Reviews

When asked by Terry Gilliam how he would go about adapting 'Watchmen' for the cinema, Alan Moore replied, 'I wouldn't'. Wise man. The point being that great (or even just interesting) books are meant to be books. Not films, not operas, not concept albums or paintings or sculptures. Books. Moore wrote 'Watchmen' as a graphic novel. J.G. Ballard wrote 'High-Rise' as a work of prose fiction. If either of them had wanted to write a film screenplay they would (and could) have done so. But they didn't. Ballard's work has never had much luck on the cinema screen: 'Crash' was, well, a car-crash (and not a very sexy one) while 'Empire of the Sun' was, you know, OK. Not exactly essential. Bit like the book, really. Ben Wheatley, a director I admire a great deal, should have heeded the warnings: stay away from Ballard - his best work is un-adaptable. No good could possibly come of trying to turn 'High-Rise' into a film. But, hey, when he was done, perhaps someone could come along and turn it back into a book. Why not? Wheatley's second mistake (the first one was to get involved in this sorry exercise at all) was to cast his film with an array of sitcom gurners like Reese Shearsmith (a perfectly good actor when under control) and the bloke who says 'Twat' in 'House of Fools.' Also on board are at least two other Wheatley regulars - that fat bloke who died horribly in 'Sightseers' and the brilliant star of 'Kill List' (which remains Wheatley's finest movie). Non-sitcom stars (Miller, Purefoy, Irons, Hawes, Hiddleston and others) have been encouraged to over-act. Only Hawes and Hiddleston disobey. Their performances are actually bearable. No-one else escapes with much dignity intact. But the movie as a whole does nobody any favours. The dialogue is atrocious, either cut-and-pasted from Ballard (what works on the page does not work when being spoken out loud) or invented purely for our listening pleasure. The repetitive and hypnotic nature of the events of the book become, in the film, merely repetitive. The music is good. The final insult, however, comes with an unsubtle crow-barring-in of a reference to Margaret Thatcher, which is so out of place and insultingly stupid it managed the impossible: it made me actually feel sorry for her - what on earth had she done to deserve getting embroiled in this mess? My advice? Avoid 'High-Rise'. If only the film-makers had done the same.

Black Pond is not normal. It is odd. It is patchy. It is padded-out with an unnecessary but not unamusing performance from Simon Amstell. It is sometimes confusing and incoherent. It is also hilarious and memorable and brilliantly-performed. Chris Langham (yes, that Chris Langham) is on top form: "It's sheer lunacy to eat a banana at this time of night." There are so many great bits: the "I love you - both of you" in the car. The "phenomenal tw*t" line. Don't miss it. It's excellent. Yes, it feels overlong and underdone, somehow - it might have been better as a short, but even so, there is more imagination and wit on display than in most "quality" movies that stink up the multiplex on a regular basis.

As a huge fan of Minnie Driver, I will happily admit to an inclination to watch any film in which she appears. Hell, I even saw that Disney Tarzan movie in which she wasn't even on the screen. So, call me biased. But not even I, a card-carrying member of the MD club, could bring myself to say anything in support of her latest venture, a Wales-set nostalgia-fest entitled Hunky Dory. La Driver plays a teacher. But not just any teacher, of course. Oh, no. MD plays a wacky, slightly f**ked-up teacher whom all her kids adore and who wants to get the kids to put on a big end-of-term show. What show? The Tempest. But not just any Tempest. Oh, no. This will be a Tempest the likes of which you have never seen, and will never want to see, ever again, for as long as you live. Yes, it's The Tempest, but with the songs of David Bowie, and others, performed by the kids, all of whom are either excellent singers or excellent musicians, or both. Which is handy. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the plot. The kids have some issues which get in the way: one might be an arsonist, one is a bit mental, one is, surprise, gay, and one doesn't fancy someone, but fancies someone else instead – crazy! Not all of the teachers approve of Driver and her zany plans. Boo! Hiss! But Driver being Driver, she perseveres, or, rather, the plot just trundles on, avoiding any genuine conflict, any genuine character development, any genuine engagement, anything genuine at all. Every five minutes or so there is a musical number featuring the aforementioned eerily note-perfect singers, accompanied by other kids hitting milk bottles or blowing into recorders. Then one of the kids will have a strop, tell the headmaster to f**k off, storm out, and – oh, no – raise very real doubts that the show will go on. But, of course, the show will go on, even if someone burns down the school hall. Who burned it down? Doesn't matter (and we never find out) because the show can be put on in someone's garden instead! Hurrah! Hurrah for Miss Minnie and her wonderful pupils! Just when you think it can't possibly get any worse, the finale introduces, from nowhere (spoiler warning) some... I can hardly bring myself to say it... some... oh, dear God, make it stop... some shadow puppets. Shadow puppets. Where did they come from? No, really, where? And who made them? And when did anyone get any time to practise with them? And then, as the end is finally in sight, and you get over your paralysing envy of the two people who were brave enough to walk out an hour earlier, the makers of this narcissistic, self-indulgent, dramatically fake, vacuous, inept, embarrassing bore pull off their greatest trick. You know how at the end of some films they have little on-screen summaries of where the characters are now? Fred works in a chip shop in Chippenham, and it's ironic cos all the way through the film he was always eating chips! You get the idea. They do that here, and it's indefensible and crass, for so many reasons. 1. We hardly know these characters at all, and certainly don't care about them, at all, so this little précis of their later lives is totally irrelevant. 2. Using the Falklands war to try and add a little gravitas to such a trivial and gravitas-free film is offensive and opportunistic. 3. You're just prolonging the agony – roll the credits, make it stop, let us out of here.

