Woody Harrelson became famous 30 years ago when, still in his early 20s, he joined the cast of the TV comedy series Cheers as the goofy, grinning bartender Woody Boyd from Hanover, Indiana. He seemed to be a simple, friendly small-town boy, somewhat out of his depth in the big city. During the 1990s his public and private personae rapidly changed. He became known as a reckless hard drinker and an outspoken political activist, whose father was a contract killer serving a life sentence for murdering a federal judge. On screen he played increasingly complex and darker roles, some of them bizarre variations on the Woody character (basketball hustler in White Men Can't Jump; psychotic criminal in Natural Born Killers), others reaching out in quite different directions (the pornographer with a civil rights mission in The People vs Larry Flynt; the gay Washington gigolo in The Walker). Ingratiation with popular audiences has never been a primary aim, and in Rampart, his second collaboration with Oren Moverman, who directed him in the highly regarded Iraq war veteran movie The Messenger, he has taken on his most difficult part to date.

The movie takes its title from the multicultural Rampart district of downtown Los Angeles, the most densely populated area of America west of the Mississippi, and it's set in 1999 when the local police force was under investigation for racism, violence, bribery, drug dealing and general malfeasance. The Los Angeles police have come a long way cinematically since the early 20th century when the Keystone Kops patrolled the city.

Harrelson plays Dave Brown, a uniformed policeman of 24 years' standing, himself the son of a cop, and he's an emblematic figure in this culture of corruption, though precisely what he represents remains undefined. He's at the centre of every scene in the film, and we meet him driving his patrol car through Rampart, physically trim, his head shaven, his uniform neatly pressed, a cigarette permanently dangling from his lip. He's apparently Woody the barman working for the LAPD, with the familiar high cheekbones, the Roman nose, the Mr Punch-like jaw, the half-smile that might be vacant, searching, mocking or hinting at violence.

Very soon Brown is out of his car talking to a pair of junior cops, and his talk gets casually racist. He rejects the existence of an ongoing scandal when the matter is raised by a policewoman and then orders her to eat the box of takeaway chips she's ordered but not touched. Has this something to do with discipline, with diet, with arbitrary authority? We're not told, though we later learn that Brown never eats. At every juncture what we learn about this easy-going charmer is designed to make him appear a troubled, contradictory character whose private and professional lives are equally messy.

He's a heavy-drinking womaniser who has a young daughter with each of his ex-wives (Anne Heche, Cynthia Nixon), who in addition to living next door to each other are also sisters. His record of arrests and convictions is high, but he has a sorry reputation for abusing blacks and Hispanics, framing suspects, and even for homicide. Within the force his dubious sobriquet is "Date Rape", which derives from the unproven charge that he murdered a sex offender, presumably motivated by concern for his own daughters. As the movie progresses he's filmed beating the driver of a car that crashes into him. This becomes a major news story. Brown later steals money from thieves after a tip-off about a heist: he needs to pay for the lawyers defending him against investigators from the District Attorney's office and the LAPD's own internal affairs department.

This is a brilliant portrait of that familiar figure, the flawed law enforcement officer dedicated to the public order, corrupted by the foul world he lives in and at the end of his tether. He first became a major Hollywood character in the years after the second world war – Kirk Douglas in Detective Story, Dana Andrews in Where the Sidewalk Ends, Orson Welles in Touch of Evil. More recently we've had examples in Europe: Gérard Depardieu in Maurice Pialat's Police, Gian Maria Volonté in Elio Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion. This is very much the territory of James Ellroy, a crime writer who combines finesse and brutality in his thrillers about the Los Angeles police. In Rampart, his first original screenplay to reach the screen, Ellroy is struggling with his own demons, and the result is forceful if somewhat blurred, and narrower in focus than Curtis Hanson's excellent film of Ellroy's LA Confidential.

Harrelson's Brown is paranoia and self-justification personified, a man torn between retribution and redemption, driven to suspecting everyone around him and using his formidable knowledge of the law to baffle his antagonists and provide a cloak of innocence. "I never hurt any good people," he claims, adding: "I'm not a racist, I'm just against everyone – equally." The whole style of the film reflects the moral climate of his world: a handheld camera that catches Brown's edgy rhythms, the natural lighting that places him in dazzling daylight or murky darkness. The presence of Brown centre stage surrounded by forceful actors who briefly appear to hurl threats and accusations makes him look like a man under constant interrogation. It confirms Harrelson's position as one of the best, most ambitious, least self-regarding actors at work today, and by the end he's compelled us to understand Brown and accord him a grudging respect.

By Philip French

Turkish film-maker Nuri Bilge Ceylan initially trained as an electrical engineer and worked as a commercial photographer until becoming a full-time director. Now in his early 50s, he's one of the most significant moviemakers to have emerged this century, an original figure in his own right and a major force in reviving a belief in the kind of serious, ambitious, morally concerned European art-house cinema that was taken to new heights by Bergman, Tarkovsky, Antonioni and Angelopoulos in the 1960s and 70s.

In the films that established his reputation – Uzak, Climates and Three Monkeys – Ceylan used pared-down narratives with long takes and sparse dialogue to explore the ethical dilemmas of middle-class Turks, studying the social and geographical contexts of their personal lives and the larger world that is shaping them. There is always, however, a mystery about his characters. This derives in part because Ceylan refuses to provide intrusive exposition. More significantly, it arises from his generous invitation to audiences to make up their own minds about what they are seeing.

His finest work to date, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, is a carefully controlled masterpiece. As the title suggests, it's a sort of fable with a very specific location in the Asian part of his native land. It's also (and the title inevitably evokes Leone's two violent classics) an exercise in popular genre cinema, in this case the crime scene investigation picture. The themes are universal and it could be reworked without much difficulty on the steppes of Russia, in the hill country of Texas or the desert of Rajasthan – anywhere where people get casually killed and other people come together to tidy up the mess.

A brief pre-credit sequence shows three men drinking at night in a dilapidated garage on the edge of a town. They are, as it gradually transpires, the perps and their victim. After the credits have rolled, three vehicles – two battered saloons and a military-style Jeep – snake their way across a bare, rolling landscape at night, their smallness and vulnerability emphasised by the widescreen. They stop beside the road and some of the passengers step out, two of them handcuffed. We might guess they're a band of mafiosi about to kill and bury some transgressor. In fact, the reverse proves to be the case. The handcuffed men are murder suspects accompanied by the police, a quartet of paramilitary gendarmes, a couple of gravediggers, a public prosecutor and a local doctor. They've confessed to their crime and are being brought to the countryside to locate the place where their victim is buried.

A body is needed to complete the investigation and it is supposedly to be found near a fountain beside a bridge not far from a lone tree situated a little further from the road. It's as if Vladimir and Estragon were accused of killing Pozzo or Lucky. But the chief suspect, Kenan, cannot or will not identify the place and for most of the film the characters are literally and figuratively in the dark as they drive around the frozen wintry heath.

At first, the dozen all-male characters are anonymous, obscure figures. But as they bicker and banter about getting the routine job done and going home, they become individuals with hopes and fears and part of a contested hierarchy. Naci, the police chief, burns on a short fuse and has a sick child in need of constant medication. His driver, nicknamed Arab Ali, has a passion for food. The sergeant of the gendarmerie wants official credit for his role in the search. Prosecutor Nusret wears a smart overcoat, white shirt and tie and a decent suit and needs to get back to Ankara without getting caught up in any serious breaches of protocol.

He's a vain man, identifying the corpse when it's eventually exhumed as looking like Clark Gable and recalling that as a university student he was nicknamed "Clark". His constant urination leads the cops to suspect he has prostate trouble. Doctor Cemal turns out to be a city man, once married to a beautiful woman, childless, sceptical, observant, thoughtful. Keeping his own counsel, and possibly a larger keeper of consciences, he meditates on fate and the significance of individuals in the larger scheme of things. Cemal resembles Anton Chekhov and doctors in Chekhov's work. All this is revealed gradually, subtly, as if we were there in the community.

Along the way, we learn about corruption, neglect, inefficiency. The gravediggers haven't brought a pick. No one has remembered to take a body bag. The police cars are poorly maintained. The driver doesn't have a map. When they put in for a rest at a village to get tea from the mayor, the electricity fails and we discover no official has visited this place for years. Yet it is there that the suspects have an epiphanous encounter with the mayor's daughter that provides the investigation with a major gear change.

The visit to the countryside is beautifully lit by Ceylan's regular cameraman, Gökhan Tiryaki, and has a resonant soundtrack of natural noise ranging from wind in the trees to overweight coppers in creaking car seats. It's followed by a lengthy coda back in the small town where the killing occurred and an autopsy takes place. Here, the doctor emerges as the dominant figure. But daylight brings not an expected clarity but further obfuscation. The case appears to have greater complexities than we'd supposed and we realise we've been watching a thriller as challenging as Antonioni's Blow-Up and Haneke's Hidden. As a character casually observes early on, we might remember this seemingly insignificant evening later in life as an anecdote that begins: "Once upon a time in Anatolia…"

By Philip French

Here is the dramatised true story of Leopold Socha: the sewer worker in Lvov in occupied Poland during the second world war who hides terrified Jews in secret underground passageways, while the vicious Nazis strut above ground. At first, Socha greedily takes all the money the desperate Jews offer him, but gradually, through the mysterious workings of redemption and grace, becomes their genuinely concerned protector. (After the war, Socha was posthumously awarded Israel's Righteous Among the Nations title.) In Darkness has something different from the storytelling brashness of Spielberg's Schindler's List – although there are similarities, including a reformed rogue and a chilling Nazi. In its fear, shame and horror, it's possibly closer to The Third Man. The brickwork tunnels, with their flickering ripples of filthy water, all look familiar. Here, the sewers are an earthly hell, a purgatorial afterlife running in parallel with the life being lived, making everyone's deepest fears a reality. But the horrors of hell are visited on the just, while the unjust walk around in airy freedom. Robert Wieckiewicz is perfectly cast as Socha, the chancer and survivor who becomes a hero. There is release at the end of this fine film, but no euphoria; just a sense of having come through a period of evil, the memory of whose darkness will never entirely lift.

