genre conventions of Friday The 13th and Halloween without evoking the slightest hint of the atmosphere. In…

The Mist

3 Jul 2008

HORROR/SCI-FI (15) 126min After The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, writer/director Frank Darabont continues his one-man championing of the Stephen King estate with an adaptation of novella The Mist. After a thunderstorm in an isolated rural…

The Visitor

3 Jul 2008

DRAMA (15) 106min Ageing widower and economics professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is a grouch. He spends his days giving his students a hard time. When he is sent to Manhattan to present a dull paper, a series of misunderstandings lead him to…

Tick Tock Lullaby

3 Jul 2008

DRAMA (15) 72min (Peccadillo DVD retail) In one particular scene of this film, a good looking thirty-something notices that he’s been trailed by a couple of ladies, and comments that it’s the first time he’s been cruised by two gay women, and that…

14 Kilometres (14 Kilometros)

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

This issue-driven Spanish drama isn’t afraid to draw on several stock clichés of the well-trodden road movie genre. Three Africans undertake the arduous journey from Niger to Spain, crossing deserts, trying to get through corrupt border controls and…

Before The Rains

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Santosh Sivan, US/India) 98min Set against the backdrop of the decline of the British empire and growth of the nationalist movement in southern India in 1937, this tale of forbidden love between an English spice merchant (Linus Roache) and a local…

Bigga Than Ben: A Russian's Guide to Ripping Off London

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(SA Halewood, UK) 85min Allegedly based on the diary of a young Moscovite who came to London in the late 1990s, Bigga than Ben is, for the majority of its running time, a distracting black comedy. Cobakka (Ben Barnes) and Spiker (Andrei Chadov) are a…

Death Defying Acts

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Gillian Armstrong, UK, Australia) 97min It’s 1926, and the world tour of escape artist Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce) brings him to Edinburgh. There he’s charmed by local con-artist Mary McGarvie (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who poses as a psychic to put…

Donkey Punch

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Oliver Blackburn, UK) 99min New British director Oliver Blackburn marks himself out as a name to watch in this misogynistic horror set in Marbella. When three lasses from Leeds (Sian Breckin, Jaime Winstone and Nichola Burley) decide to board a yacht…

Eat, For This is My Body

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Michelange Quay, Haiti/France) 105min Quay’s semi-abstract look at colonial elements in Haiti is comparable to two 1980s touchstones, Marion Hänsel’s Dust and Claire Denis’ Chocolat. While there is an impressive opening shot that glides over the…

Elite Squad (Tropa D'Elite)

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(José Padilha, Brazil) 118min Based on Luiz Eduardo Soares’ bestseller, Elite Squad is a favela thriller from the director of 2002 documentary Bus 174. It’s 1997 in Rio de Janeiro, months before a visit from Pope John Paul II. The rundown housing…

Fears of the Dark

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Various, France) 85min This episodic animation is destined for cult status. Five respected graphic novelists have each penned a story detailing what made them scared at night. Dogs, mad girls and silence all feature strongly. Each story has then been…

Jesus Christ Saviour

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Peter Geyer, Germany) 84min At the beginning of Werner Herzog’s engrossing documentary homage to his favourite actor and nemesis Klaus Kinski, My Best Fiend, there is a tantalising glimpse of Kinski performing his infamous 1971 Jesus concert. Finally…

Patti Smith: Dream of Life

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Steven Sebring, USA) 109min Patti Smith, the singer-poet and one-time ‘godmother of punk’, bares her soul in this intimate self-portrait, culled from over 11 years of filming with her friend, the photographer Steve Sebring. Beginning in 1995, the film…

Shiver (Eskalofrio)

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Isidro Ortiz, Spain) 91min Once again Spain is proving to be a breeding ground for newly discovered horror talent. Isidro Ortiz puts in his most satisfying feature yet as paranoia and the old staple of something lurking in the woods are brought into…

Somers Town

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Shane Meadows, UK) 75min While Shane Meadows’ last outing, This is England, showed the racist side of British nationalism, his follow-up, the black-and-white Somers Town, demonstrates just how nice the Brits can be to immigrants. Starting life as a…

Standard Operating Procedure

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Errol Morris, USA) 116min The great documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War) turns his investigative eye towards the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. The coup of the film is that Morris interviews some of the soldiers who…

The Edge of Love

19 Jun 2008

DRAMA (15) 110min Dylan Thomas, he of the milk wood, once remarked that: ‘When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.’ The Edge of Love is the story of how the great Welsh poet burnt a very big bridge, one that connected him to an…

Tiramisu

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Paula van der Oest, Netherlands) 90min Abandoned by her theatre director husband for a younger woman, middle-aged actress and retail therapy junkie Anne seems unconcerned by the impending loss of the Amsterdam houseboat she and her long-suffering…

The Wackness

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Jonathan Levine, USA) 110min Jonathan Levine’s follow-up to his superior teen horror flick All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is just as assured a film, although this wigged-out high school movie is greatly enriched by being a far more personal project.

