27 Dresses, Chichester Cineworld (12A) (110 mins).
Forever the bridesmaid, Jane is seemingly happy to live her life (and get her kicks) through others in this pleasant if rather tepid romcom.
It’s enjoyable enough at the time and self-effacing enough to leave very little trace on your memory once the credits have rolled - except for some gorgeous shots of New York’s Central Park (which is probably not quite the point).
27 Dresses is the follow-up movie for Katherine Heigl who was on sparkling form in the dare-to-be-different romcom Knocked Up.
But sadly this is a movie which sees her move back into the mainstream.
This time she’s Jane, a woman who manages, bizarrely, to be both romantic and selfless, stacking up the bridesmaids dresses in her cupboard without ever getting near the altar herself.
She’s hopelessly in love with her boss (Edward Burns), but he’s quickly snapped up by the kind of woman he deserves, Jane’s lying, shallow sister Tess - a ghastly character made all the worse by Malin Akerman delivering her entirely as a Cameron Diaz impersonation.
Meanwhile, cynical, newspaper wedding writer Kevin slips onto the scene.
James Marsden is another performer with a far better movie immediately behind him, in this case Enchanted. But he keeps 27 Dresses moving along nicely with his rough charm.
And together he and Jane move through that age-old romcom paradigm - repulsion followed by attraction followed by brief bliss leading to misunderstanding (with attendant sulks) rounded off by reconciliation (based on a truer self and mutual understanding).
Yep, we’ve all been here before. But it’s all sufficiently engaging to make it just about worth the watch.
Phil Hewitt.
Vantage Point, Chichester Cineworld, (12A) (90 mins).
The truth, it seems, is the sum of all our perspectives, but even then it’s a pretty murky affair, as director Pete Travis shows in this effective thriller.
Soon after arriving in Spain for a global summit on the war against terror, US President Ashton (William Hurt) is shot – an incident we see six times over, each time from a different standpoint.
Each new version solves some questions but poses more as the plot thickens to the point where nothing is what it seems.
And in each successive version, Travis contrives a cliffhanger, repeatedly taking us to the brink and leaving us there until the next vantage point catches up with the last.
It all makes for a strikingly original film which is gripping from the off, though in one important respect it’s arguable whether Travis plays fair.
Secret service agent Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid) sees something early on which sets him on the right track – but it’s not until much later that we get to share his insight.
Another weakness perhaps is that almost inevitably the film can’t sustain the tension it’s ratcheted up so efficiently.
The final sequence is a white knuckle-ride car chase in which Barnes manages to avoid all other traffic and passing pedestrians despite being shot at and chatting on his phone.
When the end comes, pretty much everyone gets a bullet – which is again disappointing, particularly as it’s not particularly clear by then who’s done what to whom and why.
The frantic ending – in which all the baddies and some of the goodies start to look confusingly like each other – lets it down a little.
But the basic idea, which sees apparent fact as a layering of perspectives, is an interesting one which Travis pulls off well.
Phil Hewitt
10,000 BC, Chichester Cineworld, (12A) (109 mins).
One minute he’s stalking stampeding mammoths. The next he’s trekking through snowy wastes and tropical jungles to get his girl back.
It’s all go for D'Leh (Steven Strait) in this bonkers epic which mangles history most entertainingly.
D'Leh is a member of the Nice But Scruffy tribe, most of whom are either killed or dragged off into slavery by the Really Rather Nasty tribe.
Among the captives is D'Leh’s sweetheart Evolet (Camilla Belle) - an abduction which launches him on his big adventure, stalking the kipnappers through all that the ancient world can throw at him.
For reasons best known to themselves, the Nasties think Evolet could usefully contribute to the building of the pyramids - which is where the mammoths come back in.
It all gets pretty mad and manic as a sham god is disrobed and the tusky beasts are prompted into yet another stampede
It goes without saying that the dialogue is rubbish, but then this was never going to be a film about the nuances of prehistoric conversation.
Instead it’s a big, bold and barmy epic with some great effects and enough momentum to keep you happy until... whatever it is that happens in the end.
I’ve no idea what that is. The film suddenly stopped. The static had apparently built up on the reel and knotted the film, bringing it to a premature halt.
Hardly life’s biggest disappointment. Once you’ve seen one provoked mammoth, you’ve probably seen them all.
But the film is fun nonetheless.
Phil Hewitt
The Accidental Husband, Chichester Cineworld, (12A) (91 mins).
Don’t you just hate - while secretly reading - those agony aunts/relationship gurus who think they’ve got it all sussed?
Emma Lloyd (Uma Thurman) is one such love expert in The Accidental Husband - and there’s a fair amount of fun in watching her come unstuck.
But the fun doesn’t go terribly much further than that in this tepid romcom.
Emma carelessly on the air, without knowing the circumstances, tells a girl to ditch her man, which she duly does.
The man in question Patrick (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) wants revenge - which he gets by falsifying computer records to make it seem that he’s actually married to Emma, so thwarting her own impending marriage.
Yes, it really is that contrived - but there are some minor laughs as Patrick consorts with the reluctant Emma, acting publicly in a way that soon flies in the face of all her prissy wisdom.
But the humour soon dries up, not least when - surprise, surprise - Patrick and Emma start to fall for each other.
In the background, Colin Firth is treading water as Emma’s fiance, turning in the kind of performance he does with his eyes closed - the deeply-decent, but deeply-dull stuffy Brit.
Uma Thurman doesn’t seem particularly at home in romcom, and all interest wanes long before the closing credits. Films don’t come slighter than this - a nice idea which falls well before the final hurdle.
But at only 91 minutes long, at least it’s not over long - and might even fit the bill if it’s blandly undemanding and slightly silly that you want.
Phil Hewitt
My Blueberry Nights, Chichester Cineworld (12A) (95 mins).
The whole notion of searching for yourself has always seemed a bit of a yawn - and so it seems again in My Blueberry Nights.
Elizabeth - or Beth or Lizzie as she variously calls herself - (Norah Jones) suffers heartbreak in New York, to which she reacts by heading off to Memphis and Las Vegas where she mixes with some pretty awful people before finding that she’s better off back in the Big Apple.
The film starts promisingly with mopey Elizabeth strolling into Jeremy’s New York cafe where they enjoy a kind of intimacy, two outsiders brought together by their respective personal tragedies.
But then Elizabeth gets itchy feet, chumming up successively with a maudlin cop, his floozy wife and then a lying, cheating gambler before finally realising which side her bread’s buttered.
The big problem is that beyond Elizabeth there’s little to link the film’s three locations, with the result that you feel like you’re watching a succession of inconclusive mini-films.
Jude Law has a certain charm, despite a dodgy accent, as the ex-pat Brit cafe owner; and Rachel Weisz does a mean turn as a boozy vamp.
But though Norah Jones does her best in the part, Elizabeth herself offers little to get interested in, a character defined solely it seems by her willingness to trust just about anyone - something the film seems to decide is a good thing even though it shows it isn’t.
Add to the mix a lot of symbolic nonsense around a potful of abandoned keys (never thrown out because that would shut the door forever, yawn, yawn), and you get an uninspiring hour and a half in the company of actors who ought to add up to more.
The ending is the best thing and redeems it to an extent, but not so much that it’s actually worth sitting through.
Phil Hewitt
Definitely Maybe, Chichester Cineworld, (112 mins) (12A)
The downside is that the film, like so many, is comfortably 20 minutes too long.
But the upside is the genuinely-intriguing premise which sets the whole thing up and keeps it rolling.