By Peter Bradshaw

Encased in a coffin, waiting to be brought back to life: That's how Snow White spends a good portion of the folk story that bears her name. There's no such downtime for the princess in the snappy retelling "Mirror Mirror," a fractured fairy tale that occupies the divide between Disney and Grimm.

A booster shot of testosterone lends kinetic kick to director Tarsem Singh's visually inventive interpretation, without shortchanging the requisite froufrou or sugarcoating the story's dark Oedipal heart. The mash-up can be choppy, but the fable zings along on the sharp comic timing of the cast, led by a royally wicked Julia Roberts.

The screenplay by Marc Klein and Jason Keller (a screen story credit goes to Melisa Wallack) pointedly rewrites the fairy-tale convention that finds every damsel helplessly imperiled until a prince delivers her from danger. This Snow White (Lily Collins) can get gussied up with the best of them, but she also holds her own in a fencing duel. And — hello, switcheroo — she rescues a prince in distress.

When in exile, Snow (it's a first-name-informal kingdom) receives martial-arts instruction from the dwarfs. Like the famous septet from Disney's 1937 classic, this woods-dwelling crew provides collective-sidekick slapstick, and each has a character-defining shtick — most memorably the love-struck Half Pint (Mark Povinelli). But they've also been restored to their folk tale roots as bandits and outcasts. They're action antiheroes with hearts of gold.

Transforming Snow White to an action hero in her own right doesn't lessen the archetypal power of the stepmother-daughter, age-beauty conflict. Collins ("The Blind Side") is a convincing foil for Roberts' jealous Queen, personifying intelligence, innate goodness and fairest-of-them-all femininity. If a movie-star self-regard has crept into Roberts' work over the years, here she uses it to winning effect, savoring the tension and silliness, and making an exceptionally entertaining evil monarch.

Advised and chided by the alter ego who resides on the other side of her magic mirror — one of the film's more striking elements — the Queen sets her sights on an imperial merger with Prince Alcott (Armie Hammer), whose province's resources would save her from the brink of bankruptcy.

Hammer, who brought an air of wounded regality to the Winklevoss twins in "The Social Network" and Clyde Tolson in "J. Edgar," gets to shake off the aggrievement and let his princely flag fly, often without a shirt.

Singh (a.k.a. Tarsem Singh Dhandwar or simply Tarsem) is a fantasist whose singular knack for spectacle can also be his weakness, set-piece razzle-dazzle not infrequently overwhelming the characters in his previous films: "The Cell," "The Fall" and "Immortals." That weakness reveals itself in "Mirror Mirror" when he stops the story cold to indulge in a puppet sequence.

But mostly the built-in structure of a well-known tale helps to rein him in, as does the propulsive rhythm of one-liners — some of the best are delivered with panache by Nathan Lane and Robert Emms, as mouthy servants. For most of its running time, the film strikes the right balance of make-believe enchantment and snark-infused lampoon, playing to older kids and adults alike.

Crucial to the movie's magic are Tom Foden's lush and witty production design and the splendid costumes by Eiko Ishioka, the renowned designer's final screen work before her death in January. The finery and regalia of their contributions are integral to Singh's vision, giving this mostly conventional princess story its fair share of romantic froth and more than a little moxie.

By Sheri Linden

Picking up a decade after he defeated the Kraken, Wothington's Perseus has settled down as a fisherman with his young son, Hellus. That lasts about five minutes since Hades (Fiennes) and Zeus' other son, Ares (Édgar Ramirez), have teamed up to unleash über-baddie Kronos, the long estranged dad of Z, H and Poseidon (Danny Huston). But first, Zeus is kidnapped, so Perseus must assemble a team and trek to the underworld to save his own God-father and make sure no one "releases the Kronos!"

That's pretty much the plot. A search for a theme would say this is a tale of fathers and sons, but that would be stretching it.

The only reason to see Wrath of the Titans is for the endless array of computer-generated boss fights. With titans that are ginormous and a fiery underworld that's visually stunning, the production value impresses.

As cool as some scenes are (a fiery mountain-size creature, a moving castle that shifts like a Rubik's Cube) there's no real sense of urgency.

Worse, none of the moments build upon the previous ones. Perseus' outfits seem to reset after every fight from battle ravaged to newly worn. This is less an actual movie and more an HD clip that is on constant loop at Best Buy.

Wrath of the Titans is a sequel that's better than the original only because Clash of the Titans set the bar so low.

Toby Bell (War Horse) has a few meta moments as Poseidon' son Agenor, coming just short of referring to Perseus as the dude who did that "release the Kraken" thing. Rosamund Pike (Barney's Version) replaces Alexa Davalos as a much stronger, more entertaining warrior Queen Andromeda. Billy Nighy overacts as fallen god Hephaestus; but did you really except him not to?

by PETER PARAS

THERE is no accounting for taste.

Despite a flimsy, contrived script and uneven performances, the 2010 British film StreetDance 3D found considerable favour with home-grown audiences, amassing over £10 million at the UK box office.

The dance sequences melded street and ballet styles with verve and included performances from Britain's Got Talent crews Diversity and Flawless to a high-energy soundtrack.

Directors Max Giwa and Dania Pasquini treat us to more of the same with StreetDance 2, which recycles the linear plot of the first film, replacing the jetes and pirouettes with the swivelling hips of salsa and the tango.

The narrative may be second-hand but almost the entire cast is new - a motley crew of gym-toned girls and muscular boys with all the right moves but scant heartfelt emotion.

Talented street dancer Ash (Falk Hentschel) seizes his one shot at glory during a high-profile competition but falls flat on his face in front of a booing crowd and reigning champions Invincible.

Dusting himself off, he meets wise-cracking Eddie (George Sampson), who suggests they join forces to create a crew from around the world with the potential to dethrone Invincible.

"I could be your Yoda," quips Eddie lamely, who labours under the illusion that Star Wars references are still hip.

So the young men criss-cross across Europe, seeking out the most imaginative, daring and supple performers to fill the ranks of their ramshackle squad.

Arriving in sun-dappled Paris, they meet bar owner Manu (Tom Conti) and his sexy niece Eva (Sofia Boutella), who speaks from the heart through dance.

"We could come up with a fusion of street and Latin that no one has seen before!" gushes Ash, unable to keep his eyes off the sassy lassie.

But first, Ash must learn to dance as part of a crew rather than by himself, which can only be accomplished through music video-style montages and some intense one-on-one with Eva.

"Dance with your heart not your head," she purrs seductively. "You're still thinking like a soloist."

StreetDance 2 is energetic and undemanding, following a predictable narrative path as Ash and Eva fall head over heels in love to a soundtrack of contemporary dance floor anthems.

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As Werner Herzog admitted, introducing his new documentary in Toronto, Into the Abyss is, for him, a fairly generic title. All his films are trips into the dark, from the most famous to the most recent: Cave of Forgotten Dreams , a woozy 3D tour around the paintings and scratchings at Chauvet with a trademark wacky coda featuring baby albino alligators.

But rarely has a quest into the depths felt quite as larky as this one: a death row documentary that's, if not quite laugh a minute, then certainly not short on chuckles. Herzog concentrates on one crime, a triple homicide in rural Texas 10 years ago, then interviews the friends and family of the woman and two teenagers shot as part of a plan to steal a Camaro sports car, as well as the perpetrators: both pushing 30, one 10 years into a 40-year sentence, the other with eight days to go before his scheduled execution.

At first, it feels like Herzog lingers too long on the grisly details – there's copious use of the police video of the crime scene, with violins slapped on in post-production. The template here is one superficially familiar from cable channel rush-jobs: sad-faced cops recall lives gone awry, still-teary relatives hold up framed photos of loved ones.

But Herzog's approach makes it feel fresh. "Please describe an encounter with a squirrel" is one of his questions for the prison chaplain, along with "Why does God allow capital punishment?" He gets some remarkable insights from officials in the business of execution – in particular a man who had a sudden breakdown after unstrapping his 125th prisoner from the gurney.

The cumulative effect suggests a world in which murder, desperation and operatic levels of tragedy are workaday (one town is actually called Cut and Shoot). As well as losing her brother and mother in the attacks, one woman tells how she also lost almost every other member of her family (plus dog) in a variety of colourful accidents, suicides and slayings in the six years beforehand. She unplugged her phone soon afterwards: "I just couldn't handle another call."

Almost all the fathers mentioned are serving substantial prison terms themselves. People are arrested at their relatives' funerals, live in car boots, can't read, dump bodies where they're bound to be found. So why so wry? One man tells of a time a 14-inch screwdriver was thrust into his torso. Did he go to hospital? "I had to be at work in 30 minutes." But you were OK? "Seem to be," says the man. "So I was lucky there."

What you'd like more of is the men at the centre of the crime, for Herzog to grapple directly with their obfuscations, their religious conversions. Yet they remain opaque, behind their glass panes and grills, just as the pregnancy of one of their wives (who fell for him while working on his appeal) stays mysterious. But these are the kind of surrealities Herzog also does best. He coaxes stories of mysterious monkey attacks and ravenous alligators from the least likely places, lingers in auto graveyards, where impounded vehicles – including the one which motivated these murders – sit until tree roots spring up next to the gearstick. For something with such a morbid draw, Into the Abyss leaves you startled by life.

By Catherine Shoard

The furry troublemakers go on a cruise in the third film in the animated series.

In addition to the successful movie franchise, the contemporary incarnation of Alvin and the Chipmunks has also pretty much established that critics are never going to show it any love.

