News hour, with Jerry Caesar

FILM: The Iron Lady (2011)

2012-01-31T18:11:00.002Z

The story: As she considers the fate of her late husband's belongings, Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) reflects on her rise to power.

Whatever your opinion of Margaret Thatcher, it seems an odd decision to make such a personal film about a woman laying her past to rest when the woman in question is still alive - and not in a strong position to answer back. At the very least, it is presumptious, and I think it says something uncomfortable about the way people with dementia are regarded. The full sense of that presumption doesn't come until the end of Phyllida Lloyd's film, a movie that takes a while to get a direct handle on. This is partly because of the flashbacks, shifts in perspective from Thatcher's diminished present to memories of her rise to power, punctuated by commentary from the hallucinatory 'ghost' of her late husband (Denis, played by Jim Broadbent). These flashbacks are inherently episodic, and have a stylised glow that can partly be explained by the fact that we're seeing the past through her mind's eye. This neatly excuses exact accuracy, and adds another level to dramatic licence.

As such the structure is unusual at best, cumbersome at worst. On the other hand, the level of (Oscar-nominated) hair and makeup that (Oscar-nominated) Meryl Streep sits behind is a diminishing distraction to a performance which, when it really comes together, is eerie in the extreme. There's a scene in which she sits alone in the Commons. Now this is plainly Meryl Streep but, as the camera pans around her, it's like you're actually looking at Margaret Thatcher. This is beyond impersonation, and, barnstorming speeches aside, Streep's performnace is at is best when she's allowed to be quiet. Her wardrobe - that swishing, centurion battle dress in particular - also does a lot of the talking.

Among all the flashbacks is a voice training montage that recalls Rocky, and the scenes from the past are much more about Thatcher as a woman than a politician. This is not a film about politics. It engages with Thatcher purely on an emotional level, but the episodic nature of the scenes breaks up the audience's empathy, and so scenes that should have entranced - the Brighton bombing in particular - are held in a kind of cool isolation.

When it starts, Streep's portrayal promotes empathy rather than sympathy, playing Thatcher as a wily old goat who enjoys her hallucinations and wants to keep them a jolly secret. The way she deals with her fussing daughter (a superbly lisping Olivia Colman), playing scenes with her and Denis's ghost on two levels, leaves you in anything but fear for her. This changes, but the movie never quite marries its two halves into a message that justifies its tie-off. That's not to say you'll regret seeing it. The Iron Lady is the start of a conversation.

FILM: The Artist (2011)

2012-01-06T22:57:00.000Z

The story: A giant of silent cinema (Jean Dujardin) falls for a rising star (Berenice Bejo) just as his career - and silent cinema itself - is starting to give way to talkies.

It's hard to know where to start with The Artist. That its stars look so damned good? That you could stare at their faces all year? That the soundtrack matches and lifts every scene to perfection? That the use of real world sound - when it does come - reminds you how deliberate this film is, how lean and pure in its storytelling intent?

The basic story of The Artist is familiar, echoing What Price Hollywood and A Star Is Born in the opposite trajectories of its characters. The man is a giant of the silent era, and his time is passing; the woman a peppy (so peppy that Peppy is her name) rising star of the talkies he thinks will never amount to a hill of beans. They make a connection as one is going up and the other down, and their age difference lends another note of tragedy - still, The Artist is far from a miserable picture. It has emotional points to make, but does so with such beauty and grace, a kind of gauzy romanticism that never spills over into manufactured sentimentality.

This lack of overspill is critical. Silent movie acting is a different art to movie acting, in that the temptation to overcompensate with expressions and gestures is strong. The two leads are naturally expressive characters - they're actors playing actors - so we expect and allow them to be bigger than life. The timing of the intertitles is critical to these performances, and director Michel Hazanavicius holds them back just long enough to pull you deeper into the meaning of each scene, forcing the audience to scour the actors' faces for answers.

Like Hugo, The Artist is a movie about movies, but it's a much more cohesive piece than Martin Scorsese's picture, the documentary tendencies of which undermined its drama. The advantage The Artist has is that more intrinsically about a changing of the times as much as a changing of the movies; George Valentin is a kind of Victorian showman, a jolly presence who's happiest when he's bringing joy, but only within the bounds of dignity. To him the talkies are an ill-judged, incontinent mess of extraneous noise, like the rise of the motor car. He knows what he needs to do to make people feel, make them laugh. Why complicate it? That's his artistic choice, but the movie also plays with his lack of communication as a person. It opens with his character being tortured. 'Talk!' scream his interrogators. He will not. 'Talk to me!' yells his wife later on. He does not see the need.

There's nothing extraneous about this movie. It's rich in every respect, making you feel and making you laugh, and capable of surprise at every turn. It's an homage to the style of silent movies conducted with a love of the genre and an eye on the timeless. The audience I saw it with applauded at the end, and you can understand why. It's a salute to quality.

FILM: Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982)

2012-01-03T19:20:00.002Z

The story: A portrait of teen high school life as recorded by director Cameron Crowe in his book of the same name, Fast Times follows a girl (Jennifer Jason Leigh) bouncing between the wrong types of boy.

Amy Heckerling's film has a documentary feel, one that gives it a raw edge you don't expect. It's more dense than the average high school picture, and more dirty. Here's two examples to give you an idea of the tone: 1) a hard-working doormat (Judge Reinhold, one of those people who looked 40 until he was 50) is caught pleasuring himself to fantasies about his younger sister's friend (Phoebe Cates) 2) Jennifer Jason Leigh's first date with a sleazeball she picks up at a restaurant ends in a less than romantic fashion, counterpointed by a weirdly upbeat soundtrack.

So that's the tone. As for the narrative, the film winds a familiar story of love-seeking around the facades and realities of its characters, the most flamboyant of which is a wise-talking guy who pretends to know everything and everyone (Robert Romanus), and Sean Penn's permanently stoned surfer dude.

There's not much else to say about it, aside from that this is one of those coming-of-age movies that speaks to a generation - and so to anyone viewing it outside that context, it's more of a period piece. The movie is a product of its time, and the later celebrity of even its smallest characters becomes almost more interesting than the plot. There's Nicolas Cage (then Coppola) in two scenes, not speaking. There's Forest Whitaker as a jock who does a bit of speaking, and lots of looking intimidating. Another blink and you'll miss them duo: Eric Stoltz and Anthony Edwards (believe it or not, it's only four years before Top Gun) as two of Penn's stoner friends (see above picture). For people watching now - especially for those out of the age-range of its characters - the star-watching's the thing.

FILM: All About Eve (1950)

2012-01-01T14:50:00.000Z

The story: A fading actress (Bette Davis) takes in a devoted fan (Anne Baxter), who slowly takes over her life.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz's movie is that rare fusion of a brilliant screenplay (his), great casting and acting you can't take your eyes off. It's a series of great performances, most of them female, competing for attention both within the characters and on the screen. Bette Davis is the Queen Bee, both on screen and on set - she has the acid-tongued, hardened disposition you'd expect - but with a sliver of vulnerability in the middle, mostly where her boyfriend Bill is concerned. (Gary Merrill, who Davis married after meeting on the film. The chemistry between them is obvious.)

Davis is the practised end of the spectrum and while Eve - as the alleged ingenue, all innocence and eagerness - should be her opposite pole, the most striking counterpoint comes from a short appearance by Marilyn Monroe. Then around 24, Monroe is a young actress on the make, and the moment she's on the screen you stop looking at Davis. Now that's power, and Davis must have known it.

Anne Baxter's Eve is the most thankless role, partly because her true nature doesn't emerge until the end of the film, and so everything she does has requires an ambiguity that Baxter delivers well. Eve feels least like a real person of them all - seen harshly, she's a MacGuffin, but may just seem that way because a) everyone else is so clearly defined and b) she spends so much time undercover.

The final performance to relish is a male one - George Sanders as Addison DeWitt, a deliciously arch theatre critic. DeWitt is an uncommon and improbable person, much like Eve, and Sanders was an uncommon man. When he was 65, he took an overdose and died, leaving a note that read 'Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored'. Sanders also provides the film's voiceover, and his perspective on the world of theatre drips with a cool acid of the kind that the fiery Davis could never produce. These four performances, delivering lines of rare quality, are the tip of a two hour, 20 minute iceberg that never once feels in danger of melting. The slight niggle about Eve's plausibility aside, it's a masterpiece and was recognised as such: six Oscars (including for Sanders, the screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture - Davis and Baxter were nominated).

FILM: Hugo (2011)

2011-12-31T15:34:00.000Z

The story: A young boy (Asa Butterfield) loses his father (Jude Law) and ends up winding the clocks at a Paris train station in the 1930s and trying to fix the automaton his dad left behind. Then, one day, an encounter with a toy store owner (Ben Kingsley) changes his entire life.

When you start watching, Hugo looks like a life affirming coming-of-age drama. By the end, you wonder if the drama was a merely a feint by Martin Scorsese to draw audiences into a celebration of cinematic pioneers. Hugo could easily have been a documentary, and that this is even possible tells you that something is wrong with the drama that sets up the pay-off at the end. The first half drags. There are huge spaces between the lines, spaces that seems unnatural. This pacing is especially unfair on Asa Butterfield (so good in The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas) in the lead, because he has such an incredible face for the big screen that you want the pace of the performance to match. But that's not the character, and the way it's directed does him few favours.

The pacing was surely a stylistic decision because this is a very stylised world, almost comic-book like yet very real, drifting past in an uncommonly bright and well-articulated use of 3D. The force of this style does place a weight on the performances, but one that keys into its central metaphor - of the world being a machine with no spare parts, and that everything must, like the clockwork automaton Hugo cares for, fit together, or be capable of being fixed. The establishing of this metaphor is laborious, and involves observing the movements of the people in the train station, watching the repetition and the evolution of their behaviour. Out of them all, Sacha Baron Cohen emerges the best - playing a zealous station inspector with Inspector Clouseau tendencies and a well hidden but unsentimental sense of vulnerability.

Once the system of the film is set in motion, it becomes pure joy. Christopher Lee, Ben Kingsley and Michael Stuhlbarg all deploy performances that hit exactly the right mark in Scorsese's world, and Chloe Grace Moretz - with a flawless British accent - continues her march to becoming one of Hollywood's brightest new stars. Despite its pacing flaws, Hugo is an incredible experience, one that leaves you with a warm nostalgic hug. It's an important film about film that informs and inspires you to learn more, but it would have been much better with 10-15 minutes cut out of the first half.

FILM: Contagion (2011)

2011-12-30T14:11:00.000Z

The story: A flu virus spreads across the world, starting with a travelling businesswoman (Gwyneth Paltrow).

If you have a easily activated cough reflex, Steven Soderbergh's movie will leave you with an itchy throat. The screening your reviewer attended was punctuated by awkward coughs and occasional bursts of laughter at the self-consciousness of it all, a reaction that's not entirely fair to the movie. The opening gambit (mild spoiler alert) involves Gwyneth Paltrow foaming at the mouth and having her head sawn off for medical purposes. It's an attention-grabber, as are the rest of the cast – Matt Damon as a sturdy dad, Laurence Fishburne as a reassuring but flawed disease big cheese, Kate Winslet and Marion Cotillard as roving specialists and Jude Law as an investigative blogger with a horrible accent. It could be Australian, it could be South African, but it seems to exist to rub you up the wrong way - as does his character.

The shining star in the cast though is Jennifer Ehle's scientist (another curiously accented character, but not in a way that puts you off) a role that becomes much more than you expect it to. Ehle really makes the most of it, and she's the most dramatic thing in the whole film. As Contagion continues, it increasingly resembles a blend of documentary and music video, sketching a portrait of viral spread with a moody electronic accompaniment. The human stories are subservient to the picture of the concept, and it's to Ehle's credit that hers rises above it without causing a clash of interests.

This isn't as apocalyptic a film as you want it to be. Things get very bad, but not so bad as to undermine the basic tenets of American cultural superiority. If you've seen Burn After Reading, the ending to Contagion has a similar feel, that of reminding humanity just how transient and small it really is. What it may leave you with most is a sense of how easily viruses move from place to place, and a distinct wariness of peanut bowls in pubs.

FILM: Dishonored (1931)

2011-12-30T11:10:00.000Z

The story: A woman of dubious moral standing (Marlene Dietrich) becomes a spy for Austria against the invading Russian forces during World War I.

‘I’m not afraid of life. I’m not afraid of death, either.’ Dietrich is a woman who’s been through the emotional wringer and, while she may have come out the other side, she’s…missing something. Is it purpose? Will the chance to serve her country fill the gap? Blind devotion to a cause isn’t Dietrich's thing – she needs a little more soul - so enter Victor McLaglen as a charismatic Russian spy, a rare match for her seductive powers. Their scenes together sparkle, partly because he doesn’t break down and spill his secrets at the mere sight of her stockings. They spot an equality in each other.

Dietrich is very game in this picture. She pretends to be a cat, does some neat bits of comedy and goes undercover as a frumpy hotel maid – she’s so shorn of glamour you barely recognise her, looking fat and childlike. Yet even while posing as a simple illiterate bumpkin, her sex appeal drives the plot. (She’s still sporting boots no country maid has any business owning.) This characteristic is every bit as much a location as the exotic spots that director Josef von Sternberg likes to create (see their other films together, but especially Morocco, Shanghai Express and The Scarlet Empress), because it’s part of the atmosphere. It's the terrain her foes fall on.

This appeal is a kind of burden, but also a reflection of the strength of passion within. Von Sternberg treats it like a special power and as a way into the character’s deeper feelings. Dietrich’s spy is angry at the world and at the stupidity of war, and this comes out in artfully filmed stretches of angry piano playing. She goes everywhere with a black cat, stressing a witchy, outsider aspect. The movie ends very much with that in mind, and ends beautifully - leaving you with a slightly better impression of the film than it deserves.

FILM: Eat Pray Love (2010)

2011-12-29T22:07:00.000Z

The story: The marriage of a New York writer (Julia Roberts) collapses and she travels the world to find herself, via the media of food, prayer and romance.

If this movie didn't have Julia Roberts in the lead, it would be nowhere. For all but a very specific slice of the audience, her character is going to feel at best a bit of a flake, at worst narcissistic, shallow and barely worthy of existence. She feels more like a construct that a real person. Her marriage collapses, so she sleeps with an actor who's putting on a play based on her work. She then manages to turn what should have been a fun fling into an scuzzy copy of her marriage in a matter of days. She's miserable, but in the happy position to be able to drop everything and travel the planet for a year 'finding herself'.

It's perhaps Eat Pray Love's bad luck to have come out at a time of relative financial discomfort and, to its credit, its not as soul-sappingly misjudged as Sex And The City 2 (although there is a scene, near the end on the beach, where Roberts is a ringer for Sarah Jessica Parker). But it is very boring, because it's about a woman who never seems real. And that's not Julia Roberts's fault. She smiles when she can, attempts to find depth where she can, but it's not there. One scene is entirely about her Rome friends finessing their descriptions of her personality over lunch.

The cinematography attempts to make up for this this lack of depth by focusing on how good Julia Roberts looks even when *ahem* she is having a little trouble fitting into her jeans after eating a pizza. There is talk of muffin tops, but both Roberts and her friend never look anything short of catwalk-ready. It's this kind of transparent idiocy that stops the 'her journey' from having any emotional impact whatsoever.

The one stretch where the film has emotional power is the scenes with Javier Bardem as the charming Portuguese who nearly kills her by accident. Bardem's is also the most sympathetically written part in the whole film, which could have made him seem like a cliche or narrative tool. But he never feels less than real.

The rest of the film is riddled with cliches which, given its astonishing length - 2 hours 13 minutes - is a horrible prospect. Yet for all this, the film isn't all 'bad'. It looks nice. The music editing is very clever at times, enough to make you think that something great is about to happen. There's a moment with James Franco's flaky yogi where you think the film is going to reveal itself as a deliciously self-aware satire, but it's just a blip and, at the end, this is just a film about a woman who goes looking for herself and doesn't find enough to fill 2 hours and 13 minutes. It's pleasant to look at and sounds good, but it all sits on a wisp of smoke.

FILM: Going The Distance (2010)

2011-12-29T11:51:00.000Z

The story: An aspiring reporter (Drew Barrymore) falls in love with a music producer (Justin Long) in New York, but then has to move back to San Francisco. Can they keep a long-distance romance going?

It sounds like a dig, but the best thing about Going The Distance is that the two main characters are vaguely believable. Drew Barrymore's character isn't particularly likeablee - she's frustrated with her lack of job and, while ostensibly relaxed is, in some ways, extremely high maintenance. Long plays a bit of a doormat, so by default he's the nicer of the two. In a lot of romcoms, you end up disliking characters because they aren't really characters at all, just a reflexive snarkiness and a nose for sex. Here you have the option to dislike them because you can actually believe in them as people. That's actually a huge plus.

The film has an acid sense of humour and a lewd mouth which, if you don't mind such things, is another plus because it's backed up by a consistently funny script delivered by a strong secondary cast: Christina Applegate as Barrymore's uptight sister, Charlie Day as Long's friend with the open-door toilet policy. Each partner has their own life on each side of the States, so you bat back and forth between a string of comic vignettes. It's solid comic territory and plays well.

The critical question with romcoms is one of sentiment, whether it all falls apart in the final third because of some wild contrivance to force the happy ending. Going The Distance doesn't fall victim to that. That's not to say it always rings true - this is heightened reality, rat-a-tat comedy - and the film does commit one scripting sin: a one-line explanation for the rapid evolution of Barrymore's journalistic career that's hard to miss, but remains a small niggle. This is consistent, funny, a little heartwarming and a fun way to spend an hour and 40 minutes. That might not sound like much, but it's a hell of a lot better than some of the competition.

FILM: Cyrus (2010)

2011-12-27T19:30:00.000Z

The story: A depressed man (John C. Reilly) is dragged to a party by his ex-wife (Catherine Keener), gets horribly drunk and meets an amazing woman (Marisa Tomei). The only problem: she has a grown-up son (Jonah Hill) who really doesn't like him at all.

Cyrus is one of those 'indie' feel movies that's actually produced by a big studio's indie-style arm (Fox Searchlight), the kind of picture that's increasingly rare in financially straitened times. The set-up suggests a lurch toward the cartoonish, that the inevitable war between man and manchild would be an escalating farce of Father Of The Bride proportions. Yet the brilliance of the film is that it remains honest throughout, never going for the easy gag or making Cyrus into the kind of outlandish all-powerful figure he could so easily have been.

That you see the movie from all three perspectives here is key. Reilly's is the dominant one, but you also see events from both the mum and the son's point-of-view, and their opinions of each other evolve as their relationships twist this way and that. For audiences used to seeing Reilly play big in larger-than-life comedies, seeing him play small – in both a character and a leading role – is a welcome, welcome sight. He's so good at it. His character is needy, with a reflexive need to overshare and be honest that stems from spending seven years largely by himself, clinging to the occasional contact with his soon to remarry ex-wife.

Tomei and Hill also have a wildly dysfunctional relationship, but neither of them quite realise it. They both enjoy their status quo so much they haven't considered how it holds them both back. Molly (Tomei) is aware Cyrus is a little odd, but a mother's indulgence trumps her seeing him straight. By the time you get to the end, this comedy has become a drama, and it does so without sentiment or taking the easy route to its conclusion. What happens next is wisely left to the audience's imagination.

FILM: My Week With Marilyn (2011)

2011-12-27T16:10:00.000Z

The story: To prove his ability to his illustrious family, Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) becomes an assistant on the set of The Prince And The Showgirl, where he gets a unique perspective on the on-set struggle between Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams).

The perspective of Clark on this story is a good one because he's a gofer, meaning that he can go anywhere, bouncing between sides and giving the audience a rounded impression of what's going on. It's also good because he's young, impressionable, and serves as a proxy for the mass public bewitchment at the spectacle of Marilyn Monroe. She's his first love, a feeling most people can relate to. When they see her on the street they flock to her like termites, suffocating her: What makes Monroe famous is also what makes her miserable or, at least, makes her worse. She looks great but can't ever feel great about herself, either because she has no self-esteem or because she knows that looks fade with time.