Divorcing Manhattan dad Will (Ryan Reynolds) is tackled by his ten-year-old daughter Maya (Abigail Breslin) about the life he led before he got wed.
His response is to tell her about the three great loves of his life - but for no particularly comprehensible reason, he decides to change the names and make Maya guess which of the women ends up as her mum.
The three are nicely contrasted - the cosy, comfy Emily (Elizabeth Banks), the kooky, nutty April (Isla Fisher) and the edgy, intellectual Summer (Rachel Weisz).
The story flashes back as their lives intertwine, the movie recreating Will’s move to New York as an idealistic young activist as part Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign.
He’s full of hopes, full of ambitions - but just can’t help bumping between the three.
It all sags a little towards the end before reviving for an excellent ending, but overall it’s absorbing, fun and nicely-involving.
Breslin overdoes the wise-beyond-her-years act and is mostly the kind of kid no one would want to have. And Weisz is occasionally fairly annoying with all those Kate Winslet mannerisms she’s acquired.
But otherwise, with its love puzzle element and its evocation of an idealist discovering the big city and all that goes with it, it’s got plenty of charm. 20 minutes shorter, and it would have been spot on.
Phil Hewitt.
Sweeney Todd, Chichester Cineworld, (18) (116 mins).
Gruesome, gothic and gripping, Sweeney Todd is the year’s first must-see film - a superb big-screen retelling of the Stephen Sondheim musical.
Dominating it, just as it should, is yet another terrific performance from Johnny Depp, the most chameleon of our stars turning up this time as the mild-mannered Victorian barber who turns demon killer after a lusty judge shatters his family.
Alan Rickman does villainy so well and is on fine form as the judge who has Benjamin Barker deported, just so he can get his hands on his wife.
When he returns, Barker is Sweeney Todd, a monster with only vengeance in his heart.
And that’s when he teams up with the besotted Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), a pie-shop owner who rejoices in selling the worst pies in London - and then finds a way of making them infinitely more disgusting.
Promising the closest shave you’ll ever have, Todd starts slitting throats, pulls the lever and dispatches the corpses to Mrs Lovett’s evil basement when they’re pulped into sausage meat.
And yet - in Bonham Carter’s brilliant characterisation - Mrs Lovett still somehow manages to suggest a heart of gold, especially in her dreams of a happy future.
The dreams break into technicolor - a sharp contrast to the gloomy, murky colours of the rest of the film, colours broken only by frequent gushes of blood.
Tales don’t come much more macabre than this, but director Timothy Burton instantly sucks you into his dark world - a world in which the songs work remarkably well.
Sondheim is a love-him-or-loathe-him type composer and lyricist, with music often far too jarring - but here it’s just right, the performers relishing the devilish cleverness of each and every one of the words.
Burton has memorably realised a nightmare in this film, with excellent support from Timothy Spall and Sacha Baron Cohen.
Phil Hewitt
Walk Hard - The Dewey Cox Story, Chichester Cineworld, (15) (96 mins).
The increasingly-depressing realisation which comes with this film is that here’s a movie which blew all its best bits in the trailer.
For weeks, the coming-soon sequence has been promising great things.
Sadly, now it’s here, the film isn’t much more than the padding between them.
But it’s by no means a film without its own kind of charm, a spoof biopic of a country star who breaks all the rules that icons are supposed to break.
After accidentally slicing his big brother in half, he finds solace in the blues and then adulation in country, winning the world’s hearts with his theme-tune promise to “walk hard” through life.
A teenage dad, he’s seduced by every drug going and by his strange liking for collecting exotic animals as we journey through the years.
The skill of the film is in the progression, from country to comeback, via peace and love, protest and punk, each little era cleverly sketched in.
But aside from the bits in the trailer, the film falls flat for the simple reason that it simply isn’t funny enough.
One particularly feeble scene sees Dewey (John C Reilly) meeting The Beatles in India - a scene which simply serves as a reminder of the benchmark by which all spoof rock biopics ought to be judged.
Walk Hard - The Dewey Cox Story simply isn’t in the same league as The Rutles, the great Beatles parody by Eric Idle and Neil Innes.
But let’s not be too hard on Dewey. He does at least offer one great scene - the Let’s Duet song dripping with all its hilarious innuendo.
And for that scene alone, the film’s probably worth watching. Just a shame that the trailer set all other expectations so high...
Phil Hewitt
Charlie Wilson's War, Chichester Cineworld, (15) (102 mins).
The fact that the Afghans beat off the invading Russians back in the 1980s comes down, it seems, to just one person - righteous playboy congressman Charlie Wilson.
This is one of those irritating based-on-truth tales that make you wish you knew more of the background, if only to know whether there is some kind of agenda here.
But maybe it’s best just to enjoy the story, a rollicking one which is well acted and well told.
Whilst sitting in a jacuzzi with a couple of strippers, Charlie Wilson finds his conscience pricked by a news report of the uneven struggle the Afghans are facing against the highly-equipped Russians.
The US authorities sympathise with the rebels but can’t support them openly - which is when Charlie starts to mastermind the world’s biggest covert operation, secretly getting the rebels the hardware that eventually drives the Russians out.
Wilson teams up with a born-again wealthy Commie-hating socialite
(Julia Roberts) and an embittered, angry, chip-on-the-shoulder CIA operative (Phillip Seymour Hoffman).
And it’s a powerful combination, with Tom Hanks on good form, delivering us a Wilson who is a charismatic, lovable rogue with his heart just about in the right place.
But it is Phillip Seymour Hoffman, never less than brilliant whatever he does, who steals the show with his gruff CIA man.
The film glosses over the fact that it all goes sour in the end, dwelling instead on Wilson as some kind of rebel hero of our time.
The US authorities honour Wilson, but it is the ringing endorsement from Pakistani President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq ('Charlie did it’) which sticks in the mind.
All of which simply serves to underline just how murky the whole thing is...
Phil Hewitt
PS I Love You, Chichester Cineworld (125 mins) (12A).
Heart-warming tale of how life must go on after your loved-one’s death or mawkish old twaddle?
PS I Love You is, sadly, mostly the latter, largely for those who like emotion mangled and manipulated beyond all recognition.
Holly (Hilary Swank) and Gerry (Gerard Butler) kick the film off with a blazing row - but only, it turns out, because they love each other so much.
Which is the point at which Gerry kicks the bucket, but not before meticulously planning a post-mortem final flourish, bombarding his widow with letters in which he gets her to reminisce, realise what she’s lost and finally move on.
All very decent of him, but I’m with her mother on this one - it’s also fairly cruel, a morbid way of spinning out her grief.
But more worryingly, it’s also a fairly morbid way of getting her to know and appreciate him once it’s all too late.
Bizarrely he arranges a little holiday for her in his native Ireland where even more bizarrely she meets his mum and dad for the first time - all of which, weirdest of all, prompts her to become the designer of the most ghastly-looking shoes you could ever imagine.
But at least she’s being herself and being creative, which is apparently what dead Gerry wanted all along - all of which leaves the big question hanging...
Why on earth couldn’t he get through to her in life in the way he manages to so easily in death?
It’s all beatuifully shot, especially in the chocolate-box Ireland scenes, and it’s all pleasingly acted. Swank looks great with that little tear ever ready to tumble.
But at the end of the day, Gerry’s undead stalking of his widow is just a little hard to take - all part of the self-indulgence which allows director Richard Lagravenese to stretch the film past the two-hour mark.