That being the case, if the true gauge of a worthy sequel is consistency, then it would be fair to say that Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked is every bit as frantic, frenetic, groan-inducing and all around grating as its two predecessors.

From the p.o.v. of its targeted young audiences (it’s G-rated, as opposed to those prior PG ratings) it should handily do the trick at the holiday box office, although it still would have been nice if they could have made a slight effort to instill the Ross Bagdasarian Sr. characters with a modicum of charm and inventiveness.

The plot, if you could call it that, has Alvin, Simon and Theodore (again provided by the sped-up voices of Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler and Jesse McCartney) wreaking havoc aboard a luxury liner, much to the eternal chagrin of their “dad” Dave (a contractually sincere but nevertheless embarrassed-looking Jason Lee).

Once again Alvin’s shenanigans lead to no good - in this case landing all the ‘Munks and Chipettes (the returning Amy Poehler, Anna Faris and Christina Applegate, although good luck telling their characters apart) on a remote island with an active volcano and a crazed fortune hunter (former SNL cast-member Jenny Slate).

They’re soon joined by Dave and the ever-conniving Uncle Ian (David Cross) who spends the entire film stuck in a pelican suit.

While incoming director Mike Mitchell (Shrek Forever After) admittedly keeps the ‘Munks moving at a chipper clip, the script by Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger - they also penned the Squeakquel - settles for well-worn pop culture references (James Bond, Cast Away) and wince-worthy puns, like “You can follow me on Critter.”

At least there’s a glimmer of inspiration in some of those song choices.

Aside from sampling recent hit offerings from Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and LMFAO, the film actually mines a bit of humor by having the marooned Chipettes singing defeated, a cappella snippets of Destiny’s Child’s "Survivor" and The Go-Go’s "Vacation."

Remarkably The Ballad of Gilligan’s Isle didn’t make the cut.

Between Somali pirates, online pirates and Johnny Depp, there wouldn’t seem to be a gap in the market where crossbones and cutlasses are concerned.

But, apparently, they didn’t get that memo over at Aardman, where they’ve spent the past five years arduously turning the first in Gideon Defoe’s book series about comically crap buccaneers into one of their trademark stop-motion opuses.

With loving craft and meticulous detail, they’ve ended up creating a veritable treasure trove that, like Wallace and Gromit’s escapades, boasts a constant barrage of verbal and visual wit.

Yet it’s never particularly funny, the gentle buffoonery on display being likelier to induce genial chuckles and smiles of appreciation than out-and-out, sidesplitting belly laughs.

Central to Peter Lord’s Adventure is that very British combo of crippling insecurity and cringing embarrassment Hugh Grant has been lucratively mining for the last two decades.

He’s ideally cast then as the follically unchallenged Pirate Captain, a second-tier brigand who languishes in the shadow of cockier corsairs like Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven), his swaggering American nemesis.

A chance to redeem himself arrives in the form of Charles Darwin (David Tennant), who politely informs the Captain while walking the plank that hispet parrot Polly is actually a dodo.

Cue a trip to London to make booty of the bird, even if it means incurring Queen Victoria’s (Imelda Staunton) wrath – who loathes pirates almost as much as Hugh hates tabloid hacks.

After half an hour setting up its kooky, U-cert universe, Scientists! hits its stride at the mid-point with a breakneck chase in a staircase-surfing bathtub that drolly recalls The Wrong Trousers’ model-railway finale.

By the hour mark, though, an inertia has set in that not even Queen Vic doing ninja flips on her giant floating fortress can dispel. Only Aardman would think of pinning a Blue Peter badge on a pirate hat or adding a cameo from Elephant Man Joseph Merrick.

Yet it soon becomes evident such ingenious grace notes are embellishing a slender concept that, while perfectly suited to a half-hour short, struggles to sustain a full-length feature. Essentially Captain Pugwash on a bigger budget, Pirates! proves good will and artistry only go so far.

That said, it’ll be worth a case of doubloons to anybody with little ones to entertain over the Easter hols.

By Neil Smith

Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne track the struggles of working class life so persistently that their films might seem like textbook examples of gritty, post-industrial, un-fun European art cinema.

Yet when films like Rosetta, The Son and La Promesse hurtle through housing projects or mobile homes using hand-held cameras, they have such engrossing, reckless energy that they can feel more like noir-ish thrillers.

Now, with The Kid With A Bike, they literally zoom into the light – the Dardennes usually shoot in Seraing in Liège, the gritty part of Belgium, either indoors, or during the grey winter months. Yet it’s not just sunshine that makes this their warmest movie to date, winning the 2011 Grand Prix at Cannes.

Cyril, 11, is a ginger-headed handful who refuses to accept that he has been abandoned by his deadbeat dad. Instead he obsessively searches for his father and his bike. Breaking out of the orphanage, he runs away to the flat where he used to live, and when the authorities try to take him back, he hides in a doctor’s office and clings to the legs of a hairdresser (Cécile de France). “You can hold on to me, but not so tight,” she tells him, setting the tone for their unlikely friendship. Samantha agrees to be his part-time guardian, letting him stay with her at weekends. She also retrieves the bike that his feckless father sold on.

There’s already one famous film about children and beloved bicycles, of course – Vittorio De Sica’s naturalist classic The Bicycle Thief – and like De Sica, the Dardennes are fascinated by those with unloved, unattended lives.

Their central characters are flawed, and often do awful things, but the Dardennnes’ world view is entirely practical. If they repent, their reward isn’t so much spiritual as access to a useful set of new possibilities. Nor do they make a saviour’s lot look attractive in their films. Usually the job is onerous, complicated and unappreciated: for instance, the attention Samantha gives to Cyril is resented by her boyfriend, and while Cyril forms a tentative bond to Samantha, he’s attracted to another option – a young delinquent (Egon Di Mateo) who shows him how to mug people.

Cyril’s dad (Jérémie Renier) is neither interested in repentance nor in helping Cyril: “It’s too much for me,” he says. Although we don’t hear the father’s story, in a sense it’s been sketched out in earlier Dardennes films, where the same actor played a kid with a rotten dad in La Promesse (1996) and then a fraught father himself in L’Enfant (2006). In another auteur’s book, this might seem like an act of self-homage. For the Dardenne brothers, it’s simply another way of suggesting that family dysfunction is an unresolved cycle.

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It's not really my kind of book. But when my daughter said she was reading The Hunger Games and asked if I would read it too, I obliged. Despite having two parents who love to read, the kid is not a fan. So, I am happy to play book club if that helps get her between the pages.

I was more than pleasantly surprised. The book was fast-paced, well-written and about more than teenage, romantic angst. It reminded me of the post-apocalyptic fiction I read in graduate school. And I got into the story so much that I raced through all three books in the series in a matter of days.

So when I heard a movie was on the way, I was almost as excited as my daughter. I was really curious to see how such a vast world would translate to the screen. Yesterday, I got the chance to find out.

The theater was full of reviewers. So I don't give too much credence to their reactions in the theater. I'm curious to watch it with a general audience to see if there are gasps and laughter and tears and applause. In our row, there was a lot of crying, and it was my daughter and I who were responsible for it.

If you don't know the story, it's about a world (our world) after a great war in which the people rebelled against the Capitol. The country is now divided into twelve districts plus the Capitol so that the latter can maintain control of the former. In the Capitol, life is opulent, all based on the services provided by the districts.

In the districts, there is never enough to eat and the people live in squalor. And to add insult to injury, once a year, the Capitol demands that the districts each offer up one boy and one girl to compete in the Hunger Games, a survival game to the death to remind the people of why they should not rebel against the Capitol. The winner and his or her district gets food for the year to remind the people that the Capitol "takes care of" them.

The film was relatively true to the book. Although, as in most book-to-movie translations, there were some details we were surprised to find missing or changed. For example, how Katniss gets the now-famous mockingjay pin and how little attention is paid to Katniss keeping her family alive with her illegal hunting after her father dies and her mother goes catatonic.

We are given a glimpse of District 12 in the beginning of the film though. The filth and desperation is apparent. What is startling is how perfectly familiar it looks. It could be anywhere, under a bridge in any US city, in the favelas of Brazil, the slums of India.

I believe the familiarity is no mistake. This is not a sci-fi film. It's as political is it is entertaining. But, as always, I can't help but wonder if the people who need to see this will. And, if they do, will they recognize themselves and their wrong doings. President Snow is made out to be the villain in the Hunger Games. But what he does would not be possible without the acquiescence of the people of the Capitol.

District 12 is rendered in muddy colors. The people live in poverty and their downtrodden state is clear. The Capitol, on the other hand, is the exact opposite, of course, all bright colors and opulence, everything over the top. No one wanting. The book is about many things, the film focuses primarily on one -- the haves and the have nots and the injustice of that state of affairs.

Jennifer Lawrence, who plays Katniss, portrays the right blend of fragility and strength. First, volunteering in her sister's place to be in the Games and then preparing for them with as much ferocity as any of the other competitors. Liam Hemsworth as Gale is handsome and slightly brooding as he watches the Hunger Games unfold on live "reality" TV.

The love for Katniss that Josh Hutcherson evokes as Peeta is palpable. But so is his intelligence and understanding of what's really going on. He is hunky, sure. But he is also calculating. He is truly appalled by the Capitol and is willing to do anything to preserve his humanity during the Games while still trying to keep Katniss alive.

The result is a film that will keep viewers, even the millions who have read the books and know the outcome, at the edge of their seats. And if the storyline doesn't grab you -- unlikely as that is -- the special effects and the portrayal of the Game arena and its inner-workings, is enough to intrigue most.

My daughter is a sensitive soul. She cried for the people of District 12. She cried at the death of Rue, played by Amandla Stenberg. She cried when it looked hopeless for Katniss and Peeta despite knowing that they would survive. I cried watching my daughter, wondering if she understood the implications of the film, the political underpinnings.