So much, so Monroe. She's a black hole and the film doesn't go too heavily after trying to understand her, because such a task - like playing her - is utterly thankless, and mimics the experience of the men in her life. Like magpies, they flock to a beautiful surface; then fall into an unfathomable all-consuming blackness that will spit them out, panting, and desperate, onto the ground. The sensible ones don't get close.

As Monroe, Michelle Williams slips from playful to sweetly manipulative and deeply messed up (remember Jen in Dawson's Creek), with as much skill as the screenplay allows, nailing down the performance as much as anyone could and disappearing utterly behind the character. Watch the stills they show over the credits at the end and, if you look at them long enough, you start to doubt who you're seeing.

Kenneth Branagh is great too, but in a very different way - he's clearly having the time of his life, slipping between three modes of speech. 1) the aristocratic eastern Europeanism of the character in the movie 2) the aristocratic over-Englishness of his more refined self 3) the more honest, more common and much more direct actual person. He has some great lines, ('Trying to teach her how to act is like teaching Urdu to a badger.') and delivers them with relish.

Going between the two is Eddie Redmayne as Clark, an actor whose subtle eye-acting and rippling face makes him an oddly appealing presence to watch. It's to his misfortune that he's a key part of the section of the story that doesn't punch as hard as it should - the scenes between him an Monroe. It's here that the movie's mostly light tone becomes unstuck on its subject matter - which needed to show, rather than tell. Its other flaw has nothing to do with Redmayne: the fact that, like The Queen, My Week With Marilyn looks more like TV than cinema. Which is to say that the production doesn't quite live up to the talent on screen.

This is a flaw of subtlety that is at its most glaring in the steady introduction of a stream of British acting talent, most of whom have only a few scenes - Jim Carter, Simon Russell Beale, Michael Kitchen - and who seem to be starring in a self-conscious showcase, rather than just acting the part. In contrast to this, Judi Dench and a hard-smoking Philip Jackson (the bodyguard) make admirable use of their screen time. My Week With Marilyn is an enjoyable confection because of its cast but, with just a little more subtlety, and a more believable recreation of a time gone by, it could have been great.

FILM: Please Give (2010)

2011-12-27T13:23:00.000Z

The story: A New York couple (Catherine Keener, Oliver Platt) deal with the guilt of selling the furniture of dead people in their boutique store – and, specifically, with waiting for the old woman next door to die so they can take over her apartment.

Please Give is about liberal guilt at war with a money-grabbing disposition, and the nature of honesty. Is honesty saying everything that's on your mind, aggressively revealing things that you know will hurt other people simply to 'tell it like it is'? Or is it staying true to some essence of humanity and other people's sensitivities? If such questions send you running, then this movie is not for you. The characters spend most of its length pondering and agonising, and were the cast not as good as they are (Oliver Platt and Catherine Keener as the couple, Rebecca Hall as the neighbour's granddaughter, Amanda Peet as her overly honest sister) this could start to grate.

But it's not an agony mill. One of the characters has an affair, and the viewer is spared the tortuous confrontation scene that you'd normally expect. As it develops its themes, Please Give does make you think, and there are nice characters that make the story easier to swallow. Rebecca Hall (also of The Town, once again with a flawless American accent) is the most obvious way in – she's a nice nurse who cares for people. The daughter of the couple (Sarah Steele, very nicely cast as a blend of Keener and Platt) bears the psychological scarring of her mother's constant worrying, and is also sympathetic as someone trying to find her way. She looks to the two sisters for inspiration.

It has some really nice moments. The sunniest scene is when Hall takes some old people for a drive to see the autumn leaves, and it's as if she's got children in the back of the car – they talk very directly, fall asleep without warning and swing into terrible sulks. At the other end of the scale, Peet's character openly asks the couple what they're going to do with the extra space after her grandmother dies.

It's perhaps because of the constant navel-gazing that Please Give lacks a bit of drive, but then it is that kind of movie – a talky NY introspecter – and the performances make it an enjoyable watch, with themes that are enough to send all but the most dedicated brain in circles.

FILM: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

2011-12-27T11:16:00.000Z

The story: A retired spymaster (Gary Oldman) is brought back to find a mole at the highest levels of British intelligence.

If you're not already aware of the plot, then Tinker Tailor will require forensic levels of concentration. But then all the best thrillers do, and you can't criticise the screenplay for consisting largely of plot when it is condensing - with very few shortcuts - the story that occupied a seven-hour miniseries. Some characters have twists that weren't there in the series: Tom Hardy's Ricki Tarr is quite a different proposition to the original, as is Benedict Cumberbatch's Peter Guillam. In both cases the difference adds something, although their hairstyles take some serious getting used to. (It was the 70s after all - so someone has to look flamboyant.) In the original series, all that flamboyance was sucked up by Ian Richardson's Bill Haydon but Colin Firth's is smaller, and there is less space to understand him at anything above the machine level.

In Tomas Alfredson's film, the spies speak less in the kind of quaint, in-crowd jargon that so populated the series. That's not to say the language has been flattened: but when people start talking properly about tradecraft, it makes more impact. Alfredson's view is of the spy as an outsider, so you have more of the outside world for them to be outsiders with: it's a wider portrait of London at the time, fused with darkly exotic sense of cinematography that turns narrow offices into wide vistas by panning back, back, back. At first, this can be jarring: the offices of the circus resemble a submarine wreck punctuated by orange: yet eventually this layout makes a kind of military sense. Were it to remain as a symptom of stylisation, it would be problematic.

The mood of the movie as a whole is more direct. The violence is presented in unflinchingly, lingeringly unpleasant and unusual terms, so as to emphasise the cold hard operation of these peoples' lives - in most of the death scenes, there's an unusual detail that ensures they remain lodged firmly in your mind. Despite these jarring effects, the movie is an utterly immersive experience, with lots of eye-acting from Gary Oldman to emphasise when he's making a connection and seeing a pattern that we haven't seen. Occasionally, he sounds disturbingly like Alec Guinness. Some critics have said that he is a crueller, more sadistic interpretation of the character - I didn't come away with that impression. His actions can be interpreted in that light, but it's more as a consequence of the world he's in and the reactions of those to whom he is acting than as of anything inherent in his personality. A small distinction, but an important one.

Tom Hardy has a great scene, one in which he manages to play small very nicely indeed. For an actor mostly familiar for his magnetic, charismatic roles, this is a nice change. More of it would be most welcome. In the end, Tinker Tailor is an aesthetic and narrative triumph. The only thing lacking is the sense of history for the main characters, which would give the ending more emotional oomph - as it stands this is a colder, forensic enterprise. Whether Alfredson intended this as a comment on the nature of the characters is unclear. Bottom line: it's bloody good.

FILM: The Town (2010)

2011-12-27T11:09:00.000Z

The story: One of a gang of robbers (Ben Affleck) Charlestown, Mass, falls for the manager (Rebecca Hall) of a bank they rob. Meanwhile, the FBI close in on the gang.

In directing The Town, Ben Affleck builds on his work in Gone Baby Gone - hardbitten lives in rough, tough Massachusetts - while also taking the lead role. It could have been a genre picture about a gang disintegrating after one too many heists, or a caper about the long build up and execution of 'one last job'. It has elements of both but is something else altogether - what, isn't quite clear. The movie is a portrait of lives twisting through an impossible situation, and for the first half hour it seems their unfolding and inevitable misery will be its business.

The style gives you hints that something deeper is at work. The camera lingers over shots that suggest mired decay, especially when regarding a dilapidated version of the Washington monument that stands in the city. There are big, quiet moments in the film that give you a chance to appreciate what's going on. That's Affleck's doing, and it's very neat.

Affleck is the lead but he's not always sympathetic, especially if you're of the unflinching school that movies about crooks don't have heroes, only misplaced glamour. It's hard to see any glamour here - the gang commit a string of jobs, and the camera lingers over their actions to record their professionalism, to emphasise that this is their career. These guys are born to this life; there's not much choice. So the air is one of tragedy, not Ocean's 11.

The movie really starts to work after about half an hour, but where it's never short is in the cast. As the bank manager, Rebecca Hall's original English accent is almost invisible; as the FBI man on Ben Affleck's tail, Mad Men's Jon Hamm is impressively unattractive as a man trying to get the job done, with prejudice; and Pete Postlethwaite as the local crime kingpin is utterly chilling.

The Town has action, social comment, tragedy and a bit of romance. It doesn't soar the heights of Gone Baby Gone, but it's a good few notches above the genre benchmark.

FILM: Karen Cries On The Bus (2011)

2011-12-27T11:06:00.000Z

The story: After ten years of suffocating marriage to the wrong man, Karen (Angela Carrizosa) leaves her husband behind to make a new start.

Nicely and almost too neatly structured, the strength of this Colombian drama lies in its fundamentally warm nature. Sure, there's a suicide attempt. Sure, someone gets busted for stealing tampons from a supermarket when at their lowest ebb. But despite expectations that it would be a trawl through the gutters of downfall, the film turns out to be a celebration of personal re-invention.

The clearest signs of this transformation are in Angela Carrizosa's bewitching performance as Karen – starting out repressed, uptight and submissive, her dress sense evolves as her personality unfolds, becoming confident without becoming trashy and winding up Bohemian by way of classy. Her friend is a counterpoint to this transformation: sporting hoop earrings and the look of Madonna in the 1980s, an example of how not to make it as a woman in the big city - at least in the long term. Her lifestyle rests on the favour of men, a suffocation that Karen is desperate to escape from.

Karen's husband is presented as a world-class prat, although by the end you realise that he is as much a victim of restrictive gender roles as his liberated wife. By the end you also realise that the movie has a didactic streak, as Karen's case is framed as just one of many; a symptom of the times. The actors give the film slightly more power than the screenplay delivers and the camera lingers on the listener in a conversation, taking in their reactions to what's being said. It's also quite funny, at times – there's at least as many laughs in here as in a bad romantic comedy.

Ultimately, the film ends up being less truthful than it could have been, because it uses a cyclical structure to reference a problem in society, one it could just have easily referenced with a more organic approach. That said, going to see a film that you expect to put you through the ringer, and which you leave elated and better off as a human being, is an experience not to be sniffed at.

FILM: The Lost Weekend (1945)

2011-12-27T11:00:00.000Z

The story: Hard-drinking writer Don (Ray Milland) is being taken away for the weekend by his brother (Phillip Terry) to sober up. Will the weekend fix or doom him forever?

The first thing to note about The Lost Weekend is the casting. Ray Milland's character is supposed to be 33 in this film - he looks on the wrong end of his 40s. This has an explanation: Milland was around 40 when he made the film, and his character spends most of it hanging by a thread. In fact, the ordeal he endures pushes the movie into heightened territory, with scenes reminiscent of horror. At one point, he is on a Sisyphean errand to pawn his belongings for one more drink, only every store is shut. Every damned one! It's like some strange circle of hell. Later, he starts hallucinating, a scene that looks like an excerpt from a heavy handed public information film. This is Billy Wilder - you expect a little heightened reality.

The film is a sympathetic but unflinching portrait of a drunk. Don (Milland), like many writers, believes that he can only write while drunk. He dreams up story ideas, sketches them out in the pub, then rushes home to write: only he sobers up too quickly and the genius is gone. It's a tragic merry-go-round, one Don has been on far too long. He has become industrially devious about the secretion of booze: one bottle hanging out the window on a piece of string; another stashed in the vacuum cleaner, one more behind an air conditioning vent.

Milland is an instantly sympathetic figure to modern eyes, because he looks like James Stewart. You keep expecting that 'aw, shucks' decency to drift out and save the day. Yet the pull of the booze is strong, and has a spiritual element. Whenever Don nears some drink, ghostly choirs strike up on the soundtrack, etching his torment across every scene. Milland pours with sweat. He gurns, he twists, suffers and aches his way through the merry-go-round without ever seeming like a ham. The camera often pulls back, framing Milland with reference to what he needs; what he's seeking. One shot has his furtive head darting around the bottom of the frame, before the reflection of a bottle he's hidden at the top suddenly changes his complexion altogether.

What's best is that you don't know where this story is going to end. Don is fundamentally a good guy, certainly when he doesn't have a drink in him - so does he deserve to die? But then he chooses to drink, so what happens is his responsibility. Wilder keeps you guessing, all the way to the end.

FILM: 50/50 (2011)

2011-12-26T22:00:00.000Z

The story: A young man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is diagnosed with cancer, and his best friend (Seth Rogen), girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard) and mother (Anjelica Huston) try to deal with it.

A lot has been written about the mysogynist streak in this film and you can see why. As the girlfriend of a cancer victim, Bryce Dallas Howard behaves appallingly. And the other main woman in the film is portrayed as a kind of madonna to her whore - she's Levitt's therapist, played with that twinkly vulnerability that Anna Kendrick conjures so effectively. It's the kind of twinkle you can see the thinking behind, a self-deprecating consideration of the situation at hand. And Kendrick's performance is part of why what could have been an uncomfortable 'mirror woman' scenario doesn't really trouble, especially when you consider how the movie ends. Add to this that the other significant female character - Anjelica Huston as the mum - is undeniably sympathetic by the end, and you be hard-pressed to find a serious argument for mysogyny.

The scene that makes you wonder involves a painting and various destructive tools, but it says more about the main character's frustration than it does about the girlfriend, whose portayal is - in any case - not one of a pure villain. As the main with the cancer., Joseph Gordon-Levitt builds on a career that only seems to get more impressive. Every movie you see him in, this guy looks more and more like Edward G. Robinson. There's a moment when Levitt is shaving his head and the way he looks, up and back through the mirror, is pure Robinson. Watch the way he wears a suit in Inception and you'll see more of what I mean.

All of which is a long way of saying that he's good and getting better. Here, Levitt is playing the risk-averse under-exploiter of life, and it's to his credit that the performance doesn't simply take the carpe diem trajectory. This is a film of flips and reverses, one mostly executed without sentimentality. There's only a couple of musical cues that give cause for concern and one of the blackest early scenes - of Levitt stoned in chemotherapy - largely sets the tone.

This isn't a bromance either, although the friendship between Levitt and Rogen (his best friend) is front and centre, its emotions underplayed and their interactions mostly fuel for a displacing comedy, as many male friendships in such a situation tend to be. Yet this is a genuinely affecting mainstream film about male emotions, which is worth taking note of by itself. The fact that its funny just removes an excuse to see it.

FILM: Born To Be Bad (1934)

2011-11-10T09:00:00.000Z

The story: A single mother with a dubious lifestyle (Loretta Young) is close to losing her son (Jackie Kelk) to social services, until their paths cross with a dairy magnate (Cary Grant).

Born To Be Bad starts out looking like the main concern is going to be the morality of the mother, but it's ultimately that of the child. It starts out like a Dietrich picture, with the damaged woman on track to be repaired by romance, but it's not that simple and definitely not that romantic. Lowell Sherman is the director, and you can't help but wish he'd lived a little longer. He only had one and a half films left in him after Born To Be Bad, but this film's agility and willingness to experiment leaves you wanting more. There's an ambition to the editing that doesn't quite work, but which you appreciate - and there's a use of technology in the storyline (filmed evidence in court, a portable vinyl recorder) that feels fresh.

At the centre of the story is Loretta Young's morally detached Letty, whose seven-year-old son smokes and tears around the neighbourhood causing havoc. The boy is such a maverick, he even pre-empts Michael J. Fox in Back To The Future by some 50 years, letting a truck drag him down the street on his roller skates. He's a wild child, but Letty thinks he'll turn out OK, like she had to after giving birth to him at 15. She didn't turn out OK, but she doesn't realise that. Her face is a model of symmetrical beauty, all open eyes and expression, but her mouth says things like this: 'nothing matters very much'. She's on the take, on the make, justifying it all through her love of black lungs Mickey. She's also very obviously a prostitute. Tut tut tut, goes society.

As the plot unfolds, it dumps you in a couple of places you can't see a plausible way out of, yet thanks to the three nimble, constantly evolving central performances and some strong, tragi-comic secondary characters, it all hangs together. Watch for the scene with Cary Grant's wife towards the end and you'll see what I mean. The story simply wouldn't work without it, and that it works at all at around 60 minutes is a salute to Sherman. That the film is allowed to have this kind of complexity and lack of predictability is also down to its release date, barely a few months before the Hays Code came in. Had it been made six months later, that final scene wouldn't have nearly the power that it does. This is an adult story, well told and without reliance on the easier formulas of the time.

FILM: Tucker And Dale Vs Evil (2010)

2011-11-09T09:00:00.000Z

The story: A group of clean-cut college kids encounter a pair of hillbillies (Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine) in a horror comedy that's told from the latter's perspective.

Horror movies are sometimes funny, occasionally clever and rarely sweet. More than any other genre, they tend to conform to their own stereotypes, partly because it's one of the easiest types of film with which to make a splash. Low entry costs, high impact. This manages to be all three, as well as making you jump from time to time. The less you know about the plot the better, so just skip the rest and watch it if you want to go in blind.

Its first point of cleverness is to subvert the typical perspective of the hillbilly horror sub-genre - that is, you see everything from the hicks' point of view, not the smart-ass college kids. Tucker and Dale are classic small town dreamers. One smart to the world, the other sweet and smarter than he thinks. Then they meet a gang of college kids who've seen too many movies and things just gets worse and worse. It's like a farce but played with such ridiculous flair it lacks the stress you'd usually associate with that type of comedy.

T&D is very bloody, referencing classic horror set-ups all along its length. The lonely log cabin; the skinny dip in the creepy lake; the overworked woodchipper; the cans and cans of carelessly stacked gasoline; the creepy tale of woodland revenge. This is softened both by the comedy and by the two leads. Firefly's Alan Tudyk (the best thing in the most recent Transformers outing) is always a smart and reassuring presence, while Tyler Labine is like a quieter, kinder Jack Black. The most sensible of the college kids is played by the one from 30 Rock who always walks around without a bra (Katrina Bowden), although she's not too easy to recognise because here she's playing smart.

This picture has the feel of a cult secret, the kind of thing that gets by on word of mouth more than marketing and reviews. You almost don't want it to get too big. But it deserves recognition for being so fun and different, and for never losing its nerve.

FILM: The Adventures Of Tintin (2011)

2011-11-08T22:57:00.002Z

The story: Belgian reporter Tintin (Jamie Bell) stumbles onto the story of a sunken ship, and the hidden treasure it conceals - but he's not the only one...

It doesn't matter so much in the books, but Tintin is a fundamentally tedious character. He lacks any of the personal pizzazz you expect from an adventurer. There are no wisecracks, romance or minor eccentricities. What's interesting about him is what you can infer about the time he was written - and that mostly boils down to an assumption of colonialist superiority. When he's on screen, Jamie Bell gives him a very human voice, and nails the slim charm that the character possesses - the 'great snakes' enthusiasm for a story, a sort of 'tally ho' in disguise, that elevated son-of-empire tenacity - but it really isn't enough until the permanently tortured Captain Haddock shows up.

In the books (which the first five minutes of the film continually references, via a very cool credits sequence), Snowy is the mischievous counterpoint to Tintin's by-the-book sleuthing - in the film, Haddock is the humanising influence. Andy Serkis, the man who managed to humanise Gollum, brings considerable firepower to the role of Haddock, and the motion capture technology puts that front and centre. The way the creases round his eyes are captured is strangely beautiful. The odd couple chemistry between Haddock and Tintin kicks the film into high gear, and you barely draw breath again until one of the closing chase sequences (an astonishing motorcycle chase) and then it's only to allay the strain of retrieving your jaw from the floor.