I have seen many, many films in my time (far too many, probably) but never before have I been so tempted to walk out. This temptation began within the first five minutes, when I realised, with grim certainty, that here was one of those films where they compiled the soundtrack first and made the film around it. Photogenic kids singing Bowie, Drake and EL-effing-O. Minnie. The 1976 drought. Hey, this thing practically writes itself. No, it doesn't. It's a nightmare. Two hours and seven quid I will never get back.

Nicely shot. Very well acted by the two young leads. Apart from that? British indie-lite. Every five minutes the action stops so we can have another artfully-done montage set to the music of some no-doubt achingly-hip acoustic singer-songwriter. This is called "padding". The actual story is, frankly, cretinous. Girl goes and hides in a cave on the Norfolk coast. Her best mate takes her crisps and bin-liners (he's read about the beneficial, warming qualities of the latter in - wait for it - the "Scouting Book for Boys"). Comedy policeman (the terminally miscast Stephen Mackintosh) and comedy parents and comedy friends (a pathetic gallery of over-the-top grotesques with not a single amusing line of dialogue between them) never realise that the best way to find the girl would be to follow her best mate, who goes and sees her several times. It never occurs to them. Why not? The only conclusions we can reach are, either: all these people are utterly stupid, or: the makers of this film think we, the audience, are utterly stupid. Great. Thanks for that. SPOILERS BELOW... And all that the vile act of violence at the end proves is that the film-makers have no idea how to end this hopeless little film and think that showing a young boy smashing a young girl's leg with a rock (and later kissing her dead, vomit-encrusted mouth) is enough to "shock" us and make us think - wow, what a great work of art. No. This is not a great work of art. It wears its influence on its sleeve (Shane Meadows, Shane Meadows and, um, Shane Meadows) but it doesn't earn its heavyweight finale. Instead it is badly written, insipid, full of utterly unrealistic events and motivation (why on earth does that woman in the pool suggest the boy hold her baby; why are the forensic team combing a crime scene while the main suspect sits there in the middle of it?) and loose ends and trite dialogue and banal scenes that serve no purpose (the dire bit in the club, with his dad dragging him on stage, for example). I'm all for supporting new talent and British films and blah blah blah, but, really, someone out there (apart from Shane Meadows) must be able to do better than this.

1. Check out pictures of the real Tina Modotti and ask yourself, "would I cast Ashley Judd (of all people) to play her in a movie?"

2. What's with the English-speaking characters? Why have them all speak English-with-a-Spanish-accent when they are all supposed to be speaking Spanish? Are the film-makers so patronising that they think we can't handle subtitles? Yes, apparently. OK, so let's have everyone speak English. But then they're going to have to sing in English, and their political banners are going to have to be written in English. Oh dear... didn't think of that, did you? And what are you going to do when your Spanish characters go to America? That's right: have them speak English-with-a-Spanish-accent. Which they would have done, of course, in an English-speaking country. What a mess. What a patronising mess.

3. An obviously low budget makes demands on imagination and inspiration. So what do we get? Naff sequences of Rivera as King Kong. Jeez.

4. Rivera says he won't change his mural. He has principles, he says. He does? What are they? The movie never tells us. Perhaps we should have had sub-titles for his political banners, so we might have understood what he was campaigning for/against... But then, if he spoke in English-with-a-Spanish-accent all the time, why were his banners in Spanish anyway? See above...

5. Frida is in constant pain. She is? Only when it suits the story. She seems pretty capable of ignoring the pain most of the time. Now, this may be true to life, but you have got to convince the viewer of the case.

6. What language are they all speaking in when Trotsky comes to stay? They all seem to understand each other perfectly well. English? Russian? Spanish?

7. The only time the movie comes alive is when Frida and Trot are on top of some Mexican pyramid. The camera (cliche-alert) swirls around and we feel some genuine emotion and spiritedness.

On the whole, though, this film is a huge missed opportunity.

