DISOBEDIENCE

Sebastian Lelio follows up his superb A FANTASTIC WOMAN with DISOBEDIENCE - a drama based on the novel by Naomi Alderman - set in London's Orthodox Jewish community.  It stars Rachel Weisz as a Ronit and Rachel McAdams as Esti - two girls who fell in love as teenagers and realised that they were gay.  Their reactions were, however, different. Ronit left the community, went to New York, and has become a successful photographer, although has never fallen in love with anyone else.  Esti stayed in the community and married their childhood friend Dovid (Alessandro Nivola).  She lives an apparently straight life, teaches in an Orthodox school, and is trying to make the best of things.

The movie opens with Ronit's father, a revered Rabbi, making his final sermon on the idea of free will and disobedience.  He collapses and dies, and Ronit returns for his funeral, setting the events of the film in motion.  Her character is difficult - at times I winced at her unwillingness to make nice just for the few days she's back - insisting talking about business at a sabbath meal even though she knows its offensive, or playing with wearing an orthodox wig.  But as I watched the film further I realised that this was exactly the point.  Ronit can't make nice - that's why she had to leave.  That's why she isn't Esti.  And yet as the film progressed I realised that Esti was actually the more interesting character, because while she appears to be compliant, she was actually the one who contacted Ronit and precipitated her return.  And so the discovered kiss at the centre of the film that triggers its second act crisis of conscience is not an unbelievable risk, and one that stretches credulity, but once again in Esti's character.  She wants to be discovered, triggered, and is in some sense using Ronit.

Which leads me, surprisingly, to the most fascinating character of all in the film - Dovid, played beautifully in a career-best performance by Alessandro Nivola.  In a film that is very respectful of the orthodox community, Dovid comes across as an intelligent man really trying his best to understand his wife's feelings, humble and empathetic.  He's the person in the community who is welcoming to Ronit despite their suspicion of her.  He's the person who really tries to understand how to do the right thing.  It's a truly moving depiction of a religious man without judgment or hypocrisy, and so rare to see on screen.

DISOBEDIENCE is rated R and has a running time of 114 minutes. It is available to screen on demand at Curzon Home Cinema and on limited release in cinemas.

DOCTOR STRANGE

DOCTOR STRANGE is a patchwork quilt of a Marvel movie.  Pleasant enough to watch, but undeserving of a second view, in which almost every character, action sequence or funny line echoes another film, and the only originality comes not from the central character but from Tilda Swinton.  It's visually arresting but emotionally hollow mid-tier Marvel of a kind that - with a release calendar chock full of B-grade comic book characters -  I have become rather bored by. 

As with IRON MAN, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a rich materialistic egotistical genius brought low by a severe accident, who supplements his physical healing process with "super powers".   As with SHERLOCK, Strange has a perfect memory and a fondness for being right.  As with StarChild, Strange has a fondness for cheesy seventies hits.  Strange was a successful but cocky surgeon who texts while driving and ends up in an horrific car crash that renders his hands unfit for surgery.  In desperation, he journeys to Nepal where he finds a mystical Jedi Master, sorry, Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), who puts him through a training regime straight out of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.  I kid you not, there's even a "judge me by my size, do you" sequence. It turns out that, quelle surprise, Strange has a rare aptitude for astral projection and drawing energy from other dimensions of the multiverse to cast magic spells.  He even gets a cool gadget that allows his to reverse time.  (Do you think that will be significant?!) He also gets a HARRY POTTER style set of magical gadgets, including a sentient cloak that actually reminded me a bit of Terry Pratchett's luggage.  So armed, he goes off to fight the Ancient One's former pupil turned evil villain (Mads Mikkelsen) who wants to open Earth up to an eviller villain whose name sounds like Dormouse.  Oh yes, I forgot that Strange has an ex-girlfriend played by Rachel McAdams who's also a surgeon but she has nothing to do but simper.  He also has sidekicks at his zen school played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Benedict Wong who exist to show a moral centre and comic relief respectively. 