This movie really does look incredible. Early trailers lent credence to the idea that Tintin could be another Polar Express - stuck in the uncanny valley - but every performer has character. And you simply couldn't have done a movie of this scope in live action without it costing a billion dollars. It's not just the size of the scenes, or the exoticism of the settings, it's the detail in every scene, little visual points that continually knock the story along, ensuring a sense of pace. There is humour, too - Tintin's indomitable quiff is made to resemble Jaws, striking through the waves, and the transitions between scenes are masterly (example: the contours of a handshake dissolve in the side of a desert hill). The only jarring moments are those when it resembles a computer game, especially when Tintin must suddenly achieve a set task (retrieve the keys from the drunken sailors; stop the falcon from escaping; reach the life boat in time).

The comedy works much better with Haddock than it does with incompetent cops Thompson and Thomson, mostly because you always know where the latter's exchanges are going, almost down to the word. Haddock gets chat like this: 'My memory isn't what it used to be.' 'What did it used to be?' 'I've forgotten.' It's Haddock's movie, really, although you share Tintin's frustrations with the antics of this shambling alcoholic (yes, he's an alcoholic - he was obviously an alcoholic in the books too, but you'd think that it was a carefully guarded secret by the way some critics have reacted), it's Haddock who actually changes across the course of the film. His is the only furrow of depth in a film that otherwise exists to astonish and entertain, and manages both aims very well indeed.

PS Be prepared for a sequel-anticipating final scene, but don't bother staying until after the credits. There ain't anything more.

FILM: Drive (2011)

2011-11-02T09:00:00.000Z

The story: A movie stuntman (Ryan Gosling) becomes involved in the life of his neighbour (Carey Mulligan), leading him into a dangerous situation.

The more you think about Drive after you've seen it, the better it seems. This is a surprise because, when the credits roll, the whole thing feels unsatisfactory, like a half empty exercise in storytelling and style that exists to justify itself. Why? Well, because the first half of the movie - in which Gosling falls for Williams - exists to justify the extreme violence he undertakes on her behalf in the second. And you're very conscious of that.

Secondly, it is incredibly stylish, and although it never feels to stylised, the consequence of seeing the lines in the screenplay can make you resent the style that sits on top of it. Give yourself a few hours though, and all that fades into the background, leaving you with fond memories of one man's descent into love and violence, backed by a thumping but patient 80s inflected soundtrack, a great supporting cast (Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston as a luckless mechanic; Mad Men's Christina Hendricks as a lowly gangster's skank in ill-fitting jeans) lead by Gosling's watchful driver (name unknown). Gosling's character is the kind of man plenty of men want to be; cool without being consciously so, eerie self-possession hinting at deep waters, a preternatural talent for something - in short, the strong, silent type. He's a character straight out of a western, the stranger with a mysterious past who sorts out the town once and for all.

The woman he does it for is Carey Mulligan, acting every inch the haircut that makes her resemble Michelle Williams (Gosling's co-star in antiromance Blue Valentine). There's a scene between them when she has to sell her attraction to Gosling, and you can practically see her heart rate quicken. It's nicely done, and it's a relationship that's built without ever resorting to the Hollywood shorthand of sex for intimacy - this may be more because of the director's dislike of shooting sex scenes but, if not, then the screenplay deserves great credit for not just chucking them into bed instead of taking the time to create something emotionally plausible.

Drive is fundamentally a pulp piece with an A+ in style, and while it's not the all-action film that the trailers suggest, when the violence does come it's of the most unpleasant order. Likewise, the movie takes its time but, when it says something, you won't miss it - and the scenes and soundtrack will ensure it sticks in your brain for weeks.

FILM: Troll Hunter (2010)

2011-11-01T09:00:00.000Z

The story: A group of film students follow an enigmatic man around the countryside, believing that he is a bear poacher - but learning that he hunts something else altogether.

Think of The Blair Witch Project. Now dial down the number of night vision scenes of people panting and ramp up the sense of humour, and that's the ballpark this Norwegian faux documentary operates in. The troll hunter in question is a detached, matter-of-fact figure with a fatherly posture that may or may not represent something that's actually in his character. Essentially he's an aggrieved civil servant, and that's his reason for allowing an annoying band of know-it-all lefties to tramp around after him, unearthing the great truth behind disappearing walkers and unlicensed bear maulings: trolls.

After a while, you start to believe it. The use of sound here is key, because you hear the trolls a long time before you see them, which is why it's important to see this movie in the cinema, or through some large speakers. Their breathing, crunching and roaring soon start to have a physical impact, if not an emotional one. And when you see one turned to stone, all you want to do is climb into the screen and poke it. Because the sound paints such a picture, it's nice that the trolls aren't at all disappointing when you actually see them, and you see a lot of them (not like Monsters). One scene sticks in the memory, shot from within a cabin as this giant stomps across the landscape far, far in the distance. You feel like you're right there in the cabin, in the warmth, waiting for this thing to tear everything apart.

So the atmosphere is great. And there's a wry line of humour that runs through the film - after the students become hardened to their new reality, one of them reports it to camera with an intensity reminiscent of a local news reporter trying his hardest. The movie treads a very fine line between exploiting the inherent amusement in a cover-up (the Troll Security Service hires incompetent comedy Polish men to clean up after them), and drawing you into the web of the world it's creating. It utterly succeeds and, while it does clearly build to a climactic finale, you never feel the hand of a script in getting there. And somehow, the thundering rock music that brackets the picture gives it a student authenticity.

FILM: The Red Shoes (1948)

2011-10-31T09:00:00.000Z

The story: A promising young dancer (Moira Shearer) and an arrogant student composer (Marius Goring) come under the influence of the demanding head of a ballet company (Anton Walbrook), a man with a new production to produce, and little time to waste...

Watching The Red Shoes now, and even being aware of its reputation, doesn't quite prepare you for how often this film surprises. The main theme is what drove the more recent Black Swan - the consequences of artistic perfection, although the choice her is more between love or perfection, not perfection or sanity. There is something of the unhinged and the supernatural about it, but mainly in the section where the ballet both the dancer and the composer are killing themselves for - The Red Shoes - is performed in the middle of the film, and performed as it is imagined rather than as how the audience would actually see it.

The ballet within the film is a metaphor for what goes on outside it - the young dancer who dons the scarlet slippers is unable ever to take them off. They're like an extreme version of the acting bug. The dancer will dance until something very bad happens and, the implication is, there will always be someone who wants to take her place once she can dance no more. The bulk of the film's visual effects go on this production-within-a-production, dropping mystical ripples that echo elsewhere in the film. This isn't overplayed but the film has a darkness, an edge that stands out all the more sharply against its sunny, luxurious locations and for it being set around gobby showpeople.

Swan Lake has a side role here. There's a scene in which Shearer represents the tortured duality of the Odette/Odile role to dazzling effect, and it's a scene that you could imagine inspired the entire screenplay of Black Swan. On one hand, The Red Shoes is a dark fable of the perils of sacrificing too much for the stage; on the other, its a weepy romance with a slightly odd supernatural bit in the middle. It's both at once without losing much for occupying dual roles, which may explain its appeal. The old artistic struggle.

FILM: Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

2011-10-30T22:17:00.001Z

The story: An account of the final day at a children's summer camp in 1981, following the various stories of counsellors as they try to cram as much in as possible before the end of summer.

Watch the first ten minutes of this film, and you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a bad copy of the camp comedies that went out in the 1980s. Watch a little bit more, and you start to release it's half homage, half spoof - and once the film has dealt with setting up the plot (mostly concerned with who wants to sleep with who) it becomes a steadily stranger sequence of spoof climaxes that riff on an array of films, with the shooting and acting style switching accordingly.

It's a hotbed of lo-fi stars, from Janeane Garofalo (camp director) to David Hyde Pierce (helpful astrophysicist), Law And Order's Christopher Meloni (damaged Vietnam vet) and Bradley Cooper (musical theatre aficionado), although the standout is Paul Rudd's sulky teenage love god, complete with aviator shades and Bruce Springsteen tribute outfit. It's an extraordinary performance, very physical - and Rudd himself looks the same age when this was filmed - ten years ago, although that's not always easy to remember - as he does now. The man is stuck at 40. He will look 40 when he dies.

The movie has a specific quirk that will endear or alienate some viewers. It's capable of extreme left turns into difficult territory (death and drugs being the most obvious) that pull the floor out from under you. Some people enjoy this, some don't. But both will appreciate the sharpness with which it's performed, and to a narrative timescale that shortens or lengthens according to the needs of any one character at any time (a journey that takes two hours one minute takes 30 seconds the next - a man walks away from a recreation hall either very fast or very slow, depending on how much someone wants to catch him). Logic only comes into it as much as it's needed to serve the comedy.

It's crazy but it's nicely done and, primarily, it's an experience that pushes in ways you don't expect. Always a commendation.

FILM: A Single Man (2009)

2011-09-08T22:53:00.000+01:00

The story: In the 1960s, a gay, California-dwelling British professor (Colin Firth) loses his lover, and is crippled by the grief. One day, he decides to change his life completely - Tom Ford's film captures that day.

Style in movies can be tricky. Whether it's falling into the confines of a genre or following a strictly defined palette, the fallout on the plausibility of the storytelling can be considerable. In Tom Ford's movie, the two are inextricably intertwined - he introduces us to a man reeling with grief who has made a decision about changing the way he lives his life. It's a big decision, and it affects how he views everything around him. It's as if he's seeing things for the first time, so detail and colour are accordingly heightened - be it a sunset, the face of a Spanish prostitute or Nicholas Hoult's buttocks. Ford (a fashion designer) takes the details and the colour to extremes, treating the look as an integral part of the character.

That doesn't sound too different - wardrobe and makeup are traditional tools for shaping character - but he takes it to glorious, beautiful lengths. Firth observes it all: the armour-like Brigitte Bardot make-up and hair, the little girl with the loud dress in the bank, the sweaty backs of tennis players - all from behind his impeccable suit, shoes and glasses. Whenever his interest is piqued, the onscreen colour surges with warmth.

This is all punctuated by flashbacks to his lost relationship and his old self, memories refracted through his drunk English friend (Julianne Moore, wildly made up, excellent) and the student who takes an interest in his life (Nicholas Hoult). It's a portrait of a life at a turning point and, for that reason alone, it's interesting - you never know quite what he'll do next.

To say that Colin Firth is good in this movie doesn't really cover it - this is the picture that set up the momentum for his Oscar win in The King's Speech - there is depth to his presence in every scene, purpose to every movement and gesture. Ford takes that performance and amplifies it through this extraordinary marriage of stylistic flair and narrative purpose, and the result is a thing of beauty with a warm, beating heart.

FILM: Frisco Jenny (1932)

2011-09-08T00:00:00.000+01:00

The story: The daughter of a man who runs a house of ill repute loses everything in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and sets about rebuilding her life - by any means necessary.

You keep wondering, while watching Frisco Jenny, whether it's a true story. It just has that ring. It isn't, but part of why you wonder is Ruth Chatterton in the lead, a woman who is to self-possession what bakers are to bread - she's most natural in scenes when, even if not in control, she cares little enough that she might as well be. That sense of 'based-in-fact' might also come from what looks like archive footage of San Francisco burning in the early scenes, the insertion of which is much easier to get away with in black and white than colour.

Frisco Jenny plays with that self-possession, building it up and then giving it one hell of a beating. By the time the movie has made its first time jump (three years), there's a moment of drift and you start to wonder where it's going - but the plot kicks in quickly, and then it just gets better, scene by scene, until the tough climax. As a pre-code movie, you'd think it wouldn't judge her lifestyle - that this would be Mae West territory - although the final analysis here is more nuanced than that. In truth this is more like a Dietrich picture, and although Chatterton doesn't ooze that kind of exotic sensuality, she makes up for it in cool self-possession, and the suggestion of a sense of humour.

This isn't a great movie, but it's much better than you expect it to be at the start. There are some lovely scenes that play with your expectations of prostitutes, some nice background detail (have a good look at Jenny's book when she's on the phone) and a bold, make-up free finale from Chatterton that pushes it firmly into tearjerker territory.

FILM: Super 8 (2011)

2011-09-07T00:00:00.000+01:00

The story: A group of film-making friends accidentally capture footage of a rail crash involving a secret government cargo, and their town attracts the attention of the US Air Force.

The superficial sci-fi storyline of Super 8 is not as good as ET, but it's distracting in the most pyrotechnic sense, involving some awesome special effects. The train crash near the start is a full throttle experience best experienced in the cinema, with sound that punches holes in your head. But it's when you think about all the layers sitting underneath the sci-fi that the true quality of the film comes into focus.

As you'd expect of a movie involving Spielberg, the main emotional refrain, staggering through the screenplay like a punchdrunk fighter, is of a father and son trying to reconnect. Then there's all the interplays between a group of small town friends that comes with a level of banter unseen since The Goonies. Were the script and performances not so natural, they could seem like caricatures - the fat one; the lanky one with glasses who looks like a young Matt Damon; the maths geek; the babbling explosives obsessive. Then, there's the introduction of a girl – an excellent Elle Fanning, who seems to get younger as the film goes on – and the effect that has on them all. (Arguably, it's bigger than the rail crash.) You see the sci-fi story mostly through their perspective, so we only get limited information, but enough to react to it on an emotional level. It more than works as an exercise in spectacle and tension, but it's the scenes between the friends that are most satisfying. These would stand on their own, while the mere spectacle would leave you cold.

To my eyes this is the equal of The Goonies, which I saw in a 1980s childhood and probably idealise. I wonder how children today will perceive it, either as a straight-up adventure or a period piece. I think the scale of the film overcomes the distance of its setting, and the 1980s is more recognisably part of our era than the 1950s were to children in the 1980s. The kids in Super 8 stay in touch with walkie talkies, rather than mobile phones; they make their own movies with small handheld devices, like kids can now (although the developing process is a bit different). Other bits of period detail are neat - TIE Fighters hanging from the ceiling, Nasa toys at breakfast.

Super 8 is a complete piece of entertainment that manages to succeed dramatically, look amazing, sound better and perform that rarest of tricks – leave you sitting in your cinema seat, wanting more. (There is a little bit, during the credits.)

FILM: Winter's Bone (2010)

2011-09-06T00:00:00.000+01:00

The story: A girl from the Missouri Ozarks (Jennifer Lawrence) hunts for her father while trying to keep her family together – but the community seems unwilling, or unable, to help.

You keep expecting Winter's Bone to dive off and become a horror movie or, at the very least, pitch into Deliverance territory. There are banjos, so the reflex is Pavlovian. Yet however horrifying or harrowing it becomes, this is film is a fundamentally humanising experience. This is partly because events flow at a natural pace; it doesn't feel consciously like a screenplay until you get near the very, very end, when the story is tied off in such a way that changes your perspective on this land and its people.

Whether that's the right perspective or not is irrelevant. There isn't one. It's true within the context of the film, and that's what's important. As such, Winter's Bone succeeds most as a portrait of a people than a twisty-turny account of drug deals gone wrong and cross-county chases (more the stuff of fiction, in any case). Visually, the contrasts are strong, between the bleakness of the woods and the cosiness of the homes, reflecting the harsh, reflexively suspicious characters of its people in public as a product of wanting to protect what they have at home.

The film is careful to damn the conditions, not the people, focusing on economic hardship and the impact of meth cooking on the community. In the lead, Jennifer Lawrence has all kinds of very real-looking things to do – running around, plunging her hands in unpleasant places, shooting guns, skinning squirrels – and this immersion in the surroundings and its practices give her performance an edgy authenticity. When she looks a bounty hunter up and down and says doing what's necessary is in her blood, you believe her.

FILM: The Outsiders (1983)

2011-09-05T00:00:00.000+01:00

The story: In an 1960s Oklahoma town, tensions between two rival gangs - the Greasers and the Socs - rapidly escalate after one side loses a member in a fight.

The big reason to watch The Outsiders these days is the cast, which reads like a laundry list of ready-to-blow talent. Tom Cruise (pumped, muscular), Patrick Swayze (looking the same as he did in his 50s), Rob Lowe (quirkier than in later life) , Emilio Estevez (a build-up to Billy The Kid), Diane Lane (oddly unrecognisable). Such future stars are all in it, but they're not the leads – that's C. Thomas Howell (sensitive, smart), Ralph Macchio (sensitive, doomed, ready for his fightback in The Karate Kid), and Matt Dillon (reliable street veteran). All directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

This isn't what you'd commonly think of as a 'Brat Pack' movie. It's more in the tradition of West Side Story. The movie's opening title cards visualise the idea of one set of the Greasers being from 'the wrong side of the tracks', an idea frequently referred to in dialogue. There are no musical numbers, but there is a swooping orchestral score that emphasises events with something approaching operatic fervour.

The point of it all is the pointlessness of the fighting, that a rumble isn't going to change the social opportunities in the town. In fact, any fallout will probably serve to reinforce it - it won't be the monied classes going to jail. Many of these characters are still very much children, something you're keenly reminded of when two of the pouchier-cheeked characters go on into hiding. While the motivation for this mini-adventure is distinctly adult, the way they spend their time is disarmingly childish.

(You start to wonder if this is the kind of life that The Fonz escaped by inveigling himself into the Cunnighams' social circle in Happy Days. Did he used to have friends called 'Sodapop' and 'Ponyboy'? Did they schedule punch-ups with the rich jobs? Smoke in the local hospital after barely escaping a fire? Maybe a prequel TV series should give us the answers.)

The mood of The Outsiders is heavy, and its direction of motion pretty clear – were it not for the cast, this atmosphere could be oppressive. Ultimately, the tone of the film is wrapped up in the saxophone that drifts wistfully across the closing credits, a hallmark of that curious brand of socially conscious 1980s nostalgia.

FILM: The Purchase Price (1932)

2011-09-04T09:30:00.001+01:00

The story: A torch singer (Barbara Stanwyck) is discontented with her lot, and finds herself moving to a North Dakota farming town to escape.

The set-up is a familiar one: the dame is a torch singer, and she has every man in the palm of her hand. Every man except the one she wants. Yet William Wellman's tale doesn't take the Marlene Dietrich route – where desire leads to danger – but pinballs off in a completely different direction, leaving Barbara Stanwyck married to a Dakota farmer and wondering what the hell happened to her life. For the audience it's a similar sensation, but this movie's love of sharp turns is matched by its knack for quick characterisation.

There's a great scene that precedes the move, where Stanwyck's unceremonious dumping is pointedly followed by binmen picking up the trash from the other side of the road. You see this city ain't nothing but bad, and the simple country folk - well, they've got something to teach her. The aforementioned bumpkins are a comic mix of sharp-eyed horse traders, chatty women and the lop-faced offspring of Benny from Crossroads. It's all hard handshakes and living by your wits, earning every cent and scenting every dime – the kind of place where a trip to buy some coal can land you a mention in the local newspaper because nothing ever happens - nothing apart from scrimping, saving, farming and drinking. There's even a rowdy bar, the venue for a fight that features some dizzying point-of-view camerawork, one of two pretty stunning action scenes (the other involves Stanwyck fighting a very real looking fire at close quarters).

Wellman's efficiency in establishing the difference between these two worlds allows for plenty of humour, but somewhere along the way, Stanwyck's emotional journey gets lost. Despite her farmer husband being mostly stony-faced, you end up empathising more with him, as his perspective is clearer, and the time isn't taken to explain why her character is the way she is. The fact that the ending is so curt underlines that in a rather brutal way. An extra five minutes on what is only a 68 minute film would have made a big difference.

FILM: Bulworth (1998)

2011-09-03T09:28:00.001+01:00

The story: A disillusioned US senator (Warren Beatty) takes a contract out on his own life, but finds that the freedom of impending death liberates his political tongue and gives him reason to live.