A Complete History of My Sexual Failures

19 Jun 2008

DOCUMENTARY (18) 93min Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned – most people would regard this maxim as pretty true. Documentary filmmaker Chris Waitt, however, flies in the face of danger. After finding himself on the receiving end of a string of…

Adulthood

19 Jun 2008

DRAMA (15) 99min Despite a fairly miserable showing at the box office 2006’s Kidulthood has spawned a sequel. Like its predecessor Adulthood’s London-centric depiction of inner-city struggles won’t speak as immediately to a Scottish audience but it’s…

Couscous (La Graine et le mulet)

19 Jun 2008

DRAMA (15) 154min Filmmaker Abdel Kechiche builds on the promise that he displayed with 2003’s L’Esquive by creating a drama similar in style and spirit to Vittorio De Sica’s 1951 neorealist fantasy Miracle in Milan. The man in need of a miracle in…

Female Agents (Les Femmes Des Ombres)

19 Jun 2008

WAR/THRILLER (15) 116min Spring 1944, the lead up to the Normandy landings, and the technical planning and manufacture of a floating dock has been going on since January. When a British geologist ends up in a French hospital, the plan is thrown into…

Teeth

19 Jun 2008

HORROR/COMEDY (18) 93min Vagina dentata is the Latin name for a vagina with teeth, a primal fear which crops up in a number of different cultures and philosophies, now emerging at the centre of this teen flick written and directed by Mitchell…

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

19 Jun 2008

FANTASY/ACTION (PG) 143min In the second instalment of the Narnia film adaptations, the Pevensie children are summoned back to CS Lewis’ fantasy kingdom by Prince Caspian’s blowing of a magic horn, expecting lion king Aslan to rear his head and…

The Escapist

19 Jun 2008

THRILLER (15) 101min The origins of this smart and tough British prison escape thriller lie in a short film, 2004’s Get The Picture, which writer-director Rupert Wyatt made with actor Brian Cox as a showcase for his evidently considerable talents. Cox…

The Happening

19 Jun 2008

DRAMA/SCI-FI (15) 90min The best and worst of M Night Shyamalan’s questionable talents are on display in The Happening, but after The Village and the dire Lady in The Water, it’s good to see Shyamalan hitting any sort of form at all. The apocalyptic…

The Incredible Hulk

19 Jun 2008

SUPERHERO (12A) 112min By general consent, Ang Lee’s 2003 film Hulk was considered a flop. Five years on from its failure to win over fans of the Marvel Comic monster/superhero – and to clean up at the box office – comes this relaunch of the franchise…

The Ruins

19 Jun 2008

HORROR (18) 90min From Hostel to Paradise Lost, there are obvious political reasons for the current glut of horror films featuring groups of American teenagers holidaying abroad who get picked off one-by-one by mysterious forces. But even Marshall…

The Waiting Room

19 Jun 2008

DRAMA (15) 105min Elderly Roger (Frank Finlay) sits in a suburban London train station, forlornly waiting for his dead wife to arrive, his presence providing the catalyst for a Brief Encounter-style chance meeting between Anna (Anne-Marie Duff) and…

Wanted

19 Jun 2008

THRILLER/ACTION (18) 111min Scottish comic book writer Mark Millar's ultra-violent graphic novel gets the Hollywood blockbuster treatment in this sfx-heavy actioner that benefits from the skewered perspective of Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, who…

Gone Baby Gone

5 Jun 2008

THRILLER/DRAMA (15) 113min Ben Affleck’s long delayed (because of the Madeline McCann case) child abduction crime drama finally stumbles in to British cinemas. Based, like Clint Eastwood’s 2003 film Mystic River, on a novel by Irish Bostonian Dennis…

Sex and the City

5 Jun 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE/COMEDY (15) 145min As Carrie Bradshaw might say – ‘I couldn’t help but wonder how four ageing divas were going to resurrect Sex and the City: The Brand’. Is it possible that Charlotte, Samantha, Carrie and Miranda could pull off the same…

In Search of a Midnight Kiss

5 Jun 2008

COMEDY/ROMANCE (15) 99min Writer/director Alex Holdridge’s dispatch from the frontline of the LA dating scene is exactly what it depicts: a witty, slight affair. Wilson (Scoot McNairy) is a detached single desperate for a date to provide him with a…

Priceless

5 Jun 2008

COMEDY/ROMANCE (12A) 104min The best things in life are free, but all seasoned Riviera gold digger Irène (Audrey Tautou) wants is her own credit card from an ageing sugar daddy. Meanwhile, luckless, impoverished bar tender and dog walker Jean (Gad…

Un Secret

5 Jun 2008

DRAMA (15) 106min Veteran French writer-director Claude Miller (Garde à Vue, La Petite Voleuse) revisits France’s traumatic experiences under German Occupation during World War II in this polished and suspenseful melodrama. Adapted from Philippe…