Half an hour shorter, and the film would have been considerably more digestible. As it is, it gives you an uncomfortable little inkling of the eternity that Gerry is now enjoying.
Phil Hewitt
Fred Claus, Chichester Cineworld, (PG) (116 mins).
Santa Claus, it seems, had a big brother - big bad brother corrupted by a life in little Nick’s nauseatingly-glowing shadow.
His tale is told in this painfully-long piece of festive schmaltz, a film which consistently looks great but seriously dips in the middle.
But thanks to a little bit of Stones in the soundtrack, it picks up towards the end to become a passably-entertaining addition to that great long line of instantly-forgettable festive fluff.
While Santa Claus (Paul Giamatti) is loving and giving, big brother Fred (Vince Vaughn) spends his time repossessing gifts, lying and generally being a right old Scrooge.
But when jail beckons, brother Nicholas - always a saint - bails him out on the condition he comes to the North Pole to learn to be a nice chap.
There is some ghastly ‘believe in yourself’ type-nonsense towards the end; and there is even a cynical, black orphan thrown into the mix to tug at the heart strings; but you’d have to be as miserable as Fred not to get a little bit drawn into the let’s-save-Christmas drama of the finale.
It’s all driven by the film’s star turn, a terrific Kevin Spacey as a mean-and-nasty accountant-type intent on shutting Santa down. A bit like Fred, he too, it seems, was a damaged child.
Fred goes off to Siblings Anonymous to lift the chip on his shoulder ? a particularly dull scene which could comfortably be jettisoned in the half-hour that seriously needs lopping.
Spacey, however, as the villainous Clyde Northcut, simply opts to wreck Christmas for everyone - a plan which brings everyone else together in the quest to save Santa’s job.
It’s certainly not a classic, but it’s nicely naff enough to help while away those hours until Santa Claus really does come down the chimney - without, let’s hope, his big brother.
Phil Hewitt
Beowulf, Chichester Cineworld (12A), (114 mins).
An ancient epic gets the very latest computer treatment in Robert Zemeckis’ gory, gripping version of Beowulf.
The result is a bit like watching Shrek characters rampaging through a very bloody computer game.
But it’s a mix which really works - save for one or two reservations.
Ray Winstone is certainly a movie hardman, but his voice is more East End gangster than epic hero, and he’s consistently the jarring note in this cartoon creation. You just don’t want to hear Beowulf announcing “I’m ‘ere to kill ya’ monstah”.
Fortunately the idealised, computer-generated looks he gets given are much more in keeping with the epic role - not that that fully explains the way he insists on getting his kit off before duffing up Grendel.
But that aside, it’s terrific stuff, pacy, involving and even moving, with the cartoon characters (except fortunately for Winstone)looking disarmingly like the actors that voice them (Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins etc etc).
More impressive still perhaps is Grendel, an ugly, ghastly, head-and-limb-ripping, slavering brute who still manages to be quite sweet when the chips are down. He’s horrifying but also human - for reasons the story makes clear.
And once he’s gone to meet his maker, his mummy takes over - a gorgeous seductress one moment, a terrifying dragon the next. The chase scene at the end is brilliantly done, the dragon rousing the warrior in a Beowulf who is long since emotionally dead.
Whatever the dragon throws at him, Beowulf is up for it, slashing away gruesomely with his sword and eventually glimpsing the beating heart he knows he must still (the 12A rating is a little generous).
Great stuff... if only it wasn’t for Ray Winstone’s East End voice. Cor blimey, guv’nor, heroes have gotta sound at least ah bit heroic too, ain’t they!
Phil Hewitt
Sleuth (15), Chichester Cineworld (88 mins).
For all its big names, Sleuth fails to sparkle, its cat and mouse games slowly seeming more tedious until death finally releases us all.
Perhaps it’s simply overloaded.
It stars Michael Caine and Jude Law; the original play is by Anthony Shaffer; the screenplay is by Harold Pinter; and the director is Kenneth Branagh.
All of which is probably just a bit too stellar. it was never likely to equal the sum of its parts. In the event, it adds up to considerably less.
Michael Caine is mega successful crime writer Andrew Wyke. Jude Law is the out-of-work actor Milo Tindle who is having an affair with his wife.
Tindle turns up on Wyke’s doorstep hoping to force him into agreeing to a divorce.
But Tindle gets more than he bargained for when Wyke offers him a pay-off involving a staged burglary. Wyke turns the screw to near-deadly effect; Tindle’s response is to do the same.
And so it goes on. And on. To ever less impact.
If you want to see a film which really does offer genuine, sexual, cat-and-mouse thrills while managing to be both chilling and gripping, dig out Hard Candy - a film which does brilliantly all that Sleuth tries and fails to do.
Beside it, Sleuth is a pale flop, two actors at less than top form grinding out pointless games - all viewed from daftly-tricksy angles.
Presumably the idea behind the strange camerawork and all the high-tech paraphernalia is to heighten the tension. It doesn’t. It simply distracts.
The small mercy is that this film isn’t long - though at times it seems it.
Phil Hewitt
Elizabeth - The Golden Age, Chichester Cineworld, (12A), (115 mins).
It’s difficult to find anyone with a good word to say for Elizabeth - The Golden Age. It’s difficult to see why.
It’s a sweeping historical epic, and it is impressive through and through.
Director Shekhar Kapur’s fresh instalment sees Cate Blanchett achieve maximum impact in her return to the screen as the Virgin Queen
The film probably rides roughshod over plenty of historical detail, and a radiant Liz cooing over Raleigh’s child when she was in reality by then an ageing old crone does sail close to the limit.
But there’s no denying the vast sweep of this film which goes from intimate detail to open warfare, wrapping you up and whipping you along in a cracking tale of betrayal, intrigue and all sorts of frustrated longings.
Blanchett is mesmerising as the pasty-faced monarch, a superbly-skilled performance which opens up all her fragilities and vulnerabilities while still giving us a queen capable of exhorting the troops to victory against a dastardly Armada.
The Spaniards are played a little too much like comic book villains, but there is nothing remotely one-dimensional about Blanchett as Elizabeth who gives a richly-nuanced portrayal of a decent woman in an impossible situation.
Clive Owen isn’t quite so persuasive as Sir Walter Raleigh – and in this he isn’t helped by having to trot out some of the film’s duffest lines.
But he leaves most of his usual woodenness behind him to protect Queen and country - all the while bedding the good Queen’s ward. Blanchett judges Elizabeth’s jealousy, anger and yearning to perfection.
Meanwhile, there’s intrigue all around, not least from Samantha Morton who goes to her death with dignity as Mary Queen of Scots.
Sumptuous costumes, excellent camerawork, memorable vista and great set pieces… It romps along, involving and enjoyable. Forget the odd slight silliness – and there’s nothing not to like.
Phil Hewitt.
Eastern Promises, Chichester Cineworld (Cert 18) (100 mins).
A bunch of deeply-unappealing people do increasingly-unappealing things to each other in this grim, revoltingly-violent gangland thriller.
Throats are slit, with no detail spared; bodies are prepped for easy disposal, with no finger tips intact; and no opportunity is missed to show blood gushing from somewhere or other.
For the most part - unless this is your kind of thing - you’ll find yourself wondering just why you’re bothering with such a stomach-turning succession of wanton acts of ghastly cruelty.
But slowly, very slowly, the film starts to grip; the tension starts to mount; and the whole thing leaves you with a satisfying little hint of redemption.
Naomi Watts is Anna, a decent, principled midwife who tries to trace the family of an anonymous Russian girl who dies in childbirth.