SPOTLIGHT

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SOUTHPAW

SOUTHPAW is an earnest but risibly cliched and over-acted boxing drama written by Kurt Sutter (SONS OF ANARCHY) and directed by Antoine Fuqua (TRAINING DAY).  The movie starts Jake Gyllenhaal in a typically intense, hyper-realistic portrayal of a working-class kid turned successful boxing champion.  He's married to the love of his life (Rachel McAdams) and has a young daughter which is all so far so ROCKY. But pretty soon, his wife is caught up in a shooting and dies in one of those over-scored over-dramatic moments that will serve as the lynchpin for the rest of the film, in which our broken hero tries to resurrect his career and win back his daughter from the evil social services. His flashy manager (50 Cent - actually ok as an actor) having left him, our hero winds up begging a wizened old boxing manager played by Forrest Whitaker to train him.  Because as in ROCKY, the best training is low-rent, austere hard work on the worn-out mats of a back-street gym.  

SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS

The sequel to Guy Ritchie's 2009 Sherlock Holmes reboot has just as much style, period atmosphere, wit and bite, but suffers from a rather baggy script from husband and wife team, Michele and Kieran Mulroney.  The result is a film that is certainly entertaining enough to justify a cinema ticket, but which propels the franchise no further, and does a great disservice to Noomi Rapace and Stephen Fry, stranded in under-written roles.

The movie is set in the Europe of 1891 - a febrile, uncertain place with anarchists rising against major powers, and the major powers signing peace treaties but all the while gearing up for what will become the First World War. Holmes' arch-nemesis, Professor Moriarty (Mad Men's Jared Harris) seeks not just to corner the supply of weaponry but also to create the demand for them, by staging terrorist plots and assassination attempts that will bring Europe to war. Holmes (Robert Downey Junior) has to stop him, aided as always by his side-kick John Watson (Jude Law), interrupting his honeymoon with Mary (Kelly Reilly). The movie thus takes the result of a fast-paced, action-set-piece-packed ride across Europe, from London to Paris, by way of Cambridge, and on to the fateful Reichenbach Falls.  Along for the ride are Holmes' indolent but secretly powerful elder brother Mycroft (official National Treasure, Stephen Fry) and a rather random gypsy called Simza (Noomi Rapace - the original Lisbeth Salander). 

First the positive.  All the things that made the first SHERLOCK HOLMES a roaring success are present in the second. I love the dark, richly dressed sets, and CGI that bring to life the grim dirty Victorian cities of London and Paris, filled with dodgy clubs, filthy streets, but punctuated with glorious civic architecture and handsomely dressed upper class men and women.  For the keen-eyed, there's even a glimpse of the Sacre Coeur under scaffolding in Paris harking back to the use of an unfinished Tower Bridge in the first film.  I also love the way in which Ritchie gives us a more pugnacious Holmes than those dessicated twentieth century TV adaptations.  This feels truer to the books, where Holmes definitely has a grimy past and is in fine physical form.  I also love the device Ritchie uses to show his process of deduction - the careful editing, the bullet time replay of fights, the voice-over of every move selected. It all makes for the movies vitality and takes the novels back to their pop-cultural origins.  But most of all, any Holmes adaptation lives or dies on the relationship between Holmes and Watson, and what really sets these films alight is the genuine spark between Downey Junior and Law - the beautifully essayed mutual frustration, respect and affection.  I will always hand over money to see Holmes and Watson sparring.  Finally, to all these factors, we can add one more happy decision.  Jared Harris makes a superb Moriarty, and some of the best scenes in the film are (as they should be) the confrontations between the two - the matching of wits. 