Lukas Moodyson's far-out new feature film is not for everyone. In fact, it's not for anyone. Or perhaps, somewhere in some abandoned mental home there is someone, wallowing in their own waste products, sucking a warm thumb, breaking wind and giggling, who might regard Container as a masterpiece. The rest of us, stuck with boring old sanity and intelligence can dismiss this drivel as the pointless waste of space it so assuredly is. Container is just the kind of "arty" irrelevance that makes a certain kind of film-fan go all weak at the knees. Shot on grainy black-and-white and blessed with a voice-over so inane and expressionless it makes David Beckham sound like Orson Welles, this movie has to be seen to be believed. Seeing it, however, is not advisable. At the screening I attended, Moodyson himself was there to take questions. He's got guts, I'll give him that. Had I been responsible for this witless debacle I'd have kept well away from any audience stupid enough to have paid to see it. But there he was, advising us that perhaps the best way to appreciate his film was by falling asleep during it. Later, the ghost of Andy "f*cking" Warhol was invoked. Ah yes, Andy Warhol, touch-stone for any and all second-rate artists who find that their work is boring the chattering classes to death. It's "Warholesque". So deal with it. Moodyson made the charming and wonderful Together. I still hold that film close to my heart, so was prepared to go along with Container, to see where Moodyson might lead me. He led me nowhere. His film is a blank, a nothing, an empty space. What a brilliant comment on the vacuousness of contemporary culture, right? Wrong. A film with nothing to say about everything and anything is not commenting on vacuousness, it is contributing to it.

Shout it from the roof-tops: after years spent churning out enjoyable action movies (Total Recall, Robocop), iconic "erotic thrillers" (Basic Instinct) and utter, utter tripe (Showgirls, Hollow Man, Starship Troopers), Paul Verhoeven has turned Serious. Out go the overwrought action sequences, the gratuitous nudity and the obsession with bodily fluids. In come the sensitivity, the subtlety, the delicate touch that a film about Jews and Nazis in WWII surely require. Just kidding. Verhoven couldn't be subtle if his life depended on it. Sensitivity? Get real. Delicate touch? This is war. And what a curious war it is. People – even the most downtrodden – wear immaculate, brand-new clothes straight out of the wardrobe department. Our heroine gets shot in the head, and her charming little scar lasts almost two entire scenes before it is dispensed with altogether. Most ludicrously of all, when a man takes a bullet in the shoulder he is advised not to worry – "it's just a flesh wound". Ah yes, the old flesh wound routine. Cue close-up of pincers extracting said bullet from said flesh. Seconds later, the fortunate victim is up and about and back to his usual self. Wonderful things, flesh wounds. Verhoeven has obviously seen the same recent war films that everyone else has. Unfortunately he has not learned anything from them. He is still labouring under the impression that nudity, obscenity, and endless violence are the hallmarks of seriousness and profundity. Anyone who might disagree with him just doesn't get it. Don't you know the man is an Artist? Don't you know that nothing can compromise his unyielding vision? What Spielberg and Polanski understood instinctively when it was their turn to tackle WWII was that while the horror demanded to be shown, there had to be more than that. Humanity was what they brought to the table, and their audiences left the cinema reeling because they had seen something recognisable and terrible. Verhoeven doesn't seem to care about humanity at all. Perhaps he prefers robots, and guns, and Michael Douglas. He seems unaware of what actually happens to a person when they go through violence and torment and abuse. His doll-like heroine starts the film as she ends it – unaffected by the vile events that have occurred. But if she is unaffected, what about us? If none of these things seem to actually matter, then what are we doing sitting through them? I can imagine well enough, thank you, what it might look like when you pour a vat of faeces over a half-naked actress. But how does it feel? What effect will it have on the character? None, apparently: the sh*t happens, and in the very next scene she is back to her old self – blonde and bubbly and perfect. So, that's alright then. She sees her entire family wiped out by Nazis – an event that supposedly drives her to seek revenge - but she doesn't seem particularly to miss them or care about them once they are gone. So why should we? Clearly, Verhoeven wants to make his own Schindler, his own Pianist. What he has created instead is a shrill mish-mash of grotesquery and camp. He will, I am sure, condemn anyone who has the gall to laugh at inappropriate moments during his very important movie. My favourite such moment came early on when the Comedy Nazi, looking down on the grisly results of his handiwork, said, in close-up, one simple word: "Excellent". My laughter was a genuine, human response to a terrible event rendered banal by a bad artist. When Verhoeven sticks to action-packed blockbusters he is on safe ground. As soon as he tries to be Important he is doomed. No doubt he will say of his detractors that they just don't understand what he is doing. On the contrary, I understand perfectly well – I just wish he would stop doing it. The Black Book is all surface, no feeling. Nothing hurts, nothing matters: it's just a flesh wound.

Update, April 2007. I wrote the above after seeing the film at the London Film Festival in October 2006. It is reassuring to see that my favourite film critic, Anthony Lane, would seem to agree with many of the points I made back then. (April 9th, 2007 issue of the New Yorker)

Air Force One features Harrison Ford, Glenn Close, Gary Oldman, Dean Stockewell, and William H. Macy. A dream cast! In the freshest, friskiest, funniest, laugh-out-loudest comedy of the year! Cheer as President Harrison Ford takes on the baddies all by himself – "Right now, he's our only hope". Hiss as Dean Stockwell tries to get Glenn Close to sign away power and "take down Air Force One". Will she sign? Like hell! Sigh with relief when the fax machine stalls, stalls a little longer, and then… just when we'd given up hope… stalls a little longer, and then works! Clap like a whacked-out space cadet on class-a drugs when the fax lady parachutes to safety. Scratch your head a little when you realise that the big plot device of the bad guys having a guy on the inside is of no interest or use whatsoever. Ponder for a long time just why Gary Oldman's character doesn't just shoot the wife and the kid, for crying out loud. Marvel at the advances in special effects technology that can make a plane crash in a big budget movie look like a plane crash in a primitive video game. Thrills! Spills! Drama! Action! Utter, utter, crap!