The clues are all there in a diary she leaves, a diary in Russian which Anna fairly obligingly takes for translation to the very family who have raped and abused the girl. Not surprisingly, the family, who dabble in all sorts of crime when they’re not throwing big Russian parties, want the diary back.
Will Anna back off?
Always in the background is Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), a chauffeur-cum-hitman who might just be something more. The family are just so ghastly that you wonder what he’s up to. A man of mystery, he’s got his own agenda – an agenda upset by all that’s happening to Anna.
And all the while, the violence is getting worse and worse. See this on an empty stomach unless you want to see your Weetabix again.
But the annoying thing is that you can’t just dismiss this film as a cheap little foray into gruesome thrills. Anna’s persistence, indeed her courage, and the enigma which is Nikolai ensure that David Cronenberg’s film is considerably more than an upended bottle of tomato sauce.
Phil Hewitt
Mr Brooks, Chichester Cineworld, (cert 18) (121 mins).
Marshall is a back-seat driver in the very worst sense in Bruce A Evans’ grim and gory thriller.
He’s always there in the back seat of the car, urging on to murder that seemingly-nice Mr Brooks, an apparent pillar of the community.
And boy, do they do it in style. Externalising the voice in Brooks’ head, Marshall is pushing on an open door when he pumps up Brooks’ blood lust.
Brooks – businessman of the year by day – by night is addicted to killing, and between them Brooks and Marshall, respectively Kevin Costner and William Hurt, are a hellish double act who find that three’s most definitely a crowd when ghastly photographer Smith (Dane Cook) decides to get in on the action.
Smith witnesses Brooks (and Marshall) doing his/their bloody business – and tries to use his knowledge to force them to let him join in the fun.
His mistake is to underestimate Brooks, buttoned up and sinister, and his nasty, naggy sidekick.
More of a threat to them is Demi Moore as the hard-nosed detective – though her part in the film is mostly the part when the silliness of a potentially-silly plot breaks through groaningly.
It’s good to see Costner and Moore back on the screen – two names from the past who remain as watchable as they ever were.
But Moore’s multi-millionairess, messily-divorcing, butt-kicking detective is a little hard to take – as is the other threat to Brooks, a daughter who is fast turning out to be a chip off the old block.
All in all, though, it’s entertaining stuff, even if it’s never quite as gripping as you’d like it to be. The double-crossing is just a touch predictable – and the little incident with the scissors right at the end is just off-the-end-of-the-scale revolting.
Phil Hewitt
3:10 To Yuma, Chichester Cineworld, (15), (122 mins).
You can tell the summer’s over. All of a sudden decent films are appearing on our screens.
Atonement last week, 3:10 To Yuma this, hugely contrasting and each highly satisfying.
3:10 To Yuma is a Western for those of us who have never been remotely interested in Westerns, a slow-burner of a film which expertly draws you into a dangerous trek across Arizona in the late 1800s.
At the heart of that trek is an intense relationship in which enmity gradually becomes respect before finding its realisation in the most remarkable of turn-arounds.
Civil War veteran Dan Evans can secure his family financially if he delivers infamous outlaw Ben Wade to the 3:10 to Yuma, a train that will take him to trial.
Hot on their heels is Wade’s gang, a brutal bunch even more vicious than he is. Along the way is Apache country.
Everything stacks up against Evans and his son, and yet everything simply serves to harden his resolve. He’s a man on a mission as the film’s superb final sequence shows.
Russell Crowe plays Wade, a part tailor-made for him. You couldn’t imagine anyone else bringing the same smiling menace to the part and yet at the same time suggesting somewhere deep down the seeds of some kind of redemption.
Wade is casually brutal, but this is no one-dimensional playing as Crowe brilliantly brings out through the changing nature of his developing relationship with Evans, his captor.
Christian Bale is terrific in the part, a man of few words but total determination. Put the two men together, and the film builds powerfully towards a conclusion which surprises and yet which, on reflection, is totally in keeping - the best kind of ending for a totally-engrossing film.
Phil Hewitt
Atonement, Chichester Cineworld, (15), (123 mins).
Films oozing quality have been few and far between this year - a fact which makes Atonement all the more of a sumptuous treat to savour.
Superbly shot and superbly acted, it’s a film which engrosses from the very first moment, holding you gripped throughout as it unravels its complex tale of love, injustice and betrayal - and their consequences.
A big part of the pleasure is the sheer skill of the story-telling. The tale moves forward then moves back and then moves forward again. There’s a slow-motion reverse action replay and the film even offers its own alternative - all part of the richness of a movie which is quite beautifully put together.
James McAvoy, comfortably the most exciting screen actor around at the moment, delivers a perfect performance as Robbie, the housekeeper’s boy-turned-toff who is wrongly banished - and worse - by his wealthy protectors.
Keira Knightley is similarly impressive as Cecilia, the daughter of the house, her finest performance yet fulfilling all the Pride And Prejudice promise - a performance which should finally knock on the head all those accusations of woodenness she gets (mostly) unfairly thrown at her.
It all turns on an innocent incident at a water fountain - an incident which is disastrously misconstrued by Cecilia’s younger sister, a mistake compounded when she catches Cecilia and Robbie at it in the library.
Five years on, the resolution is found in war-time Britain, with Cecilia now a nurse and Robbie fighting his way back to Dunkirk in the hope of evacuation.
Elegant life in the mid-1930s is beautifully portrayed. The horrors of war and life in a wartime hospital are no less persuasively evoked.
Every moment of the film wraps you up in it all - and you just don’t want it to end. But when it does, it does so with revelations which make more poignant still a terrific story wonderfully well told.
Phil Hewitt
No Reservations, Chichester Cineworld, (PG), (104 mins).
A control freak gets softened by the double onslaught of a free-spirited colleague and a very cute kid in this highly-satisfying romcom.
Catherine Zeta-Jones is top New York chef Kate Armstrong, a stroppy, intimidating perfectionist who wants her own way in everything.
But then when her sister is killed and Kate inherits her niece Zoe (Abigail Breslin), Kate starts to realise that there might be more to life than delivering perfect food and shouting at any customers brave enough to suggest it’s less than perfect.
Something else is unlocked - slowly and teasingly - in Kate when sous-chef Nick (Aaron Eckhart) joins her staff, an opera-loving, pleasure-seeking kind of guy.
Nick finds a way into Zoe’s world of mourning, which in turns gives him an entree into Kate’s world of control.
It’s all terribly predictable. Repulsion is followed by growing, barely-acknowledged attraction which is then followed by bed and a big tiff.
But it’s charmingly done, the tender scenes contrasting nicely with the pressure-cooker atmosphere of Kate’s kitchen.
Breslin is sweet without being sugary, and Zeta-Jones has real presence as the melting ice-maiden Kate. At times it’s hard to see why anyone should find Nick quite so charming, but that’s not Eckhart’s fault.
He gives a performance as good as the rest in this enjoyable couple of hours. The sparks fly entertainingly between Kate and Nick, and Zoe offers the extra dimension.
No one overeggs the soufflé which turns out suitably light and fluffy.
Phil Hewitt
Knocked Up, Chichester Cineworld, (15), (129 mins).
At last, just what we need for a miserable summer - a laugh-out-loud film which manages to tug at a few heartstrings even as it delivers some of the least PC lines you’ll ever hear.
Director Judd Apatow has got a winner on his hands with this romcom which breaks all the rules. Sex and pregnancy come first. Next comes the search for romance and a reason to be together.