The Hunger Games isn't really the future. It's today. The masses suffer while the few live in preposterous affluence. The Capitol of Panem has more than enough to spare, as do the mega celebs of our days. We have hungry and homeless and all around the world people live in sub-human conditions. This is a story about greed and about turning a blind eye.

The film is exciting and goes by shockingly quickly considering it's two hours and twenty-two minutes long. But, it's more than a love triangle or an adventure film. It's a cautionary tale. We figuratively sacrifice the children of others in order to lead the lives of comfort we lead. How long could it be before we do it literally?

By Jenny Block

Since they killed Osama bin Laden last year, Navy SEALs have become American heroes, so it was just a matter of time before someone decided to make a film using actual active-duty Navy SEALs playing themselves in the leads.

For security reasons, those who took part cannot be named in the final credits, but no such shield should be given to Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, who use their cast to endow a lousy action flick with free hardware and a phoney moral authority.

Unabashed, the co-directors appear at the start of the film to pay tribute to their own impulse to explore what it takes to be a SEAL. In which case, why not make a documentary? Better yet, why not just tell us to go see this year’s Oscar-nominated Hell And Back Again, a remarkable true story about a marine who fought in Afghanistan and barely lived to tell the tale?

Instead, we’re offered something cobbled together from old Rambo movies which presents the SEALs as superfit, ethnically and socially diverse and intimidatingly manly.

They employ assertive taos such as “Being dangerous is sacred, a badge of honour,” and can kill a man with their bare hands. They are also really terrible actors, which is quite something in a genre where Charlie Sheen, Vin Diesel and Demi Moore have played SEALs over the years.

On its own terms, you can admire the ninja stealth of the SEALs on their missions, and the scenes where they crawl across terrain strafed by live ammunition are remarkable.

It’s just a pity that Act Of Valor reduces everything to level ten of a video game. The plot consists of three missions – rescuing a kidnapped CIA agent (Roselyn Sanchez) who is being tortured in a very sheer tanktop, then attempting to neutralise the threats posed by a Ukrainian drug smuggler (Alex Veadov) and a jihadist (Jason Cottle) who plans to murder Americans by strapping state-of-the-art bombs to terrified Filipinos.

There’s not much complexity to these villains, who tend to be ugly, scarred brutes who blow up children and get babes in bikinis to fix their drinks. By contrast, the SEALs enjoy surfing, family time and beer. Thank goodness it is so easy to identify enemies of the state.

A subplot about a father-to-be loses suspense in its opening minutes after one SEAL clearly announces the fate of another when he narrates a letter to his comrade’s unborn child.

This film also has no time for that most beloved of movie conventions – the lone wolf. Act Of Valor is all about teamwork and respecting authority, although the film’s enthusiastic over-editing ensures that it’s never clear how the team works.

No-one shouts, no-one gets the shakes. And unlike soldiers in the news, no-one makes politically incorrect remarks or shoots a civilian by mistake. It’s no surprise to learn that Act Of Valor was once intended as a recruitment film, because what we are presented with here is so ridiculously gung ho, it makes Top Gun look like All Quiet On The Western Front.

By SIOBHAN SYNNOT

Michael Winterbottom is such a restlessly, brilliantly prolific and unparochial film-maker, declining to be limited either conceptually or geographically: always keeping us on our toes. This latest movie starts with a bold and intriguing concept, but is bafflingly muted and underpowered, its initial promise fading as it drifts away to a self-conscious conclusion. Trishna is a Thomas Hardy adaptation – Winterbottom's third, in fact, having made Jude in 1996 and The Claim (based on The Mayor of Casterbridge) in 2000. It is a loose reworking of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and the story is transplanted to modern India where Jay (Riz Ahmed), the son of a rich Jaipur hotelier, is travelling with friends. One evening Jay is captivated by the delicate beauty of a young woman he sees at a party: this is Trishna, played by Freida Pinto. She comes from a poor family, and her father, a delivery driver, plunges the family into poverty by driving half-asleep on India's hair-raising roads and crashing his jeep. (It's a smart twist on one of the novel's most famous scenes.) The infatuated Jay hears about Trishna's plight and gets her a job at his dad's luxury hotel; and so begins a fateful relationship.

Any Hardy reader will find himself tipped off balance by the challenge in Winterbottom's bold opening. All the stuff about the father of Tess/Trishna and his delusions of family grandeur is jettisoned in favour of a fast, fluid introduction that actually centres on Jay: rich, a little conceited, but quite decent and high-minded. Wait: is he supposed to be Alec d'Urberville or Angel Clare?

An interesting ambiguity, but like so much else in the movie, it seems to get slowly but surely poured away into the story's damp sand. There is tragedy and violence, perhaps attributable to thwarted ambition: although both find themselves in the hotel business, Jay has dreams of being in Bollywood and Trishna is a talented dancer. Their dreams are soured and their life and love are on a tragically wrong track. Yet something prevents Ahmed and Pinto from expressing these emotions powerfully and satisfyingly enough, and Pinto never quite shows that her character is changed by what she has gone through. The story is rather shapeless, with little dramatic traction: it feels as if it could end at the one-hour mark or go on for another four. Winterbottom's location work in Jaipur and Mumbai has richness and spectacle, but somehow this does not come fully to life.

By Peter Bradshaw

William Brent Bell's horror film follows a young woman’s investigation into the events that landed her mother in Italy’s Centrino Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Dabbling in the same, shaky handheld horror arena as The Last Exorcism, The Devil Inside purports to follow, documentary-style, a young American woman’s investigation into the events that landed her mother in Italy’s Centrino Hospital for the Criminally Insane two decades earlier.

While that 2010 film ultimately failed to deliver on some admittedly chilling atmospherics, this latest variation, directed and co-written by William Brent Bell, never gets off the ground, trotting out the same predictable twisting heads and psycho-babble without a whiff of originality or discernible visual flair.

As a result, the would-be thriller proves as scary and unsettling as a slab of devil’s food cake - only considerably less satisfying.

Horror fans hungry for a demonic possession fix could initially take the bait, but subsequent word-of-mouth should mean that Paramount’s Insurge genre label won’t have a new Paranormal Activity on its hands.

All that endless talking into cinematographer Gonzalo Amat’s handheld camera begins back in 1989, with emergency responders working their way through a domestic crime scene in which a distraught woman (Suzan Crowley) has brutally murdered three people - all belonging to her church.
Determined to find out what happened to her mother that night, daughter Isabella (Fernanda Andrade), with a trusty videographer in tow, travels to Italy and hooks up with a pair of ordained priests (Simon Quarterman and Evan Helmuth), who happen to perform forbidden ritual exorcisms on the side.

After much debate about whether their subjects are mentally ill or possessed by il diavolo, the group finally gets down to the business at hand where Isabella’s institutionalized mom is concerned, only to get more than they bargained for when it appears she’s harboring not one but four demons with nasty powers of transference.

Saddled with its tired docu format, the production can never extricate itself from all those directly-into-the-lens personal confessions and its constant rehashing of the same previously shown footage to establish any sort of prevailing mood other than random hysteria.

With the exception of veteran British actress Crowley, who’s efficiently disturbing as Isabella’s damaged mother, the rest of the cast is less convincing, coming across as actors self-consciously playing their earnest roles, often to chuckle-inducing effect.

And then there’s that opening statement that “The Vatican did not endorse this film or aid in its completion.”

Good call.

by Michael Rechtshaffen

It feels as if Cameron Crowe is still weathering the fallout from his last two, critically derided movies, Vanilla Sky (2001) and Elizabethtown (2005), the career impact of which was like a particularly devastating left-right combination to his own face. Short of smothering us in a warm, furry nest of soft toys, he could hardly have found a cosier way of cuddling back up to his audience than We Bought a Zoo. The movie is pretty, sticky, thoroughly innocuous, and quite nice. If we scoff at plausibility, as well we might, Crowe has that readiest of instant comebacks: it’s based on a true story.

Matt Damon stars as sometime Guardian columnist Benjamin Mee, a widowed father of two who chooses an odd moment to jack in his career and up sticks. “Rolling hills”, he tells the estate agent, are a priority. After ruling out everything else, they stumble on a rambling dream home with a hitch: it’s also a working wildlife park, on the brink of closure unless a cash injection and heaps of hard work can bring it up to scratch.

Benjamin’s delighted young daughter (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) takes an immediate shine to the peacocks, but his teenage son (Colin Ford) continues to sulk, scowl and draw pictures of decapitations. Meanwhile, an ageing tiger looks ready to give up the ghost. If you think Crowe and co-screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna are tough enough to resist the ready-made parallels with mum’s terminal illness, think again.

The real Mee didn’t grieve quite as chastely as Damon’s does here ­- his memoir has stories of multiple flings with younger women, all cleaned away for family-viewing purposes.

Scarlett Johansson, as zookeeper Kelly, is enlisted to do a strangely butch Ashley Judd routine and show him some grudging interest, but at least she comes off better than her fellow volunteers, a motley crew of colourfully plumed eccentrics who look as if they’ve wandered in from the set of a cancelled Wes Anderson flick.

Amid the mush, coercively overscored by Jónsi from the Icelandic band Sigur Rós, there’s good support from Thomas Haden Church and Elle Fanning, but the main thing keeping this grounded is Damon’s performance, which is square, shaded and honest enough to make Crowe’s featherbrained film touching in spite of itself.

By Tim Robey

Mark Wahlberg stars as a retired smuggler who is forced back into the game to pay off his brother-in-law's debt and protect his family.

