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DVD/Blu-ray: The Artist (PG)

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The hype and awards have slightly diminished the impact of Hazanavicius's adroit homage to Hollywood's silent era, and the first 20 minutes are a bit so-what-ish, but then, suddenly, everything – the acting, the melodramatic score, the dog (Uggie), the gorgeous faded black-and-white look – kicks in.

DVD/Blu-ray: Klitschko (12A)

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

This erratic documentary tries to shine some light on the two enigmatic Ukrainian man mountains that have dominated heavyweight boxing in recent times.

Intruders (15)

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Two imaginative children, Mia (Ella Purnell) in London and Juan (Izá* Corchero) in Madrid, are haunted by Hollow Face, a beast who steals children's faces.

DVD/Blu-ray: The Bridge (15)

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Martin is a bulky, scruffy Copenhagen cop whose "nether regions hurt" due to a vasectomy (Morse never had this trouble); Saga is a slim, un-feeling detective in Malmö.

What to Expect When You're Expecting (12A)

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

"A miracle is happening inside me," coos one of the pregnant women who squat on this ensemble comedy about the joys and sorrows of parenting. The miracle happening inside me was that I managed to sit through the whole film without throwing up. But it was a close thing.

Free Men (12A)

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Resistance under the Nazi occupation has become such a hot topic among the French that one sometimes wonders if they're protesting too much. There weren't that many heroic Maquis.

Men in Black 3D (PG)

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Surprise of the week. Perhaps it's only because expectations were so low going in that this second MiB sequel felt like, at times, improbable fun. The return of Smith and Jones as Agent J and Agent K seemed destined to be a matter of duty rather than pleasure, which may be why the older partner, looking his years, spends so much time offscreen. No matter, as it happens, because this film is borrowing from Back to the Future and sending Agent J on a rescue mission.

Moonrise Kingdom (12A)

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Wes Anderson's films are as formally distinctive as Peter Greenaway's, and sometimes as maddening. They are pictorial things, but less in the way of a film than, say, a graphic novel. Where Greenaway thinks like a painter, Anderson uses the camera like a cartoonist, each frame hyper-composed in colour and composition, an eccentric mini-work of art in itself.

Tales of the Night 3D (NC)

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Michel Ocelot's suite of animated fancies is like a child's diorama transferred to the screen.

Personal Best (12A)

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Sam Blair's documentary, timed for the run-in to the Olympics, considers the prospects of four British sprinters.

First Night: Paperboy, Cannes Film Festival

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Lee Daniels is proving himself to be a bombastic film-maker. His directorial debut, Precious, mixed fantastical dream sequences with social realism. At Cannes he unveiled a crime drama, mixed with blaxploitation and a coming-of-age tale. It's as if Daniels has been schooled in Bollywood, so much does he adhere to the Indian film-making philosophy that the more genres the merrier.

On the Road, Cannes Film Festival

Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Walter Salles takes an orthodox approach to Jack Kerouac's classic text. As with his adaptation of Che Guevara's Motorcycle Diaries, Salles seems as preoccupied with the mundane as he is with the tales of threesomes, drugs and broken friendships.

First Night: Killing Them Softly, Cannes Film Festival

Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly is a mobster thriller that takes a worm's eye view of its subject matter. The protagonists – including Brad Pitt's über-cynical enforcer Jackie Cogan – are brutish types who inhabit a world so sordid that it makes Goodfellas seem glamorous in the extreme.

First Night: The Angels' Share, Cannes Film Festival

Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The venerable British director Ken Loach has a reputation as a dour social realist. Even fervent admirers sometimes need to brace themselves for his latest polemical blast. What can be overlooked is the humour and tenderness.

Amour, Cannes Film Festival

Mon, 21 May 2012 11:46:58 +0100

Michael Haneke is now a firm favourite to join the illustrious list of two-time Palme d’Or winners thanks to this heart-breaking tale about the dying weeks in the relationship of an octogenarian couple.

First Night: Confession of a Child of the Century, Cannes Festival

Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Tabloid bad boy Pete Doherty is perfectly cast in French director Sylvie Verheyde's Alfred de Musset adaptation, Confession of a Child of the Century.

DVD: Haywire

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:18 +0100

Steven Soderbergh’s post-Bourne spy movie is – in spite of the presence of Antonio Banderas and Michael Fassbender – a showcase for Gina Carano, a mixed martial arts champ who’d never done any acting before.

The Dictator, Larry Charles, 83 mins (15) 2 Days in New York, Julie Delpy, 91 mins (15) The Raid, Gareth Huw Evans, 90 mins (18)

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Anyone who's seen both Borat ... and Ali G Indahouse will assume that Sacha Baron Cohen is a lot more entertaining when he's bouncing off unsuspecting members of the public than he is when he's working from a proper screenplay. But anyone who's seen The Dictator will revise that assumption, pronto. Tightly scripted by Baron Cohen and three alumni of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, it may well be his best film, as well as the year's best comedy.

Cannes round-up: Rust and Bone, Paradise: Love, After the Battle, Broken and Mekong Hotel

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

It's the rule in Cannes: arrive champing at the bit for drop-dead masterpieces, and be prepared to swallow a few disappointments before things really warm up.

Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson, 100 mins, 12A

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

We can expect great things of Cannes – but not, it's a safe bet, too many laughs. You think the likes of Michael Haneke are here to amuse us? So, we'd best grab our merriment while we may, with Wes Anderson's opening film Moonrise Kingdom. Anderson's precise aesthete humour isn't to all tastes. But if it's not his best (that's surely The Royal Tenenbaums), Moonrise Kingdom is Anderson's most enjoyable film for a while. Following his animated Fantastic Mr Fox, it's the second time that Anderson has let out his inner child – in this case, his inner boy scout.

DVD/Blu-ray: The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (U)

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:13 +0100

Ealing Studios' jaunty 1947 take on Charles Dickens's tale of child abuse, a stolen inheritance and avarice flies by at a fair lick, with three astounding performances from Cedric Hardwicke as the despicable Uncle Ralph, Stanley Holloway as garrulous theatre manager Vincent Crummies and Alfred Drayton as the sadistic Wackford Squeers.

DVD/Blu-ray: The Descendants (15)

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:12 +0100

“I'm the back-up parent, the understudy,” explains George Clooney's complacent family man and workaholic Hawaiian lawyer.

DVD/Blu-ray: The Grey (15)

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:09 +0100

“I'm calling on you,” pleads Ottway (Liam Neeson) to the heavens, but God isn't listening in this grisly, gripping Alaskan horror.

The Dictator, 83mins (15)

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The latest character to give Sacha Baron Cohen the license to say outrageous and offensive things is General Aladeen, the composite ruler of an oil-rich Middle Eastern country, as despotic as he is idiotic.

Films of the week (19/05/2012): The future is bleak in Scott’s definitive cut

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Film choice

New film releases this weekend

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

2 Days in New York (15)

The Dictator, 83 mins (15)

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The first laugh comes before the film has even started. "In loving memory of Kim Jong-il" reads the dedication title. It pretty much sets the tone for The Dictator, a broad, hit-and-miss satire about an Arab tyrant's indulgence of his capricious – and murderous – will. While Kim Jong-il may get the opening nod, Sacha Baron Cohen's lavishly bearded despot, General Aladeen, is more obviously inspired by Gaddafi and Saddam, who cosied up to the West even while they were torturing and killing their own people. "Broad" hardly covers it. This is a man who orders the disappearance of minions, aides, even a wife, with a surreptitious finger swiped across his throat.

Also showing (18/05/2012)

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The Raid (18) ***

First Night: Moonrise Kingdom, Cannes Festival Opening Film

Thu, 17 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The polite applause at the end of the press screening of Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom was in keeping with the subdued opening to this year's Cannes. In spite of the controversy about the lack of women film-makers in the programme and the usual publicity stunts, this has been a surprisingly muted festival. Anderson's new film – like every other Wes Anderson film before it – is mannered in the extreme.

DVD: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Warner)

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:15 +0100

Guy Ritchie’s second Sherlock Holmes film improves on his first in every respect.

All In Good Time, Nigel Cole, 93 mins (12A) How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Adrian Grunberg, 96 mins (15) Jeff, Who Lives At Home, Jay and Mark Duplass, 83 mins (15)

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The question that's usually prompted by the British film industry's more feeble offerings is, "How did this get funded?" But All In Good Time must have seemed a safe bet. It's directed by Nigel Cole, who made Calendar Girls, and it's scripted by Ayub Khan-Din, who wrote East Is East, so the producers must have assumed it would be ... well, a colourful, crowd-pleasing comedy drama. They wouldn't have expected a film as boring and hollow as this one.

Dark Shadows, Tim Burton, 113 mins (12A)

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Don't think Tim Burton doesn't know that his Dark Shadows is creaky – it's designed to be as creaky as the coffin that Johnny Depp's vampire hero is forever rising from. Burton's gothic comedy is based on an American TV classic – or so we're told, since the supernatural daytime soap Dark Shadows ran in the United States from 1966 to 1971 but is largely unknown in Britain. Having taken the trouble to exhume the series from its cobwebbed vaults (at least, watched clips on YouTube), I can tell you it looks cobwebby indeed, like Edward D Wood trying his hand at Douglas Sirk melodrama, or Peyton Place gone Transylvanian.

DVD: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (20th Century Fox)

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

This shoddy melodrama draws tenuous parallels between two women in 19th-century China, and two more in present-day Hong Kong.

DVD/Blu-ray: Shame (18)

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:57 +0100

After their outstanding alliance on Hunger, Steve McQueen again coaxes a hugely committed turn out of Michael Fassbender in this tale of a desensitised sex addict who unravels when his damaged sister (Carey Mulligan) comes to stay in his flash Manhattan apartment.

DVD/Blu-ray: A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (18)

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:13 +0100

"This is the worst orgy ever," moans neurotic Adam in this awkward sex comedy about a group of old friends struggling with being thirtysomething.

DVD/Blu-ray: Treme: Season 2 (15)

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:11 +0100

David Simon's fiercely intelligent series continues to chart the lives of a hazardous New Orleans neighbourhood after Hurricane Katrina.