You have to admire Warren Beatty's balls. They're right out there in Bulworth, a movie that's a full-tilt political statement, delirious romcom and hitman thriller all rolled into one. Bulworth (Beatty) experiences a complete conversion, shifting from stuffed suit and stock speeches to street clothes and rapping. He actually spends entire scenes spinning rhymes, delivering his manifesto through no other means. All the while, he's dodging bullets and falling ever-so-hard for Halle Berry, a feisty girl he spots in an out-of-hours Compton nightclub.

The characters in Bulworth don't always make a lot of sense, but then the film is conducted in a kind of delirium, with the senator variously starving, stoned, drunk and being insanely honest with those who were once his keenest financial backers: big insurance, big oil, big Hollywood. The senator is suddenly telling it like it is, and it's Beatty's honesty that really sells this picture. It's a real go-for-broke performance, and not even a particularly egotistical one.

The movie succeeds on Beatty's charm and the feisty intelligence of the premise, and rarely does it even come close to feeling sanctimonious – for Beatty's target isn't just Republicans, it's everyone. His senator is a Democrat and his target is the system, and the sheer extremes he goes to illustrate just how bad Beatty thought the racial situation was. This is all pre-Obama, of course, so some of the politics has dated but the point remains relevant.

The media satire is spot-on – the way the pack of reporters follow Bulworth, never questioning but ever filming his increasingly weird behaviour. They match his panic-sprinting step for step, batting not an eyelid when he plunges into a water fountain or drinks openly during a political debate. Hey, this is politics - nothing's weird. Everyone's just there to see happens next. On this level it's a critique of passivity as much as of politics, of the viewer as much as the reporter, and out-and-out encouragement to be 'mad as hell'.

FILM: Broadcast News (1987)

2011-09-02T09:30:00.001+01:00

The story: A good-looking network anchor (William Hurt) hits it off with a high-standards news producer (Holly Hunter) in James L. Brooks's TV news satire.

For a fan of The Simpsons, looking at Broadcast News in retrospect is illuminating. Many of the names behind it (James L. Brooks, Rich Sakai, Gracie Films) are the same, but it's the sentiment about TV news you recognise - that kneejerk distrust of the mindless and the simplistically good-looking, the sugar in place of the wheat. Broadcast News predates rolling, 24 hour news and the internet, but remains relevant because its points are moral rather than technological. Is news that pushes emotional rather than intellectual buttons valid? Where should the balance sit between commercial and journalistic interests in corporate-funded newsrooms? These are riffs that The Simpsons has been hitting for two decades, but much of it is rooted here.

Broadcast News is a slice of life drama, following the romantic and academic fortunes of three characters from high school, through a career defining point and then, seven years on - who ended up with who, and where. There are some extremely funny moments, notably an outlandish piece of slapstick with Joan Cusack, but most of the comedy is quiet and underexploited. Transitional scenes that you'd expect to see in lesser films are bypassed, the fallout reported through background detail - which is often funnier.

Hurt, in retrospect, is also a shock. He's playing a himbo, a kind of character you don't see too often (and not something Hurt is known for in his later career). But is he just a bit thick? Or is his easy nature indicative of an easy morality, making him a poison at the newsroom's heart? Holly Hunter is set up as his antithesis, a driven and dedicated woman who finds small moments every day to unplug her phone and cry at her desk. It's a ritualistic cleansing that her colleagues (an excellent support cast too long to list here) expect and ignore.

This contest could easily set Broadcast News up as an opposites attract romcom, but it's more about ideals than it is about relationships. It's hard to imagine making this film now - it would turn into the equivalent of Morning Glory - as such stories feel more like the preserve of TV than cinema. Whether that's something for lament or not is unclear, but the quality of the film is not.

FILM: Captain America - The First Avenger (2011)

2011-09-01T10:58:00.001+01:00

The story: A weedy American (Chris Evans) is desperate to serve his country in World War II, and is selected to take part in a unique scientific upgrade created by the brilliant Dr Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci).

Superheroes all have problems. The Hulk is angry, Spider-Man's an insecure geek, Batman misses his parents and Iron Man is a self-loathing alcoholic. And Steve Rogers? He can't get drunk. Yep – the regenerative powers he receives stop him from getting plastered although, you imagine that – if he really put his mind to it – he might be able to make it work. But he probably wouldn't. Steve Rogers is, as his superhero name suggests, all-American – but not in the sense of chiselled overdrive. He starts the movie as a 90lb weakling with asthma and heart trouble, although he's desperate to be out there doing his bit in the war effort. No because he likes to kill, but because he hates bullies.

So there is a moral question here – whether, once he receives all these incredible powers, he remains a nice guy. And while you can probably guess the answer, the olde-worlde simplicity of Captain America is its most appealing trait. The director Joe Johnston also did the not dissimilar Rocketeer back in 1990, and the pleasingly hokey Jurassic Park III, both movies with a homespun charm. The world he creates here is most similar to the former, a place of men achieving beyond the means of their times, and a golden age for mavericks - who populate the supporting cast to superb effect. Toby Jones (bad scientist), Hugo Weaving (too bad even for the Nazis), Dominic Cooper (womanizing workaholic and Iron Man's dad) all add the colour that swirls around a stoic Chris Evans in the lead.

Its other selling point is the sly analysis of Rogers' role as a propaganda tool in World War II - let's just say that the first time you see him in the costume is less than edifying. That, and witnessing the Cap on a noble Nazi-bashing rampage montage, form two rolling sections of great enjoyment in a film that is never dull, although it lacks the edge of Iron Man or the campy vastness of Thor. You leave it feeling somehow fortified, and excited by the prospect of seeing these different on-screen energies together for The Avengers next year. (Stay until after the credits if you can, there's a trailer for it then.)

FILM: Sex And The City 2 (2010)

2011-08-31T09:40:00.000+01:00

The story: The girls (Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon) get together for a gay wedding, and then head off to Dubai on one of Samantha's PR jollies.

A bad review is its own kind of attraction, because people want to see how bad something can possibly be. Yet nothing can prepare for the first half hour of the Sex And The City sequel, which comes in like a freight train loaded with musical theatre performers. The girls are at a gay wedding – where people are gay, talk, look and sound gay, and make jokes about how gay it is to be gay non-stop, and all the straight girls are just as gay as them, calling each other bitches and all that. Then Liza Minnelli turns up, and does a rendition of Beyonce's All The Single Ladies.

Yes. Liza Minnelli, singing Beyonce. And that's the least of it. My jaw was on the floor, along with any intention of realism that Candace Bushnell might once have had for the characters. For what this wants to be is a stupendous celebration of women railing against age through the accumulation of stuff and hormones, revelling in luxury as a comfort to the harsh economic realities that (sniff) mean that Carrie hasn't wanted to sell her old flat, because she wouldn't get a good price for it. (Instead, they just keep it on – and she visits, sometimes, to write.)

The occasional voice mocks this vapid self-obsession from within in the movie, not least a nasty (probably male) reviewer of Carrie's skin-deep book about marriage. ('It's a satire', says Miranda incredulously. Is it?) Anyone with even vaguely liberal sentiments will find the scenes in Abu Dhabi hard to take, centering mostly as they do on Samantha's (loud) search for arousal amid disapproving women in burkhas, most of whom become the butt of jokes. This movie would be a perfect recruiting tool for Islamic extremists.

Such jokes are arguably a matter of taste but, if you're going to do them, you'd better surround them with an intelligent script. And that's where SATC2 really falls into a canyon. It's self-obsessed to the point of delusion, a parade of caricatures rambling about problems to which no-one in the cinema would want to relate because of how vile these people seem. The characters getting older isn't the problem. A lack of honesty in writing for them is – when it began, Sex And The City was an insightful, satirical critique of working ladies in the city, in the vague tradition of The Best Of Everything, Three On A Match and the like. What it has become is a deluded monster, something it could only get away with if the jaw-dropping spectacle of its initial scenes were sustained. It isn't, and the lapse into soap about people it's impossible to like utterly kills the film. It becomes boring, which is perhaps its ultimate crime.

There is a scene in which Miranda and Charlotte talk honestly about the problems of motherhood. It's the only real moment in the film, and only serves to highlight how bad the rest of it is.

FILM: The Tree Of Life (2011)

2011-08-30T22:08:00.000+01:00

The story: A family struggle to deal with a loss in 1950s Texas, a story remembered from the perspective of their eldest son (Sean Penn) from a swanky job in the future.

Anyone who despairs at the state of arty cinema should find comfort from The Tree Of Life. Yes, it has a big director - Terrence Malick - yes, it has big stars - Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, the rising Jessica Chastain - but it's also a deeply weird experience, segwaying from family tragedy into the story of the evolution of the universe via a strange fog that would, in the 1960s, have passed as an alien entity on Star Trek. Yet there it was, front and centre on the Vue West End in London's Leicester Square, sharing equal hoarding space with a blockbuster.

The Tree Of Life is two things, which interfere or bolster each other's purpose according to your perception. First, it's a portrait of a family with an unhappy father (Pitt's frustrated musician) a free-spirited, borderline angelic mother (Chastain, background deliberately vague) and their three children, told through the perspective of their eldest (played as a distracted grown-up by Sean Penn). Second, it's a portrait of the connections in life in general, and this latter strand veers toward the transcendant, taking us, ultimately, into what looks like the Rapture.

To feed the latter purpose the family story jumps around in time, never fully explaining, with some characters barely saying a word. What you get is motivation and regret and the lines between the two, and you get it with a curious eloquence. Chastain said that Malick's directing style was demanding. A scene would be played and then he would ask them to do it again, only using looks instead of words. That the actors manage this without looking as if they're eating the scenery says something about the talent involved.

Yet were the family at its heart more linked with the world around them, their story would be more grounded and wouldn't float away with the transcendental side of the film. Malick is great at creating tension and empathy, but not for something that feels wholly real. The cinematography is part of this, a dreamy, swirling, utterly beautiful and constantly motive sense of shooting that feels like art. (If you saw There Will Be Blood, it's up there - but completely different and possibly more successful.) It feels dreamy because it's a succession of memories in the head of the character Penn plays, but this does leave you wanting other perspectives - especially the mother's, which is deliberately absent to accent her innocent nature.

Oddly, the fact that the movie tries to get you to engage with the emotional journey of a dinosaur barely half an hour in isn't a great problem. These evolution-of-life scenes are beautiful enough to allow audiences to disregard their weirdness, although some laughter at the sheer surrealness of it would be fully justified. If you want a movie that stays with you and gives you a different slant on existence, this is to be highly recommended. And it's also something that should most definitely be seen in the cinema, and on a good screen - because its beauty is worse studying as large as you can see it.

FILM TRAILERS: Like Crazy (2011)

2011-08-02T15:15:00.002+01:00

Any film that has ‘Indian Paintbrush’ as one of its production partners is indie by definition. There’s a lot of empty space and wide shots in what looks like the ambiguous story of a transatlantic romance between the rebooted Chekhov (Anton Yelchin) and Felicity Jones (Cemetery Junction), with Jennifer Lawrence (Winter's Bone) playing spoilers. The sound mix in this Sundance winner echoes mumblecore, but the ‘London’ and seaside scenes point to a wider ambition. This year’s young Blue Valentine?

FILM TRAILERS: Dark Knight Rises (2012)

2011-07-24T15:26:00.002+01:00

Trailers really should get you excited about a film - that's the point of them - which is why it's such a shame that the recent teaser for The Dark Knight Rises seems such a bust. As soon as the words 'every hero has a journey' drift onto the screen, you feel marooned in the land of bad cliches, fobbed off with what looks like spare footage from the first movie. Batman is barely in it. You briefly glimpse Tom Hardy as Bane. The font looks awful and it all feels thoroughly depressing, like a terrible betrayal Christopher Nolan has perpetrated on Batman fans simply because he can. It's like having sand kicked in your face.

The strangest thing happens when you watch it twice, though. It gets good. Perhaps this is down to some strange alchemy, but I'd ascribe more it to watching it expecting action, receiving mood setting that you'd already assumed, and feeling all cheated as a result. It's all about expectations...

FILM TRAILERS: Steven Soderbergh's Haywire (2011)

2011-07-24T10:55:00.004+01:00

Some first impressions of the trailer for Haywire, Steven Soderbergh's Nikita-style actioner. Gina Carano looks and sounds superb in the action sequences, and certainly does a good line in both aggrieved and determined as the top agent betrayed by the man she trusts (Ewan McGregor).

The picture looks to concern itself with a pacey revenge-arc, with the only man Carono can trust being her father (solid Bill Paxton). Michael Fassbender is on the cast, which is always a good sign, alongside veterans Michael Douglas and Antonio Banderas (some nice wattage there) and the thunking sounds in the fight scenes augur well, being reminiscent of Bourne in their gut-connecting solidity.

It's always good when your star can actually do the fighting - Carono is a mixed martial artist and ex American Gladiator - so the camera doesn't have to cutaway so much, and the benefits show even in the trailer. If the pacing's good, can it go wrong?

FILM: Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (2011)

2011-07-22T23:23:00.001+01:00

The story: In the final film of the series, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and co race to defeat Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) as his forces threaten to overwhelm Hogwarts.

So, this is it - the final curtain, etc. A series that started with the boyish wink of a classic boarding school romp finishes with all the apocalyptic furore of Apocalypse Now. Well, almost. The scenes in the bombed out Hogwarts, and the Nazified dark wizards, remind you of a World War II movie. The wrecked school arches echo bombed out churches in occupied France, with wizards stalking each other among the dead bodies.

The palette of the film is virtually black and white, with splashes of colour occurring mostly near sources of unfettered good (the quirky Luna Lovegood and her purple cords, for instance). There are some ghosts, and they all have the same sandblasted sheen, an eerie effect that's different enough from Star Wars to stop quotes like 'Use the force, Luke' from bouncing about in your head.

As it's a dark movie in the literal sense, I'd think twice about seeing it in 3D - assuming you have the option. 3D makes everything darker, and as there are few scenes where that third dimension brings anything to the screen you can't divine from the cinematography, the trade-off isn't necessarily worth it.

As the second of two parts, the movie is more of a narrative than an emotional success. It finishes the story in spectacular style but, because it picks up halfway through, some of the emotional investment built up in the first film is lost. It's a compromise, because the story is so dense and the characters so loved that the need to give them all a good send-off necessitates the immense running time. It's only when you notice how little screen time some get (Julie Walters, Miriam Margolyes, Jim Broadbent) that you realise what an immense task this is. To think of the film's life in the long-term, as part of a collection, this movie makes more sense. Watching HP7B without recent memories of HP7A is like watching Quantum Of Solace with only a vague recollection of Casino Royale.

These caveats aside it's a superbly executed movie, one that rivets you with its sheer scale and density of talent. The supporting cast is incredible and, to a generation of movie fans, the central trio simply are those characters, living that life, in that world. There's a sequence at the end that shows some of them 19 years on, but it's as if someone just shrugged and put them in longer clothes and hair. Only one of them really gets to say anything - I won't say who, for faint risk of a spoiler - and they're the only one who gets away with it, because the acting conveys the age. Perhaps the makeup department went for the 'less is more' option. Or perhaps this is one of those things that works better with a recent viewing of HP7A. One can only imagine the effect of watching all eight films back to back, aside from mild eye strain.

FILM: What Price Hollywood? (1932)

2011-07-22T23:03:00.000+01:00

The story: An aspiring actress (Constance Bennett) uses her work as a waitress to get a break with a big-shot movie director (Lowell Sherman), and their careers head off on quite different trajectories.

To look at the DVD cover, you'd think What Price Hollywood was all about Constance Bennett. She is on screen for most of the movie, but the arc with real emotional punch belongs to the director that makes her - played by the marvellous Lowell Sherman. (Also a director in real life, Sherman was behind one of Mae West's best pre-code films, She Done Him Wrong). He starts out as a drunk riding the tail end of his talent, still good but slipping from his best because of wine, whisky and anything else he can get his hands on.

Sherman's alcoholism is presented for laughs at the start, but by the end of the movie it's a very different picture. Sherman himself seems to undergo a transformation of the kind only previously accomplished by Lionel Barrymore in Jekyll And Hyde. It's all the more powerful because he disappears for the entire middle third of the movie while Mary (Bennett), now entrenched as America's favourite gal next' door, pursues a romance with someone he doesn't like. (It's a dynamic vaguely reminiscent of Laura.) Een with this absence, Sherman dominates your memory of the film, makes you feel both happy and sad, and lets you think the screenplay is funnier than it is.

There's nothing wrong with Bennett's performance - she is what she's supposed to be: Sherman just has that scene-stealing aura. See him in Ladies Of Leisure and you'll see what I mean - because it's not just the showboating that keeps you wanting to see more, it's the promise of deeper layers to the character. And here he does more than you might expect, because the characters in George Cukor's film are pretty superficial, notably when you compare it to the directors' masterpiece Dinner At Eight, which came out just a year later. But maybe that's the point, as it's at least one part Hollywood satire. Whatever you think, don't miss the final few scenes - they're magnificently inventive.

FILM: The Killers (2010)

2011-07-22T22:55:00.001+01:00

The story: A disenchanted hitman (Ashton Kutcher) meets a play-it-safe daddy's girl (Katherine Heigl) on holiday - and decides to give it all up for a life in suburbia. But can he leave his old life behind?

The oddest thing about The Killers is Catherine O'Hara. Not the actress, but her character - she plays Katherine Heigl's mum, married to Tom Selleck. Both husband and wife are rather tense individuals, and this seems to have driven her to the bottle and, after a certain point in the film, you don't see her sober. It's a gag - she's an alcoholic. Ha ha. Heigl phones at 10 in the morning, and mum's drinking away a hangover with Bloody Marys. Later she's at gunpoint and - uh oh - what's that in her hand? Looks like a large glass of wine. Tom Selleck is Tom Selleck, with moustache on overdrive, and that's not so much a joke more of a riff that echoes across the film. The moustache is never far from your mind.

For all the funsterness of these performances, they're a better pairing than Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl who, while absolutely fine - and looking great - don't spark in the way they might. Kutcher tries his best as the jaded hitman but he's too boyish and not enough of a contrast to Heigl, who starts out nervy and jumpy but clearly isn't. You keep thinking of John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank, which is an unfair comparison - but, there it is. If he was five years older it would work a lot better,

The landscape they swan across is jetset Europe at the start, seguewaying into a sunshine suburbia where nothing is quite as it seems. Katherine Heigl's hair goes from holiday pizazz to Stepford wife in a matter of minutes, and the suburbia gags are nicely done, but it's such familiar territory you end up focusing mainly on how good everyone looks. Even Heigl can't help herself, going on about Kutcher's 'physical godlike perfection'.

The Killers is all about the looks, and it looks very nice indeed, although just a little more thought about Kutcher's back story would have gone a long way in making the story more enjoyable. As it stands it's a perfectly undemanding movie that someone could easily have made a brilliant TV series from the mid-60s.

UK POLITICS: Phone hacking scandal, House of Commons, July 20, 2011

2011-07-20T14:27:00.000+01:00

After an initial and very apparent threat to the Prime Minister, today's questions have lapsed into a simmering impasse. Cameron's line is consistent (and will remain so, barring any shock revelations) with plenty of supportive feeder questions from his own party. Any needling from the Liberal Democrats, coming across more as conscientious than combative, merely steals material from Labour.

It's now coming up to 2pm, and Cameron is so comfortable he's even started talking about the Big Society and his support of the local press in the face of council papers. Labour has given up asking about Sky, Rebecca Brooks et al. The last member to ask Cameron if he had 'ever' uttered the word BSkyB near Brooks (who Cameron occasionally calls 'Wade') didn't even receive an answer. Cameron stood up, made a noise of flustered disbelief, and sat down again. That's not a denial of course - he claims that he is not a robot and cannot remember everything - but the repeated asking of the question makes Labour look like the tinfoil hat brigade.

The argument, as with the austerity debate, has been most persuasive when pointing out the hypocrisy of the opposition. Damian McBride, Alastair Campbell, Gordon Brown's proximity to Murdoch when Miliband was his (Brown's) advisor, Miliband announcing his policies via the Sun, etc. The strategy seems to be one of exhaustion and, after 138 questions to the Prime Minister and barring any revelations in the debate that follows, seems to have sufficed for this session.

