I went into Death Wish expecting a laugh a minute, but in that respect, I was disappointed. For all its faults, the movie was never meant to be a joke. It’s far too earnest, and it even tries to have a little bit of heart. The story arc follows a path so direct it could [...]

Let’s get on thing out of the way: I can’t imagine a much better adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novel Northern Lights. The Golden Compass has plenty of flaws, but they’re the flaws of Pullman’s clever, imaginative but often nonsensical book, and while Weitz could be criticized for being too faithful to source material which was bound to be nigh-impossible to translate, that criticism seems unfair. Weitz was always going to be between a rock and a hard place.

It’s not just that The Assassination of Jesse James is slow; it’s that it’s obstructively slow, in a way that serves no purpose except to make Dominik look terribly smart and artistic. It plods from one gorgeous, pointless set-piece to another, saying little, and worse giving no insight into a character that has become a cliché over the years, namely that of James himself.

Anderson seems increasingly happy to wrap a group of devoted fans around himself … and which group you fall into depends on whether or not you get the joke. But at least with his previous films there was a joke to get. If there’s one in The Darjeeling Limited then either I missed it completely or (my personal theory) it just wasn’t very funny. Of course that criticism only holds up if you choose to think of it as a comedy, and often it’s hard to tell.

An hour into Brick Lane I was all set to hate it. It seemed to be trying to sell me a brand of moral that I associate more with Disney films, where the most important thing in life is to be true to yourself, as long as being true to yourself means being white and middle class, or if you’re not, behaving like you are. But – though I’m still not certain there isn’t some element of truth in that – it recovers so drastically and so effectively in its last half hour that it’s hard to care.

Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s 30 Days of Night did a lot to revitalize horror comics, largely thanks to a great and simple premise – a tiny town in the farthest reaches of Alaska is besieged by vampires through the length of a single month-long night. As anyone who remembers my review of odd Swedish chiller Frostbiten a few months back will know, I’ve been looking forward to this film adaptation for quite a while. So if you detect a note of crushing disappointment in the rest of the review then you know why.

Apparently Cate Blanchett was always on board with the idea of a second film, and the only reason for the considerable wait was her insistence on being a suitable age to play the Elizabeth of the script. It’s a nice idea, scuppered slightly by the fact that Blanchett is in her thirties, while Elizabeth was in her fifties when the events of the film occurred. Unfortunately for anyone who worries about such things, this level of inaccuracy is more the rule than the exception.

There are moments aplenty when Stardust looks to be losing its way: every time a celebrity pops up for a needless cameo, every time dodgy CGI rears its ugly head, every time director Vaughan sends his camera sweeping off up a mountain or into space for no obviously good reason … yet, for every moment that’s crass or out of place, there are three that are charmingly, perfectly in keeping with the source material and the milieu that Gaiman draws from.

Following in the wake of Syriana, Babel, and A Might Heart comes yet another dissection of US foreign policy and the ‘War on Terror’. In an unnamed South African country, a suicide bombing targeting the local interrogator sparks off unexpected attention from the CIA when one of their agents is caught in the blast. In the rush to find a suspect, Egyptian-born US resident Anwar El-Ibrahimi is arrested when his plane lands in Washington DC, and immediately shipped to overseas detention under the controversial ‘extraordinary rendition’ law that gives the film its title.

We’ve had talking fish, bugs, ants, mammoths, hedgehogs, lions, sharks, cats, bears, pigeons, and more bloody penguins than you could shake a stick at, so we do we really need culinary rodents? Well, as it turns out, yeah, we do.