TV floorgirl/presenter Allison (Katherine Heigl) ends up in bed with professional laybout Ben (Seth Rogen) when she goes out on the town to celebrate her promotion.
Sober the next morning, Heigl is at her comic best as she contemplates the bare bum of the fat slob now occupying her bed - a choice which comes to haunt her a couple of months later when every pregnancy testing kit she can lay her hands on confirms the devastating truth: she’s knocked up.
And yet, amid the slobbiness, there’s a heart of gold. When he learns what’s happened, Ben instantly wants to do the right thing if only Allison will let him.
She might be outwardly successful and confident, but underneath she’s a mixed up bundle of insecurities.
The film throws together two polar opposites who just happen to bring out the best in each other - if only Allison will realise what Ben knows far sooner.
There’s plenty of sentiment but little sentimentality. The persistent grossness keeps the lid on any mawkishness - and in the end, you find yourself thoroughly wrapped up in it all, a pleasing romcom which dares to be different, offers plenty of laughs and never overdoes the gooey stuff.
Phil Hewitt
Shaking Dream Land, 16th Chichester Film Festival. Shown at the Chichester Cinema at New Park.I knew what this film was about and didn’t want to go there - especially on a sunny Bank holiday Sunday afternoon. After 5 minutes, I was hooked, edge of my seat hooked until the very end.
This is a local film, full of stunning photography, shot entirely in Surrey. It’s the first feature length film produced by Katrina Moss and the Independent Film Company, Eagle Films.
We were straight in with a summer wedding and Jesper Christensen (Casino Royale) as father of the groom. It is set in well-heeled Surrey. Nothing seedy here. Admittedly, the groom (Philip Winchester) was a bit tense with his father but otherwise everything was fine.
And then the story unfolds. Bit by bit. No monsters. But it was electric watching a successful life and then a marriage threatened to the core as the unreality of denial shakes this dream land family: sexual abuse.
Ann Clifford, the film’s writer; Katrina Moss and 2 of the actors were there to talk and answer questions after the showing. Ann said she had based it on an amalgam of real life characters. She had consulted with Margaret Ellis of lifecentre:SUST in the making of it. Margaret was also there. The detail in this film, the utterly convincing tiny details of how abuse strikes to the heart of a family was all there. We needed every one of those gorgeous photographic shots as this family faced up and faced reality.
This is a film that deserves a wider audience. A great big audience and a huge successful future. I hope it gets it!
Sue Griffiths, a lifecentre:SUST counsellor
/blob/ Lifecentre:SUST is a Counselling organisation based in Chichester. It offers confidential face to face counselling to all survivors of sexual violation, past or present. It also runs telephone counselling helplines as follows: Adult helpline: 01243-779196 and Under 18s helpline: 0800 2797273
The Bourne Ultimatum, Chichester Cineworld, (12A) (115 mins).
Take a deep breath and dive in. Exactly as you’d expect The Bourne Ultimatum is a white-knuckle ride, and the stakes are high.
Bourne (Matt Damon), a somewhat less-than-chatty assassin, is never going to be a terribly interesting character, however much he searches for the past that will apparently be the key to his future.
But all around him and mostly through him, the action is non-stop, breathless and gripping as the locations change, the chase accelerates and everyone is seemingly on the tail of everyone else in a high-tech jumble of plots and half-plots.
The Waterloo station assassination early on sets the tone, everyone trying to be one step ahead of everyone else, with plenty of muttered commands into concealed phones and with plenty of furrowed brows back in CIA headquarters where they’re trying to orchestrate every move.
The CIA are after Bourne and he’s after them - and at times it all gets a bit bewildering, presumably deliberately so, all part of the appeal of a film which throws everything at you and never lets you go under Paul Greengrass’ stylish direction.
Phil Hewitt
Licence To Wed, Chichester Cineworld, (12A), (91 mins).
Robin Williams is generally either brilliant or insufferable.
As the Reverend Frank, preacher from hell, he veers very definitely towards the latter in this lame comedy which has its moments but mostly falls flat on its face.
Frank is a minister on a mission. If you want him to marry you, you have to go through his wedding preparation, a ghastly intrusion which he has designed to test your life-long compatibility.
If you’re not suited, he reasons, it’s best to find out before tying the knot. Ben and his fiancee Sadie are a couple in a hurry. They agree to take the test - little realising that it will push them to the point of separation.
Frank encourages them to argue, drags them along to his crazy couple counselling sessions, bans sex and bugs their apartment - all of which leaves you wondering for most of the film just what his real motive is.
Things look up a little when Ben starts to fight back - but by then it’s too late for a film which ends in exactly the kind of schmaltz which threatens from the off.
There is little comedy in a character quite as ghastly as Frank - and there is no plausibility in Sadie being so dim as to put up with him.
The film is nowhere near as funny as it needs to be.
It’s reasonably watchable if you’ve got absolutely nothing else to do, but the only real point of interest is the little boy who manages to be even more creepily irritating than Robin Williams. It takes really quite something to upstage Williams at his worst
Phil Hewitt.
Hairspray, Chichester Cineworld, (PG) (117 mins). After all the endless sequels and part threes, after the doom and gloom of the latest Harry Potter film, after all the grim violence of Die Hard 4.0...
At last, a fantastic summer hit, a gloriously upbeat musical which puts a smile on your face from the very first bar.
And when the credits roll, you’re smiling even more. It’s the kind of film to make your face ache - a film which gushes the most infectious cheerfulness amid the most ghastly of summers.
The film, set in Baltimore in 1962, throws out plenty of right-on messages about daring to be different, being yourself and fighting for what’s right - all against the background of the unstoppable tide of racial integration.
But it’s the sheer joy of the whole thing that carries you along, a charming story of a young girl dreaming the dream and taking everyone else along with her.
Nikki Blonsky is the girl in question, a girl just dying to dance on the local TV dance show - and she sets the tone in the film’s brilliant opening sequence, singing and dancing her way out of bed and down the road to school.
The icing on the cake is John Travolta. The film repeatedly conjures up memories of Grease and is probably a better movie, but this isn’t Travolta in Grease mood.
This is Travolta as you’ve never seen him before - a fantastic funny performance which sees him sharing the film’s best two duets; first when his daughter takes him on the town to introduce him to all the delights of the 1960s and second when Christopher Walken as his.. well, husband... rebuilds a few bridges as they croon under the washing line.
Hmmm, this really is a lovely film, colourful, energetic and huge fun.
Phil Hewitt
Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, Chichester Cineworld (12A) (138 mins).
With the years rattling by, Harry and the gang are now in the fifth year at Hogwarts - and they’re still facing pretty much the same problem.
Which is probably the problem with this film.
The threat of Voldemort is growing ever greater - which is exactly what has been happening ever since Harry was in the first year.
This latest film is enjoyable, strongly visual and comes with one or two terrific performances, but by the end of it you’re no further forward than you were at the end of film one - which doesn’t matter at all if you’re content for a couple more hours of more of the same.
Harry is battling - as ever - an evil which never quite seems to arrive, the only difference being that this is the book (remember the fuss?) when probably the series’ least interesting character dies.
Fortunately, it’s also the book in which one of the series’ most enjoyable characters makes her appearance - the glorious pink fluffy tyrant Dolores Umbridge, beautifully played with smiling nastiness by Imelda Staunton.
Another great addition is a fleeting Helena Bonham Carter as batty Bellatrix Le (very very ) Strange.
Elsewhere, it’s pretty familiar territory - with all the familiar flaws. Firstly, that Emma Watson and Rupert Grint are so strikingly superior to Daniel Radcliffe in the acting stakes.