The gritty style only accentuates the increasingly far-fetched dramatics in Contraband, an involving, atmospherically grungy mid-register thriller. The central device of a retired criminal being forced back into the game for a final job is recycled from countless previous films and TV shows, while some key climactic developments feel variously forced and/or simplistically achieved. But the lead role of a working class former smuggler who dirties his hands again to save his family fits Mark Wahlberg like a glove and there's enough punch and rough stuff here to make this Universal release a moderate success domestically and better than that overseas.

A life based on ill-gotten gains is par for the course for the Farraday clan; while old Pop stews in the slammer, son Chris (Wahlberg) remains a legend even though he now runs an alarm installation company and his dimwit brother-in-law Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) triggers the new round of trouble by dumping a bunch of drugs into the sea just as he's about to be nailed on a cargo ship. There are so many Irish mugs running around here you'd think we're in Boston but it's actually New Orleans, a major port for all manner of substances coming in from Latin America.

Unfortunately, the lost stash was intended for Tim Briggs, a crazed, trigger-happy lunatic played by Giovanni Ribisi in such a wigged-out manner that it suggests the actor is advertising himself for any role (if there is any) Nicolas Cage declines. Briggs demands instant satisfaction for the debt, so threateningly so that Chris realizes he has no choice but to pull a job himself, and quick.

This one, too, will involve a smuggling operation aboard a transport ship, this one bound for Panama, where Chris arranges top pick up a massive amount of counterfeit American currency. With best pal Danny (Lukas Haas) and the questionable Andy, who's older sister Kate (Kate Beckinsale) is Chris's wife, the old pro signs on to a vessel commanded by a stern captain (an amusing G.K. Simmons) with less than sweet feelings for Chris's notorious dad. With help of old accomplices, Chris sets everything in place for the return trip, which will involve hiding the sheets of counterfeit bills from the captain as well as from customs authorities.

Panama is seldom seen in major films, so sequences featuring the canal, the soaring new skyline and reeking slums impart welcome color and visual interest. It is also here, however, where the plotting of first-time screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski and the sequence timing worked out by director Baltasar Kormakur get more than a little hairy, not to mention overly convenient. After a meeting with a drug lord (Diego Luna) goes awry, the Americans' escape seems unconvincingly easy, just as the motivating incident is outlandishly coincidental. On top of it all, what Chris pulls off ashore is far too involved to have fit into the very short period of time before the ship is due to sail again; a sense of urgency is one thing, but winding the clock too tightly can break the spring, which more or less happens here.

Back home, more dramaturgic problems await, as old ghosts come back to haunt Chris's best friend Sebastian (Ben Foster), who's supposed to be looking after his pal's wife and two boys but does so in a way that would tick off most husbands.

Contraband is based on a little-seen 2008 Icelandic suspenser called Reykjavik-Rotterdam written by Arnaldur Indridason and Oskar Jonasson, director by the latter and produced by and starring Kormakur, whose debut feature, the madly original Reykjavik 101, arguably remains his best film. Despite the Gulf of Mexico settings, the new film, which is largely set at night, retains a certain Nordic gloom; the visual scheme worked out with cinematographer Barry Ackroyd is dominated by glum grays and blues, although the camerawork remains alert and alive to the alarming events that punctuate the characters' lives with all-too-frequent regularity.

Kormakur's unvarnished style on the one hand comes as a welcome change from both the slicker Hollywood norm and the more mannered antics of some young directors. At the same time, however, the images' grubby honesty not only keep the film's temperature on the low side, but also make the overt manipulations of the story appear even more artificial than they might have otherwise. Kormakur set out to make a thriller with a semblance of a real-life backdrop and succeeded up to a point, but the grit and pulp are like oil and water here.

Conveying Chris's family commitment and professional toughness with equal conviction, Wahlberg provides the film with a solid center. Looney is in full supply thanks not only to Ribisi but to Foster, Luna and Jones, while Beckinsale, her innate classiness calibrated down a few notches, has little to do but be supportive, worried and, eventually, besieged. In just three scenes, William Lucking, as Chris's father, creates an indelible picture of a defeated but still cagey old school Irish-American crim.

by Todd McCarthy

BASED on a 1980s TV show that only aired in the UK on then nascent Sky TV, 21 Jump Street wouldn’t have any cultural currency at all in this country if a minor actor from A Nightmare on Elm Street called Johnny Depp hadn’t been cast in it. Playing a youthful undercover cop recruited to infiltrate crime syndicates in high school, Depp spent years fostering his anti-authoritarian outsider image by dissing both the show (he called it “borderline fascist”) and the teen idol status it conferred up on him. Time, however, clearly heals all wounds. Judging from the “surprise” cameo he makes towards the end of this film version (his involvement has been one of the worst-kept secrets since production began), he’s certainly over whatever well-remunerated beef he had with the show. Thing is, by the time Depp does turn up, 21 Jump Street is also over him.

Conceived as a self-aware, action-heavy pastiche of both a mismatched-buddy cop movie and a high school comedy, this update of 21 Jump Street doesn’t actually need Depp’s distracting presence, primarily because it’s funny enough to work without any prior knowledge of the show. That’s partly down to a sly script that embraces, then builds on, lowered expectations (“All they do now is recycle shit from the past and hope no-one notices,” quips one character early on). And partly it’s down to the film’s secret weapon: the unexpectedly funny presence of Channing Tatum. Though Tatum has been in some unintentionally amusing films before (The Vow, Dear John and The Eagle immediately spring to mind), 21 Jump Street is his first straight-up comedy and, like Mark Wahlberg in The Other Guys, he’s something of revelation.

Capitalising on his endearing sweetness and himbo dimness, he plays Jenko, a six-pack flaunting jock whose chiselled features have allowed him to breeze through high school (despite his limited intelligence), but haven’t guaranteed him excitement in his new job as a rookie cop. His partner, Schmidt (Jonah Hill), is a former classmate: a socially awkward, academically bright guy who was on the opposite end of social spectrum at school thanks to his tragic attempts to look like Eminem (as well as his general inability to stop emitting an all-round nerdy vibe). Despite their past differences, however, they’ve become firm friends – relying on each other’s respective strengths (Jenko’s ability to administer beat-downs; Schmidt’s ability to pass tests) to get them through the police academy and onto the streets – where they promptly botch their first drug bust (largely through excessive force and Jenko’s inability to remember the rights he has to read arrestees).

Assigned to something more befitting their collective immaturity, they’re transferred to the Jump Street undercover unit to infiltrate a high school in order find out who is manufacturing a new deadly psychedelic drug called HFS. It’s here that the film, and its stars (Tatum in particular), start coming into their own. In an amusing spin on the tropes of the high school movie, 21 Jump Street takes into account the mainstream popularity of Glee, geek chic and comic books and imagines a school in which the cool, popular kids are sensitive and respectful drama lovers who care about their futures. The outsiders, on the other hand, are the square-jawed, dumb-as-a-doorknob jocks – which doesn’t sit well with Jenko, especially after he’s forced to hang with the science nerds while Schmidt is embraced – for the first time in his life – by the cool clique.

Needless to say, this distracts them from the task at hand, and the film makes the most of this to amp up the bromance gags. As jealousy rears its head, Jenko begins to access a hitherto untapped reservoir of hurt feelings and Tatum’s naturally naïve, puppy-dog-like disposition makes him especially easy to root for as he mines the pathos of a suddenly insecure moron to perfection. Hill, who co-wrote the screenplay, riffs a little too heavily on his Superbad days at times, but as Schmidt grows in confidence after realising he’s getting the chance to relive his torturous high school days as one of the in-crowd, this simple but effective switch actually works well for the film.

The supporting cast does good work too. Bridesmaids’ Ellie Kemper is amusing in a small role as a repressed chemistry teacher so unused to being in the vicinity of hot guys she can’t stop openly lusting after Jenko. James Franco’s little brother Dave, meanwhile, takes the role of the leader of the cool kids off into pleasingly strange territory, especially as he keeps pushing Jenko’s buttons. Even Ice Cube is bearable as their angry, embrace-the-cliché captain.

Coming out in what is generally considered the pre-summer dumping ground for mainstream releases, 21 Jump Street feels like a minor triumph. It’s certainly preferable to any recent Johnny Depp vehicles.

By Alistair Harkness

On 19th April The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band release a 2 minute phonographic wax cylinder of their song “Greg’s Greats Record Shop”. It is 90 years since wax cylinders were last in commercial production in the UK.

Only 25 copies of the cylinder have been produced and each has been hand-cut in Somerset. The “single” is a brand new version of their song “Lonely Record Shop” which appears on their album “Year of the Rabbit”. This version, with alternative lyrics, will not be made available in any other format.

To celebrate this historic release The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band will play two shows - at the Half Moon in London on 19th April and the Jericho Tavern, Oxford on 20th April. Their special guests at both will be The Edison Brothers, performing the world’s first wax cylinder DJ sets ahead of their appearances Camp Bestival and Bestival in the summer. Additional support comes from The Shellac Collective (London) and Brickwork Lizards (Oxford), Advance tickets are available at £7 from http://www.wegottickets.com

The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band formed as a skiffle group in 2006, taking their name from “spasm” bands who played homemade instruments on the streets of New Orleans a century earlier.

Their line-up of ukulele, kazoo (attached to a coat hanger and wore around the neck) and banjo was abandoned when founder Stuart Macbeth broke his banjo at a seaside gig - and switched to piano.

He has since been joined by Bunny Eros (trumpet), Muggsy West (tenor sax), Red Wilkins (tenor & baritone sax), Carlo Matassa (guitar), Buzz Booker (string bass) and Skippy Gannon (drums). Their live shows are legendary and in the past three years they’ve played over 500 shows including Glastonbury, Bestival, Camp Bestival, Notting Hill Carnival, the Royal Albert Hall, Ronnie Scott’s and the Royal Festival Hall.

