| Vantage Point | | Sometimes, the truth is hidden in plain sight - you just need to know where to look. Vantage Point is an intricate action-thriller, which replays a devastating terrorist attack from eight perspectives, exposing a web of intrigue, which leaves the American president fighting for his life during a high-profile visit to Salamanca in Spain. |
 | Lars and the Real Girl, Garage and Son of Man | | There are some films that cause you to wince simply by reading the synopsis. Take, for example, the tale of a creepy nerd in a small US town, who sends off for a designer sex doll and proceeds to pass it off as his girlfriend. But, far from being another sniggering piece of teen-targeted smut in the Superbad mould, Craig Gillespie's Lars and the Real Girl is an utterly charming study of crippling loneliness, unspoken affection and community spirit. Refusing to mock its admittedly far-fetched premise, this is a paean to a plastic Pollyanna who makes everybody feel better about themselves and each other. Frank Capra couldn't have done it any better. |
 | The Bank Job and Untraceable | | Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais, the writing partnership behind The Likely Lads, Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, penned The Bank Job, a dramatisation of true-life crime on the streets of 1971 London. The film pilfers all of the essential ingredients for a heist movie: dodgy geezers, unexpected glitches in the master plan, a close call with the Rozzers, and some earthy dialogue ("It may be smart to go and stay with your aunt in case things turn to custard.")
Unfortunately, Roger Donaldson's thriller tunnels through familiar ground and the film is severely handicapped by a lifeless leading man with all the charisma of a crowbar. Shady car dealer Terry Leather (Jason Statham) thinks he has hit the jackpot when beautiful model Martine (Saffron Burrows) invites him to take part in a robbery, targeting the safety deposit boxes in the vault of Lloyd's Bank on the corner of Baker Street and Marylebone Road. |
| Folksy hokum with art house kudos | | A couple of front-rank auteurs have new titles on release this week. Hong Kong's Wong Kar Wai and the Dane Lars von Trier have always sought to challenge conventional narrative cinema, with Wong achieving an audiovisual sensuality that complements his compassionate studies of embattled individuals and Von Trier making mischief at every opportunity by either stripping the action to its essentials or provoking his target audience. Yet, with their latest offerings, they have managed to produce intriguing pictures in spite of their best efforts to sabotage them with curiously intrusive directorial tactics. |
 | Rambo | | Twenty years after Rambo's last bloodthirsty tour of duty, Sylvester Stallone's iconic warrior stumbles out of retirement to wreak havoc on the oppressive Burmese military. In his role as director, co-writer and leading man, Stallone's intentions are noble, refocusing the spotlight on the long-running civil war between ruling forces and the Karen People of Burma, who have been tortured and murdered for nearly 60 years. |
 | WAZ, Edge of Heaven and Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens | | British TV veteran Tom Shankland wears his influences on his sleeve in his feature debut, W?Z, a serial killer chiller whose nasty atmosphere (and stylised title) owes much to Bryan Singer's Se7en (1995), while its luxuriation in torture and gore derives from such Splat Pack outings as the Saw series. |
 | There will be Blood | | Adapted from Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, There Will Be Blood is one of this year's Oscar frontrunners, nominated for eight statuettes including Best Picture, Best Director (Paul Thomas Anderson), Best Actor In A Leading Role (Daniel Day-Lewis - who this week won the Bafta) and Best Adapted Screenplay. |
| Fluent in the Language of Love | | Fittingly, there are a couple of continental romantic comedies on offer this Valentine weekend. You may have to travel to find them, but - if you like your love stories to combine cornball and kook- you could do a lot worse than seek out Emmanuel Mouret's Change of Address and Maciek Zak's Midnight Talks. |
 | The Bucket List | | 'I love the smell of chemo in the morning . . ." Terminal cancer is the unlikely catalyst for a comical journey of self-discovery for two old codgers in The Bucket List. If Beaches and Terms of Endearment are the pinnacle of emotionally manipulative chick flicks, then Rob Reiner's new feature is the testosterone-fuelled equivalent, wringing every last tear from its contrived set-up. |
 | Juno | | t's hard to imagine a more immaculately conceived or perfectly delivered comedy this year than Juno. From the striking first image of a girl staring quizzically at a discarded LazyBoy as she chugs juice, informing us in voiceover that "it started with a chair", we're putty in the hands of writer Diablo Cody as she crafts an astutely observed portrait of small town mores. |