All these good things just about make for the perfect winter blockbuster.  But, as I said before, the movie is severely let down by its script by Michele and Kieran Mulroney.  To be sure, they get some things right. I like the way small details early in the movie become important gags or plot points later on, particularly the urban camouflage!  This is a film in which one has to pay attention despite the superficial appearance of a brawny action flick.  But in too many major ways their script gets it horribly wrong.  The pacing in the first half is woefully slow.  There are some fun action set pieces but we don't really feel we know what the stakes are - what precisely Holmes is trying to do, what mystery he is trying to solve.  It's more than an hour into the over-long two hour run-time before we realise what the plot really is. Poor Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) is pretty much thrown to the dogs, with barely an impact on Holmes.  But worst of all, the whole gypsy plot line is also a complete waste of time. You could easily have cut it from the film and had a tighter, more evenly paced 90 minute flick.  Presumably Guy Ritchie was happy to have another opportunity to indulge his fascination with gypsies, but is all that nonsense really worth it for 60 seconds of comedy dancing from Jude Law, and a short horse joke?  

As it is, we get poor Noomi Rapace cast as Simza - a talented actress who basically looks pained for 120 minutes.  Moreover, poor Stephen Fry is utterly short-changed in his role as Mycroft - I mean - what comic joy could have been woven from an encounter between Fry and Downey Junior on screen!  But the screenwriters simply had a naked arse gag. Poor.  The storyline also leaves poor Kelly Reilly rather short-changed as Mary, although she, unlike Noomi Rapace, does manage to steal every scene she's in and leave a favourable impression far outweighing her actual screen-time. Let's hope now that Simza has been rendered irrelevant, Mary and Mycroft will get more screen-time in the next film. And yes, I suspect that given the early box office there will be another film.  And yes, this instalment was still enough fun, despite its flaws, that I look forward to it. I only hope that the producers replace the screenwriters.

SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS is on release in the US, UK, Canada, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and Turkey. It opens on December 22nd in Malta, Germany, Israel, Singapore, Slovenia, Thailand, Finland, Indonesia, Romania and Taiwan, Denmark and Norway. It opens on December 29th in Belgium, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Russia, Estonia, India, Lithuania and South Africa. It opens on January 5th in Armenia, Australia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Spain and Poland. It opens in Brazil on January 13th; in France on January 25th; and in Japan on March 10th.

MORNING GLORY - muddled

Writer Aline Brosh McKenna (27 DRESSES, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA) and director Roger Michell (NOTTING HILL) have a served up a muddled mess in their new alleged comedy, MORNING GLORY. A newly emaciated Rachel McAdams (SHERLOCK HOLMES) stars as plucky little TV producer Becky Fuller, hired by Jeff Goldblum's cynical executive, to turn around the worst-rated network TV morning show, hosted by Diane Keaton's Colleen Peck. The emotional heart of the film is the relationship between Fuller and the heavyweight serious journo, played by Harrison Ford, that she shoe-horns into co-hosting the show. He's reluctant to do frivolous cooking segments, and makes everyone's life hell, until he learns the virtue of being a team player. Or something. Frankly it was a last minute character development that seemed about as phony as the high-concept set-up of the movie; as superficially essayed as Becky's relationship with Patrick Wilson's Adam Bennet; and about as painful to witness as Becky Fuller's wannabe charming, ditzy behaviour.

The problem with the movie is that it picks up lots of serious issues and then never bothers to deal with them - either seriously or comedically. There are vague gestures toward exploring the dumbing down of morning TV - the difficulty of achieving work-life balance - but the movie chooses a frenetic pace, montages, and attempts at crackling dialogue rather than the genuinely intelligent, blackly funny sunny satire of a movie like NETWORK. Basically, this is frivolous nonsense and not worthy of anybody's time, least of all the cast.