The Original Rabbit Foot Spasm Band - ‘Greg’s Greats Record Shop” http://rabbitfootspasmband.tumblr.com

A routine serial-killer thriller all gussied up in a faux-literary frock, The Raven is built on the same rickety plot device that was used in Basic Instinct and TV show Castle, among others.

It is Baltimore in 1849 and a murderer is using the works of the city’s most notorious writer – Edgar Allan Poe – as the inspiration for his ghoulish crimes. When Inspector Fields (Luke Evans) is stuck for a clue, he turns to Poe ( John Cusack) himself. Although the premise is threadbare, the raffish Poe is a rich character, well served by a fine actor. Poe’s works are also thick with gruesome source material even if the macabre touches splutter rather than splatter on to the screen.

Director James McTeigue’s mistake is to fail to nominate a genre – delivering neither Gothic horror nor a proper murder mystery. The Moriarty-like villain is too shadowy to be a memorable monster, the suspect list too short to provide whodunnit suspense. A killer twist would have salvaged much of the far-fetched hokum that precedes it but you’re likely to greet the grand unmasking with a shrug.

As it happens, Poe and his nemesis enjoy a delicious exchange near the end before a bold final sting in the tale. Perhaps if the pair had been matched against each other earlier, The Raven might have had something to – groan – crow about.

Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/film/reviews/892560-the-raven-is-a-routine-thriller-gussied-up-in-a-faux-literary-frock#ixzz1odZ8h8BU

Director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody follow up their bright, optimistic teenage comedy, Juno, with a dark variation on the homecoming/nostalgia-trip movie, a familiar genre that probably originated with Julien Duvivier's Un Carnet de bal in 1937. Charlize Theron plays the depressed, borderline alcoholic divorcee Mavis Gary, ghostwriter on a once popular series of high school novels that's about to be axed. Out of the blue she decides to revisit her native hometown of Mercury, Minnesota, where 20 years ago she was prom queen. Mavis's mad aim is to win back her handsome high-school boyfriend, Buddy (sweet-natured Patrick Wilson), who's just become a father, and wrest him from a life of small-town mediocrity.

At first it's funny and superior as Mavis patronises her despised Hicksville roots and prepares herself for conquest. It modulates into funny and embarrassing, before it becomes unadulterated embarrassment verging on the deeply sad and even tragic. Theron is excellent and heartbreaking as she experiences her midlife crisis and sees how much she's misread the world around her. But the star of the film is stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt as the pudgy former classmate she'd ignored who becomes her new confidant. As a teenager he briefly achieved a sort of fame as the victim of a hate crime when he was permanently crippled by bullies who attacked him in the belief that he was gay. When he proved to be straight, his case was considered less interesting, and he settled for a life as an eccentric, friendless stoic. The film's moral is that you can go home again, but you'd be wise not to.

by Philip French

Robert Pattinson, Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas and Christina Ricci star in this adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's novel about a social climber in belle epoque Paris who uses women to elevate his station.

BERLIN — There are countless brooding shots of Robert Pattinson in Bel Ami, occasionally of him shirtless and invariably drenched in overwrought music. That might titillate the swooning legions of Team Edward Twilight fans, but for the grown-ups, there’s not much here to bite into. Neophyte film directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, with help from Rachel Bennette’s shallow screenplay, have reduced Guy de Maupassant’s portrait of corrupting ambition to a risible bodice-ripper.

Published in 1885, as Maupassant was slowly succumbing to syphilis, the novel centers on Georges Duroy, a handsome young social climber from the provinces, fresh out of the cavalry in Algeria and hungry to make his fortune in belle epoque Paris. Broke and blessed with no discernible talents, he quickly learns that the path to power is not through important men but their influential wives.

We get Georges’ number in early glimpses of Pattinson glowering at the shabby walls of his cramped apartment or enviously watching the Paris swells. He’s at his most expressive when clobbering a cockroach to death. But there’s no inner life in the miscast actor’s one-dimensional characterization. He lacks the fundamental guile for the role, played in one of the best-known previous versions (1947’s The Private Affairs of Bel Ami) by the inimitably supercilious George Sanders.

When Georges shows his true colors, one of his key stepping stones, Madeleine (Uma Thurman), says, “I had no conception of the depths of your emptiness.” As so often happens in Bennette’s adaptation, she’s stating the obvious. The assessment is aimed at the venal character but applies equally to the charisma-free performance, in which there’s nobody home.

That’s a big problem when we are expected to buy the beguiling magnetism of this dullard, who is short on conversation skills, social graces and virility but leaves every woman he meets spellbound.

Georges’ entree into high society comes via old regiment buddy Charles Forestier (Philip Glenister), now the well-connected political editor of national daily La Vie Francaise. Charles gives him cash to buy formalwear and invites him to a dinner at which he instantly mesmerizes his friend’s wife, Madeleine; the flirty Clotilde (Christina Ricci); and the more composed Virginie (Kristin Scott Thomas), wife of the paper’s editor, Monsieur Rousset (Colm Meaney).

He begins an affair with the married Clotilde, portrayed here as a lightweight on the same wavelength as Georges, and the woman he comes closest to loving. Her husband is often away, so she sets Georges up in an apartment for their trysts. With Madeleine’s help, he gets a job at La Vie Francaise but develops no skill as a writer. When Charles loses patience with him, Georges turns to Madame Rousset to secure his position.

A convenient death, a strategic marriage and much bed-hopping later, Georges has landed a scoop thanks to Madeleine’s political savvy. But when he is shut out of a lucrative scheme to make a fortune off the government’s secret plan to invade Morocco, Georges truncates his affair with the infatuated Virginie and makes an enemy of her husband, meanwhile setting his sights on their clueless daughter (Holliday Grainger).

In Maupassant’s book, detailed descriptions of the women’s clothing, their skin and hair, their jewelry, helped convey that Georges’ intoxicating effect on them is mutual. The film’s gaze focuses chiefly on him and not through his eyes, so his behavior seems even more calculating. That would make sense if he didn’t also come across as a dolt.

Bennette’s screenplay is woefully short on connective tissue among characters and incident, lurching through eventful passages without sufficient narrative grounding. She fails to make much of the political backdrop or to engage in the novel’s sharp social analysis of a bourgeois Paris full of whores, opportunists and frauds.

In their theater work with the company they co-founded, Cheek by Jowl, Donnellan and Ormerod are known for pared-down design and dynamic approach to performance, enabling them to claw out vigorous new life in classic texts. Here the co-directors seem hampered by the weight of period production design and uncertain about how best to frame the action for maximum effect. Other than frequently favoring a chiaroscuro palette, Stefano Falivene’s cinematography lacks distinction. Most crucially, this is a film about sex that’s without sensuality.

More disappointing still is the evident absence of communication among the cast. Dialogue is often stilted and awkward, and the actors too rarely appear to inhabit the same world.

Pattinson is without gravitas, and while the women are generally more watchable, he has little chemistry with any of them. Thurman maintains a strained poise and haughty superiority even when Madeleine is humiliated. Ricci isn’t the most natural fit for a late-19th century European, though her vulnerability is a welcome note, and Scott Thomas deserves better than the undignified treatment her character receives.

As is often the case when the dramatic and emotional fabric is thin, the false solution is to drown every scene in blustery music, in this case by Lakshman Joseph de Saram and Rachel Portman. But it would take more than an agitated string section to lend substance to this vapid melodrama.

by David Rooney

John Carter is one of those films that is so stultifying, so oppressive and so mysteriously and interminably long that I felt as if someone had dragged me into the kitchen of my local Greggs, and was baking my head into the centre of a colossal cube of white bread. As the film went on, the loaf around my skull grew to the size of a basketball, and then a coffee table, and then an Audi. The boring and badly acted sci-fi mashup continued inexorably, and the bready blandness pressed into my nostrils, eardrums, eye sockets and mouth. I wanted to cry for help, but in bread no one can hear you scream. Finally, I clawed the doughy, gooey, tasteless mass desperately away from my mouth and screeched: "Jesus, I'm watching a pointless film about a 1860s American civil war action hero on Mars, which the inhabitants apparently call Barsoom. I can't breathe."

It is based on a fantasy-romance serial by Edgar Rice Burroughs from 1912, A Princess of Mars, and is adapted and directed by the renowned Pixar-Disney talent Andrew Stanton, notable for having worked on animated gems such as Wall-E, Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Up. But this heavy, airless film doesn't have a fraction of the wit, fun and imagination of those films. Something in the wacky fusion of period drama and interplanetary travel multiplies the gravitational force a thousand times, dragging everything down.

Taylor Kitsch plays John Carter, a bone-weary civil war veteran and lone-wolf tough guy who we first see in Arizona, prospecting for gold in territory where there are Apaches. Carter fought for the Confederacy, and he is masculine, reticent and polite with the womenfolk, but a ferocious battler against those who would seek to circumscribe his liberty. And then, of all the crazy things, a golden amulet with runic occult symbols whooshes Carter off to Mars – that is, Barsoom.

Anyway, Carter finds that he can leap tall mountains with a single bound, but becomes captured by creatures called Tharks. They live in the shadow of two warring humanoid tribes, the evil and tyrannous Zodangans who are oppressing the Heliumites, from Helium, with whose beautiful Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) Carter is soon to fall in love.

Might it be that Barsoom has parallels with the Earthly strife that Carter has just lived through? "Let red man kill red man until only Tharks remain," says one, and it could be that Tharks are the Native Americans, and the Zodangans and the Heliumites are the civil war belligerents. But which is which? And is there any equivalent of America's slavery? No – unless you count the bondage suffered by proud Carter himself on that fierce red planet.