John Fawcett made the excellent and original Ginger Snaps, so I had high hopes for The Dark. What a let-down. Cutting from slow peaceful scenes to huge close-ups accompanied by a loud bang on the soundtrack will make the audience jump, but so will creeping up behind them and saying "boo". It's a cheap trick and I would have hoped this film would be above that. Sean Bean and Maria Bello are both fine actors, struggling with an underwritten script. What a shame. The plot is actually interesting and different, and there are moments of genuine creepiness, but by the end you just don't care enough about any of it. The Dark also has that intangible look of the cheap British horror film: greyed-out, grainy, muted colours. Can't quite put my finger on it, but other examples are Paper House and The Light House, neither of which are very good, coincidentally. It's an aesthetic that I personally find unappealing. Coupled with endless flashbacks and flash-frames and death-dream sequences, it all adds up to an unsatisfying mess. Could have been brilliant, could have been worse. Watch Ginger Snaps (again) - it's so much better.

Hey, we're making a heart-warming drama about a loser weather man who just wants everyone to get along, but can't break out of his bad habits and bad luck. OK, but just in case things get too sentimental, how about throwing in Michael Caine wittering inanely about "f*cking and sucking and blowing" and, in case that's still not offensive enough, let's toss in some jokes about the hero's pre-pubescent daughter's genitalia. What could possibly go wrong? Now, there is a time and a place for off-colour humour. There is a time and a place for whimsical sentimentality. Rarely are those times and places the same. Jokes about a little girl's genitalia need to be handled (!) very carefully indeed. The makers of this film have no idea what they are doing, why they are doing it, or who in their right mind would pay money to see this drivel. The under-written script veers from grotesque gags to "heart-warming" comedy, stopping along the way at child-abuse, blandly vulgar dialogue and surreal whimsy. Everything the film-makers can possibly think of is thrown at the screen in the desperate hope that some of it will stick. It doesn't. Likewise, the soundtrack is packed with that kind of annoying plinky music that's supposed to indicate a certain world-weary sardonicism with a hint of uplift just around the corner. It is as pleasant as the sound of a dentist's drill. The characterisation is depressingly lazy. Michael Caine is a Pulitzer-prize winning novelist? You could have fooled me. He comes across as inarticulate and confused. Cage is supposed to be - what? Likable? Horrible? Some combination of the two? Or perhaps he's supposed to be whatever the script demands of him at certain points. Having a row? He's horrible. Bonding with his kids? Likable. Insulting his daughter's appearance while on the phone to his wife? Horrible again. The only laughs come from watching people throw junk food at Cage. Now THAT'S funny.

Not much time to write this, so forgive any errors and SPOILERS. This is a great movie. Go and see it. Forget King Kong or Match P*int or any of the nonsense stinking up the place. Thirteen is genuinely unnerving, incredibly tense and very well made. At times the wide-screen B&W close-ups recall '50s and '60s French cinema, in a good way. The atmosphere goes from murky and confused to all-too-clear with chilling precision. It is very nerve-wracking. It is very good. What are you waiting for? Go! Now! Turns out I have to write more than this as I have not reached my minumum quota. What else to say? Performances? Excellent. Photography? Excellent. Music? Excellent. Why are you still here? Go and find your nearest cinema showing this masterpiece and buy a ticket. It is the kind of film that works best on a big screen, so make the effort.

Mamoru Oshii's new movie takes the black-and-gold aesthetic from Avalon, his previous mind-**** and transports it into a grim future of cyborgs and gigantic cities and sex droids and virtual reality and people having their brains hacked-into. I think. In a genuinely dazzling collision of computer-generated animation and traditional hand-drawn characters, Oshii takes us on a bizarre and sometimes baffling journey through a city "peopled" with robots that look like humans and humans who act like robots. Some of the humans are half-robots anyway. Each human seems to have a network port in the back of the neck so that they can plug into some kind of matrix for whatever reason. This also enables the baddies to plug into them and mess with whatever remains of their minds. Things happen. Moody characters behave moodily. The music blares intermittently: Kenji Kawai's compositions are as much to the foreground as they were in Avalon, but unfortunately are nowhere near as memorable. As if to prove correct the cliché that what goes around comes around, the film seems heavily indebted to Blade Runner, which itself was heavily indebted to Oriental popular culture. Also, the often dream-like atmosphere and the way the screen is crammed with as much as possible owe quite a lot to the work of Chris Marker. GITS 2 is not the most exciting film you'll ever see, but it is interesting and it looks fantastic. There is a danger though that some impressionable people will be over-influenced it by it. I worry not that they will go out and start shooting sex-robots, but that they will think the movie is somehow profound and its makers are deep thinkers. It isn't. They might be, but there's not really much deep thought on display here. The characters discuss philosophy between gun-battles, but it's the gun-battles, not the philosophy, that the makers seem most interested in.