MORNING GLORY opened last year in the US. It is currently on release in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Germany, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Ukraine, Austria, Finland, Norway, Greece, Malaysia, the Netherlands, France, Iceland, Denmark and Spain. It opens in February in Egypt, Brazil, Sweden, New Zealand, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Slovenia, Japan, Norway and Poland. It opens in March in Italy, the Philippines, Argentina, Chile, Croatia, North Korea, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Romania, Venezuela, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Malaysia, Portugal, Singapore, Thailand and Israel. It opens in April in Turkey, Belgium, France and Iceland.

SHERLOCK HOLMES - solid blockbuster fun, but what's with Adler?

I have read much of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon, but was never as taken with it, qua detective fiction, as I was with Agatha Christie. The reason being that Conan Doyle did not play fair. His Victorian detective always solved crimes by means of arcane knowledge that only he could possess - the taste of a particular type of wax used by just one candle-manufacturer in Brittany. As a consequence, the clever reader cannot solve a Conan Doyle mystery in the same way that he can use pure logic and close observation to solve an Agatha Christie novel. So, I read Conan Doyle, as most schoolchildren do, for that sense of Britain at the height of imperial glory but also at the depths of urban degradation - and for that wonderfully subversive idea that Holmes was a bit of a bastard, possibly homo-erotically attached to his sidekick Dr Watson, and addicted to cocaine.

I would suggest that Guy Ritchie's new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes also works best as a mood piece, interspersed by some rather spectacular stunts. His London is out of Tim Burton's SWEENEY TODD - all smoke-filled narrow streets and filthy docks contrasted with the opulent luxury of parliament, Mayfair hotels, and quasi-Masonic lodges. The production design is simply marvellous and makes good use of what is left of Victorian Britain in Manchester and London (from what I could tell). Ritchie also finally finds a suitable object for his obsession with posh chaps bruising with the chavs. He amps up Holmes' boxing, drug-taking and general down-and-dirtiness. Holmes is happy chatting with the local bobby, Clarkie, or with a grimy looking trawlerman. He is altogether more uncomfortable dining in a genteel restaurant.

As an action film, SHERLOCK HOLMES works well too. Ritchie gives us some marvellous stunts that truly make use of the Thames. There are three action set-pieces: one sees a ship slipped off its moorings during a fight between Holmes and a French giant; the second sees Watson set off a string of explosions at a riverside factory; and the final act confrontation between Holmes and his adversary, Lord Blackwood, takes places atop an as-yet-unfinished Tower Bridge. I would have happily paid the price of admission just to see the imagined Victorian vista from the top of that bridge.

Even better than as a mood piece and as an action film, SHERLOCK HOLMES works best as a "bromance" in the manner of all the best action/detective flicks. Robert Downey Junior and Jude Law, as Holmes and Watson respectively, utterly convinced me of their fondness for each other. With such a high-stakes and frankly ludicrous plot swirling about them, it was the credibility of their relationship that anchored the film. I loved their bickering; Holmes' resentment of Watson's new fiancée; and their genuine affection. We truly believe that, as in the books, Watson has brought Holmes back to the edges of respectable society. We also believe, in the first of a few annoying retcons, that Holmes keeps Watson's addiction to gambling in check. When all the explosions were over, I loved the scenes between these two, and I'll be watching the next film for those.

So all in all, I had a rather good time with SHERLOCK HOLMES as a beautifully rendered, action blockbuster, centred around a charismatic relationship between Holmes and Watson. Sure the plot was insane - Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) wants to use black magic to rule the world! But it does at least do that typical Holmes thing where something that seems supernatural can be explained with good old fashioned science. I know that Ritchie has exaggerated Holmes' bruiser antics in the manner of his Mockney flicks, but hey, what's life without a little indulgence? And, it finally looks like Ritchie has found a good excuse to use his slo-mo fight scene style!