This film can't go 10 minutes without one of this nation's character actors striding on saying something ridiculous in a silly outfit with a straight face. Dominic West, Ciarán Hinds, Mark Strong, James Purefoy – all lend the story some exotic Brit classiness. Strong plays one of the all-powerful Therns, a sinister priestly caste of intergalactic puppet-masters, seeking to control everything that goes on. Hinds is Tardos Mors, leader of the Heliumites and West is Sab Than, of the wicked and opportunist Zodangans. Their clothes look like a mix of Roman and Aztec, sometimes with a quasi-Greek singlet, usually associated with a high priest about to sacrifice a small animal. They are also pretty keen on guyliner.

The fact that some characters are from Helium might lead you to hope that they will release some balloon animals, or at least enliven the story by speaking in a squeaky-high voice. Many of the solemn lines could well have been improved by being delivered in a gaseous nasal falsetto: "If Helium falls, so does Barsoom!"; "Will you stay and fight – for Helium?"

But this struggle is merely the backdrop to the love story between Carter and Dejah Thoris, and Carter's ability to fly means he can impress the princess by catching her in mid-air like Superman with Lois Lane, or David Copperfield with Claudia Schiffer. But Dejah, with her seen-it-all-before smirk, is not a very sympathetic heroine, and Kitsch is stolid and dull. And as for the red planet, the answer to David Bowie's famous question is no. What a sadd'ning bore it is.

by Peter Bradshaw

Internationally renowned sound artist Janek Schaefer brings his latest sonic creation, Local Radio Orchestra, to Oxford this spring. In this orchestra the audience are the players and radios are their instruments. Janek brings his vintage Bush radios to The Yard at Modern Art Oxford on Saturday 5th May from 11am-5pm. This is a free event presented by Oxford Contemporary Music and Modern Art Oxford.

Local radio orchestra is fuelled by a Transmitter Trunk holding 12 iPods and 24 short range digital fm transmitters. Janek’s pirate station engulfs the entire radio spectrum within a short radius to create a community radio orchestra. His collection of classic portable radios is used by the audience to pick one of twelve separate parts of a composition by tuning in and out of the radio frequencies. By playing the different parts of the music through their radios, the audience organically makes new arrangements of the piece of music.

Two pieces of music composed by Janek will be performed. ‘Love Hz’ uses recordings of an Indian bellows organ called 'The Shruti Box'. Twelve separate notes from this intricate hand pumped drone instrument have been recorded. Each will be broadcast on a different frequency across the FM radio spectrum in ascending order. ‘Secret Service [all creeds all colours]’ collects examples of religious celebration music and sound from around the world. It showcases the glorious diversity of the cultural melting pot we inhabit. There are twenty eight recordings to tune into on the radio dials. This music was originally produced for Colourscape, Clapham Common 2010.

Local Radio Orchestra was commissioned by OCM, South Hill Park and Beaford Arts with support from PRS for Music Foundation. It was premiered at South Hill Park in 2011 and since then has been performed at Beaford Arts, Compass Festival Leeds and GALERIE8 East London.

Janek Schaefer- For more information visit http://www.audioh.com

OCM - For more information visit their website

OCM has teamed up with the Pitt Rivers Museum and Sound and Music for a new artistic development project.

The Embedded programme will offer an opportunity for an early career artist to explore the nature of a residency, enabling them to develop their skills through connecting with and contributing to the work of the Pitt Rivers Museum and OCM.

Call deadline: 2 April 2012

The Pitt Rivers Museum cares for the University of Oxford's collection of anthropology and world archaeology. The museum’s holdings include objects, photographs, manuscripts, sound recordings, and film. Oxford Contemporary Music produces and presents new music and sound based events and installations in a wide variety of settings.

download the application pack for this call here

For more information about Sound and Music, click here to visit their website.

For more information about Oxford Contemporary Music, click here to visit their website.

What does Oxford mean to you?

Everyone knows about the boffins on bicycles, Boat Race and Brideshead but what about all the other stuff that brings the City of Dreaming Spires to life? Have you seen a sign or shop display that made you smirk or a street scene that surprised or amused you? Would you like to draw attention to any unsung attractions – or unattractions – that escape the notice of the average visitor to the city?

As part of Oxfordshire Artweeks, Arts at the Old Fire Station will present an exhibition of photography by the people of Oxford, focusing on the city in which they live. Run in conjunction with The Caravan Gallery, O3 Gallery, Oxford Castle Quarter, Crisis Skylight, Grandpont Children’s Centre and The Redbridge Travellers Women's Group, the exhibition, entitled Here and Now will take the form of an open submission photographic competition that is free to enter and open to anyone living in Oxford. The Caravan Gallery's intention is to create a snapshot of the reality of living in Oxford that might be at odds with the romanticised idea that the world has of the city. Jan Williams of The Caravan Gallery comments,

''We're really looking forward to encouraging the people of Oxford to view their city with fresh eyes, in turn helping us realise part of the bigger picture we're working on with O3 Gallery in the Oxford Castle Quarter, namely the Oxford Pride of Place Project.''

The most idiosyncratic images will be selected by The Caravan Gallery, the Shop and Gallery Manager of Arts at the Old Fire Station and the Manager of O3 Gallery. These photographs will be turned into museum quality prints displayed in the Here and Now exhibition (Friday 4th May until Saturday 26th May) in the gallery at the Old Fire Station during Oxfordshire Artweeks. One prize winner and two runners up will receive a selection of prizes including a signed copy of Is Britain Great? 3 by The Caravan Gallery and a set of postcards commissioned for the Pride of Place Project at Oxford Castle Quarter. All exhibitors will be able to collect their print after the exhibition has closed. Shop and Gallery Manager at Arts at the Old Fire Station, Emily Alexander remarked,“Both OFS and O3 Gallery work with a lot of early-career artists from the region, and we're excited to be collaborating on this innovative cross-venue exhibition that provides yet another platform for artists to exhibit as part of the country's biggest and oldest open studio event in this its 30th year.”

So think hard, look harder, grab your cameras, get snapping and submit your images to before12:00pm GMT on the 13th April 2012. The Caravan Gallery eagerly awaits your interesting insights and unusual observations that will help them to create a multifaceted picture of the real Oxford in all its authentic splendor!

Download the competition rules from http://www.oldfirestation.info/gallery.html

Oxford based artist Dionne Barber has worked closely with Pegasus since its re-opening in September 2010. Her residency has culminated in an exhibition celebrating the venue’s 50th anniversary, Encompass from 3 to 28 April. It explores the true character of Pegasus; through drawing and painting she has captured the changing spaces and movement that is life at theatre, the characters, performances and passion that cement its spirit and unique atmosphere.

Dionne’s practice focuses on using the visual arts as a tool to channel thoughts; it involves the collection and gathering of source materials; observing human interaction and using the power of spaces, contents, and atmosphere. Capturing and encapsulating the essence of spaces, timelessness and calm is something that truly fascinates her, and is a constant drive within her work.

As well as weekly sessions at Pegasus, Dionne recently designed the set for the January youth theatre production, Till I Die, an exploration of the Hillsborough disaster through the eyes of young football fans.

Running regular workshops at Pegasus, she shares her artistic practice and skills as a designer with children and young people. Ranging from parent and toddler sessions to workshops with pre-teens, Dionne’s activities help their self expression and creative discovery.

Encompass
At Pegasus, Magdalen Road, Oxford OX4 1RE
From 3rd to 28th April
Free entry
Information: 01865 812 150 http://www.pegasustheatre.org.uk
Artists website: http://www.dionnebarber.com

Oxford’s only LAN gaming and comic book centre opens its doors to the public.

Friday March 2nd at 3:30pm is the opening of Lazy Gamer, Oxfordshire’s only LAN Gaming centre and comic book store. To celebrate the launch, the public is invited to come and play video games on their epically specced computers and Xboxes for free. There is also complimentary food and prizes to be won. Tournaments will be held to determine the ultimate gamer.

Each of Lazy Gamers PCs are built for the gamer in mind. The stations are all complete with large monitors, cushy ergonomic chairs, gaming headphones, customisable Cyborg gaming keyboards & Cybord RAT mice. Lazy Gamer has all of the games that you want to play. From Battlefield 3, Star Wars The Old Republic, World of Warcraft, to Street Fighter, FIFA, Skyrim, EVE and more.

Lazy Gamer also has a solid comic book and manga collection. Everything from ‘The Walking Dead’ to your standard DC/ Marvel. And if we don’t have it, we can get it for you.

Following the launch day, Lazy Gamer will be hosting regular gaming tournaments, all nighter events (with free food), and a ‘pizza to your seat’ service, so you don’t have to interrupt your game time.

Saturday the 3rd of March and Sunday the 4th, there will be buy one hour, get one hour free, all weekend. Lazy Gamer offers a daily gaming ‘happy hour’ from 11am-1pm, where gaming is half off. Weekend opening times are: Friday 3:30pm - 10pm / Saturday 12 noon - 10pm / Sunday 12 noon - 6pm.

Come and get your game on.

Lazy Gamer is owned and managed by Chris Povey and Mohammad Rahgozar and is Oxfordshire’s only LAN Gaming centre and comic book store. It is located at 117 London Road, Headington, Oxford OX3 9HZ. http://lazy-gamer.com

Teachers invited to join Professor Tanya Byron and Children’s Laureate Julia Donaldson to discuss biggest challenges to literacy across the UK

The first ever World Literacy Summit will take place in Oxford next month, bringing together 200 of the world’s literacy experts from up to 50 countries to discuss the international literacy crisis.

Current estimates suggest that illiteracy affects more than 800 million people globally. The summit, which takes places in Oxford on 1st-4th April 2012, will see leaders from government, education and international development meet to address the key theme: “From Poverty, to Literacy, to a future’.

A report released by the World Literacy Trust in January 2012 revealed that more than six million UK adults are functionally illiterate, meaning they cannot read a medicine bottle or food labels or fill out a job application.

As a result conference partner Pearson is hosting a one-day ‘UK educators’ strand as part of the World Literacy Summit, on Tuesday 3rd April.