Lord of War, for all its radical and anti-establishment trappings, is about as comforting and safe a movie as you could possibly imagine. Its banal, elementary messages can be summed up as: Guns are bad. People who trade in them are bad. Many parts of Africa are messed-up. Nicolas Cage is wearing a hair piece. In an ever-decreasing circle of asinine clichés that would insult the intelligence of a seven-year-old child, Lord of War takes us into the terrible and frightening world of international gun-running. Cage plays an international gun-runner with weird hair and an indeterminate accent. He will sell to anyone, anywhere, as long as they cough up the cash. And what a lot of cash that turns out to be. He lives the high-life. He has everything: a loser little brother, a gorgeous but frustrated wife, stereotype parents, persistent FBI guy on his trail, the works. Keen-eyed viewers may well spot parallels between this film and Goodfellas. And Blow. And no doubt one or two other movies. In other words, we've seen it all before, and done a lot better. Andrew Niccol, the hack who gave Gattaca and Simone to a grateful public, may think he's dealing with heavy moral issues and opening our eyes to the way the world really is. In fact, all he's doing is dressing up a predictable "rise-and-fall" story with a bit of student politics. But no amount of moralising and politicising can disguise the total obviousness and predictability of the whole enterprise. At one point, Cage's wife, an aspiring but not over-talented painter sells her first painting. Guess who bought it? Then, Cage's brother, a drug-addled loser, gets clean, gets a girl-friend and states that his life is getting better all the time. Guess what happens to him? Later, Cage's uncle tells him how great everything is and then walks off to get into his car. Guess what happens then? And so on. Instead of being surprised by the movie, the audience is always at least one, if not fifteen steps ahead of it. The cast includes Ian Holm, Ethan Hawke, Eamonn Walker and Jared Leto (we name the guilty men!). These are all talented and intelligent performers, which only makes you wonder what on earth they are doing involved in this mess. As for Bridget Moynahan, let's just say she is well cast as a model who wants to get into acting but doesn't have the talent.

As someone who believes that Shane Black's The Long Kiss Goodnight is one of the most under-rated movies of the last ten years, I was looking forward to his new one with a certain amount of eagerness. He's well known as a writer (Lethal Weapon, Last Boy Scout, and, ahem, Last Action Hero) but Kiss Kiss Bang Bang would be his debut as a director, working from his own script. Even better, it would star not only Robert Downey Jr. but also Val Kilmer. Now, Kilmer is almost as under-rated as Black himself, so the whole prospect just became even more tantalising.

Notice how I managed, in the previous paragraph, to casually throw in mention of several earlier movies while jokily admitting that I didn't think all of Black's works has actually been that great, thus tempering my gushing prose with a healthy dose of cynicism? Cool, huh? Notice also how I implied that I am very familiar with the work of Val Kilmer without actually mentioning any of his movies? I could have gone on about his performance in Spartan, for example, which just happens to be one of his more obscure ones, but that might have been overdoing it a little.

KKBB, as those of us who refer to the titles of movies using only initials refer to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, is too clever for its own good, in a world where most movies are too stupid for their own good. This, of course, means it will die at the box-office, confuse many critics who appreciate just about anything except clever American movies, and be heartily appreciated by the rest of us.

The movie tells the story of Harry, a dead-beat petty crook in New York who gets involved in, like, murder and corruption and stuff when he ends up in LA, researching an acting role against his will. Harry is a combination of movie-star cool and total ass-hole. I mean it as a compliment when I say that Robert Downey Jr. is perfectly cast in the role.

Harry is joined by Perry, or, to give him his full name, Gay Perry. Perry, in case you haven't guessed already, is gay. He is played by Val Kilmer in somewhat bouffant mode. Perry is the coolest, sharpest character in a movie filled with cool, sharp characters. The dialogue is snappy and rude and hilarious and, best of all, audible. The direction and editing are tight and efficient without drawing attention to themselves. In other words, Black avoids almost all the pitfalls a first-time director filming his own script could plunge into headfirst. Almost all. The one mistake this movie makes is in being so knowing, so arch, so hip, so cool that it runs the risk of turning in on itself and being about nothing other than how knowing, arch, hip and cool it is. The only reason it exists is to comment on its own existence. Granted, that's one more reason than most movies have to exist, but even so.

By the end of the movie, after several scenes that feel like they must be the last one but turn out not to be (how arch, how knowing, how etc…) you don't really care (if you ever did) about any of the characters, or anything that has happened to anyone.

But hey, who cares about caring about stuff anyway? When a film is this much fun and this fast and unpredictable, it's almost churlish to complain. KKBB will not be to everyone's taste, but that's not my problem. I loved every minute of it, even the bits that didn't really work and the bits that seemed out of place.

