| Speedracer | | Go, Speed Racer, Go!" Based on the Japanese animated series, Speed Racer signals the return of Andy and Larry Wachowski, the publicity-shy brothers who pioneered 'bullet time' in The Matrix trilogy. |
 | Honeydripper, Un Secret and I Served the King of England | | Screen history is pocked with African-American musicals showcasing stars who were rarely allowed to exhibit their talents in mainstream pictures. Indeed, on the rare occasions when the likes of Lena Horne, Bill Bojangles' Robinson or the Nicholas Brothers were accorded guest slots in prestigious studio pictures, their numbers were invariably cut from prints destined for the Deep South for fear of offending supremacist audiences. |
| The Iron Man | | The tug-of-war between altruism and materialism is at the heart of Iron Man, Jon Favreau's marvellous nuts and bolts realisation of the red and gold armoured Marvel Comics superhero, writes Damon Smith. Following the lead of the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises, Favreau devotes the majority of the opening hour to the characters. He fleshes out their personalities, insecurities and the underlying tensions (attraction, jealousy, irritation) which light the fuse on an action-oriented second half, awash with spectacular visual effects. |
 | The Oxford Murders | | John Hurt, the star of The Oxford Murders, recalled at its premiere in the city last week that he had last filmed here nearly 30 years ago on Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate. The vast sums lavished on this legendarily over-budget movie contrast sharply with the parsimony evidently practised over the new and rather disappointing film from Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia. Cimino spent weeks transforming Mansfield College into 1870s Harvard - thousands of leaves were stuck on trees to give the appearance of high summer - for a scene that lasted two minutes; de la Inglesia spent less than a week in Oxford (and infinitely tinier sums) on the making of a whole film. |
| Joy Division and Tovarisch I Am Not Dead | | The Manchester music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s has already been explored in Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People and Anton Corbijn's Control. But, for all the knowing irony of the former's profile of Factory Records boss Anthony Wilson and the grim melodrama of the latter's study of troubled singer Ian Curtis, the feeling lingered that the full story had yet to be told. However, director Grant Gee and screenwriter Jon Savage have gone a long way to putting the record straight in the documentary, Joy Division. |
| Persepolis and Death Note | | Ollie Johnston died last week. He was one of the 'Nine Old Men' who helped Walt Disney establish an animation empire. Starting out on Mickey Mouse shorts, he was a member of the team that produced the studio's first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1937. On its release, this landmark picture was known as "Disney's folly", as few thought that audiences would have the stamina for a full-length cartoon. However, the film was a triumph and Johnston went on to create key sequences in such enduring favourites as Pinocchio (1940), Bambi (1942), Cinderella (1950), Mary Poppins (1965) and The Jungle Book (1967). |
 | Three and Out | | Screenwriters Steve Lewis and Tony Owen evidently disagree, contriving a comedy of errors about a beleaguered London Tube driver who can earn a sizeable compensation package if he can persuade someone to leap in front of his train. Even the most skilled scribes would struggle to navigate the thorny and sensitive moral dilemmas at heart of Three And Out and, regrettably, Lewis and Owen aren't up to thetask, clumsily melding a farcical opening 30 minutes with the heart-rending emotions of the downbeat finale. It's no wonder that rail union Aslef protested the premiere. |
 | Street Kings and In Bruges | | Writer-director David Ayer has certainly found his groove - gritty crime thrillers about morally tainted cops who bend the law to compensate for an imperfect legal system - but he's in danger of getting stuck in it. Having previously penned screenplays for Training Day, Dark Blue and Harsh Times, making his debut behind the camera with the last film, Ayer returns to the crime-infected streets of Los Angeles with Street Kings, a brutal journey into the city's underbelly. |
| Private Property, Hope, Protégé, Botched and Captain Eager and the Mark of Voth | | Joachim Lafosse's Private Property is a masterly study of a Belgian family that is simultaneously held together and rent asunder by its dyfunctionality. Having used her twins against husband Patrick Descamps during their messy divorce, the haughty Isabelle Huppert now finds them obstructing her fresh start with chef Kris Cuppens. But, for all the twentysomething siblings' infantilisation, Huppert is no more mature herself and her inability to sell their rambling country home and move on with her life becomes as infuriating as younger son Jérémie Renier's indolent insolence. Quibbling slightly, Renier's resentful brat a touch too boorish. But, otherwise, the performances are laudably naturalistic and there isn't a wasted word in the compact screenplay. However, the real power comes from Lafosse's studied use of static, Ozu-like camerawork, which gives each scene a tangible intensity that makes the climactic tracking shot all the more disconcerting. |