That is not to say that there isn't a problem with this film. And that problem is the retconned introduction of Irene Adler - a love interest for Holmes. Anyone with any knowledge of the books will know that this is just plain wrong. But, producers aiming for a target demographic of horny teenage boys will have their way so it looks like we're saddled with her. Ritchie just doesn't do female characters. He doesn't know how to create a well-rounded, interesting woman on screen. And Rachel McAdams' Irene Adler is a victim of this. The concept of the character, nowhere in the books, is a good one - to have a criminal mastermind who has gotten under Holmes' skin. But for a woman to have married as many times as Adler and to have been up to as much crime, she would need to be older - nearer to Holmes' age. I would have loved to see Helen McCrory in this role. But more to the point, Adler was utterly redundant in this flick, except as a nod to the teenage male audience, and in helping to set up the second film. I mean, seriously, imagine a film without Adler. It would've been twenty minutes shorter and the better for it. So for the sequel, I'm hoping that McAdams will be booted, just like that awful Katie Holmes from BATMAN BEGINS, and replaced by someone older and frankly, better at acting. I'm also hoping the scriptwriters give her more to do.

SHERLOCK HOLMES is on release in the USA, UK, Bahrain, Croatia, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Malaysia, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Latvia, Switzerland, Australia, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Indonesia, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Mexico, Romania and Sweden. It opens next weekend in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Brazil and Estonia. It opens on January 14th in Argentina, Greece, Spain, and Turkey. It opens on January 22nd in Finland; on January 28th in Germany and Switzerland; on February 3rd in France and on March 12th in Japan.

THE TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE – Intelligent, Romantic, Tragic

I liked the TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE. It made me cry, and not in a way that made me feel violated and manipulated like TITANIC or DEVDAS. And it made me think, not only about the causal paradoxes that are inherent to time-travel movies – but also about the unique ethical dilemmas the plot brings up.

Ultimately though, the best thing about TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE is that it doesn’t rotate around the science-fiction aspect of time travel, or about any of the ethical issues it raises – it’s just a good, old-fashioned love story: soft; kind; tragic. The time travel is an interesting twist – it makes a more complex and thought provoking plot possible – it means that, unlike other romances, you can still be thinking about it the day after.

I’ve never read the book, and it’s possible that it doesn’t do it justice, few films do. I would certainly have liked some of the issues explored further. Was the relationship genuinely fidelitous around the conception of the couple’s child? Was the hero’s decision prior to that conception justified? Was the hero cruel or kind at the end? I would imagine the book looks at these in some more detail.

But I’m nitpicking. Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams are convincing in the main roles – the movie is well shot and directed – the screenplay has appropriate depth and feeling. It was funny, happy, sad and thought provoking – and while it won’t be everybody’s cup of tea (I can see young male action-movie-fans balking at this one) - it proved an excellent couples movie and a poignant way of spending an afternoon with Mrs Plainview.

Fundamentally a solid, intelligent romantic drama: highly recommended to all fans of the genre.

THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE is on release in the UK, USA, Canada, Iceland, the Philippines and Mexico. It opens in September in Greece, Singapore, the Czech Republic, Germany, Argentina, Hong Kong and Vietnam. It opens in October in Sweden, Russia and Estonia. It opens in November in Australia, Italy and France. It opens in December in New Zealand and on February 25th 2010 in Portugal.

STATE OF PLAY - derivative, badly made, dull political thriller

I love political thrillers, and have liked the previous work of the writers behind STATE OF PLAY - Billy Ray (FLIGHTPLAN), Matthew Michael Carnahan (LIONS FOR LAMBS), and Tony Gilroy (DUPLICITY, MICHAEL CLAYTON,THE BOURNE MOVIES & THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE). Unfortunately, these collective talents have turned in a script that, if one were being kind, might be accused of excessive nods to genre tropes, and if one were honest, would be accused of being derivative, lazy and predictable.

