- Reviews RSS Feed

The Muppets, James Bobin, 109 mins (U) The Woman in Black, James Watkins, 95 mins (12A)

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

When you hear that The Muppets are returning to the big screen, but that the film has been snubbed by Frank Oz (who used to voice Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear), you might fear some sort of committee-sanctioned, soulless travesty.

A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg, 100 mins (15)

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

It couldn't be a more mouth-watering prospect: David Cronenberg and Sigmund Freud, face to face at last!

DVD: Friends With Benefits, For retail & rental (Sony)

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Two young, single people who decide on a sex-only relationship, Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis keep going on about how phoney Hollywood romantic comedies always are, but Friends With Benefits is hardly a radical alternative.

DVD: Johnny English Reborn, For retail & rental (Universal)

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

It's not a film that any of us were clamouring for, but Johnny English Reborn is a significant improvement on the first shambolic spy-spoof that Rowan Atkinson made in 2003.

Girl Model (NC)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:59 +0000

This documentary offers a glimpse into the brutish meat-market that is the modelling industry. Its opening shot is the most unsettling, a hangar-sized space in which skinny Russian girls parade in their underwear before talent scouts.

DVD: To Kill a Mockingbird (12)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:45 +0000

Restore your faith in humanity with this stupendous adaptation of Harper Lee's masterpiece.

DVD: Abduction (12)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:43 +0000

"I feel like a stranger in my own life," Taylor Lautner's hunk, Nathan, informs his shrink (Sigourney Weaver).

DVD: Holy Flying Circus (15)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:42 +0000

Tony Roche 's silly and often funny re-imagining of the furore that surrounded the release of Monty Python's Life of Brian received a bit of panning when shown on BBC4 last year.

DVD: Midnight in Paris (12)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:37 +0000

"Nostalgia is denial – denial of the painful present." Woody Allen's fixation with the past is explored in this magical-realist fantasy, his loveliest film for quite some time.

DVD: Friends with Benefits (15)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:19 +0000

Mila Kunis stars in this ghastly and tiresomely foul-mouthed rom-com. She plays Jamie, a New York head-hunter who is dumped for having "big eyes" by a jerk in the opening scene.

Big Miracle (PG)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:16 +0000

Drew Barrymore saves the whale in another truth-based drama: it's enough to make you long for the days when they just made things up.

The Vow (12A)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:15 +0000

Though it claims to be "inspired by true events", nothing much about this amnesiac romance is persuasive.

The Muppets (U)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:11 +0000

It's time to play the music, it's time to light the lights... it's time to revisit the simpler days of your childhood with favourite felt-based friends The Muppets.

A Dangerous Method (15) / The Woman in Black (12A) (2/5, 2/5)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:09 +0000

Freud vs Jung: Celebrity Shrink Smackdown was probably not a title David Cronenberg considered while making this drama about the twin pioneers of psychoanalysis, though for all its scrupulous balance and methodical explanation a small pep-pill of vulgarity might not have gone amiss. In an interesting and honourable career Cronenberg has mostly forsaken his extravagant parables of outward mutation for searching enquiries into inner turmoil, and A Dangerous Method goes back to basics, an earnest, sombre and pretty stifling picture about divergent philosophies of the mind.

First Night: In the Land of Blood and Honey, Berlin Film Festival

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

When Angelina Jolie arrives in snowbound Berlin at the weekend for the screening of In The Land Of Blood And Honey (her debut feature as a director), the paparazzi will be out in force. She will walk the red carpet. Amid all the fanfare, many will forget quite how grim her film actually is.

Carnage, Roman Polanski, 79 Mins (15) Young Adult, Jason Reitman, 90 Mins (15)

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

What would you do if somebody thumped your child? It's fiction's big question at the moment, one that's been asked in an award-winning novel, Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap, an award-winning film, Susanne Bier's In a Better World, and an award-winning play, Yasmina Reza's The God of Carnage, which has now been made into a film by Roman Polanski. Renamed Carnage, and relocated from Paris to New York, it all takes place one afternoon shortly after the son of Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz has whacked the son of Jodie Foster and John C Reilly around the head with a stick. The grown-ups pride themselves on being impeccably civilised, so they get together in Foster and Reilly's tasteful Brooklyn apartment to weigh up what should be done.

Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sean Durkin, 101 Mins (15)

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

To be honest, there's not that much in common between the two films under review this week, except that they're both about women in trouble; they both contain scenes in which the protagonist freaks out alarmingly during a family-and-friends gathering; and both, in different ways, make you ill at ease. In fact, both offer welcome evidence that there's still the odd American film that dares to venture into genuinely uncomfortable areas.

DVD: Tyrannosaur, For retail & rental (Optimum)

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Paddy Considine makes the jump from actor to writer-director with impressive ease, which is not to say that his raw debut drama is easy to watch.

