New Titles, March, 'Machete', 'Due Date', 'Saw Final Chapter'

With its Mexican anti-hero Machete (Danny Trejo), its choreographed violence and its crude sexism, this gleefully excessive pastiche of an exploitation picture delivers everything promised by its own faux trailer. That trailer was part of the fake ‘Coming Attractions’ section of co-director Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Grindhouse’ double-bill; this indulgent fanboy vanity project is that cheapskate drive-in movie made real. So if your idea of a nostalgic good time is a nonstop action-movie featuring a tight-lipped Mexican day-worker (Trejo) turned vigilante killer, a sleazeball Mexican drug lord (Steven Seagal), an opportunist Texan politician (Robert De Niro), his corrupt behind-the-scenes fixer (Jeff Fahey), a racist businessman (Don Johnson), a chilli-hot female immigration agent (Jessica Alba), a fiery freedom fighter who runs a taco stand (Michelle Rodriguez), a gun-toting padre (Cheech Marin) and an avenging angel in a nun’s outfit (Lindsay Lohan), this will toast your enchilada. The problem is that the overcooked plot tries to shoehorn in a political subtext about illegal ‘wetbacks’ and right-wing politicians and businessmen who exploit the racist backlash they incite. Other new stuff I'm Still Here A Town Called Panic Police, Adjective Frontier Blues White Material Illusionist, The Saw: The Final Chapter Machete Jackass 3 I Spit On Your Grave City Island My Soul To Take Unthinkable Skyline Switch, The Gainsbourg Loved Ones, The Due Date

March, New Titles, The Town, The American, A Prophet

The Town

This is a slick but inert cops ’n’ robbers yarn from Ben Affleck (with his director-writer-star hat on) that feels all but indistinguishable from the thousands of similar films that have blazed a trail before it. Sporting a neat crew cut, a sweat-glazed six-pack and a nice line in ‘Boston’-emblazoned tracksuit tops, Affleck is Doug, the conflicted leader of a rubber-masked wrecking crew who take down banks on behalf of kingpin (and florist!) Pete Postlethwaite. Doug wants to take his loot and make a break for Florida, a desire fuelled by his relationship with Rebecca Hall's kindly soup-kitchen mama. But Pete’s got dirt on him, and even though the Feds are closing in (led by ‘Mad Men’ heartthrob John Hamm), the team keep breaking banks, leading to a minutely orchestrated take-down of the Boston Red Sox’s home ground.

The American

Anton Corbijn showed with ‘Control’, his film about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, that, as a photographer-turned-filmmaker, he’s as happy to let his camera linger on a troubled character’s good-looking face or to indulge a moody landscape as to tell a story through traditional means. He pushes that approach to the limit with this attractive, quiet, passive study of Jack (George Clooney in his most downbeat role ever), the American in question, whom we first meet on the snow flats of Sweden and quickly learn has lethal potential despite his calm exterior and love of butterflies.

A Prophet

Malik, a French-Arab convict who enters a concrete-and-steel hell to serve a sentence of six years (so we know he can’t have done anything too dreadful) tries to keep his head down, but this isn’t that sort of place. The ruling bully boys are the Corsican inmates, led by ageing but vicious César (Niels Arestrup), who forces Malik to kill another inmate in a very successful scene that’s one of the most claustrophobic and disturbing episodes I’ve seen in a long while. From here, Malik is César’s vassal, committed to working for him on the inside and, later, using a series of day-release excursions to represent his criminal interests on the outside. But Malik is a clever individualist.

Also out this week

Summer Coda

Night Of The Hunter

Cronos

Hot Millions

Darjeeling Limited (Criterion)

Modern Times (Criterion)

Freedom's Fury

March, New Titles, 'Social Network', 'Paranormal Activity 2'

The Social Network

Director David Fincher (‘Fight Club’, ‘Zodiac’) and writer Aaron Sorkin (‘The West Wing’, ‘A Few Good Men’) have made a mischievous, scaremongering tale about the origins of Facebook that combines the talky rigour of Sorkin’s writing with the spooky crispness of Fincher’s imagery.

It launches us headfirst into an intense exchange between two students, Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara), sitting in a Harvard bar, opposite each other, nursing beers. You can hardly call it a conversation. She speaks smartly and normally; he avoids eye- contact, talks through her, responds selectively and, when the chat doesn’t go his way, needily asks: ‘Is this real?’

It’s a brilliant scene: on its own because it says so much about the filmmakers’ spin on Facebook founder Zuckerberg and the limits of interaction that his invention seeks to plaster over, and in the context of the work as a whole because it tells us straightaway that this is a film about a creeping void between people, whether or not they’re lovers, enemies, business partners or Facebook friends. It’s a savvy prologue to a story of how a perfect storm of social inadequacy, Ivy League exclusivity and computing genius inspired a global phenomenon.

