April, New Titles, 'Harry Potter 8.1', 'Tron Legacy', 'Megamind'

For over a decade, Disney’s ‘Tron’ was the red-headed stepchild of ’80s genre movies, seen as a blatant attempt to cash in on the arcade craze, a film bursting with style but lacking in substance. But as times changed, ‘Tron’ was re-evaluated: arcade culture was now fashionably retro, and as our world became increasingly digitised, the film’s ideas of virtual reality and complex computerised systems became oddly prescient. It also didn’t hurt that this coincided with Jeff Bridge's rise from dependable leading man to countercultural icon.

Even so, the announcement two years ago that Disney was beginning work on a sequel seemed optimistic in the extreme: not only would this be the longest-gestating franchise attempt in cinema history, but were there really enough retro-nerds around to make the film a genuine commercial prospect? Now, thanks to a geek-targeted marketing campaign of staggering intensity, ‘Tron: Legacy’ is one of the most anticipated multiplex releases of the season. But can the film live up to the slavish hype?

The answer is… sort of.

And then came Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, Part 1

Anyone who complained that the previous episode in the ‘Harry Potter’ saga felt too much like scene-setting for the final showdown will be equally disappointed with ‘Deathly Hallows Part 1’. A film with no beginning and no end but a whole lot of expository middle, this is the least satisfying instalment in the series since Chris Columbus folded up his director’s chair.

Bill Nighy's dour, dandified Minister of Magic sets the tone with a barbed speech bemoaning the state of the magical nation: murders, disappearances and raids are becoming commonplace and no one, it seems, is safe. Least of all our bespectacled hero, who bids farewell to the suburbia of his youth before being whisked away in the film’s only outright action sequence, a dizzying high-speed flying-bike chase through the Dartford tunnel.

Megamind

A steady flow of superhero-movie conventions are given the wink-wink treatment in this hyperactive Dreamworks animation about Megamind, a blue, bulbous-headed scoundrel, voiced by Will Ferrell, who plunges into depression when he unexpectedly kills his rival, Metro Man (voiced by Brad Pitt), and finds himself short of anyone to foil his schemes. At a low ebb (and holding a torch for feisty, Jean Seberg-a-like reporter Roxanne Ritchi, voiced by Tina Fey) he entertains the notion of giving up evil altogether.

If this sounds a little like the recent ‘Despicable Me’, that’s because it rolls with a similar idea, albeit employing a more realistic animation style and a strain of reference-heavy humour aimed at a slightly more mature audience. But the film also pinches a few pages out of the ‘Kick-Ass’ rule book, notably in the way it dismantles the archetypal ‘masked crusader’ and delights in revealing the mundane chores of life as a full-time master of chaos: those jumbo-collared leather capes don’t just stitch themselves, you know.

Other new stuff

Criterion's 'Sweet Smell Of Success'

Criterion's 'Topsy Turvy'

Criterion's 'Senso'

Criterion's 'Still Walking'

Blood Out

An Ordinary Execution

April, New Titles, 'Catfish', 'I Love You Phillip Morris', 'Red'

'Catfish'

In late 2007, filmmakers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost sensed a story unfolding as they began to film the life of Ariel's brother.. Riveting documentary about nerdy New York artsy hipster who Facebook-friends a gifted 6 year old rural painter in upstate Michigan and falls for her 19 year old sister Megan. His brother is filming the entire affair as it develops online, and they take a roadtrip, far from their metropolitan comfort-zone, to meet the family at last...

See the finished documentary that started so many arguments among old friends about whether it was a set up or not. (Clearly not, surely? - Ed.)

Other titles

Red

Voyage Of The Dawn Treader

Lemmy

Wild Target

Another Year

Certified Copy

The Maid

Peepli Live

Ivul

Get Low

Treme

The Magician (Criterion)

House (Criterion)

This Way Of Life

Wagner And Me

I Love You Phillip Morris

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)