DVD: Perfect Sense, For retail & rental (Entertainment One)

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Perfect Sense features yet another of the global pandemics which seem to obsess today's film-makers, but it's less an apocalyptic disaster movie than a haunting indie fable about two people, Ewan McGregor and Eva Green, learning to accept true love.

How the real final scene fascinates us

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:59 +0000

The buck-toothed youngster on the other side of the glass panel is friendly and eager to please. There is a naive quality about him that is oddly appealing. His name is Michael James Perry and he is going to be dead in a few weeks time. He is an inmate on death row at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas.

DVD: One Day (12)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:57 +0000

One Day has one of the most powerful arguments yet for not cycling in London; Boris Johnson would hate it.

Chronicle (12A)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:53 +0000

Josh Trank's movie is about what happens when superpowers fall into the possession of people who aren't superheroes.

DVD: One Day (12)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:51 +0000

One Day has one of the most powerful arguments yet for not cycling in London; Boris Johnson would hate it.

DVD: Lady and the Tramp (U)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:43 +0000

"He's a self-confessed chicken thief, and all-around sleazeball," is how scoffing Josh described the Tramp in The Last Days of Disco.

DVD: Borgen: Season 1 (15)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:31 +0000

"Caesar was murdered by his friends, too." Denmark's answer to The West Wing involves a lot of walking and talking along corridors, spin-doctoring, conniving and clandestine meetings at the dead of night.

Bombay Beach (NC)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:27 +0000

The Israeli film-maker Alma Har'el melds documentary observation, dream and dance in her portrait of Bombay Beach, a forlorn backwater in the South Californian desert where the residents eke out a spartan, trailer-park existence that's part refuge from and part rebuke to the American Dream.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (15) / Carnage (15) (4/5, 1/5)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:24 +0000

Acompelling wave of dread gathers during the tense psychodrama Martha Marcy May Marlene, though for most of its length we can't be sure from which direction it's coming. By the time it breaks over us the film has ended, and we leave it feeling pretty freaked out. It is remarkable for two debuts, Sean Durkin writing and directing his first feature, and Elizabeth Olsen starring in hers. In their different ways they have set themselves a blazing standard, and deserve all the plaudits coming to them.

DVD: Tyrannosaur (18)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:20 +0000

Paddy Considine, Shane Meadows's pal and favourite actor, directs his impressive debut feature, a brutal, provincial drama that may lack Meadows's warmth and humour, but doesn't lack heart or intensity.

Young Adult (15)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:18 +0000

There's excellent acid in the combination of director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody, already proven in the snarky Juno and reinforced by this smalltown comedy of self-delusion.

DVD: What's Your Number? (15)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:17 +0000

This is horrible, just horrible. Anna Faris, who showed comic potential in the lousy Scary Movie series, plays Ally Darling, a young woman who is unlucky in relationships and has been dumped from her job.

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (PG)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:15 +0000

This latest 3D adventure romp, leaning heavily on Jurassic Park, stars Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, bonding with stroppy stepson Josh Hutcherson as they decode signs from the novels of Jules Verne to find The Mysterious Island.

Man on a Ledge (12A)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:07 +0000

A high-rise thriller that aims low, Man on a Ledge asks us not so much to suspend our disbelief as string it up, set it on fire and pee on the remains.

Like Crazy, Drake Doremus, 90 mins (12) The Grey, Joe Carnahan, 117 mins (15)

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Judged on its premise alone, Like Crazy could be any old romantic comedy.

The Descendants, Alexander Payne, 115 mins (15)

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

If Alexander Payne's The Descendants weren't set in Hawaii, it could almost take place somewhere entirely unexotic – New Jersey, perhaps, or Reigate. Although the story is rooted in Hawaiian life, Payne is interested in the ordinariness of things in the USA's 50th state. In voiceover, the protagonist Matt King (George Clooney) complains, "My friends on the mainland think just because I live in Hawaii, I'm in paradise ... Like a permanent vacation ... we're all just out here sipping Mai Tais, shaking our hips and catching waves" – all this over shots of traffic jams, skyscrapers, homeless people. "Are they insane?" he continues. "Do they think we're immune to life?"

DVD: Melancholia, For retail & rental (Artificial Eye)

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

Lars Von Trier's lyrical disaster movie is as strange as it is beautiful.

DVD: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, For retail & rental (Optimum)

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:00:01 +0000

In a year or two, we're bound to get a longer "Director's Cut" of Tomas Alfredson's atmospheric spy drama, but the current version feels horribly rushed, particularly to begin with, when its scenes have been snipped into tiny pieces, and then taped together with copious voice-over.

The Descendants (15)