Secondly, that it is difficult to be truly excited by a plot in which anyone can appear anywhere at any time and anything can happen - something which seems even more the case this time round.
Five films in, all the talk of “you know who” is getting just a touch tedious; but against that Watson and Grint are excellent - and visually the film is as strong as any other in the series.
Phil Hewitt
Die Hard 4.0, Chichester Cineworld, (15), (130 mins)
It all turns personal for NYPD detective John McClane in his first Die Hard outing in more than ten years.
One minute he’s pretty much single-handedly fighting to save the United States from complete computer and utilities meltdown.
The next he’s fighting to ensure that the death of his daughter won’t be the price of his success.
Evil villain Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) has hacked into United States security in order to cause the total mayhem his silly ex-bosses so naively refused to believe would be possible.
He’d warned them it could be done. They ridiculed him. And now they’re paying the price.
But fortunately for the US of A and indeed for the civilised world, veteran cop McClane (Bruce Willis) is on his case, a dinosaur fighting with his fists in a high-tech world – a fight which turns genuinely nasty when Gabriel plays his trump card and kidnaps McClane’s daughter.
Willis is excellent as the gritty detective, still capable of duffing up the best; and Justin Long is similarly impressive as Matt Farrell, the slightly-nerdy hacker he’s forced to team up with, the only person, it seems, with the remotest idea what’s going on.
Along the way there are some terrific set pieces, particularly when McClane is bombing along the motorway trying to shake off a state-of-the art plane mistakenly intent on destroying him.
Gabriel is capable of hacking into anything, sending out all manner of messages designed to muddle the authorities – but Willis, the old-style action man, is more than his equal at every turn in a couple of hours of entertaining nonsense.
Phil Hewitt
Shrek The Third, Chichester Cineworld (U) (93 mins).
Let’s hope for Shrek’s sake that Shrek The Third is also Shrek The Last.
Not that it isn’t a good film. It’s perfectly watchable and has got its share of good moments.
It’s just that it isn’t a patch on Shrek II which itself wasn’t a patch on Shrek I.
Just as with Pirates Of The Caribbean, the returns (artistic, though probably not box office) are diminishing rapidly.
And just as with Captain Jack in Pirates III, Shrek isn’t even the star of his own show this time round.
The storyline is horribly thin. Shrek, the big green ogre, is threatened with the misfortune of becoming King after the death of Princess Fiona’s father.
Faced with the horrors of looming fatherhood, all he wants to do is retreat to his foul-smelling swamp.
And so he goes off in search of a substitute king, coming back with the stroppy brattish Arthur who, wouldn’t you just know it, comes good in the end.
Meanwhile, the vain, preening Prince Charming has taken over Far, Far Away, imprisoning Fiona and her gang of princesses.
All the usual voices are there - Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Antonio Banderas, Rupert Everett etc etc - but little of the magic which oozed from the first film remains now.
The grouchy loner Shrek or even the lovestruck Romeo Shrek is far more entertaining than prospective dad Shrek on a quest to shirk his kingly responsibilities.
Phil Hewitt
Vacancy, Chichester Cineworld, (15) (85 mins)
Bickering, grieving David and Amy Fox clearly never watched the film Psycho.
If they had, they would never have stopped at the creepy, lonely motel which ironically seems their best hope when their car breaks down in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere.
Instead of keeping walking, they take a chance and soon discover that the cockroaches running around the bathroom are the least of their problems.
Trying to take a break from their constant arguments (centred, it seems, on the loss of their child), David shoves in one of the videos piled on top of the telly – and this is when things really do take a turn for the worst.
The films all show in quite revolting detail the murders of the room’s previous incumbents. When David notices a few half-hidden cameras about the place, he realises that he and Amy are being set up for starring roles in the motel owner’s next home movie.
There is something deeply sick about the idea at the heart of this movie, and you can’t help wondering at all the effort which has been invested in realising that idea.
But it’s worryingly difficult to stay very sniffy for long. Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson don’t actually bring a great deal of life to the roles of the Foxes on the run, but there is a definite, macabre thrill to the chase.
Director Nimrod Antal repeatedly gives them hope and then repeatedly snatches it away. Are they better hiding in their room as the masked killers move in? Or are they better running for the open? Other equally-grim options includes tunnels and attics, all of which keep the tension horribly high.
Phil Hewitt
Ocean's Thirteen, Chichester Cineworld (PG) (122 mins).
Much the same cast of characters and much the same kind of crime caper – and on those scores Ocean's Thirteen probably doesn’t add much to numbers Eleven and Twelve.
But it’s still got a certain something this summer’s other threequels – most notably Pirates – are lacking.
Danny Ocean (George Clooney) is back, and it doesn’t really matter quite what’s he’s up to. For the record, he’s trying to relieve ruthless casino owner Willy Bank of lots of diamonds and lots of money.
And for the most part, we’re on very familiar territory with the meticulous preparation for the job and all the high-tech twists and turns that that involves – plus quite a few twists and turns of the lower-tech double-crossing variety.
Slowly the plan comes together, and the gang live on their wits as it threatens to unravel at any moment. Just as Bank is about to download their identities, the gang hack into his computer and change their images – all very cleverly done.
And all very stylishly done, the whole look and feel of the movie, especially its rather smug line in humour, once again seeming far more important than the events it portrays.
But it’s difficult to dislike it, however much you feel you’ve been there before. It’s enjoyably involving, and Al Pacino is great as Bank, amply compensating for the fact that the Elliott Gould character (Reuben Tishkoff) is even more annoying than ever.
Elsewhere Brad Pitt, Matt Damon et al tread water as they go through the lucrative motions – all very watchable, even if it does make you feel that it’s high time summer cinema dared to bring us something genuinely different.
Shrek Three and yet more Harry Potter await… Never mind PG. It’s time to introduce a new classification. DV. Déjà vu.
Phil Hewitt
Wedding Daze, Chichester Cineworld, (15) (92 mins).
The girl of Anderson’s dreams drops dead on the spot when he proposes to her dressed as Cupid - which more or less the tone for this film.
At least to start with.
Initially, it’s all pretty lame, mixing some questionable taste with desperate attempts to screw laughs out of a succession of awkward, embarrassing situations.
But then, a funny thing starts to happen. Funny peculiar, that is.
If you survive to the half-way mark, you’ll start to find it slowly sucking you in, winning you over with its cheery mix of the weird and the gross.
Anderson (Jason Biggs) mopes for a year for his lost love, driving his best mate to distraction. Finally to stop the nagging, Anderson proposes to a waitress on the spur of the moment, just to get his mate off his case.
But as fate would have it, the waitress just happens to be the one girl in the world likely to say yes to a wedding proposal from a total stranger - and so she does, prompting all manner of awkwardnesses as the awkward couple introduce each other to their prospective in-laws in a kind of poor man’s Meet The Parents.
Meanwhile, oh so predictably, Anderson and Katie (Isla Fisher) really are falling in love - though, of course, they are the last to see it.
And that’s when it all starts to spiral out of control, which is roughly when the film starts to perk up. The mad in-laws on either side get ever madder; Anderson’s ghostly ex forbids him; and Katie’s all-too-real ex relentlessly pursues her, getting gayer by the minute.
With such a cast of nutters rubbing up against each other, the sparks fly pretty entertainingly towards the end - and the smile it leaves you with fades the memory of at least some of the yawns at the start.
Phil Hewitt
Away From Her, 15, Chichester Cinema At New Park from Friday June 1 to Thursday June 7.