The day will bring together some of the UK’s top authors and educators to explore the most crucial issues affecting children’s literacy in the UK. Experts including Professor Tanya Byron and Children’s Laureate Julia Donaldson will discuss the practical and creative ways educators can work together to improve literacy levels across the UK.

Confirmed speakers and themes are:

• Professor Tanya Byron, Child Psychologist
• Julia Donaldson, Children’s Laureate and author of the Gruffalo – Stories, reading and how drama can impact on children’s literacy
• Pie Corbett, Author and storytelling expert– Storytelling for literacy and life.
• Brenda Bigland, Educational Consultant and Head Teacher – Getting parents involved in their children’s reading .

To enable UK educators to attend the event The World Literacy Summit and Pearson are offering a special day attendance rate of £150 including lunch and refreshments.

For further information and to register for tickets please visit: http://www.worldliteracy2012.org/pearson-uk-strand.html

For further information about the World Literacy Summit please visit: http://www.worldliteracy2012.org

"Project X" is the movie equivalent of that good-looking, well-off teenage boy your gut tells you to keep away from your teenage daughter. He may turn on the charm and come from what we assume is a "good family" (as if money were a determiner). But something sets off the warning bells — that he has lost his mind to his hormones, that he objectifies women in the worst way, that he's too casual with the homophobic slurs.

That doesn't really describe Thomas (Thomas Mann), the gawky upper-middle-class teen in this "Hangover" for high schoolers. But it nails his pal Costa (Oliver Cooper). Costa's a blustering transplanted New Yorker who eggs on Thomas as they plan a parents-out-of-town birthday party. He's hellbent on turning this North Pasadena fete into an epic party that will be the "game changer" for their social status, lift them into their high school's elite and give them access to sex with the school hotties.

Costa has blasted the invitations all over social media, so the socially anonymous Thomas will be hosting hordes of "randoms," peers who don't know he exists. Not to worry, though. Costa has hired a team of middle schoolers led by Tyler (Nick Nervies, hilarious). They have nun-chucks and Tasers and jackets with "Security" on them.

What could go wrong?

This Todd ("Hangover") Phillips production produces its share of explosive laughs, mostly of the "Oh my God" variety, but it's a wearying "romp," from its tired "lose our virginity" formula to the conceit of making this a "birthday" mockumentary, ostensibly filmed by a goth-video nerd (Dax Flame).

Even with all the random shots of pert female bottoms, topless teens and ogled short skirts and shorter shorts, it's hard to say if screenwriters Michael Bacall and Matt Drake or director Nima Nourizadeh are unrepentant pigs. Maybe Phillips is their Costa, the bottom feeder egging them on in their pursuit of the bottom. And bottoms.

By Roger Moore

The new film from Paweł Pawlikowski – moody, menacing, downbeat – takes something fro m the director's Polish compatriots Polanski and Kieslowski. It often feels like a sort of b-side to The Tenant; it could, alternatively, have worked as one of the stories in the Three Colours trilogy. Ethan Hawke plays Tom Ricks, a divorced and depressed American writer who is living in a flea pit hotel in Paris, having spent every last cent pursuing a futile custody claim. At a literary soiree, he meets a beautiful Hungarian widow, Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas); their romantic adventure reignites his literary imagination, but there is an awful price to be paid for this.

This film has to be indulged a little, and you'll have to negotiate the stumbling block that is Hawke's stodgy, dodgy French accent. Yet this movie moves at a sinuous, confident pace; it is most captivatingly odd when Margit first kisses Tom and he gulps, flinches, shudders in wordless shock, as if overwhelmed by her sensuality and force.

By Peter Bradshaw

THE show must go on for an unconventional drama teacher, who inspires her pupils to chase their dreams during the hottest summer on record, in Marc Evans's feel good rites-of-passage drama.

Set in 1976 Swansea and shot on location in south Wales, Hunky Dory taps into the enduring popularity of the TV series Glee to chronicle growing pains during a comprehensive school musical.

The trials and tribulations in Laurence Coriat's screenplay are familiar and the resolution to each conflict is predictable but Evans's film has a sweetness and sincerity that is charming.

He is blessed with a young cast, many of them newcomers, whose natural performances and strong singing voices leave us with a winning smile.

While Swansea swelters in temperatures nudging 30 degrees centigrade, teacher Vivienne (Minnie Driver) struggles to stage a futuristic rock musical based on Shakespeare's The Tempest set to songs of the era by David Bowie and Electric Light Orchestra.

Her unorthodox approach to teaching fails to curry favour with colleagues in the staffroom.

Social studies teacher Miss Valentine (Haydn Gwynne) purses her lips at the mere mention of the play while PE teacher Mr Cafferty (Steve Speirs) advocates a stronger hand with the youngsters, arguing cryptically, "Self-expression won't butter the parsnips".

Vivienne faces stern challenges from the pupils too.

Leading man Davey (Aneurin Barnard) fails to keep his emotions in check when his on-off romance with leading lady Stella (Danielle Branch) implodes.

Vivienne counsels the lad through his heartbreak, inflaming the lad's raging hormones.

"Are you going to sleep with him?" asks Vivienne's continental housemate.

"Oh my God, you're so French!" she gasps.

Meanwhile, Davey's classmate Evan (Tom Harries) comes to terms with his sexuality, skinhead Kenny (Darren Evans) rebels against his participation in the play and Jake (George MacKay) contemplates a romance with the pretty sister (Kimberley Nixon) of his best mate Lewis (Adam Byard).

As tempers flare, the school's headmaster (Robert Pugh) weathers criticism before accepting a role as Prospero in Vivienne's ramshackle production.

Hunky Dory is bathed in a golden glow to mirror the intense heat of that glorious summer when the nation was officially in a state of drought leading to a hosepipe ban.

Evans uses the locations well, including shots of Brynamman Lido where the teenagers try to cool off and the distinctive skyline of the Port Talbot steelworks that belches smoke into the heated air.

Driver eases effortlessly into her role as the educator with a lust for life and Barnard, who won an Olivier Award for his performance in the musical Spring Awakening, makes his mark on the big screen.

Co-stars cope well with the script's amiable mix of comedy and angst, culminating in the climactic performance of The Tempest with a flamboyant punk-rock vibe.

Original source

If movies were dogs, then Wanderlust would be a Jack Russell terrier, along the lines of the celebrated Uggie, who many seem to agree gave perhaps the most memorable performance of 2011 in The Artist, so eager to please. Linda (Jennifer Aniston) and George (Paul Rudd) are a couple of failed Manhattan yupsters who happen upon Elysium, which is the name of a Georgia hippie commune led by wacko Seth (Justin Theroux). Actually, everyone in the enclave is more than a little off, but what would you expect from a place where there are no doors, therefore allowing no privacy, and everything is shared, including husbands and wives? The couple is gradually seduced by this touchy-feely, anti-materialistic ethos, with the initially skittish Linda probably drinking the Kool-Aid, as she puts it, more heartily than George, who definitely has more trouble letting down his uptight guard.

Directed and co-written by David Wain, Wanderlust has a genial vibe that manages to sustain itself through the highly varied level of jokes with which he barrages the audience. With its sylvan, bucolic setting and eclectically assembled cast of eccentrics, it bears a strong resemblance to Wain’s likeably messy Wet Hot American Summer, as well as such venerable straight guy-meets-counterculture farces as I Love You, Alice B. Toklas. George and Linda share a wacky surname, which along with so much else here seems a tribute to Preston Sturges, but Wain’s comic effect is more improv/loosey-goosey than Sturges’ exquisitely crafted, surprisingly literate scripts, with the end result being more farcically scattershot. That’s okay, though - for every laugh that misses, there’s sure to be a real one to follow closely.

Linda Lavin gets the film off to a rousing start, playing the best NYC yenta-realtor since Sylvia Miles in Wall Street, her crack nasal timing describing a “juicy” micro-loft, which prospective buyer George soon realizes is nothing but a studio. Rudd is in his element, giving one of his best performances, and neatly skates the line between funny and affecting. (His lengthy improv in front of a mirror, trying to psych himself up for an adulterous commune moment with nubile Malin Akerman should be a lot funnier than it is, however.) Aniston has less to do, but also brings her considerable comic technique and innately ingratiating Everywoman quality to wannabe artist Linda. A funny scene has her trying to pitch an earnest documentary about penguins with testicular cancer to a group of particularly venal HBO execs.

Joe Lo Truglio is, literally, a cast standout, often displaying his sizeable junk as Elysium’s resident nudist/would-be novelist. He’s an integral part of producer Judd Apatow’s laudable stated intention to (finally) get some male frontal nudity into his every film. “Reno 911”’s treasurable Kerri Kenney adds her wonderfully brazen effrontery as a nut-job who claims she keeps her uterus in a jar. This outrage is topped by Lauren Ambrose, who gives birth onscreen in one of Apatow’s patented “ew” moments, calculated to make the adolescent boy in all of us chortle and retch. Kathryn Hahn is another member of Elysium’s woozy sisterhood, but seethes, as so many of these crunchy-granola dames do, with an intense anger at funny odds with the place’s strenuously mellow vibe.

Ken Marino has a field day as George’s horrendous racist jerk of a contrastingly successful brother, who’s as full of crap as the porta-potties he makes his big bones with. Michaela Watkins as his understandably alcoholic wife got a huge hand from the preview audience when she roused herself to finally tell him off. Theroux, with his endlessly dated references to VHS and two-way pagers, symbols of the world he left behind and was never updated about, is not as powerfully charismatic as his part calls for, but it’s also true that he has been handed the weakest material. Alan Alda crinkles and beams, as usual, playing the crusty, addle-pated founder of Elysium way back when, and it’s kind of amazing how much mileage Wain gets out of his easy senior moments, constantly repeating the names of his original commune members.

By David Noh

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