UK POLITICS: Prime Minister's Questions, July 6, 2011

2011-07-20T13:57:00.001+01:00

Both Cameron and Miliband saved their powder for the final exchange. This PMQs was taking place in the opening salvoes of the phone hacking scandal, when the allegations about Milly Dowler had just surfaced, and before those concerning the relations of dead soldiers. As such, Ed Miliband's opening statement of unity with David Cameron on the plight of our armed forces was denied the perhaps neater segueway into phone hacking it might otherwise have had.

No, his lead is Milly Dowler, and he pushes for a public inquiry. Cameron agrees, but only to the point that it would not interfere with an ongoing police investigation. This is a line he holds - despite Miliband's precedent on the Gibson detainee inquiry - sticking mostly to a righteous appreciation of 'correct legal processes', which he also claims was observed with relation to the BSkyB bid. (A claim at which the house harrumphs in derision, at least twice.)

Cameron is clearly keen to control the velocity of proceedings, and does so from the perceived position of the cooler head hoping to prevail in troubled times. Ed Miliband channels months of political frustrations into a steely manifestation of the public's anger. His points mount toward a challenge of the Sky bid, leaving his personal attack as the final point: the Prime Minister's apparent lack of judgement in hiring Andy Coulson. Cameron deploys his personal disgust at the scandal to deflect it, and does so neatly.

This is at once a stage in an ongoing scandal and a watershed moment all of its own. Cameron recognises that the shift from hacking politicians and celebrities to murder victims is the shift that matters, and it's a surreal moment of self reference. Miliband seems to be goading him into out-and-out condemnation of the Murdochs, so poisoning any future relations between the Conservative party and the Sun and Times, and calling into question more than just Cameron's choice of spin doctor. Every move carries plenty of dimensions, because the situation is evolving so violently - leaving aside the long-term impact of any police investigations and public inquiries, which may take years.

Whether this scandal precedes a seismic shift in the long-term dynamic between politicians and press is doubtful, but it clearly signals a change in its tone. So long as the media sit between the public and the government, there will some kind of exchange. As if aware of the long game, George Osborne sits merrily on the bench, slinging knowing, superior smiles across the house, resembling a hyper intelligent nodding dog.

UK POLITICS: Prime Minister's Questions, June 29, 2011

2011-07-20T13:47:00.003+01:00

Ed Miliband really seems to have done his homework this week. There are 163 statutory organisations in the NHS, he claims. How many will be left after Mr Cameron's top-down re-organisation - surely, there would be fewer? That's what he implies, while clearly knowing it's the opposite (the sly old dog!) and indeed, he gleefully announces the new figure is 521 - following Cameron's typical evasion of his cunning elephant trap .

Cameron's defence rests on money-saving, a bottom line figure of £5 billion, numbers of quangos be damned Yet Miliband creates a persuasive narrative of bureaucratic horror, in which the hundreds made redundant from the NHS will be rehired to do jobs with slightly different names. (Newspapers love that kind of thing, not that Ed Miliband loves newspapers. Oh no.)

The best Cameron can do in response is note that Tony Blair supports his plans. Tony Blair? Really? One to file in the 'must try harder' folder. He also claims that Ed Miliband wants to make Britain look like debt-ridden Greece, which is better - but it isn't until Miliband has finished speaking, much later, that he hits a persuasive vein - Labour can't talk about the strikes because they're funded by the unions. That went underexploited.

The House was a fearsome hubbub, like the last class before the summer holidays. Speaker Bercow had to shout, very loudly, to stop members shouting. It must have been the heat. Those cheap suits making people itchy, bottoms sliding unexpectedly off seats, a stink of the mingling of sweat and man-made fibres wafting pungently into the air, thickening the discourse with its vile aroma.

Only one man could cut through the fetid stench - the Father of the House, Sir Peter Tapsell, who rose with a far-sighted question about Europe that left Cameron looking like a student intimidated during a seminar. It's always an extraordinary experience when Sir Peter stands up, him and Jack Straw. Always worth listening.

FILM: Bridesmaids (2011)

2011-07-18T22:49:00.001+01:00

The story: Annie (Kristen Wiig), a single woman unlucky in love and business, finds out her childhood friend (Maya Rudolph) is getting married. It should be a reason for celebration, but a seemingly perfect member of the bridal party (Rose Byrne) upstages her at every turn.

Spun a little differently, Bridesmaids could easily be a very depressing movie. The central thread is one woman, Annie (Kristen Wiig) bottoming out, causing plenty of collateral damage on the way. An influencing factor in this is the wedding of her childhood buddy, which is increasingly controlled by a seemingly perfect rival best friend - it's a war for influence, and not one she's winning. The romance side of things ain't great either. Annie is dating a nasty nympho played by Mad Men's Jon Hamm, delivering a neat twist on the himbo role he debuted on TV's 30 Rock. She's not a happy lady, with a broken business and relationship sat in the space where her hope chest might once have been.

Wiig's character is easily the most three-dimensional in Bridesmaids, and that's because Wiig is such a damn fine actress. If you look at how much she moves her face, how much she conveys, it's a wonder that you don't sit there after ten minutes yelling for her to calm down. But no, it all seems right, because it's rooted in something real, much like the other women in the film who embody violent extremes of experience almost to the point of caricature, were caricature to be considered a pejorative in this particular case. They mostly brim with madness, and exist as reference points for Annie's universe, arguments for different life choices within a comedy context. One other point - Annie has wrinkles around her eyes. She's allowed to have them. That's important.

Within this framework sits a very funny script with lines that catch you off balance. Annie's mum is excited to see that Castaway has arrived on 'the Netflix', because it's like 'Forrest Gump on an island'. The writing is consistently good and the film doesn't lapse into formula, bumping the plot along through a series of what it are more vignettes than sketches. Only once does the humour stray into serious gross-out territory, and only one bodily fluid is present with any force on the screen. Where it can become overpowering is in the scenes of Annie's assorted collapses, a couple of which are real watch-through-the-fingers territory. It's in this tricky mix of tones - extreme comedy alternating with portraits, ultimately, of depression - that the film's appeal may waver with audiences who find such a brutal juxtaposition unpalatable.

Aside from Wiig, one of the few actresses in the film who genuinely straddles that is Melissa McCarthy. Apparently playing the fat, easy gag when she comes on screen, McCarthy's is one of the deeper characters in it, much moreso than the bride. The bride's uber-organiser, uber-perfect new friend Helen is left necessarily unhumanised for much of the film, although Rose Byrne plays her with at least two levels, certainly behind the eyes.

The cast is head and shoulders above what you'd expect of a movie that could easily (and wrongly) be marketed either as a romcom or a gross-out product of the Judd Apatow stable, and that, the script and the film's refreshingly human heart are what leave you more than satisfied by the end. It's not a movie that stays with you, but it's mighty fun while it does.

FILM: Transformers: Dark Of The Moon (2011)

2011-07-18T22:41:00.001+01:00

The story: The return of the Decepticons coincides with the revelation of the real trigger for the space race, and Sam must help the Autobots unravel the mystery.

Big, big empty spaces sit in the middle of Transformers 3. Huge, yawning gaps through which individual bubbles of relative excellence float freely, loosely tethered to the narrative. It does what X Men: First Class does, to bold effect - insert itself into history. In that recent franchise reboot, it was mutant orchestration of the Cuban Missile Crisis; in Transformers 3 it's the Apollo programme, why it began and why it was closed down.

Michael Bay really goes for this, roping in the modern-day Buzz Aldrin and dimensionalising footage of Kennedy into 3D. This is a thrilling opening set piece, especially compared to the tedium of Shia LaBeouf's life as Sam, which swiftly dampens most of the excitement created. Trying to get a job, having an amazingly hot girlfriend, taking job interviews with John Malkovich, that sort of thing. The worst thing is that LaBeouf looks like he's trying to do something interesting this time round, and occasionally bursts with a kind of unhinged energy that could be mistaken for charisma. His father openly wonders how he can have so many hot girlfriends, while a couple of snide references are made to him being well shot of Megan Fox (who compared Michael Bay to Hitler, and was fired after movie number two).

The final sequence in a devastated Chicago, which should be a tour de force, is symptomatic of what's wrong with the entire movie - rarely does it have the urgency or the ability to make you care about anyone on the screen. One of the Autobots dies, in a manner clearly designed to evoke empathy from the audience. It's hard to even be sure of his name. At one point, the action is held up because Optimus Prime gets stuck in some wires. It's an unruly mess, like a bunch of firecrackers going off inside a massive ariticulated lorry that's moving at 35 miles per hour.

There's definitely good in it. Alan Tudyk is great value as Dutch, a German-speaking sidekick with a camp facade and some dangerous moves. You could watch a whole spin-off with him as the star - the character's a cliche but he's fun, and performed with heart. The voices of Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) and Megatron (Hugo Weaving) are spot-on, holding your attention far more than anything LaBeouf does; Community's Ken Jeong is sparky as an unhinged worker at the place Sam finally gets a job. Leonard Nimoy is also wryly cast as a long-lost Autobot, who seems to have a beard and actually uses a line about 'the needs of the many' that your reviewer was, for some reason, the only person in the theatre to laugh at (it might be the age difference).

The effects are great too, genuinely jaw dropping. A building gets crushed in two by a giant robot snake, and you feel every window pane break. At one point, the view shifts so you're behind the gun like in a computer game (they do this in the film of Doom, more predictably), and the 3D works really well when the paratroopers come down. (Like the floating jellyfish in Avatar.)

There are echoes of the franchise's right-wing politics. Fox News pops up, despite this being a Paramount Picture - Sam's medal from President Obama is frequently laughed at, especially in one job interview with a fervent Republican. The Autobots, presented as superior moral beings, also have a strong interventionist foreign policy. At one point they gallavant off to a rogue nuclear facility in 'the middle east' to take down the pesky fellas who built it.

It's better than the second movie too, in terms of its story.Yet it's a very bloated piece of work that's not really a film, more an assembly of things, an industrial transition. It's a step on a road to a different version of cinema, going back along the road that Pirates Of The Caribbean built from funride to film. Or it's just a lot of stuff that doesn't really fit together very well - take your pick. Either way, it has almost no soul, and even less when the human stars are on screen.

FILM: GI Joe: The Rise Of Cobra (2009)

2011-07-18T22:23:00.001+01:00

The story: A NATO mission to transport a new and deadly armament from a weapons dealer (Christopher Eccleston) triggers the interest of GI Joe, and the rise of a new and international terrifying terrorist force.

Calling a movie with a budget of nearly $200 million cheap and cheerful might seem to be damning with faint praise, but it's actually a compliment. When you put it up against the Transformers movies, especially the third one, GI Joe is like a breath of fresh air. It's a cartoon, and it knows it.

The characters are having a good time - they enjoy running about in high tech military suits, camping it up to the max, and while there's a dark streak to some of them, that never rises above the pantomime. Christopher Eccleston's comically Scottish arms dealer - a descendant of Destro, 'destroyer of wurlds', is just the start of that. (Wait until you meet his twisted science genius sidekick.)

The two main characters, Duke and Ripcord, wind up joining the Joes after stumbling into them on a mission. They go to their base, which is hidden beneath the sands of Egypt by some dodgy CGI (hence the cheap) and turns out to be a parade of absurdist camp, the kind of place a 12-year-old wishes he could play Laser Quest. There are entire levels devoted to naval warfare, gun ranges with holographic targets, and pugil stick fights in the style of Gladiators. Duke and Ripcord are like schoolboys in a sweetshop.

There's a subtle anti-French vibe that also provides amusemaent. Paris, not New York, Chicago, Washington or San Francisco, is the city targeted by a rising Cobra, and they really go for it. Breaker (Said Taghmaoui) who speaks with a pronounced French accent, makes an issue out of saying he is Moroccan.

Easily the best acting comes from Snake Eyes, the mute ninja whose feud with a camp, white-wearing, shuriken-spinning enemy ninja is explained via flashback. GI Joe does what it says on the tin, and while it won't win any medals for feminine empowerment (women rarely put up much of a fight on their own), it's fun stuff with a line in action so wildly extreme that it makes you laugh like slapstick. It's a cartoon fantasy, only a couple of steps down that line from Die Another Day - which which is shares a fascination for invisibility. 'Doing Mach 6 and loving it', says one of the characters after nicking a superfast, experimental aircraft. This isn't experimental, but it's damned good fun.

FILM: Zodiac (2007)

2011-07-18T21:47:00.003+01:00

The story: David Fincher's thriller based on the true-life case of the Zodiac killer, who taunted San Francisco police and newspapers with accounts and threats of his crimes.

This is a long movie. It starts out so well, but it's a tough old slog toward the end. This might be less down to injudicious editing than it is to a deliberate, empathetic obsession with the subject matter – the focus of the film isn't so much how the Zodiac killer's crimes affect the families of his victims, but the destruction wrought on the pursuers who become obsessed with him.

A reporter (Robert Downey Jr), a cartoonist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and two cops (Anthony Edwards and Mark Ruffalo) all suffer for their unswerving focus on Zodiac, most of which they bring on themselves. As the obsession with getting some kind of answer - any answer - grows towards the end, so does the dizzying depth of detail, and the difficulty of keeping up with it all. You feel as if David Fincher became as obsessed with the cases as his characters did, and asks the audience to do the same - as a punishing exercise in empathy.

The bulk of the set-up takes place in the late 60s-early 70s, and this is when the film is at its best. The style is calm, with long framing shots that characters move around in. The camera doesn't bat back and forth between conversants, and rarely shows you characters there's no need to see (a waiter taking an order, for instance). When a taxi is rolling through the streets, the camera shifts to an overheard view to follow it, the car locked in the centre of the shot. In this early stage, yellow is a dominant colour (like the taxi). Normally, if you were noticing things like this – in a crime thriller, after all – you'd suspect something was wrong with the pacing. Yet in this first half there really isn't, it's just the period detail is so fun to appreciate.

This stylised approach also suggests a lack of naturalism, but the characters actually feel pretty real – the stylising is frame, not content. There's no 'comic relief' as such, with the possible exception of Brian Cox's take on the flamboyant lawyer Melvin Belli (who really did appear in Star Trek, if you're wondering). The characters are a nice mix of light and shade, with the occasional quirk to catch your eye – Mark Ruffalo's detective feels like an homage to Columbo, and has a taste for Animal Crackers that even the Zodiac case can't shift. Robert Downey Jr's reporter is flamboyant in his waistcoat, manner and facial hair but fundamentally troubled. Gyllenhaal's cartoonist starts out cutely book-obsessed, and ages (at least in terms of personality) the least gracefully.

The film actually ends in the 1990s, and the slow shift of period is fascinating to watch. Just don't expect the final act not to mirror the agonies of trying to close a case with a million different files in a million different jurisdictions, where blind alleys and misdirection are everyday hazards.

FILM: Salt (2010)

2011-07-18T18:28:00.001+01:00

The story: A CIA agent (Angelina Jolie) is accused of being a Russian sleeper agent, and goes on the run. Her colleagues (Liev Schreiber and Chiwetel Ejiofor) give chase.

The tone of this thriller is hard and cold, like a Cold War espionage flick. Angelina Jolie slots neatly into that, all angular features and icy demeanour. Yet she's still Angelina Jolie, and watching Jolie on screen comes with baggage, especially in a movie that turns on whether her character is good or bad. Salt was originally written for Tom Cruise, who did Knight And Day around the same time - a movie which, similarly, was as much about whether Tom Cruise could be bad as it was about gunfights and glitzy locations.

So, could Angelina Jolie really be playing a Russian spy - and a bad one? It's possible. Tom Cruise was a hit man in Collateral, although his pure professionalism lent that character a level of understanding that a less famous actor might not have been allowed. Salt asks the question, then launches into one long chase sequence for you to consider the answer, throwing a few curveballs along the way.

It is, of course, a spectacular ride, with Jolie on convincing physical form - and that says more than you'd think, because one scene has her hopping between lorries on a freeway. All of this is played straight, with none of the wry, comic book sensibility that came with Tom Cruise's not dissimilar antics in Knight And Day. The tone is steadfastly Muscovite, bereft of any buddy comedy, romance or wisecracks. Salt's pure purpose is to provide spectacle, pace and to keep you wondering if Angelina Jolie could be a Russian spy or not.

To a certain degree this works rather well, and if you're happy to entertain the possibility that Jolie could blend into crowds as an assassin then you have no business ridiculing the movie's more outlandish action setpieces, which are executed with the same pokerfaced expression. Just don't expect much more than a movie machine - a well oiled genre picture, like Hanna without the quirks.

UK POLITICS: Prime Minister's Questions, June 22, 2011

2011-07-12T21:27:00.001+01:00

Ed Miliband now resembles a weapon, but his guidance system is seriously wonky. This week, he tried to embarrass the Prime Minister by hurling a quote back at him (Cameron to army: 'you do the fighting, I'll do the talking') in the wrong-headed belief that the PM would deal with it directly out of sheer shame. It's our brave men and women overseas, after all. How could he be perceived to be rude about them?

Surely Mr Cameron would be forced to deal with that. Would he ****. Cameron skirted around it, just as he did the suggestion that the Strategic Defence Review was outdated - implying that the review had, itself, already been reviewed. Some verbal jousting ensued, with either side trying to use the self-satirising phrase 'review of the review' in the best way possible. Cameron avoided it completely; Miliband used to to no effect. Again, no guidance systems.

Whatever their ineffectiveness, these questions undoubtedly hold George Osborne's attention. After Miliband stops speaking, the Chancellor's eyes begin darting around the chamber distractedly, as if he were following a bee.

Ed Miliband's second attack is on DNA for sentencing, railing at Cameron's plans to remove the genetic information of unconvicted rape suspects from police databases. There's a real ethical issue here, some real meat. But Miliband throws it away on conviction statistics, and some unattractive posturing. Cameron is also off his game, wandering off on some tangent about how Ed Balls and Ed Miliband don't speak to each other.

It feels very much like a pre-prepared attack, an angle pre-agreed in Tory HQ - make Ed Miliband look as if he's not in tune with his colleagues. Make him look out of step, not a leader but a man facing a mutiny. That's fine, but it shouldn't seem so obvious. Cameron's attack was so clear that the speaker reined him in on it. Does this reveal fear on the Tory part, or just a moment of exhaustion?

FILM: The A-Team (2010)

2011-06-28T15:14:00.003+01:00

The story: An elite team of Iraq War veterans (Liam Neeson, Sharlto Copley, Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson, Bradley Cooper) try to clear their name after a mission goes badly wrong.

The critical steer when The A-Team movie came out was simple – it's noisy, violent and brash. That's not wrong, but the first two thirds have a sense of humour and a swagger all their own, and are fun to watch. Where it fails quite spectacularly is in the final third as, having set BA up as a convert to non-violence (seemingly through religion), the movie then glories in trying to turn him around to the idea that, actually, killing's OK if you're angry enough. In fact, it feels pretty good. It's addictive.

This leaves a bad taste in the mouth, especially when you consider the famously death-light tone of the original series. This, in turn, makes the post-credits cameos by Dirk Benedict and Dwight Schultz seem all the more ill-advised. To call the scene an afterthought is to understate its flaws. Schultz's line is terrible, and the various in-jokes that pepper the film are a far better tribute to the original show than this.

That aside, the first two thirds are better than you'd suspect – a rollercoaster of action and gags, punctuated by fun performances that find their own space, rather than simply aping the originals. (Sharlto Copley is particularly good at this, when you consider what an elephant trap for overacting Murdock is.)