I'm having trouble finishing this thing now. Need to sign off with a memorable little summation of my feelings about the film, or a little quip or something, or maybe I'll just

As someone who has never seen any of Wheedon's earlier entertainments, I had no particular expectations of this movie. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I ended up seeing one of the most entertaining, balls to the wall, pedal to the metal science fiction adventures in living memory. Make no mistake, people, this is top-flight entertainment that will live on for many years and be required viewing among those who care about such things at all (and this should include you). Serenity is packed with action, more-than-adequate effects, imagination, wit, verve, style, gorgeous women, sassy dialogue, and non-stop momentum. It lasts for two hours. It feels like ten minutes. Most importantly of all, you care about the characters. You believe in them. You root for them. You are mildly upset when some of them don't make it to the end. This is no pompous, soul-less St*r W*rs "epic" with as much genuine depth as a puddle. No, this is quality film-making, relying on character and imagination and fun and suspense rather than billion-dollar effects-sprees and green-screen emptiness. See it, friends, it's what going to the cinema is all about.

SPOILER WARNING "I, Robot", the new nonsense-fest from Will Smith, is directed by the goon who brought you "Dark City". Ah yes, "Dark City", that unbelievably stupid wallow in "noir" cliches which managed to convince one or two less discerning viewers that it was a masterpiece. For the rest of us it was a pretentious and embarrassing bore. "I, Robot" is better than "Dark City", which is like saying being kicked in the balls is better than being kicked in the balls twice. Will Smith plays a jaded cop who sleeps in his shorts and his hat, and hates robots. But wait - he has a robot arm (surprise!) and he was once saved by a robot, but the robot should have saved the little girl who also needed saving at the same time. Yawn. In the opening scene Mr. Smith runs after a robot who looks like he's stolen a handbag. Guess what? It hasn't stolen it, it's returning it to its rightful owner. Ho ho. Mr. Smith has a fat, grumpy, cigar-chewing boss who says things like "Give me your badge". Yawn. There are various pointless and unnecessary action sequences that defy all belief and common sense. The one where the demolition robot destroys the house is particularly stupid and irrelevant. On the plus side, the special effects are good, and the film is relatively short. The plot, such as it is, is completely insane, even more insane than that mad one in "Minority Report". Scientist finds out that evil computer wants to take over world with robots, so invents tough robot and instructs robot to kill him so as to send warning to cop who hates robots. Did I miss something? And why (WHY?) are all the old robots put in big crates and left in a desert? Why not at least switch them off first? And why am I supposed to be impressed by computer-generated images fighting each other? It's just a jazzy cartoon. That said, I would just like to make one final point: This film is rubbish.

SPOILER WARNING. The original Thunderbirds was an eccentric, low-budget, weird piece of TV science fiction with the emphasis on alluring gadgetry and brilliant machines. The fact that all roles were played by puppets certainly helped it attain a certain cult status. Fans and even casual viewers have fond memories of puppets bobbing around miniature sets and palm trees folding back to allow Thunderbird 2 to get down the runway. Approaching a cinematic updating of the concept, director Jonathan Frakes had two choices: Go for a faithful, no-holds-barred action-packed romp full of alluring gadgetry and brilliant machines with a 21st century gloss, or ruin the whole thing and make the worst film of the year. Unfortunately, Mr. Frakes chose the latter option. That his film is bad does not seem to be the result of people trying to make a good film and failing; rather it appears that from the outset they hampered themselves with a lousy script, unappealing performers and a total misjudgement of their intended audience. Things start out well enough, with a lavish and entertaining credit sequence. Pretty soon, though, as we are swiftly introduced to the doltish Alan Tracey in his low-budget sub-Hogwarts school, packed with drama-school extras who are all ten years younger than him, things take a turn for the worse. Alan is the youngest son of the head Thunderbird, played here by a depressingly lacklustre Bill Paxton. Alan's older brothers, a gang of adolescent interchangeable hunks with up-to-the-minute haircuts that will ensure the film dates a lot quicker than the TV show ever did, are allowed to fly powerful space rockets all day, and Alan wants to join them. But guess what? He has some growing-up to do first. Cue a villain who comes up with a brilliant plan to get all the Thunderbirds off the island, thus allowing him to infiltrate their high-security lair and... steal lots of money from the Bank of London. Yawn. This hilariously unexciting plot reaches hitherto unimagined levels of tedium and patronising guff when the baddies are thwarted in their fiendishly complex plan by three children (Alan and his no-less-irritating chums), Lady Penelope, and Parker. These last two steal the film (for what it's worth) but even they cannot transcend its overwhelming stupidity. Starting out as a kick-ass vision in pink, Lady P ends as an embarrassing pantomime victim, locked into a cage with no difficulty whatsoever. No doubt the presence of three children in starring roles is an attempt to make the film appealing to the youngsters. The result, however, is to make the film unappealing to everyone. Sticking kids in a film like this is a sure sign of creative bankruptcy. Likewise, whose bright idea was it to sideline the machines and instead concentrate on a bland and unconvincing coming-of-age story? No, really, whose? The actors playing characters more convincingly realised thirty years ago by puppets are a disgrace. Ben Kingsley's finest moment comes when he utters the chillingly terrifying line, "See you soon... Jeff!" That he has to spit this out while being CARRIED by his henchman only makes his humiliation more complete. The henchman himself has to pretend to be incapacitated when children spray him with green goo. No child alive dreams of incapacitating henchmen by spraying them with green goo. They may dream of bisecting them with a lightsaber or karate-chopping them into the middle of next week, but they do not dream of spraying them with green goo. Only patronising film-makers think that they do, and that watching a scene in which this happens might in some way be entertaining. The script is a tired amalgamation of cliches, heart-warming homilies, bad jokes and laughable threats. It may sound like a complaint but actually it is meant as a compliment when I say that much of the dialogue is inaudible. When you can make out what the poor saps are saying, you just want to die. The good guys rarely get to shout anything more profound than "F.A.B" or "Look out!" while the bad guys are limited to "Mwah ha ha ha!" Huge amounts of money were no doubt spent on this disaster, but the film-makers ensure that the vast sets look as cheap and badly-lit as possible. Quite an achievement. The Thunderbirds themselves are impressive enough in all their computer-generated glory, but they lack the nutty charm of the originals, and they're not on screen for nearly long enough. In spite of all the technical expertise involved there is little imagination or originality on display. Even the theme tune has been watered down and made instantly forgettable rather than irresistibly catchy.