DVD/Blu-ray: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (12)

Sat, 12 May 2012 00:00:09 +0100

The BBC's Sherlock has been such a hoot, with the chemistry between Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman so perfect, that Guy Ritchie's two frenetic efforts have been left somewhat trailing in its wake.

First Night: The Dictator, Royal Festival Hall, London

Fri, 11 May 2012 09:00:01 +0100

From Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator to Woody Allen's Bananas, dictatorships have always been fertile comedic ground. Now Sacha Baron Cohen takes a crack with his latest creation, Admiral General Aladeen, "the last great dictator" and leader of fictional Middle Eastern country, the Republic of Wadiya. Having already offended a coalition of Palestinian militias in his last film, Brüno, it's no surprise he's turned his attentions to a character said to be loosely based on late Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi.

All in Good Time (12A)

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Adapting from the stage play Rafta Rafta, itself an update of a Bill Naughton play from 1963, Ayub Khan-Din presents a heartwarmer about family and tradition among the Indian immigrant community of working-class Bolton.

Café de Flore (15)

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Jean-Marc Vallée's ambitious family drama hopscotches between characters, continents and timeframes as it explores the anguish of love.

Charlie Casanova (18)

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Taking a democratic approach to audience-baiting – it wants to offend everyone, equally – Terry McMahon's sulphurous satire revolves around Irish businessman Charlie (Emmett Scanlan), a handsome sociopath whose mind starts falling apart at a weekend conference spent with his wife and friends.

Dark Shadows (12A)

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Tim Burton needs Johnny Depp more than ever these days. This big-screen revisiting of a cult TV show from the 1960s, largely unknown over here, is beset with Burton's familiar faults - overproduced and underwritten, it labours through swathes of gothic mystery without seeming to know if it should scare us to death or make us bust out laughing. In the end, it barely does either.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (15)

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Mel Gibson, taking time out from a busy schedule of arrests, court appearances and voicemail rants, rolls back the years to play one of his nutty antiheroes in this violent down-Mexico-way thriller.

Jeff, Who Lives at Home (15)

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

I love titles with a comma in them. Whether it's enigmatic, like Craig Raine's book of poems The Onion, Memory, or plaintive (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?) or exhortatory (Rabbit, Run) or elegiac (Larkin's Going, Going), the comma makes a little hook to lure you in. With films, it crops up in the good (Happy, Texas), the bad (Dude, Where's My Car?) and the indifferent (Lust, Caution), but the pause it creates is cheering in a high-speed digital age where punctuation is losing its potency.

American Pie: Reunion, Jon Hurqitz & Hayden Schlossberg, 112 mins (15) Safe, Boaz Yakin, 95 mins (15) Monsieur Lazhar, Philippe Falardeau, 94 mins

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

It may be notorious for the moment its hormonal teenage hero vented his frustrations on a pastry, but American Pie also had a heart, a sheaf of tightly scripted storylines, and more exquisitely timed comic set-pieces than the combined works of Judd Apatow and the Farrelly brothers. Better still, it had a sense of purpose. The four protagonists all pledged to lose their virginities by the time they left school – and movie plots don't get more urgent than that.

Two Years at Sea, Ben Rivers, 88 mins (U)

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The fact that I'm devoting 950 words of prose here to Two Years at Sea might suggest that it is what you'd call the Major Movie of the Week. Not quite. It's really a minor movie, but I mean "minor" in the noblest, most exalted sense. This is film-making in a minor key, thoughtful and melancholic: a black-and-white, almost wordless documentary with no discernible narrative, its only human figure being a weather-beaten man with the long grey beard of Count Leo Tolstoy.

Also showing: The Lucky One, Beauty and the Beast 3D, Juan of the Dead, Silent House, Angel & Tony, and Piggy

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

The Lucky One (101 mins, 12A)

DVD: War Horse

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

Steven Spielberg's sentimental film of Michael Morpurgo's novel wasn't anywhere near as acclaimed as the National Theatre stage production, and it's easy to see why.

DVD: Clone

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:01 +0100

After the death of Eva Green's boyfriend, Matt Smith, she gives birth to his clone.

DVD/Blu-ray: War Horse (12)

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:45 +0100

The first 45 minutes of Spielberg's lavishly mounted adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's novel have all the bite of an episode of Heartbeat.

DVD/Blu-ray: Dracula, Prince of Darkness (15)

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:17 +0100

"There are no bogeyman anymore," yells Father Sandor in a vampire-fearing Romanian tavern.

DVD/Blu-ray: The Iron Lady (12)

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:12 +0100

Meryl Streep gives a note-perfect portrait of an elderly lady bewildered with dementia.

DVD/Blu-ray: Transit (15)

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:05 +0100

Four clammy bank robbers dump stolen cash on an unsuspecting family in Negret's absurd thriller.

DVD/Blu-ray: Braquo: Series 1 (18)

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:03 +0100

Leather jackets, facial hair and intense expressions abound in France's answer to The Shield.

Goodbye First Love (15)