It's not a disappointment if you enjoy the genre, but to claim that the ending is some kind of 'gritty' modernising of the original is disingenuous nonsense. If you want to make a movie where killing is celebrated, then do it from the start – don't take an even-handed attitude to it for the most part, then make a stupid argument for how actually, killing feels pretty good. It's an insult to the audience that's more about contempt than any kind of quasi intellectualism. This bitter, cynical refrain also occurs in the second halves of Taken and From Paris With Love, action films that fetishise mass slaughter, but do so by pretending to have a genuine purpose at the start. Such dishonesty in a blockbuster is just stupid, because it tells the audience you think they're idiots.

The only place the film's slippery sense of morality scores is in its portrayal of the bad guys, because your're never quite sure who they actually are. That works, because they're in the shadows - a vast grey area outside the straight military certainties of Hannibal and co. Letting that grey area bleed into the central foursome undermines the whole momentum of the film.

FILM: Morning Glory (2010)

2011-06-27T12:05:00.003+01:00

The story: A TV producer (Rachel McAdams) is tasked with reviving an ailing breakfast show. Can she persuade a grumpy news veteran (Harrison Ford) to join her lightweight show?

There’s a movie called The Ugly Truth that treads similar ground to Morning Glory – perky TV producer, difficult talent, a bit of romance - but the latter makes the former look liked chopped liver. The Ugly Truth had decent elements, notably the workplace comedy, but the romance was uncomfortable and the ending – it involved a hot air balloon – hatefully ridiculous. Morning Glory starts out as the story of a perky-but-tough TV producer and finishes as the story of a perky-but-tough TV producer. There’s a bit of romantic interest but it’s not been twisted into the romcom format purely for the sake of it. Morning Glory’s is its own thing, and all the better for it.

In some ways, it’s an update of the Depression-era-gal making good movie. Rachel McAdams gets fired from one job because of cutbacks, and struggles to get another one – when she does, she’s working harder and getting paid less than before. But she loves it. Irascible anchor Harrison Ford says she has ‘moxie’ and that’s exactly the word. McAdams is like Joan Blondell on speed. The character sleeps, breathes and lives work, whether her boyfriend likes it or not. News flows through her 24/7, her brain spitting out feature ideas every other second. There’s no effort to show that she’s got it all – the work is all she has, and she wouldn't trade it.

The temptation would be to sentimentalise this, to show her the error of her ways, and there is a bit of that – but only to the extent that the workplace becomes her family. She doesn’t want or get a life outside it, and McAdams is very plausible at pulling this off. There are people in jobs like that who aren’t a million miles from her, and it helps that the environment she works in feels like real – the people, the noises, the places, are all just believable enough.

Her counterpoint is Harrison Ford’s grouchy news veteran, shanghai’d into the programme by McAdams’s moxie. He’s a man who once pulled Colin Powell from a burning jeep, goddammit. What’s he doing on this trashy breakfast programme? He doesn’t want to be there, and that’s the struggle that sustains the rest of the film - can McAdams keep from messing up her big shot? The temptation would be to sentimentalise him too, yet that’s mostly resisted. Look out for the conflict between Ford and his co-anchor, Diane Keaton (looking incredible, acting better), which is marvellously barbed and never overplayed.

Morning Glory has pace, wit and the self-esteem to stay whole for most of its running time; it’s good enough to throw away gags, like the network she works at being called IBS, and casting Jeff Golblum as a bit of a **** and not turning him into a clown. That says a lot about what it keeps.

FILM: Death At A Funeral (2010)

2011-06-25T11:13:00.003+01:00

The story: A dysfunctional family come together to bury their patriarch, but the day doesn’t go easily – or without surprises.

A black (in both senses) comedy that plays out like a sequel to Father Of The Bride or Meet The Parents, Death At A Funeral has a great first third, full of gags and set-ups - when we meet the attendees, and learn about their various issues. Chris Rock is giving his father’s eulogy, but everyone thinks his flash writer sibling (Martin Lawrence) should do it instead. Rock's wife (a believable Regina Hall) is desperate to get pregnant, and the mother-in-law insensitively mocks her failures.

Elaine (Zoe Saldana) has brought a boyfriend along that her father doesn’t approve of, while a creepy ex (Luke Wilson, echoing brother Owen's turn in Meet The Parents) lurks in the background, and Uncle Russell (Danny Glover, actually saying ‘I’m too old for this ****’, and spending a lot of time on the toilet) is just mad at everyone. There’s a secret that emerges about the father’s past, but I won’t spoil it or any of the jokes.

So that’s the first third – the second wanders into farce, ramping the situations toward amusingly absurd outcomes, albeit ones that you can sometimes see coming. Chris Rock’s performance gives it a bit of intelligence and everyman moral backbone, the Saul Bass-esque titles give it a little style, and there’s a stand-out piece of gurning from X-Men’s Cyclops (James Marsden) as Elaine’s disapproved of boyfriend.

This is a remake of a British film of the same name, and I’d be intrigued to hear from anyone who’s seen both how it fares by comparison. I’m guessing the British one is slightly more arch, which would lead people to believe this version is actually less good than it is. Sure, the editing could be tighter and the mid-section more creative, but there are enough laughs in the first third to sustain your interest in the characters for most of the rest of the film.

FILM: Bride Of Frankenstein (1935)

2011-06-24T20:57:00.002+01:00

The story: Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) is persuaded to create a mate (Elsa Lanchester, who also plays Mary Shelley) for his monster (Boris Karloff), who survived the catastrophic events of the previous movie.

The problem with the Frankenstein story is that it's now so familiar, the first half of any movie can put you to sleep. It's a problem with Kenneth Branagh's version and it's a problem here; the slog from the opening framing device (a fun conversation between the author, Mary Shelley, her husband and a posturing Byron) to the enjoyable final act is a long one if you know the story.

The pantomime acting only compensates so much - although, in casting such aspersions on the players' style, we must be careful not to include Boris Karloff as the monster. When the camera is on Karloff, the emotional struggle is clear even through the makeup; it's there in the gait and the eyes, and reaches its peak in the scene in the shack with the blind man - as the monster jigs to music, downs wine and smokes cigars with the glee of an overexcited toddler. The creature is at the mercy of his emotions, which are in turn at the mercy of an unkind world. Moments later, brutes rush in and crash the party – and Karloff's monster is swiftly stumbling from the burning ruins of his happiness, narrowly avoiding a jet of flame (which doesn't look like an planned part of the production).

The 'she's alive' moment is suitably electric, the filming style switching to diagonal angles and harshly lit close-ups to make you sit up and take notice. They fly kites from a tower to harness the power for the bride's creation, but – unlike in Back To The Future – no-one is ever concerned about whether lightning will even strike. In this half-medieval world, extreme weather is never far away and everyday existence is tinged with the suspicion of dark magic. Characters like the mad Dr Pretorius are emblematic of this. In the film's most ghoulish scene, he unveils some of his creations – they're genuinely unsettling.

If you're looking for an emotional through line in Bride Of Frankenstein that's not part of its prequel, you won't find one – the bride, who might have provided it (especially if the film had been made before the production code blunted female characters), barely appears. Considering this lack of individual purpose it functions adequately, but the good scenes – anything mad, or with Karloff - show up exactly how dull the rest of it is.

UK POLITICS: Prime Minister's Questions, June 8, 2011

2011-06-24T20:34:00.001+01:00

Ed Miliband projects a curious mixture of boredom and bitterness, the face of a man tired of having his questions deflected. As such, this week, he lacks power. He asks if the Prime Minister will be tearing up the Justice Secretary’s plans in light of his comments on rape; David Cameron skirts around the answer, while receiving a paternal gaze from Ken Clarke. So that didn’t work. Now, Red Ed tries the flaws in the NHS - but David Cameron simply quotes the shadow health secretary back to him, who apparently described the reform plan as ‘good government’.

Oh dear oh dear. Miliband looks seriously annoyed, his eyes darting sideways in pointed irritation. His plan to drive a wedge between Clarke and Cameron was rotting in the mud, and the latter was cocking the gun chamber, wheeling the weapon round, the bullet named ‘Ed’ sliding in behind the firing pin. Standing solid and with his quiff now tamed, the Prime Minister lambasted what he saw as ‘empty opposition and weak leadership’ from the other side of the chamber. At one point, he even claims that Miliband ‘misled the House’ on NHS waiting times – a comment quickly rephrased to ‘an interesting use of facts’ after John Bercow forced a recant.

Regardless of this overstep, Ed Miliband’s front bench looks asleep behind the eyes, bloodless and bored. It creates an impression of disunity, which is something the opposition can afford far less than the government – unified attack is their entire reason for being. Disunity in power can be a product of genuine disagreement, which is arguably a healthy thing.

FILM: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)

2011-06-08T22:31:00.003+01:00

The story: An ingenious scientist (Kenneth Branagh) resolves to rid the world of death after his mother karks it, but doesn't count on the consequences of his actions.

As far as Kenneth Branagh's concerned, his version of Frankenstein is an opera. And that's the starting point for watching it, because if you coming into this expecting to see horror or a psychological thriller then you'll be bitterly disappointed. The sets are the first clue: The family home in Geneva has a stage-like, open plan feel with a super-sized stairway that snakes round and up the back.

It's a home that's made for filming from the front. When the action moves to the outside, or to misery, the colour palette drops away to monochrome – before Helena Bonham Carter dashes through in a red hat. It's very fairytale, but it's also the kind of colour scheme you might use to make characters stand out at a distance on a stage.

So there's that. There's also the music, which barely lets up, occasionally leading you to imagine that the next line might be sung. There's the arc of the story, a classic account of arrogance and revenge, spiced with a trip to the North Pole that recalls H.P. Lovecraft's Mountains Of Madness. Frankenstein – a bit of a kook, he wants to marry his sister – is driven to the esoteric fringe of science by his need not to let anyone else die (his mum passed away during childbirth), which also a bit Lovecraftian.

Most of all though, it's the sheer overblown energy of the thing. It's super-sized, bigger than life, like opera tends to feel. The monster's creation scenes are a tour de force, with a crazed Branagh striding around shirtless, grappling with his naked creation in what could easily be an oil wrestling scene from a Jason Statham movie. This movie was derided when it was released, but it makes much more sense when you see it through the lens of Branagh's recent Thor, which has been billed – in some quarters – as a high-energy superhero twist on Henry V.

It's not the world's best film, but it's much more interesting than first impressions gave it credit for, mostly in terms of its ambition, but also in terms of the details that support that ambition – the styling, the sets, the curious occasional feeling that you're watching a filmed stageplay. Somewhere in between something goes wrong, because the first half fails to capture you in the way it should, especially when you consider the subject matter. The second half – the horrific consequences of Frankenstein's actions lending themselves better to the style than did the build-up – is much easier to enjoy.

FILM: Cleopatra (1934)

2011-06-08T14:34:00.001+01:00

The story: The Egyptian queen (Claudette Colbert) tries to secure her kingdom by seducing Caesar (Warren William) and Mark Anthony (Henry Wilcoxon), but will she lose herself in the process?

It’s over-the-top style and racy costumes may lead you to think otherwise, but Cecil B. DeMille’s lavishly ridiculous take on the Cleopatra story is not a pre-code movie, mainly because its star – a hip-swaying, eye-batting Claudette Colbert – is ultimately the plaything of men. Colbert’s Cleopatra has very little interest in ruling Egypt (‘Always Egypt’, she moans to an aide), a country that she seems to be in charge of solely by looking hot. She’s a goof, escaping certain death in the desert by hiding in a carpet, of which she rolls out of to surprise a stunned Julius Caesar.

Warren William’s Caesar is stiff, but you get the impression that’s how he’s been told to play it because William can do layers. His Caesar is a brash workaholic who picks up Cleopatra for her gold connections while she (the poor thing) foolishly believes he loves her. Swoon.

Cut back to Rome, where Caesar’s wife is hosting a soiree that looks like a fancy dress cocktail party in Manhattan. Mark Anthony is striding about, claiming he’s above sleep – he doesn’t need it. ‘I’m glad you’re above something’, shoots back Octavian, who’s jealous of Anthony ‘cos he’s got more letters from Caesar. These guys should have a double act.

Cleopatra’s seduction of Mark Anthony is more interesting, and their scenes together form the best stretch of the film – the expert way she navigates his defences is great fun to watch. Especially here, the film switches to a kind of broad comedy, with Anthony doing a double take when he hears that Cleopatra has been testing poisons – and could use one on him. You can virtually hear the Carry On-style sounds effects.

What Cleopatra ultimately tells you is that women are bad for your career. They mess up your focus, draw you down pathways to doom, clouding your vision with booze and sex. This is the message it delivers inside a romper suit of period carnival, its actors poured into fabulous costumes, surrounded by fabulous sets, but stuck in a contemporary mindset (rather like The Tudors). Only once does this style really break, during the fast-cutting, crash-zooming documentary-style account of the battle between Egypt and Rome. One of Colbert’s later lines sums up her character’s trajectory: ‘I’m no longer a queen, I’m a woman.’ Yet she always was in this film, and only her glamour made anyone treat her otherwise.

FILM: Trauma (2004)

2011-06-08T14:17:00.002+01:00

The story: A man (Colin Firth) suffering from grief at the loss of his wife wakes up in hospital to find the country distracted by another tragedy, and tries to put his life back together. Only his reality starts to crumble - what is fact and what is fiction?

Colin Firth is brilliant in Trauma, partly because he's so different to how you're used to seeing him. Saying that about actors seems trite - they're actors after all, isn't being different part of the point - but so much of acting can be casting 'naturally' that it's a treat to see someone breaking their mould.

They may not see themselves as having a mould, but the audience will often have a pretty firm picture of who they expect an actor to be on screen, and it takes a good one to convince them that they don't mind - in fact, enjoy - having their expectations challenged. Casting is even more relevant here, because of those inherent audience expectations: he's Colin Firth, he's a nice, police Englishman, so you want him to be happy. But the movie leads you to suspect all kinds of weirdness about his character. Is it still OK to root for him?

Firth is tactile, scruffy, mentally scarred, unpredictable and an unreliable narrator of his own existence - not because he's lying, but because he's unsure what's really going on. Someone's leaving sugar outside his door. Who is it? Someone killed a famous singer. Who was it? Mena Suvari lives across the hall, and seems to be coming on to him, eyeing him with those big limpid pools like she did Kevin Spacey in American Beauty. Could that possibly happen? (There's a chapter in Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad that deals with this.)

He lives in an eerie apartment converted from a hospital ward, and is obsessed with bugs. The movie's palette adds a coloured haze to his weird behaviour, giving his surroundings a blue tint when inside, a yellow one when out, the latter emphasising that - while he does go outside - it's never a sunny, happy day.

The film evolves from a story of grief into a thriller where everything is open to question, and even if the plot occasionally leaves you hanging - think Memento or Triangle, but less wild than either, although more satisfying than the former - Firth's performance holds you from the very first scene.

FILM: Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel (2009)

2011-06-03T13:45:00.000+01:00

The story: Three down-on-their luck nerds (Marc Wootton, Dean Lennox Kelly, Chris O'Dowd) wind up having a time travel adventure in the pub.

Frequently Asked Questions' aim is pretty clear - take a lazy nerd's deepest two wishes, and play them out for a whole movie. For the purposes of the film, these wishes are:

a) for the world to recognise your intrinsic greatness without you actually having to do anything
b) for an amazing woman to chat you up in a bar (in this case it's a pitch perfect Anna Faris)

These could apply to lazy men in general. It's just that when they're applied to nerds they seem less likely to be fulfilled, and so inherently funnier. To be fair to the group, only two of them are proper sci-fi fantasists: Marc Wootton and Chris O'Dowd's characters write letters to Hollywood telling them how to stop ruining movies, while Dean Lennox Kelly keeps himself on the sidelines, looking down on his friend's obsessions and focusing on his pint. He's a man's man, is the message his posture sends you - yet Kelly's character is a fantasist of another order. He dresses and dips his head like Noel Gallagher, and walks into empty pub toilets with shades on, performing 1980s song and dance numbers.

You can see why they're friends, in short, and this is what binds the movie at its heart. When you first meet the trio, they're annoying as hell, but when they go where they go - the less said about where the better - you're right there for the ride, willing them on, hoping they'll succeed. Or, at least, make it to the end so you can find out what happens.

FAQ will appeal to anyone who enjoys spending nights in pubs and small British movies, and while a love of sci-fi isn't a requirement - the movie is strong on nerd attitude, not trivia - it might add to your enjoyment. For those despairing at the idea of staring at hairy men for just over 80 minutes, Anna Faris is there to provide glamour and reliably sparky comic timing.

FILM: X Men: First Class (2011)

2011-06-02T23:10:00.001+01:00

The story: Against the backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis, telepathic mutant Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is recruited by the CIA to investigate a growing threat.

Set a globetrotting superhero movie in the Sixties and you run the risk of looking like Austin Powers. But that only happens once in X Men: First Class, when we dive beneath the waves on a submarine - a remarkable vehicle sporting pristine white interiors and a shiny nuclear reactor glowing in a diamond-lined room. There’s another scene that suggests the camp TV version of Batman, as Magneto enters the slanted lair of his nemesis.

And the globetrotting in general suggests James Bond, jetting between England, Switzerland, the US, Russia, Cuba and Argentina and taking time to establish each setting. This is the framework in which nestles the origin story of the X Men, torn in one way by the human-loving Charles Xavier and the other by human-hating Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender). It being the Sixties, the mutant/human opposition theme is bounced neatly through the civil rights movement (with a neat gag about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell) and the East/West struggle, culminating in a gloriously absurd rendition of the Cuban missile crisis.

This is where First Class really comes into its own, because for all the characters' carping about fitting in with society (familiar from the comics, and previous movies), it’s the fact the First Class is so wilfully and incredibly silly that it really works. It's sillier than Black Swan, possibly even sillier than Thor. The one emotional storyline you can take seriously is Lehnsherr's journey to become Magneto, and that's mainly because Michael Fassbender deploys agony and anger with such charisma that you can't not pay attention. There are other emotional journeys (most notably Jennifer Lawence's Mystique), but they're all spin-offs.

Some of the casting is jaw-dropping. Ray Wise (previously the Devil in Reaper, Leland in Twin Peaks) is the Secretary of State, Top Gun's Michael Ironside the captain of the American fleet. Both, but especially Ironside, are revealed with such delight they’re virtually treated as locations, or hugely expensive sets that the director wants to get his money’s worth from. On top of these rampant nods to the present, this crazy mutant tale is interweaved with actual footage of President Kennedy talking about the missile crisis. The cheek of the juxtaposition is incredible, especially when, mere scenes before, we’ve had a mutant-training mohe ntage that used white-bar split screen to humorous effect. It's a fireball of ridiculousness.

Yet despite the mischievous froth of the setting, the weight of establishing all these locations and all these characters – a whole world, really - does slow the story down. This is regrettable but understandable when you realise that First Class is essentially a reboot, set in a different time with what amount to spins on familiar characters and entirely new ones - but it's still a niggle that never quite goes away. Perhaps it's partly the contrast with the other movies, from which it feels very, very different. You wonder if the hefty British contingent, both on the cast and behind the camera, is partly responsible. The cast are very good – even if it looks as if they can’t believe where they are half the time – with Rose Byrne (Damages), Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone) and James McAvoy (or certainly his eyes) as standouts. (That Fassbender is excellent goes without saying.)

X Men: First Class should be forgettable, but the sheer, full-throttle craziness of it ensures that it stays in your brain after you leave the cinema, and slowly starts to get better and better inside your head. And whether some scenes made you laugh with excitement or bewilderment, that's fun either way.

FILM: The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

2011-06-01T16:53:00.000+01:00

The set-up: Werner Herzog directs and narrates this look inside the Chauvet caves in southern France, which contain the earliest known cave paintings.

At the end of Werner Herzog's film, the director makes the kind of pronouncement you'd been expecting of him for the last 90 minutes - comparing modern humanity to mutant albino alligators that live in a specially created tropical reserve powered by the steam from nuclear reactors.