Russell Crowe plays an investigative journalist called Cal McAffry, who works on a Washington Post-style paper. We know he's a maverick reporter because, in lazy movie-shorthand, he's overweight, he needs a haircut and shower, his desk is a mess and he's mean to a newbie blogger, Della Fry, played by Rachel McAdams. He has a ballsy, fearless, old school, harrassed editor - is there ever any other type? - played by Helen Mirren. We know she's got balls of steel because she swears a lot. Then again, as soon as the cub reporter starts whimpering because she's being demoted, the apparently hard-nosed editor caves in. Where's the subtle power of Ben Bradlee is ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN - a movie that STATE OF PLAY overtly aspires to be? Cal McAffry has a friend who is a US Senator, Stephen Collins, crusading against the military-industrial complex, as represented by a Blackwater style company called Pointcorp. We know he's serious, earnest and a politician because he has a square jaw and bags under his eyes. His wooden acting may also be a marker of the essential superficiality of the political class, if we were still being generous. Cal and Stephen both dated a woman in college who Stephen later married, and cheated on with an intern who has since been found murdered. The wife is played by an age-appropriate delivery device - Robin Wright Penn - the intern is played by a red-head so we'll be able to pick her out easily in the CCTV footage.

From all this information, and given that I've told you that the writers are in awe of the great paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s, you should be able to piece together the plot. The politician is implicated in death of his young lover. Both were investigating multi-billion dollar government contracts. Could it be that greedy capitalist bastards did it? The movie is very much a standard-issue jigsaw puzzle. I knew whodunnit because I'd seen the infinitely superior British TV serial on which this movie is based. Doctor007 knew whodunnit about thirty minutes in because he has a brain and he's seen enough films like it.

Apart from the predictability and laziness of the plot and characterisations, I was deeply disappointed by the casting decisions and the production values. Russell Crowe, Robin Wright Penn and Ben Affleck are meant to be college contemporaries but Crowe looks a decade older than Affleck. I was sad to see the role of Dominic Foy cut down so much (although Jason Bateman was rather good in the role) and I was sad to see Ben Affleck's role become more two-dimensional. Worst of all, there was a lot of sloppy tech stuff that pulled me out of the film. Look out for some particularly ham-fisted photo-shopped pictures of Senator Affleck as an Iraqi war soldier. My god-daughter could do a more believable job of cutting and pasting a photo of one man's head onto another man's body. 

All in all, this movie is a cheap, serviceable thriller at best, and a pretentious, dull, derivative thriller at worst. Avoid.

STATE OF PLAY is on release in Canada, Iceland, Spain, Turkey, the USA and the UK. It opens in Egypt, Greece, Italy, South Korea, the UAE, Finland, Norway and Sweden next week. It opens on May 22nd in Japan and on May 29th in Australia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, New Zealand, Russia, Bulgaria, Denmark, Lithuania, Mexico and Romania. It opens on June 5th in Estonia; on June 12th in Singapore and Brazil; on June 18th in Argentina, Chile, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal; on June 24th in France and on July 1st in Belgium.

SPOILER: Also, did anyone else find it a tad disappointing to have a movie aim at indicting the military-industrial complex but end up as a movie motivated by sexual jealousy?

THE WEDDING CRASHERS - 50% mediocre frat-pack comedy, 50% damp squib chick flick

I really tried to like THE WEDDING CRASHERS. I even watched it a second time on DVD just to give it another chance. I reckon Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are some of the funniest actors working today. In fact, Owen Wilson's role in the fantastic romantic comedy THE WENDELL BAKER STORY helped push it into my movie pantheon. So it saddens me to say that this movie is a real let-down. Not a real stinker, just very very mediocre. Let me break it down for you. The first half is a weak frat-boy comedy. Vaughn and Wilson play two guys who crash weddings to pick up ch*cks. The jokes are okay but not laugh-out loud funny - certainly not as good as anything in OLD SCHOOL. Then, about half way through, the movie loses its nerve and switches into a super-cliche love story. Unfortunately, having attempted to create comedy caricatures for the previous 45 minutes, it is hard to empathise with the main characters when they go into the "love story" phase of the film. Eventually the movie just runs out of steam and not even a cameo from Will Ferrell can save it. Worse still, the movie commits the cardinal sin of hiring the Don that is Christopher Walken and then giving him absolutely nothing to do. All in all, having spent forty million dollars, all the producers have done is guarantee the brief popularity of the phrase "ERRONEOUS!"