 | THE LAST MISTRESS, THE BANQUET, THE 39 STEPS | | Catherine Breillat is one of France's most consistently controversial film-makers. However, she reins in her genius for provocation in The Last Mistress, a handsome adaptation of a novel by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly that ventured into the Dangerous Liaison territory of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. In the vein of Jacques Rivette's recent Don't Touch the Axe, this meticulous picture combines a period aesthetic with a contemporary acuity to provide fascinating insights into both human nature and French society now and in the 1830s. |
| SHINE A LIGHT | | While many rock bands have snatched their 15 minutes of fame then wilted into obscurity - or, worse still, attempted to recapture past glories by leaping on the reunion bandwagon - The Rolling Stones have defiantly refused to gather moss for more than 45 years. |
 | My Brother is an Only Child, Beaufort, The Book of Revelation and I'm a Cyborg But That's OK | | In the 2003 epic, Best of Youth, screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli produced a chronicle of post-war Italian life that merited comparison with the German masterpiece Heimat. The duo revisits many of the same themes in Daniele Luchetti's My Brother Is an Only Child, a study of the political divisions of the 1960s and 70s that centres on two siblings in love with the same girl. This is more a domestic dramedy than an analytical snapshot of the times. However, its suggestion that conviction is merely a disposable lifestyle accessory is particularly apt for our own era of pick'n'mix values and soundbite ideologies. |
 | Son of Rambow | | For those of us who lived through the 1980s (with tattered Polaroids to recall the glaring fashion faux pas), it was the decade of leg warmers and Space Dust popping furiously on the tongue. "Frankie Say" T-shirts were the political statement of choice, while men emulated the pastel linen suits of Miami Vice's Crockett and Tubbs. |
| You, The Living, Bunny Chow and The Go Master | | The morbid hilarity of mundane existence is relentlessly revealed by Swedish auteur Roy Andersson in You, the Living, a deadpan follow-up to his wonderful 2000 comeback picture Songs from the Second Floor. Again adopting a non-linear structure and a fastidiousness to ludicrous detail that recalls Jacques Tati, Andersson flits between unlinked, inconsequential episodes in the lives of various downtrodden individuals whose self-obsession blinds them to the impending doom of the bigger picture. |
 | 27 Dresses and Drillbit Taylor | | Grey's Anatomy surgical resident Katherine Heigl continues her makeover into fully-fledged leading lady with 27 Dresses, a frothy romantic comedy penned by Aline Brosh McKenna, screenwriter of The Devil Wears Prada. Anne Fletcher's film waltzes down the aisle of predictability as the resourceful heroine seeks to rewrite the assumption that she is always the bridesmaid and never the bride. Wedding bells peal loud and clear, but not before a great deal of soul-searching, self-sacrifice and a toe-curling best (wo)man speech that threatens to end in physical violence. |
| The Spiderwick Chronicles | | The prayers of parents, desperate for something to entertain the kids during Easter, have been answered. The Spiderwick Chronicles is a rollicking fairytale full of magic and mystery, based on the books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, which reveal an alternative reality full of goblins and ogres. |
 | Flight of the Red Balloon and The Orphanage | | Commissioned by the Musée d'Orsay and riffing on The Red Balloon, Albert Lamorisse's Oscar-winning 1956 short, The Flight of the Red Balloon is Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien's most accessible picture to date. That said, it's also a typically measured and visually sublime treatise on our inability to communicate in an increasingly impersonal world, as well as an affectionate paean to the unique gift that children possess for being impervious to the gravest of events happening around them. |
 | 10,000BC and The Cottage | | Director Roland Emmerich has spent half his career trying to obliterate planet Earth and humankind with it in blockbusters such as Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow, a film which imagined the return of the Ice Age. |
| We Are Together, Water Lilies and Children of Glory | | A South African tweenager slowly pulling tongues at the camera in Paul Taylor's We Are Together will be one of this critic's enduring images of 2008. It's not a rude gesture, but a charming sign of the growing confidence that Slidile Moya feels in dealing with the world outside the Agape hostel where she lives with 25 other children from KwaZulu Natal, who have been left orphaned by the country's wholly avoidable Aids epidemic. |
| Vantage Point | | Sometimes, the truth is hidden in plain sight - you just need to know where to look. Vantage Point is an intricate action-thriller, which replays a devastating terrorist attack from eight perspectives, exposing a web of intrigue, which leaves the American president fighting for his life during a high-profile visit to Salamanca in Spain. |
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