| National Treasure Book of Secrets | | Released in the UK on Boxing Day, 2004, the original National Treasure shamelessly plundered Dan Brown's global bestseller The Da Vinci Code to contrive a fast-paced treasure hunt around some of the US's most iconic monuments and landmarks. What the film lacked in logic, it made up in breathlessly paced action sequences and old-fashioned fun, recalling the escapades of Indiana Jones, albeit without the wit. |
| Showing the dos and don't of computer generated imagery | | Computer-generated imagery has transformed children's cinema. Hand-drawn cel animation still exists, but it's too expensive and time-consuming to be used on mainstream features and it is now usually consigned to shorts and art films. However, there are exceptions, and one of the most outstanding is Michel Ocelot's Azur & Asmar: The Princes' Quest. |
 | Cloverfield and Underdog | | With increasing numbers of films flooding our cinemas, opening weekend box office takings have become increasingly important in determining the success of a feature. So it's no surprise that the film companies spend hundreds of millions of pounds every year, creating slickly edited trailers, eye-catching posters and enticing television adverts to lure us to the multiplexes. |
| Documentary tribute to dead cocklepickers | | Nick Broomfield has always been an intelligent documentarist. Unfortunately, his insufferable habit of making himself the centre of the story has deflected the purpose of some of his more significant work, giving it a parodic feel akin to that of the even more limelight-craving Michael Moore. However, Broomfield subtracted himself from the equation in Ghosts, his tribute to the Chinese cocklepickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay, and the result was a drama of acuity and authenticity. Wisely, he has adopted the same approach for Battle for Haditha, which focuses on a savage US Marine reprisal for a roadside bombing in Iraq, and, consequently, he has produced his most consistently compelling film to date. |
| Grisly scenes with Sweeney Todd | | Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's Tony Award-winning musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street fits visionary director Tim Burton like a glove. |
 | Fine start for the Boar's Hill auteur | | Oxford has long been a breeding ground for film talent. But few have made an impact at such a young age as 22-year-old director Vicky Jewson, whose debut feature, Lady Godiva, opens this week. This is a remarkable achievement by a film-maker of undoubted potential and tenacity, who persuaded a producer of the calibre of Adam Kempton to back her project and brought it in pretty much on time and budget. |
 | No Country for Old Men; Alien Vs Predator — Requiem | | Writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen orchestrate an unbearably tense game of cat-and-mouse against the barren Texan borderlands in the frequently bloody thriller No Country for Old Men, based on the book by Cormac McCarthy. Surpassing the near-perfect 1996 caper Fargo, the film is a breathtaking demonstration of concise storytelling and filmmaking brio, coupled with powerful performances and the blackest humour. |
| 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days; Back to Normandy; Shot in Bombay | | The collapse of Communism sparked a crisis in Eastern European cinema. Deprived of state subsidies, flourishing industries went into rapid decline and only since the millennium have film-makers in the myriad of fledgling republics begun to find a distinctive voice and attract wider critical attention. Predictably, Russia, Poland, Croatia and the Czech Republic have led the way. But Romania is also experiencing a new wave, which is all the more remarkable for the fact that, apart from Lucien Pintilie, the country has produced no world-class directors since moving pictures first arrived in May 1896. |
| Leave Your Chair and Hit the Road | | There's always something of a lull in the movie market in early January, as the distributors recover from the holiday blockbusters and gear themselves up for the Oscar season. Consequently, the schedules tend to fill up with reissues and minor offerings like Man in the Chair, which feels like a teleplay that has stumbled on to a big screen. |
 | Dan in Real Life and Charlie Wilson's War | | Single, love-starved characters in Hollywood romantic comedies should count their blessings. Despite all the misfortunes and humiliations that litter the path to enduring happiness - catching extremities in a zip, falling for their comatose fiancé's brother - these desperate singletons invariably snag Mr or Ms Right by the end credits, and seal the deal with a polished one-liner. And when they wake the next morning and look in the mirror, it's Kate Hudson or Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock or Hugh Grant staring dreamily back at them. Life certainly sucks. |
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