Other new titles :

Stone
Resident Evil: Afterlife
Buried
Brotherhood
Messenger, The
14 Blades
Let Me In
Social Network Blu Ray
Paranormal Activity 2

February, New Titles, 'America Lost And Found: the BBS story'

Like the rest of America, Hollywood was ripe for revolution in the late sixties. Cinema attendance was down; what had once worked seemed broken. Enter Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Steve Blauner, who knew that what Hollywood needed was new audiences—namely, young people—and that meant cultivating new talent and new ideas. Fueled by money from their invention of the superstar TV pop group the Monkees, they set off on a film-industry journey that would lead them to form BBS Productions, a company that was also a community. The innovative films produced by this team between 1968 and 1972 are collected in this box set—works that now range from the iconic (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show) to the acclaimed (The King of Marvin Gardens) to the obscure (Head; Drive, He Said; A Safe Place), all created within the studio system but lifted right out of the countercultural id.

Other titles new this week: Girl Who Played With Fire, The (2010)

Tangle Season 2 (2010)

Summer Of The Seventeenth Dol (1997)

Dear Wendy (2006)

Flipped (2010)

Down Terrace (2009)

Legend Of The Guardians The Owls Of Ha'hoole(2010)

Going The Distance (2010)

Tudors, The Season Four (2010)

Head (America Lost And Found) (1968)

Easy Rider (America Lost And Found) (1969)

Five Easy Pieces (America Lost And Found) (1970)

Drive, He Said/A Safe Place (America Lostandfound)

Last Picture Show, The (1971)

King Of Marvin Gardens, The (1971)

Red Shoes, The (1948) Blu-Ray

Deadly Impact (2008)

Crazy On The Outside (2010)

Experiment, The (2010)

Tudors, The Season 3 (2009)

January, New Titles, 'Boy', 'Kids Are All Right'

'The Kids Are All Right'

It’s the warm, wise humour of ‘The Kids Are All Right’ that distinguishes it from the pack, even more so than American writer and director Lisa Cholodenko's decision to make a funny, mainstream drama about a pair of lesbian mothers and what happens when their two teenage children invite the anonymous sperm donor who is their biological father into their comfortable, progressive lives in sunny, suburban California.

'Boy' (New Zealand, 2010)

'Charlie St Cloud' (USA, 2010)

'Sorceror's Apprentice' (USA, 2010)

'Milk Of Sorrow' (Peru, 2010)

'Me Too' (Spain, 2010)

'Despicable Me' (USA, 2010)

'Four Lions' (UK, 2010)

'Exit Through The Gift Shop' (UK, 2010)

'Other Guys, The' (USA, 2010)

'Eat Pray Love' (USA, 2010)

'Last Airbender' (USA, 2010)

New Year, New Titles, 'The Ghost Writer'

We’re so used to amped-up white-knucklers that the controlled approach of a filmmaker like Roman Polanski is immediately seductive. The director responsible for such mainstays as Chinatown andRosemary’s Baby (and of course his own real-life news cycle) turns Robert Harris’s political potboiler involving a ghostwriter (McGregor), a former British prime minister (Brosnan) and an isolated island home into a slow-burn near-masterpiece.

Other stuff just in...

A CHRISTMAS CAROL (2010)

BLISS (2007)

CITY ISLAND (2010)

CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION, THE (2010)

DESPICABLE ME (2010)

DIARY OF A WIMPY KID (2010)

DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED, THE (2010)

DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975) BLU-RAY

EAT PRAY LOVE (2010)

EXPENDABLES, THE (2010)

FROM PARIS WITH LOVE (2010)

GHOST WRITER, THE (2010)

GREAT OUTDOORS, THE (2006)

GROWN UPS (2010)

INCEPTION (2010)

KILLER INSIDE ME, THE (2010)

LAST AIRBENDER, THE (2010)

MARMADUKE (2010)

MIDDLE OF NOWHERE (2010)

MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE (2010)

ONDINE (2010)

PAPER MAN (2009)

PIRANHA (2010)

PLEASE GIVE (2010)

SPARTACUS BLOOD AND SAND (2010) DISCS 1 + 2

SPARTACUS BLOOD AND SAND (2010) DISCS 3 + 4

WINTER'S BONE (2010)

YES MEN FIX THE WORLD, THE (2009)

New Titles, December, 'Tomorrow When the War Began', 'South Solitary', 'Splice'

'Tomorrow When The War Began'

When their country is invaded and their families are taken, eight unlikely high school teenagers band together to fight.

7.5/10 on imdb

'South Solitary'

Meredith is a 35 year-old unmarried woman who arrives at a remote lighthouse island 1928 with her uncle the new head keeper

5.7/10 on imdb

'Splice'

Two young rebellious scientists are told by their employers to halt groundbreaking work that has seen them produce new creatures with medical benefits by splicing together multiple organisms' DNA. They decide to secretly continue their work, but this time splicing in human DNA.

6.2/10 on imdb

'Family Guy It's A Trap'

A Family Guy spoof on 'Return of the Jedi'