The plant is 20 miles from the Chauvet caves, and the documentary is at its best when simply recording their interior, rendering it in an unflashy 3D that puts you right in the cameraman's shoes. It's a transporting effect, looking at these ancient paintings - and at the calcite-covered skulls on the floor, the stalagmites and the stalactites almost touching, grown together over the aeons.
One of Herzog's interviewees, an archaeologist, turns out to have a previous life as a circus unicyclist - this is a detail that only Herzog could draw out in a documentary that is supposed to be about caves. Anyone else would be focusing on historical context, and there is some attempt at that, recording the faces of the scientists as if they were a substitute for ancient man as they stare at the paintings.

Some of the wackier scientists do their bit to help. One dresses 'like an Inuit', another throws spears in the ancient style, while a perfumer roams the hillside, allegedly sniffing for caves - yet the artists, arguably practicing an early form of cinema with their multi-legged paintings, remain remote figures. We can only wonder at their environment and work and try to imagine from there, which seems to be the point of the film - it's not as if Joe Public can get into these caves on their own, so Herzog is performing a public service in his own, wonderfully weird way.

FILM: Jennifer's Body (2009)

2011-05-31T15:16:00.001+01:00

The story: A high school student (Megan Fox) with a wild sexual reputation has an encounter with some dodgy musicians, and returns a changed woman.

Such is the sexual magnetism of Megan Fox - extensivley documented by Michael Bay in the first two Transformers movies - that she is cast as a temptation no man can resist in Karyn Kusama's high school horror comedy, the script for which comes from Diablo Cody (Juno).

Attractiveness is subjective of course, but Fox certainly does the job in a high school context, playing the less likeable half of a duo of mismatched friends. The other half is a dork, a condition signposted by the fact that she wears glasses; she tolerates Jennifer (Fox) because her slutty friend lends her life a little glamour. They've been friends since childhood, y'see. But can their friendship survive Jennifer's transformation into a flesh-eating sex beast with demonic powers? Should it?

Probably not. Metaphors and cultural riffs are rife in Jennifer's Body - hormones and puberty, teen detachment and unblinking belief in the internet, enslavement to celebrity culture and the like - and there are some killer lines, all delivered with an absolutely straight face. Some of them play on Jennifer's utter ignorance of anything but herself, and Fox plays the lines exactly as a one-dimensional monster should. It's funny, occasionally, and the first hour holds up decently, before the lack of focus starts to tell and it drifts into a more conventional high school horror flick, the kind that it is mostly either parodying or plundering.

Jennifer's Body is no Easy A - it doesn't pick a concept, flesh it out and leave you with something solid to think about. Yet neither is it a full-out exploitation flick that trades exclusively on lingering shots of a barely-clad Fox. Although it has something of the knowing tone of a skin and slash flick like Piranha, it's never as horrific or explicit as you expect it to be - but nor is it as smart, which leaves it swinging uncomfortably between at least two stools.

Fox does better here than many people will have been expecting, and the film occasionally catches you off guard with its heightened, otherworldly sense of events, but as a viewing experience it's best entered into with lowered expectations.

UK POLITICS: Prime Minister's Questions, May 18, 2011

2011-05-30T23:03:00.001+01:00

David Cameron is growing a quiff. That's the way it looks. A formidable array of product appears to be taming the Prime Minister's towering topside growth, notable in its contrast to Nick Clegg's more 'wash and go' bouffed up approach (it's impossible not to compare when they sit side-by-side).

Sat on the other side of the chamber, his grey fleck disappearing further into his glossy black thatch, Ed Miliband's heart must have been thumping. What a gift, he must have thought over his cornflakes, as Ken Clarke appeared to imply that some types of rape weren't as bad as others on the Today programme. Quick, I need this in my PMQs, thought Red Ed, probably (hopefully) scribbling down the quote on a torn-off piece of the cereal packet, ruining some cut-out and keep jigsaw puzzle in the process.

'I have not heard the Justice Secretary's interview,' claimed Mr Cameron, neatly deflecting onto the seriousness of the issue, not the flaws of the speaker. The quiff quivered in support, and Tory Alan Haslehurst provided a lovely soft question after the jousting ended, asking the Prime Minister something about making a speech that had something to with the Commonwealth. The Prime Minister confirmed that he had indeed received an 'extremely attractive invitation' to do just that, and was looking forward to it. Sitting next to him, George Osborne nodded and smiled at the opposition, possibly at someone in particular but believably just to Labour as a whole. 'This is our gaff', he seemed to saying, although his hair was silent. Its agreement was implicit.

Indeed, the most significant question came from the Tory benches - from Sir Peter Tapsell, the Father of the House, who asked why there should not be a renewed inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly, given that the disappearance of Madeline McCann was being reopened by the Met. David Cameron said no, but with considerable tact. To Labour's Dennis Skinner, who attacked the Tory love of rich people in what was more of an assault than a question, he rather was less so. Will Cameron's power grow as the quiff does? Is he a modern day Samson and, if so, who is his Delilah? Tune in next week to find out. Or possibly the week after.

FILM: Laura (1944)

2011-05-30T22:52:00.002+01:00

The story: A detective (Dana Andrews) investigates the life of an attractive advertising executive (Gene Tierney) after her murder.

The one regret you have after watching Laura is that it wasn’t made ten years earlier. That’s all I’ll say about the ending (for illumination, see Pre-codes), but it’s frustrating because this is a very fine noir with a great sense of framing and purpose. There’s a classic stoic detective at its heart, pulling double duty for audience enjoyment because he’s not just enjoyable for being that guy - he's a device for amplifying other's reactions.

At the start, when McPherson visits the barbed writer, Lydecker – sitting in his bath, where he punches out vicious newspaper columns – the two march off to chat to the suspects in Laura’s murder, stating that it’ll be interesting to watch their reactions. McPherson is a stone, and gives very little away in the face, which means that he’s no distraction to observing the parade of suspects we come across. You stop looking at him and focus on them.

These loose interviews (with lovers, servants, relatives) form a series of evolving personality studies that weave themselves around the central mystery, pushing the story along with what they reveal. Of them all, Vincent Price is the most interesting, partly because we now associate him so closely with horror and expect something very specific. Here he’s a ‘male beauty in distress’, a man who ‘knows a little bit about practically everything’. He's tall and stocky but seems weedy in speech - a calvacade of contradictions, he's a nicely nuanced character.

All of these scenes are very consciously framed. The main flashback takes place in a restaurant, and begins with a musician practically winking at the camera, as if the director Otto Preminger is saying – ‘we know you’re watching’, giving the narrative a kind of self-conscious edge that allows you all the more reason to question what you’re seeing (either that, or it’s a voyeuristic tip – either way, it pulls you in) because it feels constructed. You can see the moving parts, but not in a way that spoils the film. Preminger is very careful about that.

For at least half of its running time, Laura is more than the sum of its parts, with performances, dialogue and direction that keep you guessing more than much of its genre. This frays in the final third, and it only serves more to highlight how well it starts than to impair enjoyment. Still, ten years earlier and it could have been perfect...

EXCLUSIVE: Biden propelled by 90s catchphrases

2011-05-30T22:32:00.001+01:00

White House staffers have confirmed reports about Vice President Joe Biden, saying they are 'absolutely true'. Sources alleged that America's number two has taken to walking the corridors wearing a fearsome grin, shouting 1990s catchphrases at anyone who will listen. 'I guess he's just so pumped about Bin Laden and the lack of a convincing Republican candidate,' said an aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity. 'He keeps saying "we got four more years in this place, we're set."'

Biden's current favourite is said to be 'wassup' a briefly popular term that entered popular usage after its deployment in a Budweiser commercial. Unconfirmed rumours suggest that the Veep has been requesting accompanying high fives from west wing staffers.

FILM: Diner (1982)

2011-05-27T14:22:00.001+01:00

The story: A group of male friends (Tim Daly, Paul Reiser, Kevin Bacon, Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke) reunite in Baltimore for one of their number's wedding. They chat in their old diner, rehash old stories and confront current problems - but not always directly.

What Diner gets perfectly right is that sense of growing up thinking the world's got the drop on you, and that there's this one window of opportunity, one choice to make a mark and then spend years reaping the benefits - or ruing the consequences. It's one of Barry Levinson's Baltimore films, and it's vaguely autobiographical.

It's 1959, there's a touch of Happy Days in the air and Mickey Rourke is a twist on the Fonz. As if in a metaphor for the way he lives, Rourke drinks sugar straight from the jar, has wild hair and works in a salon. Yet he also wants to be a lawyer, and actually looks like the sane one when he first steps onto the screen - after a while, it's clear he's not. This man will take odds on anything.

Then there's Kevin Bacon's brainy, slit-eyed, aimless drunk; Paul Reiser as a chatterbox who hates the word nuance because you don't know where you stand with it, but who talks in such circles people have exactly the same problem with him. Rourke is closer to the film's heart than either of them, because of the street-level choices he has to make. But he doesn't have the option to marry, which is the life choice the film seems to be mostly about.

Three of the other characters illustrate the point. One wants to marry a girl, another is putting it off because he feels the panic of sexual exclusivity pawing at his neck, and another seems to merrily accept domestic tedium through either bliss or desperation. And in the details and discussions of this, Diner is a string of signposts, memorable moments from youth. What made x marry y, when he could have had z. It's a freeze frame of a crossroads in their lives, the kind of moment that lives in a black and white picture on the mantelpiece.

Occasionally, all the boys meet up at the diner and have amusing debates about whether Johnny Mathis is better than Frank Sinatra, and there's a guy who ducks in and out quoting The Sweet Smell Of Success. It's moments like this that feel real and rooted, like part of someone's youth dumped directly onto the page. You're right in there with them, part of the conversation, while distantly trying to remember if you ever spent all night in a diner shooting the breeze with people now stuck in loveless relationships or AA clinics.

There's a great scene toward the end, one of those wild off-the-cuff nights that ends in calm discourse with an exotic dancer. Yet the prevailing tone for the characters is a bittersweet sense that just not being miserable is probably good enough in life; some of them are obsessed with trivia and seem to hold onto this as something (the one thing) they can control.

Diner is laden by the need to explain the lives of everyone involved, but there are moments of great veracity in it that are worth the journey - that, and the bizarre fact that Mickey Rourke's character actually puts his penis through a popcorn box for his girlfriend to find. It's an agonising scene, but far less incredible than the explanation he offers her afterwards.

UK POLITICS: Prime Minister's Questions, May 11, 2011

2011-05-27T14:04:00.000+01:00

Ed Miliband rises to the sound of a deep, dark caterwaul - a collective yowl from the depths of hell, as he lays his elephant trap on NHS reforms for David Cameron. The idea is simple: ask the Prime Minister how he thinks it's all going, wait for an answer and then stand up again and announce exactly why the whole thing stinks. Cameron looks bored, bloodlessly quoting statistics. His hair is slightly flyaway. You think he's lost something - then he slips Miliband his serpent's smile, intercepting his opposite number's attempt to rise and respond. 'Hold on,' chastens the PM. He pulls out the out old trick of quoting John Healey, Labour's health secretary, who barely seems to say a word against Andrew Lansley.

Yet it isn't enough. Miliband has the wind at his back, pushing through the waves like one of those busty maidens on the prow of a ship. He talks with a punchy, rolling command of sentence structure that must feel really good. All the while, some distinctly shifty looking creatures are stirring on the Tory backbenches; you imagine ugly scenes and incantations occurring off camera. Something is very, very wrong. Is voodoo involved?

The Prime Minister is untroubled, and compares Red Ed to Eddie 'The Eagle' Edwards, before deploying an uncomfortable metaphor about 'the planks of the good ship Balls' being holed below the waterline. Any excuse to say Balls, you feel. It's an intrinsically funny name in a supposedly austere chamber of discussion. Miliband lands another punch about the lack of GP support for the NHS reforms - is this a turning point in their weekly dance, or is there just blood in the water after the elections?

FILM: Attack The Block (2011)

2011-05-21T10:17:00.000+01:00

The story: A group of south London tower block boys fight off an alien invasion.

How much you like Joe Cornish's movie may depend on your own inherent aversion to 'hoodies', or youths in general. The movie turns them into heroes - but starts out with them mugging a single white nurse at knifepoint on the street. Now, heroes are often flawed. Perhaps they have an inability to commit, have defrauded faceless corporations or ripped off a government it's trendy to dislike - but they don't generally rob women in the street. That's a bit too personal, too close to home. Yet that's exactly who Cornish asks us to like, or at least understand, in his comic horror tribute to Alien, Predator and the ilk.

That's a big ask, and it pushes what might otherwise be a social subtext right into your face. At various points, the boys try to explain themselves with the defensive anger of tribalist inverted snobbery ('this is our block, innit', 'we was as scared as you'), and is very wearing on the ears. It's an even bigger ask because it's taking place in the middle of a cartoonish monster genre movie, one that (rather brilliantly) chooses to light and film the tower block as if it were a spaceship in a 1970s sci-fi movie.

Yet it succeeds. The muggers end up being humanised, and you see the sides of their lives that those streetsmart personas keep hidden (bossy siblings, absent fathers, overstretched grandparents etc). It's nice that these guys are the heroes for once, and - who knows - perhaps it will do some good, either for them or the people who avoid them on the street.

Arguably the finale takes that too far, but before you get there, Cornish deploys nifty pot shots at exactly the kind of beard-stroking lefty cultural tourists you'd expect to think a 'hug-a-hoodie' movie would be the most wonderful thing ever, a neatly satisfying, balancing piece of self mockery. The monsters are good too - great teeth - and there are some killer lines in the script, but the less revealed about the movie's details the better. Preserve the mystery, keep the tension.

Ultimately, the uncomfortable way the film is constructed works to its advantage, once you get over the idea of having your preconceptions challenged in a film that you expect to do the exact opposite - and which is, fundamentally, a rattling good chase movie littered with cinematic riffs.

FILM: Hanna (2011)

2011-05-20T22:40:00.000+01:00

The story: A young girl (Saoirse Ronan) lives in the woods with her dad (Eric Bana) who relentlessly trains her for an encounter with some bad, bad people (led by Cate Blanchett) that he's kept her from for years.

What is Hanna? Is it Nikita? Sort of, in that it’s about a tough female who kicks butt. But it’s also very much like a fairytale, starting out in a forest where the intrusion of the outside world is limited to the occasional airplane. There’s a wicked queen, played by Cate Blanchett with a serpent’s smile and killer heels, who waits in the wings until Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) feels she is old enough to face her.

The fairytale motif pops up frequently, emphasised by the fact that everything Hanna sees in the outside world she is seeing for the first time. It’s all a bit alien, a bit strange, possibly magical but just as possibly bad for your health (showers, TV, electric lights - she knows about them from books, but their real world operation sends her brain into meltdown). Tom Hollander straddles the two worlds most effectively, as an effete German thug with a love of tight shorts and 1980s tracksuits, who puts on bizarre versions of Snow White in his cabaret. (It's a great, fun performance.)

There’s also a sense of magic in the way that director Joe Wright makes the movie move, especially in the action scenes. We jump between points of fight sequences, unsure of what occurred in the middle but propelled by the sheer comic book kinetics of the images and the thumping, pumping Chemical Brothers soundtrack. Every time that cranks up, you know you’re in for a good time. It's like a music video.

This is just as well, as the bits in between can sag because of the lack of an emotional centre that - if you go in expecting - you will sorely miss. Wright has opted for stylisation over naturalism and that serves him very well in the action scenes, but not so well when you want something real to hold onto. The family Hanna encounters on her travels (Olivia Williams and Jason Flemyng, struggling but happy hippies) offer a bit of that – but their more extreme moments function largely as comic relief, so you’re left hankering for the repressed emotional bond between Hanna and her dad, which is there at the start but then suddenly disappears.

It's a tricky balance but, fundamentally, Hanna kicks ass and hangs out in style - and that's enough.

BEAVER LATEST: Gibson's comeback a hit at Cannes

2011-05-18T18:17:00.001+01:00

Europe loves the anguished artistic redemption of a troubled soul, especially one who’s not doing so well in the US (see Polanski, Roman).

The latest affirmation of this aphorism came in Cannes, where Mel Gibson’s quirky comeback The Beaver reportedly received a ten minute standing ovation. Yep, there’s plenty of internet joke mileage in that, especially when you remember that it’s directed by Jodie Foster…

Read more here.

US POLITICS: Thinking of John McCain, probably too much

2011-05-17T12:35:00.002+01:00

The Republican candidates are coming out of the woodwork, and we’re starting to look for what’s familiar – partly to understand these beasts in a Presidential context but, more importantly, to figure out how they’re going to be pigeonholed until the election and after. Who’s the new George Bush? The new Reagan? The new Britney?

For instance: ex-China diplomat Jon Huntsman is a Mormon, so he's a bit like Mitt Romney without the business rep. The diplomat experience gives him foreign policy chops which reminds you of John McCain, and he's also surrounded by graduates of the McCain campaigns, which accents his apparent maverick qualities. Then there's Newt Gingrich, whose wife looks unnervingly like Cindy McCain and who, at 67 (soon to be 68), is edging towards McCain’s age in 2008 (72).

These are just two candidates, but what this tells us is that no-one is emerging with enough whack to eclipse the memory of the GOP’s last great hope. Donald Trump? Well he had whack, but his over-extension of the birther issue and the killing of Osama bin Laden effectively silenced his campaign. Perhaps Republicans have been distracted by the rise of the Tea Party, or the notion that Sarah Palin would somehow become a serious contender, to coalesce around a single candidate. Of course it’s too early to draw conclusions, and every race is different – but this does not augur well for the Republicans, especially against an Obama with $1 billion to spend in one hand and a dead terrorist in the other.

UK POLITICS: Prime Minister's Questions, May 4, 2011

2011-05-16T22:40:00.002+01:00

Staged the day before the AV vote, this must have been a taut PMQs. Buttocks must have been hovering off the benches with the tension. As if to diffuse it, Nick Clegg wears a bluish tie, and William Hague sports a cheeky yellow number. (Ken Clarke completely crosses the rubicon with a florid red affair.)

Barely a day later, the media would be plastered with pictures of poor old Cleggy looking very sad indeed. Blood was definitely in the air. You could sense it in the atmosphere, and even though people aren't talking about the looming Lib Dem hammering (for the most part), the anticipation of it underlines everything.

Ed Miliband rises to his feet, that whitish fleck on his hair appearing unduly prominent, as if he'd been painting the house at the weekend. Cameron's defence to his attack on police cuts is bloodless and automated, but effective in its wall-of-sound deployment.

Ed Miliband cocks his head like a disbelieving snake in response, as Cameron quotes the Labour leader's interview with the Sun (in which Red Ed said Red Ed was dead, and played pool with the paper's political editor) back at him. Cameron says that Miliband breaks promises, Miliband says that Cameron is unable to give straight answers. They are nothing if not predictable, although it's not usually this obvious – both minds are elsewhere, possibly.

Clegg retains a haunted air, with the faintest whiff of that once easy, collegiate disposition drifting across his features. Briefly, he is roused to a kind of detached amusement during a question about allotments.

In all the haymaking, one moment truly stands out. The house comes to a complete hush when Jack Straw rises with a question about the status of stem cell research in the UK. This is a real issue, people think, and the absence of noise makes you realise how rowdy it usually is. There is a hushed respect that somebody could actually do something that makes a difference. A real issue that effects people, rather than the business of proving the other guy wrong. Food for thought.

Judiciary latest: Bring me the head of BA Baracus

2011-05-11T10:05:00.001+01:00

Proof, if proof were needed, that the judiciary is profoundly in touch with the common man.

FILM: Zombieland (2009)

2011-05-09T09:21:00.000+01:00

The story: A random group of survivors (Jesse Eisenberg, Abigail Breslin, Emma Stone, Woody Harrelson) embark on a road trip across the zombie-ravaged remains of America.