Thunderbirds contains nothing, not a single moment or image worth remembering, and yet, paradoxically, you might have a hard time forgetting its sheer awfulness. Don't say I didn't warn you.

SPOILERS. You have been warned. In recent years the gangster genre has taken a sound beating at the hands of all manner of uncivilized thugs. We've suffered through Guy Ritchie's nauseating cockernee vodka-ad rubbish, the endless run of post-Tarantino disasters and the depressing glut of low-budget no-hoper efforts from the British school of blokes in suits shooting each other. We've gone from The Godfather via Reservoir Dogs to Two Days in the Valley and Snatch. But something interesting has been happening elsewhere, and it is slowly infecting the movies with its own potent mythology. Jake Arnott's recent novel, The Long Firm is already seen as a classic of its kind. Full of great British characteristics like deceit, violence, robbery, snobbery and buggery, it didn't reinvent the genre but it did give it a hit of much needed vitality. The Long Firm took for granted the idea that gangsters are in it for more than just the money.

All that hanging around with guys in a big guys-only gang has its appeals to certain members of society. The homosexuality of violent men was suddenly not the subtext, but the text itself. It wasn't long before Arnott's aesthetic was seeping into films, investing Gangster No. 1 with a seedy eroticism that added a new twist to some old ideas about male violence. That film took the British gangster genre to a very interesting place (and it's important that this is a British trend – the US gangster is still obsessed with talking cool and shooting straight). But a new film that blasted into our cinemas recently goes further, raising questions not just of sexuality, but of religion, redemption, corruption, morality, and the very meaning of life in a 'civilized' society. That sounds like more weight than any low-budget Brit-flick can bear, and it probably is, but the makers of Mr Inbetween are at least out there, giving it their best shot. Neil Cross's original novel was not exactly brilliant, packed as it was with grammatical errors, pretension and rather tedious action. But it's often the worst books that make the best movies, and so it proves here, for Mr Inbetween is a very fine movie indeed. It offers a world view that is pessimistic yet somehow humane; where violent men are violent because they live in a violent world. It's not much of an excuse for kicking the s**t out of people for a living, and if any of these characters really existed you'd run a mile to avoid them, but in the world of film it makes a certain sense. Part of the appeal of movies is in watching lives that you could never actually live, and would not want to. Violence as an answer to life's problems is a dead-end. You beat someone up, and someone somewhere wants to beat you up. Eventually you spend all your time beating people up or being beaten up by people. Movies offer us a glimpse of a world where the rules are different, and the best movies make that world come thrillingly alive.

Mr Inbetween tells the story of Andrew, a man who kicks the s**t out of people for a living. At the start of the film he's just kicked the s**t out of some geezer. Then he bumps into an old school friend who looks on him, even years later, with awe. The old school friend is down on his luck, paying for a round with a pocket full of pennies, and our hero takes pity on him, and wangles him a job in one of those gangster garages that gangsters always seem to have. In a perfect inversion of the real world, Andrew envies his old friend his life, his wife, his child, his domestic bliss. While we're thrilling to the unruly life of violent crime, the violent man just wants to settle down and watch the telly and dunk his digestive in a mug of sweet tea. But of course this is a crime thriller, and nothing can be that simple. The old friend is overwhelmed by Andrew's generosity, his wife is pretty grateful too, and it's not too long before she's running her fingers over Andrew's copious scar tissue. Meanwhile, Andrew's boss (The Tattooed Man), who appears to live in some bizarre underground hangar last seen in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, is cooking and discussing philosophy. There are people who need to be dealt with. Andrew and his mate, the affable driver who's always putting inappropriate songs on the car stereo ('Sorry! Sorry!') arrive at some kind of mansion/castle/stately home in the middle of the night. The Tattooed Man and his two (male) associates greet Andrew with real delight (one of them kisses him full on the lips). Terrible things happen in an upstairs room. Of course, this is not the last we will see of these sinister associates and this upstairs room. For, in true gangster movie fashion, our hero starts to long for all the things he hasn't got, and we know it's only a matter of time before he will find himself in that upstairs room, facing these three sinister (and frankly quite terrifying) men. It's not over yet, though, not by a long way. The good will suffer, the bad will attempt to redeem themselves, the evil will win. If Mr Inbetween is not entirely unpredictable then the fault probably lies as much with the genre as with the film itself. One last job. Cop about to retire. Bad man trying to go straight. Heist goes wrong. How many things can you do with this stuff? What sets a few films above the dross is not so much what they do as what they do not do. Mr Inbetween does not wallow in violence. It does not give in to cliché or caricature. It does not provide cheap laughs or cheap shocks. It does not make much money at the box office.