Julie Christie is - exactly as you’d expect - pure class in this touching drama of loss and limited rediscovery.
Christie plays Fiona who realises with perhaps slightly surprising self-awareness that she is losing her memory.
With Alzheimer's disease looming, she books herself into a nursing home - a decision her devoted husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) can’t understand, a doubt vindicated when she soon ceases to recognise him.
Rapidly institutionalised - a process accelerated by a bizarre rule which forbids visitors in the first 30 days - Fiona starts to see Grant as a persistent and slightly baffling figure on her far periphery.
And to make it all the more galling for Grant, she transfers instead all her affections to fellow resident Aubrey (Michael Murphy), a man reassuringly very much part of the new world she inhabits.
Pinsent delivers a performance of remarkable restraint as Grant, a man deeply hurt but totally forbearing.
But inevitably it is Christie who sparkles in this haunting piece, delivering a performance which mixes anguish, blankness and occasional hints of recognition in the most moving of ways.
The tagline “It's never too late to become what you might have been” is meaningless old nonsense, but the movie, which stays with you long after the credits have rolled, is an absorbing piece of quiet craftmanship.
Phil Hewitt
Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End, Chichester Cineworld, (12A) (168 mins).
At World’s End? At World’s Endless more like. Only a truly exceptional film can justify a running time of 168 minutes - and there’s nothing exceptional about this one.
In fact, for long stretches it isn’t even terribly interesting, so convoluted does it become with its endless crossing and double-crossing.
The gist is that the world’s pirates are supposedly joining forces against a massed threat from the forces of the law.
But beyond that, it’s all decidedly murky, with betrayals every five minutes and a mishmash of storylines which ensures steadily diminishing returns.
Even after the big battle at the end, it still manages to meander on meaninglessly for a few minutes more. The only saving grace is that it doesn’t quite reach the three-hour mark - though not for want of trying.
And does it matter that it’s all so disappointing? Yes, it does.
It matters hugely because the first Pirates Of The Caribbean was superb, a fantastic, funny, different, hugely-entertaining film full of genuinely-appealing wit and invention; a film memorable for introducing the wonderful Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp at his outrageous, brilliant best.
It should have been left as a glorious one-off.
But, no, along came an unnecessary, bloated sequel - which didn’t even offer a proper ending. And now comes an even-more bloated part three - a film in which not even Captain Jack can maintain his swagger.
Slowly he sinks amid all the nonsense going on around him. The character deserved better than this. In fact, it deserved to be left alone.
Phil Hewitt
Away From Her, 15, Chichester Cinema At New Park from Friday June 1 to Thursday June 7.
Julie Christie is - exactly as you’d expect - pure class in this touching drama of loss and limited rediscovery.
Christie plays Fiona who realises with perhaps slightly surprising self-awareness that she is losing her memory.
With Alzheimer's disease looming, she books herself into a nursing home - a decision her devoted husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) can’t understand, a doubt vindicated when she soon ceases to recognise him.
Rapidly institutionalised - a process accelerated by a bizarre rule which forbids visitors in the first 30 days - Fiona starts to see Grant as a persistent and slightly baffling figure on her far periphery.
And to make it all the more galling for Grant, she transfers instead all her affections to fellow resident Aubrey (Michael Murphy), a man reassuringly very much part of the new world she inhabits.
Pinsent delivers a performance of remarkable restraint as Grant, a man deeply hurt but totally forbearing.
But inevitably it is Christie who sparkles in this haunting piece, delivering a performance which mixes anguish, blankness and occasional hints of recognition in the most moving of ways.
The tagline “It's never too late to become what you might have been” is meaningless old nonsense, but the movie, which stays with you long after the credits have rolled, is an absorbing piece of quiet craftmanship.
Phil Hewitt
Lovewrecked, Chichester Cineworld (PG) (90 mins).
At last, an antidote to those grim, depressing releases of recent weeks - a piece of cinematic candyfloss which offers plenty of sweet moments without once outstaying its welcome.
You probably need to be both female and teenage to appreciate the full nuances of Randal Kleiser’s little romcom.
But even if you fail on both counts, there is still plenty of fun to be had in this tale of (fairly-innocent) deceit.
Jenny is madly in love (or so she thinks) with rock-god Jason Masters, and as chance would have it, she ends up shipwrecked alone with him on a desert island.
Or so it appears.
In fact, it’s not long before she discovers that they are simply on a hidden beach a mile or two away from the luxury resort where she was working and he was being a shallow brat.
Jenny can’t bear the thought of sharing him so she opts instead for pretence, dashing off to civilisation to buy all manner of fruit and fish which she then claims to have caught and picked, stumbling out of the undergrowth like a jungle goddess.
It’s a lovely premise, full of laughs as the rock god’s heart starts to melt.
Of course, it all goes horribly wrong before the whole thing is wrapped up with a trite little message about valuing the people on your doorstep rather than lusting after the unattainable.
All very enjoyable - and not a deadly plague or a rampaging gunman in sight.
/blob/ Stars Amanda Bynes, Chris Carmack, Jonathan Bennett, Fred Willard and Susan Durden.
Phil Hewitt
28 Weeks Later, Chichester Cineworld (18) (100 mins).
It’s difficult to think of many experiences grimmer or less enjoyable than the 100 minutes of 28 Weeks Later.
Given that it’s all about the end of civilisation (well, London) as we know it, it was never going to be a bundle of laughs.
But you fairly soon reach saturation point when it comes to watching people go bonkers, get red eyes, vomit blood, smash their heads against a wall and try to take a bite out of whoever is passing.
Exactly as you’d expect, this is horribly miserable viewing, deeply gory and deeply depressing - which is fine if that’s your idea of a night out.
Otherwise, avoid it like the plague - just like the plague, in fact, which the film depicts, a ghastly virus which has wiped out most of the UK’s population.
The US Army, thinking the infection has been removed, move in and start trying to get some sort of life back on track. But then a couple of children manage to revive the infection, and it’s not long before the Americans are executing the dreaded code red - ie shooting everyone they can.
Amid all the mayhem a dwindling group - including the kids - are trying to battle their way to survival, but increasingly there seems little worth surviving for.
The film stars Rose Byrne and Robert Caryle, though stars is probably the wrong for a film in which absolutely nothing sparkles.
Phil Hewitt
The Upside Of Anger, Chichester Cineworld, (15) (117 mins).
Joan Allen gives a terrific central performance as the ghastly, boozy, embittered, damaged wreck of a wife in Mike Binder’s tale of unhappy families.
But that doesn’t make this an easy film to sit through. Time in Terry Ann’s company soon starts to seem horribly long, and there are sections where the movie seems to meander fairly aimlessly.
But it’s probably one of those films that you enjoy more in retrospect than you do at the time, a striking portrait which gives you plenty to ponder afterwards but which leaves you wishing for a forward-fast button while you’re stuck in front of it.
Terry Ann’s husband has disappeared, apparently with a Swedish girl, leaving Terry Ann to cope (or fail to cope) by herself with their four daughters – four headstrong girls who muddle through various relationships and clash with their mother over virtually everything.
At point one, one of them falls mysteriously and apparently seriously ill – all presumably to clutch at the heartstrings and conjure some depth to it all.
In the meantime, Terry Ann is reserving her worst excesses for poor old Denny Davies (Kevin Costner), a boozy, has-been baseball star who ends up kicking the bathroom door down when she finally discovers the limit beyond which he won’t be pushed.