THE WEDDING CRASHERS is now available on region 1 and region 2 DVD, but seriously, just rent OLD SCHOOL instead.

THE FAMILY STONE - great cast, shame about the script

THE FAMILY STONE is a film that is less than the sum of its parts. Despite having a great cast and moments of compelling drama and kooky comedy, it never manages to combine these elements into a coherent and involving whole. The movie is an out-and-out sentimental Christmas family movie, that has ambitions beyond its stature. But first, let's start with the comedy set-up. Dermot Mulroney plays a stand-up guy who comes from the most politically correct family on the face of the planet. Mama Stone, played by the luminous Diane Keaton, has a whole bunch of kids, including a deaf gay son who is dating a coloured guy; a stoner son who edits documentary film (Luke Wilson); the aforementioned stand-up guy; a pregnant "rock of the family" daughter; and another kooky irritable daughter played by Rachel McAdams. On the Christmas in question Dermot Mulroney brings home his uptight Wall Street girlfriend played by Sarah Jessica Parker. The family - who pride themselves on being non-judgmental, liberal, anything-goes people - immediately turn on her. They are judgmental and mean, forcing her to flee to the local motel and call her sister as back up. The kid sister, played by Claire Danes, fits in fine, of course, creating even more tension. The film plays out from here in a fairly predictable manner. Opposites attract, pot saves the day, and by the end of the movie no real lessons have been learned. People are still as judgmental. For me, the real failing of the movie is its inability to handle the marked changes in tone of the dramatic and comedic moments. We go through scenes where the Sarah Jessica Parker character really bares her soul and her insecurities. To SJP's credit, I really felt for her. And then, a blink of an eye later, we are meant to laugh at slapstick comedy which includes, I kid you not, people slipping up on spilt pudding. Some films can get away with this change of mood and are the stronger for it. But here, it simply feels clumsy. So, all in all, a deeply disappointing movie. What a waste of a great cast!

THE FAMILY STONE went on release in the UK, US, France and Germany on the 15th December 2005. It goes on release in France on the 28th December 2005.

RED EYE - thrills and spills at thirty thousand feet

RED EYE is a taught thriller that provides the requisite gasps of horror, chases, fights and finally a schmaltzy ending. It doesn't tinker with the genre, or have pretensions beyond its basic mission, which is to hook us into a scary story, and watch it play out amidst an atmosphere of escalating tension. The set up is that Lisa Reisert is the manager of a hotel in Miami where an important US politician is going to stay. Nasty terrorists want him moved to a specific suite wherein it will be easier to assassinate him. To this end, they kidnap her father and, through their plant in the airplane seat next to her, force her to call her hotel and have the VIP guest moved. A large part of the movie takes place in the confines of the plane, and adds to the claustrophobia and rising fear at the limited options available to our heroine. But what really makes this film special is the superlative acting. The heroine is played by Rachel McAdams. She has been great in a bunch of mediocre movies, and I can't wait to see her get her teeth into a meatier role. The charming young man on the plane is played by Cillian Murphy - an Irish actor of great talent - notably in 28 Days Later, Batman Begins and the forthcoming Breakfast on Pluto. Finally, we have heavyweight Brian Cox in a brief part as Lisa's dad. I really can't fault RED EYE. At under an hour and a half it is a perfectly crafted thriller. It just goes to show that in this age of spoofs, post-modern ironies and overly worked editing, if you stick to the basics you can still turn out a great movie.

RED EYE went on release in the US in August and goes on release in the UK today. It hits Germany and Austria next week, and reaches France on October 26th 2006.