SPOILERS!! Kill Bill is the fourth film by Quentin Tarantino. In case you were unaware of this vital fact, the opening credits include the legend, `The fourth film by Quentin Tarantino'. This is a trend that needs to be nipped in the bud right now. The heart sinks at the thought of reading, `The thirty-ninth film by Steven Spielberg' or `The twentieth film by Ron Howard' or (especially) `The second film by Stephen Fry'. Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino's fourth full-length feature film) is only half a film. Its full title is Kill Bill vol. 1. At least it's not Kill Bill: Episode One: Attack of the Kung Fu Fighting Babes: The Special Edition. Tarantino, after hectoring from his producers, `decided' to split his epic action movie into two parts, thus enabling his beloved fans to appreciate fully the fruits of his artistic genius without having to nip to the toilet halfway through. They probably did us all a favour: One three-hour movie consisting of nothing but fighting and sassy dialogue? Hard work. Two ninety-minute movies consisting of nothing but fighting and sassy dialogue? A walk in the park. Two walks in the park. Tarantino, after the `mature' (i.e. `dull') Jackie Brown (The third film by Quentin Tarantino) has decided to play to his strengths here. So we get lots of violence and great music and wide-screen close-ups and brilliant action, but not so many celebrity cameos or people sitting around talking and smoking dope. Despite all the critical praise that was heaped on him for Jackie Brown, it's clear that that film saw him working on auto-pilot, cruising along happily enough with all his showbiz chums. It's not a film that anyone needs to see more than once. Unlike Reservoir Dogs (The first film by Quentin Tarantino) which demands repeat viewings, and works its magic on you like a drug. That film remains his finest moment, no matter what the Academy or anyone else said about Pulp Fiction (The second film by Quentin Tarantino). True, it was Pulp Fiction that cemented the man's reputation as a purveyor of brilliantly-made, hysterical B-movies, but Reservoir Dogs is more than just a lurid heist thriller. It would have been interesting to see Tarantino develop in the noir directions it hinted at rather than giving in to his basic instincts, stepping on the gas, shaking the ketchup bottle, and piling up the pop-culture references until we're all blue in the face. And, while Jackie Brown was praised for its `maturity', at least one viewer found it interminably and unforgivably lacklustre.

So we can be forgiven for approaching Kill Bill vol. 1 with some trepidation. Early signs are not good: in-joke references to old movies (`Our feature presentation', `Shaw Scope') fail to raise a smile. As the man himself might say, `har-di-f**kin-har'. And then. Uma Thurman draws a square in the air with her finger and the square doesn't appear on screen, thus immediately banishing all memories of that hideous moment in Pulp Fiction, when it does. Indeed, for all its wild and crazy action this is a surprisingly traditional and old-fashioned film. There are no computer-generated effects. There are none of the ludicrous and clichéd fights that we have become so used to over recent years. What we get instead is blood, sweat and tears. People fight and get injured and exhausted and some of them (quite a lot of them, actually) even die. Blood spurts all over the place. But there also startlingly beautiful moments of silence amid the carnage, such as the snow-bound night-time shot of Uma and Lucy facing off in the garden, as a water clock tips over and clicks back into place. Like a peasant in a Bruegel painting, it takes centre stage while momentous events happen in the background. But never mind all that - what about the plot? What actually happens in this movie? Well.Uma has been treated badly (beaten up, shot in the head, that sort of thing) but somehow is still alive. Waking from her coma she swears revenge. She gets a guy to make her a sword, and then she goes to kill people. Not necessarily in that order. Along the way there are: a truly great cartoon flashback, colour-coded subtitles (why don't more films do this?), Daryl Hannah whistling and wearing an eye-patch, and Lucy Liu getting scalped. Again, not necessarily in that order. And that's about it. Yes, I think we can honestly say that Quentin has made going to the cinema fun again. It's just a shame he had to split his film into two, thus turning it into a `saga', and thus grouping it with all those other horrible, portentous, humourless, endless sagas currently polluting the culture. Let the geeks have their Rings and Potter and Matrix Retarded. The rest of us can wallow in the guilty pleasure of a wide-screen extravaganza that shows Mr. Tarantino at the very top of his game. Of course only a lunatic would want all movies to be like this one; a bit of depth and subtlety is always welcome now and then. But, in a time when so much Hollywood mainstream product is artistically and imaginatively redundant, it comes as a very pleasant surprise to find we need Quentin Tarantino more than ever.