Horror movies are all about rules, be it subconsciously or through that hip post-modern sensibility that started with Scream. Zombieland starts out looking very post-modern, with nerdy loner Jesse Eisenberg recounting the rules that have kept him alive in a world of flesh-eating monsters ('beware of bathrooms', 'remember the double tap', 'don't be a hero', etc).

One of his rules is 'cardio' because these zombies move fast. A zombie genre movie might be satisfied with that as an innovation, although you can get into all kinds of semantic difficulties with the definition over who did it first: 28 Days Later had fast zombies, only they weren't really the undead - they were the infected, as they are in Zombieland. (Infected with some awful twist on Mad Cow Disease, don't cha know.)

The rules are a neat visual gag, but their employment is also a barometer of how much Eisenberg's character unclenches over the course of the film. It's impossible not to compare his performance here to The Social Network, especially as there's a gag about Facebook updates, and both are played as nerds whose lives hinge on women, but such comparisons tell us little aside from what Eisenberg is naturally adept at playing. His character here is more likeable than in Social Network, although his voiceover is occasionally irritating in its redundancy, explaining the emotions of what Eisenberg's facial expression is already telling you.

The biggest screen impact comes from Woody Harrelson, both comically (he kills zombies in the style of Deliverance and is obsessed with Twinkies) and, funnily enough, emotionally. Harrelson clearly enjoyed himself immensely, and gives the role kick and depth.

Zombieland is more of a mismatched buddy comedy than a horror movie, and it's all the better for it. Zombie movies can be terribly tense affairs, which this actively mocks without becoming a pastiche. No-one is overly concerned with what happens next to humanity, or where the last vestiges of the government might be. It's all about fun, at least on the surface - only occasionally do the four main characters allow themselves to be vulnerable.

For although Zombieland's poise is flippant, there's emotional punch to it under the skin, yet it knows where to stop in exploiting that, just as it knows exactly how much to spoof a zombie movie without becoming a Wayans Brothers production. The finale is a circus sideshow spectaular - part of it even takes place inside a haunted house - but it remains coherent and winds up as a memorable slice of fun. There's another very good reason for watching it, in casting terms - but I couldn't possiblty spoil what it is. Find out for yourself.

Find it on Amazon (UK) and Amazon (US).

FILM: Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun (1969)

2011-05-08T20:34:00.001+01:00

The story: A European-led space agency discovers a new planet on the far side of the sun, and launches a manned mission to investigate. What will they find?

It's a Gerry Anderson screenplay, but this sci-fi thriller isn't Thunderbirds - it's not about a spacegoing utopia where the villains are solely of the super variety. In fact, the biggest initial stumbling block is just how much money the mission is going to cost, and the man leading the charge to prove it's worth doing is Jason Webb, a cigar-smoking, cardiac-endangered human torpedo. Patrick Wymark plays him, and it's a joy to watch.

During a conference call, the French question the financial wisdom of Webb 'mad expedition' to the other side if the Sun. Then the Germans get a bit uppity about it, too: 'Trust a German to louse it up', spits Webb, looking like Ken Stott on a mixture of steroids and coffee. Webb keeps his cigars in a rocket shaped container, just to underline how passionate he is about Getting Things Done In Space - and no filthy kraut is going to stop him. He's just that kind of man.

Other characters seem quite obvious at first - there's 'Lisa Hartmann, security', a late 1960s bombshell in short pink dress; and the American astronaut hired for the Big Job is somewhere between Steve McQueen and early Kevin Costner. He wears aviator shades, with big baby blues shimmering underneath. Yet in private he seems to be no hero - his wife claims that space radiation has made him sterile but she's taking contraceptives on the sly; he knocks her about a bit, and starts making eyes at 'Lisa Hartmann, security'. The astronaut is one of the most interesting characters in it - Jason Webb, while wonderfully watchable, is more force than man. A spectacle, not something to be understood.

The cinematography is painfully obsessed with slow motion space manoeuvres in the way that people simply aren't these days, because we've seen it all before. Whirley, swirley spacey music and screensaver dream sequences illustrate the long journey through space, and punctuate the zero gravity ballet. Elsewhere in the style there are crash zooms and model work that make you think of Thunderbirds, but there's also some neatly claustrophobic camerawork inside the space capsule, and to highlight when characters think that something isn't quite right.

Journey feels longer than it is because of the overlong space sequences, but that's a mark of fashion that shouldn't be held against it; morally, the film moves into much greyer areas than you'd expect, and the finale is pretty clever, in a 1960 sci-fi sort of way.

Find it on Amazon (UK) and Amazon (US).

Pippa Middleton, from maid of honour to tabloid splash

2011-05-08T16:49:00.002+01:00

The surrealness of modern media is so familiar that it's become a cliche yet, occasionally, things can surprise you. Take Pippa Middleton. Last week, she was the surprise star of the Royal Wedding, an occasion which had north of 25 million Britons glued to their sofas.

Then, a Facebook site sprang up in worship of her derriere (the Pippa Middleton Ass Appreciation Society is liked by more than 210,000 at the time of writing), and Google search suggestions tell their own story of searcher's interests - the first autocomplete option after 'Pippa Middleton' being 'Pippa Middleton underwear' (then underwear pictures, then boyfriend, then legs).

And now, barely a week after dazzling the nation in Westminster Abbey, long lens pictures of a topless Ms Middleton have crawled onto the pages of the News Of The World. 'Topless inside' reads the breathless sell on the front page, casting aside all notions of propriety for the Duchess of Cambridge's sister. Racy royal relations are nothing new, of course - and act as a neat proxy for public suspicion of palace scandal - but the transparency and speed of transition from one state to the next is startling (she has now 'reportedly' been offered a porn deal). The pictures have since been taken out of circulation, it seems.

Cybermen hit by strike chaos

2011-05-07T12:45:00.000+01:00

The galactic empire of the Cybermen was in chaos last night as work on a superweapon was suspended over a minimum wage dispute. The Cyber empire, which is facing spiralling inflation and the danger of defaulting on loans from the mineral rich Daleks, has been forced into what many are calling a draconian cuts programme, with many Cyber workers facing lower wages and a longer wait for the decommissioning stage widely referred to as 'the great sleep'

FILM: Other Men's Women (1931)

2011-05-05T09:16:00.001+01:00

The story: A railroad worker (Regis Toomey) takes Bill (Grant Withers), his drunken and childhood friend, into his home - but doesn't count on how well he will get on with his wife (Mary Astor).

At the heart of Other Men's Women is a classic triangle plot, although what it becomes isn't a romance but a straight-up blue collar tragedy. These guys work together, have known each other for 20 years. Everything's been swell. As if to acknowledge that, the opening 20 minutes are a riot - not exactly funny, but full of over caffeinated characters enjoying themselves, bouncing off one another and going on about gum ('have a chew on me', is the phrase - it feels like product placement to modern ears, although it's more likely a shorthand for feeling fine).

At one point, James Cagney is standing on top of a moving train relating some great anecdote that you can't really understand. Joan Blondell is serving wisecracks from behind a station cafe. Then, the ultimate cuckoo in the nest is rolling down stairs drunk, mocking a woman for her stutter. The mood comes crashing down when something happens between the drunken cuckoo - Grant Withers, a ringer for James Stewart in the right kind of light - and Mary Astor, and they have the most efficient emotional conversation in the entire film. Astor gets some great moments in this scene; initially playing sparky and perky, batting around like a kid high on ice cream, she lets something entirely different drift into her expression during close-up. It's beautiful.

From then on the film has its focus, and doesn't really lose it. There's a tragic turn partway through that, were it overplayed and overscored in a modern TV movie, would look ridiculous. Here, they get away with it, and the movie's erratic way with emotions is anchored by its look at life on the railroad - the sight of the engines pushing through floodwater, of men in rainjackets scrambling to an emergency, is still impressive today - partly for the size of the trains, but mostly because of the hardscrabble, frontier underpinning it gives to these people's lives. Some seem better built to survive it. Cagney walks into a dancehall wearing his full wet weather railroader gear - then he strips it off to reveal a tux underneath and hotfoots it onto the dancefloor. This guy can deal with anything, you think.

The slightly overdone ending is clearly Pre-code in its morality, but the film is mostly remarkable for being all about the men. The women are triggers for their story, which is not something you see often in these kinds of pictures.

Find it on Amazon (UK) and Amazon (US).

US POLITICS: Mitch Daniels springs tech coup

2011-05-04T09:32:00.000+01:00

Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana, is to join the 2012 Presidential race with the most low key announcement yet. Mr Daniels' transition to candidate status will reflect his easygoing, tech-savvy, cost conscious and down with the kids approach according to a spokesman, who indicated that Daniels will initiate his campaign by changing his Facebook status to 'running'.

This will be a blow to the Gary Johnson camp, whose social media strategists successfully out-maneuvered Mitt Romney's team by tweeting their candidate's intention to run - rather than using the old fangled 'email' methodology favoured by Romney.

FILM: The Sunshine Boys (1975)

2011-05-03T09:10:00.001+01:00

The story: The nephew of a comedy legend (Walter Matthau) tries to get him to reunite with his old partner (George Burns) for one last show, but it’s not a smooth road – especially as Matthau loathes Burns for breaking up their partnership.

It’s easy to compare The Sunshine Boys with The Odd Couple, partly because they both feature Walter Matthau and a man he doesn’t get on with, partly because they’re both written by Neil Simon, but especially - in my particular case - as I watched them one night apart. Matthau is older here, but not by as much as you'd think considering the look of the two films. The Sunshine Boys came out just seven years after The Odd Couple but the latter, stylistically speaking, has one foot in the post-war period. Matthau’s makeup adds several decades to that, making him resemble the 21st century Rupert Murdoch.

The comedy in Sunshine is sharper than in The Odd Couple, although you’d expect that of a film about legendary comedians that stars legendary comedians. Matthau’s banter with his nephew (a kind of American Rowan Atkinson) is endlessly watchable (‘89 yearsold and just like that, he dies of nothing’), as are the nephew’s exchanges with the painfully forgetful Burns. Is he just putting that on to test people, you wonder? Can he really be that forgetful one minute, and that deliberately unpleasant the next? As with Matthau's apparent inability to hold a practical thought or let go of a grudge, it seems wilful, and that's the key to the characters - because if they weren't nasty, they'd be tragic.

The early scenes with Matthau make you think that the film's going for sad, not funny. He's on his way to an audition, he can't get there, when he does he can't remember the lines and no-one wants to work with him. This poor old man, you think. He's a wreck - no-one will employ him. He'll be homeless soon, eating out of cans. Then, slowly, you realise that he's more than capable of taking care of himself. Within the familiar irascible and endearing stereotype of old men in American cinema, he's much more the first than the second.

Burns's character isn't even slightly endearing - but he's very funny. When he made the movie, Burns was in his late 70s (Matthau was mid-50s) and he just has to walk across the screen to make you laugh. He looks like a malevolent tortoise, squatting behind his glasses, cane, coat and hat, a man unafraid of awkward silences, and who provokes irritation with the most apparently innocent actions.

Underneath all the banter and anger in the movie there's a warmth, but it only comes out once, towards the end, and it's just enough. It's not sentimental and it's not over the top - there's no freeze frame laugh - it's just a damned good comedy.

Find it on Amazon (UK) and Amazon (US).

FILM: Thor (2011)

2011-05-02T18:56:00.003+01:00

The story: Thor, the God Of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth) is cast out of Asgard by his father (Anthony Hopkins) for his arrogance, and drops into the life of an Earthbound scientist (Natalie Portman).

Although the trailer makes it look like bad TV sci-fi, Thor turns out not only to be directed by Kenneth Branagh, but an awesome ride. Branagh keeps the action and the story moving in every scene, but the fun of watching it isn't just a product of pace, but of the breezy charisma of its cast. As Thor, Chris Hemsworth is the arrogant man with lessons to learn - but he also has an easy charm, rippling torso and is every inch a gentleman with the ladies (and manners in movies go along way - just look at Tom Cruise in Knight And Day).

His main foil is Natalie Portman, playing the kind of garage genius scientist who should have at least a monobrow. She lives in squalor, works by the seat of her pants and scampers about with a headful of ideas and a complete lack of guile. She swiftly warms to the immortal with the perfect abs, although not in a way that makes her pathetic, and it's to Branagh's credit she wasn't made to open the film wearing thick specs and dungarees, slowly revealing her true beauty in the presence of Thor.

Ever since Black Swan, the presence of Portman in a mainstream movie makes you do a double take, and other cast members give similar pause. The most obvious of these is Anthony Hopkins as Odin, the ageing beacon of Asgard's hard-won peace. His power might be fading, but when he shows up on a horse to dazzle the frost giants, you better believe he means business. Stellan Skarsgård lends a squinty Scandinavian credibility as Portman's scientist buddy, and The Wire's Idris Elba glowers purposefully as the all-seeing Heimdall. These casting decisions give the movie velocity and drive, making it an effortless pleasure to watch.

But to label Thor as popcorn fodder does it a disservice. It's a turbo-charged storytelling machine, realised with some if the most beautiful effects you'll see on screen this year. They create the workings for an entire universe and the shot framing, focus and use of 3D is captivating, echoing the comic book style but never being held back by it, and taking care to limit the visual downsides of shooting in three dimensions (dimmed palette, bad handling of fast moving objects).

As ever with a Marvel picture, there's a teaser for The Avengers movie after the credits. Joss Whedon is directing the 2012 picture that will bring Iron Man, The Hulk, Thor and others together under one umbrella - and if anyone can pull that off, it's him. Whatever happens there though, Thor - unlike The Hulk - deserves a sequel. This is the kind of epic storytelling that you don't want to stop.

Find it on Amazon (UK) and Amazon (US).

FILM: The Odd Couple (1968)

2011-05-02T09:53:00.001+01:00

The story: After separating from his wife, a tense man (Jack Lemmon) moves in with his high-spending, low-living carefree friend (Walter Matthau). It soon becomes obvious that it won't be an easy ride...

Everyone knows that The Odd Couple is great, so why review it? The reason is to ask whether it has held up. It's not that narrative art has moved on much, but when a movie penetrates a certain depth into the popular consciousness (The Odd Couple spawned a TV series, a sequel, and was a play in the first place) it tends to be imitated, spoofed and referenced so much that by the time you actually come to see the original, it looks stiff and old.

The Odd Couple doesn't. The first surprise is that the movie opens with several attempted suicides, scenes that alternate with that jaunty earworm of a soundtrack that the Friends cast once hummed in a pre-credits sequence. Now that's a dark opening - man checks into a dingy hotel, tries to kill himself. And that idea hums away in the background, like a bomb waiting to go off.

Lemmon's character is crazily over-organised, obsessed with controlling his environment. Matthau's sports writer is compulsively slovenly and late, leaving a trail of mess behind him and stubbornly enduring a busted refrigerator for two weeks. This determination to live like an animal is what made Matthau's wife chuck him out. Without getting deep about it, he's using anachronistic rebellion as an excuse for not doing the right thing.

Clearly, they can both learn from each other, as many couples have in many films since - but that's not really the point until the very end. The opening third of the movie is flawless, as the poker group that Lemmon and Matthau belong to try to deal with the fact that one of them has tried to top himself. They don't do it well and you can see the gears of emotion shifting behind their eyes, triggering stares reminiscent of deers caught in the headlights.

Walter Matthau's character does his best. There's a moment when he realises what he has to do, and it's beautifully played - you can see the realisation ticking round, behind the eyes. Matthau is so nearly a very good looking man. The height (6ft 3in) and the hair suggests Clark Gable, as does the face in certain settings but the stoop, headwear and determination not to look suave steer him firmly into what we now call the character actor bracket. He's got a fascinating face, like Bogart. It's impossible to forget. It's part of what made him a star.

The double act with Lemmon's flatmate, which swings from manic tension to deep vulnerability in one scene with a pair of tittering British fillies, sustains the rest of the movie, even if the predictabilty of their arrangement does cause it to flag slightly before the end.

Find it on Amazon (UK) or Amazon (US).

Royal Wedding Latest

2011-05-01T13:14:00.000+01:00

Reports suggest that at least three new governments were installed in the Middle East on Friday, when the world's media were distracted by the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton. 'They just sprung up out of nowhere,' said Baghdad bureau chief Pointy Adams, who admitted to taking his 'eye off the ball' while regionalising the feed from Westminster Abbey for Iraqi monarchists. 'We have no idea who these new people are. I'm not 100 per cent sure I could point to the countries on a map either, if I'm being honest. I guess there's just been more important things to do.' Further reports noted that the alleged rebellions made little use of Twitter, making them virtually invisible to foreign correspondents and wire services.

Commentators have since been keen to link the two events, claiming that the class-crossing love of a commoner for a prince had clear parallels with the overthrow of despotic regimes by bazooka-wielding cab drivers.

Obama's long-form birth certificate 'just took a while to fake'

2011-04-29T20:42:00.004+01:00

Bowing to intense media pressure, President Obama admitted that his long form birth certificate had been faked in a press conference yesterday. Responding to a lettering campaign organised by conservative pressure groups that had bombarded the White House with orange peel and coconuts, Mr Obama remarked coolly to assembled reporters:

'You know what? You want to know why it took me a while to produce that birth certificate? Because it just took that long to fake. I guess we're not just not as good at covering stuff up as people say. It's got nothing at all to do with me being distracted by the economy, wars in several countries and the deepening crisis in the middle east.'

Fringe Republicans took this admission as a great moment of victory. 'Finally, after years of digging, we have succeeded. The President cannot hide his dirty secrets.And what's more, he's as good as admitted that he can't handle the pressures of the job.'

SOOTY SHOCK: Magical bear 'not attending' Royal Wedding

2011-04-28T21:17:00.000+01:00

Sooty has confirmed he will not be attending the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. The fuzzy yellow bear, 54, is currently touring his magical show in the Outer Hebrides, a scheduling clash that the bear says is 'unfortunate all round'. Mr Sooty released the following statement through his spokesman, which we have reproduced in full:

"

."

Alcoholics to get 'free pass' for Wills and Kate's big day

2011-04-27T22:22:00.001+01:00

Alcoholics will be allowed to drink whatever they want on the day of the royal wedding, claimed a spokesman. According to a report from experts consulted by alcoholics, society's aspiring tee-totallers - usually eyed warily by relatives whenever they pass close to the drinks cabinet - will be allowed and expected to have a 'celebratory snifter' to mark the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton.

'This is a time of national celebration,' wrote the expert. 'To expect the nation's alcoholics not to fit in with everyone else at this time of mass public drunkeness would violate their human rights. This is a day when they should be allowed to fit in with everyone else.'

Tina Fey, the subliminal gateway to Sarah Palin?

2011-04-26T09:23:00.005+01:00

Ever wondered why John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate? 30 Rock producer Lorne Michaels has a theory. Speaking to NPR, Tina Fey relates Michaels' notion that it all started when the Arizona senator hosted Saturday Night Live. 'We all liked him tremendously,' said Fey, who met up with McCain for an afternoon tour of DC in 2004, and even posed with him for the cover of Life magazine.

McCain hung the cover in his office for the next four years, and Michaels theorised that the image so accustomed the Presidential hopeful to seeing Fey at his side that Palin's selection was inevitable. (It's a media person's theory of course, but interesting all the same.)

Fey's impression of her came later, of course.

ROLE CALL: Casting for the White House race in 2012

2011-04-25T13:33:00.001+01:00

In sure and certain hope of the cinematic translation of the 2012 US election race, News Hour introduce Role Call: a guide to casting said picture, which directors are free to use as inspiration. This will be updated as the race gathers pace, and suggestions are welcome via comments or email (jerryseizer@gmail.com).

1. Action man Gary Johnson, the anti-deficit rising star of the GOP - Eric Roberts.
2. Harvard-educated smoothie Mitt Romney, the Republican frontrunner – Jim Carrey.
3. Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States - Will Smith.
4. Joe Biden, the plain-speaking Robin to Obama's Batman - John Larroquette.