Inexplicably, he’s rather smitten with her. It’s impossible to see why. Indeed, there are moments when you yearn for someone even vaguely appealing in this film. Some of the daughters are just about OK, but they are not their mother’s daughters for nothing.
Finally, when even he has had enough, director Mike Binder wraps it all up with a clever little twist, followed by a gush of mawkishness followed by a finale of cod philosophy.
Apparently, the truth is at best a partially-told story, so one of the daughters intones – a little piece of nonsense which evaporates as soon as you think about it. Unlike the film which in hindsight probably has quite a lot to offer.
Phil Hewitt
Next, Chichester Cineworld, (12A) (96min).
Cris Johnson possesses a remarkable gift that allows him to see what’s going to happen in the next two minutes.
Actor Nicolas Cage, who plays him, clearly possesses no such gift.
If he did, he would have seen within 30 seconds that he was embarking on a woefully-stupid movie – a film even more stupid than his hair-do.
Briefly at the start, it’s all mildly entertaining with Johnson evading everyone who’s after him simply because he knows just where they are going to turn up next.
But it all goes pear-shaped when director Lee Tamahori starts trying to use Johnson as the starting point for a complex political thriller.
The FBI get to hear about Johnson and decide that his little party piece might be fairly useful in preventing a massive bomb going off.
The trouble is that the terrorists are after him too and manage to kidnap the drippy girl he’s fallen for along the way.
Either way, poor old Johnson, who apparently just wants to be left alone with his short-term foresight, seems set to lose…
And that’s when it all gets truly silly. Somehow his ability to see into the future becomes the ability to sniff out snipers and explosives wherever they are stashed.
But the film hits rock bottom when Johnson’s gift becomes the means by which he can stand stock still on the spot while dozens of cloned Nicolas Cages go off in search of his gal.
Just one Nicolas Cage is generally more than enough. I have yet to like him in anything, and this film is right down there with his worst, almost as bad as the truly awful Weather Man.
In fact, it might even be as bad. The ending isn’t even an ending. Instead Tamahori winds it all up with a total cop-out, an ending which makes retrospective nonsense of every last bit of twaddle.
Phil Hewitt
Shooter, Chichester Cineworld, (126 mins), (15).
An ex-army sniper is framed for the attempted assassination of the US president after being tempted out of grumpy, bitter retirement.
The idea was that he should suss out the assassination potential at a number of locations where the president is speaking - in order to see how to prevent any attempts on his life.
But instead, when an attempt is made, Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) finds himself well and truly stitched-up, with plenty of surveillance footage showing him apparently casing the joint.
But fortunately Swagger is a grimly-determined kind of guy; and he gets a lucky break on the run when he teams up with an FBI agent who smells a rat about the whole thing.
Together they set about tracking down the real culprits in an increasingly murky web of political intrigue.
As so often in this kind of movie, it all seems to come down to oil pipes in distant lands, a cause more likely to prompt a yawn than an “Oh really? How interesting!”
And a lot of the tension is dissipated in a protracted, gruesome shoot-out scene, hardly what you want to watch after America’s real-life gun horrors last week.
But all in all, this is a reasonably watchable thriller, the little guy loner taking on big business and vast political interests... a sort of David versus Goliath with guns.
Probably not remotely memorable the next day, but entertaining enough while it lasts.
Phil Hewitt
Perfect Stranger, Chichester Cineworld, (15) (109 mins).
A complex web of relationships - both real and virtual - is cleverly spun in this absorbing thriller starring Halle Berry on top form.
By the end, it’s all so convoluted that it’s difficult to force yourself even to contemplate mentally rewinding it just to see it if makes sense.
Best simply to assume it does and enjoy the succession of twists and turns which take you down ever darker paths.
Child abuse, on-line chat up, philandering, murder, obsession and just about any other dark art you might care to practise are all included - all to dark, moody effect in a film which grips even as it slips through your fingers.
Berry is Rowena Price. an investigative journalist trying to track down the killer of her childhood friend - a murderer with a particularly grisly modus operandi.
The trail takes her directly to super-rich, super-suave, super-randy advertising boss Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis) - and the evidence stacks up nicely.
But this is one of those films where you can take nothing for granted, where real-life aliases are just as mystifying and just as devious and damaging as on-line nicknames.
It’s enthralling stuff as Rowena burrows ever deeper into Harrison’s world - one complicated by a jealous wife in the background, just as Rowena’s world is complicated by the dodgy computer nerd who is supposedly helping her.
It would be difficult to guess the ending, but in fairness the clues are probably in there somewhere. This is a stylish thriller with some strong performances and plenty to make your brain ache - in a satisfying kind of way...
Phil Hewitt
The Last Mimzy, Chichester Cineworld, (96 mins) (PG).
Apparently, the future - in the shape a space-travelling, time-jumping stuffed bunny named Mimzy - is trying to tell us something.
The trouble is that it is not awfully easy to work out quite what the message is or to stay patient long enough to find out.
But it’s an intriguing premise at least in this reasonably-sweet slice of family-orientated sci-fi.
Brother and sister Noah (Chris O'Neil) and Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) develop some special talents after they find a mysterious box of toys on a beach.
Noah discovers he’s got a pretty mean golf swing, an ability to talk to spiders and a gift for some pretty heavy-duty scientific research.
Emma meanwhile gets terribly attached to little Mimzy, an increasingly weary stuffed toy who seems to know everything...
Putting two and two together, the children conclude that they have somehow been chosen by another world for a fairly-momentous task, one which will set them not just against their parents but against the FBI as well.
And time is running out, not just for Mimzy but for the universe she came from.
There are times when it is difficult to buy into this film’s great sense of wonder at the cosmic implications it keeps trying to suggest. There are times when it seems simply twaddle.
But Chris O'Neil and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn are both engaging young actors - and Joely Richardson and Timothy Hutton give strong, if rather bewildered, support.
They know their kids are gifted, but not surprisingly they are just a touch traumatised when they start to sense the full import of what little Noah and Emma are dealing with.
This is pretty weird stuff but it certainly has its moments - a family film with a difference, but one which might just have the adults fidgeting through a fair part of it.
Phil Hewitt
Mr Bean's Holiday, Chichester Cineworld (PG) (90 mins).
Rather like Jacques Tati (whom we’re presumably supposed to think of), Mr Bean is very much in the like-it-or-loathe-it category.
To those of us convinced that his sole purpose was to make long flights seem ever longer, the first Mr Bean movie a few years back was a very pleasant surprise, genuinely funny and even a bit touching.
Mr Bean's Holiday, out just in time for Easter, is a return to normal service. Worse than normal service, in fact.
In the past, Mr Bean’s antics have seemed simply dull and unfunny - but also maybe sweetly innocent if you are in the mood.
This time, with Rowan Atkinson rather older, Bean seems decidedly dodgy, particularly given that most of the plot is about him befriending a young lad on a train after unwittingly separating him from his father.
Bean has won a church raffle and with it a trip to Cannes, on which he takes his penchant for disaster and his camcorder to chart it all.
The last quarter of an hour where he hijacks the Cannes Film Festival is actually pretty good, but it’s probably still not reward enough for the tired old journey that gets you there.
Mr Bean, now weird rather than cute, isn’t going to win new fans with this outing. But he’ll probably delight his existing ones - much to the mystification of the rest of us. Phil Hewitt (who will now be disowned by his children for writing this).
300, Chichester Cineworld (15) (117 mins)
With their rippling muscles, their roars, their scowls and their little leather pants, the Spartans are a pretty ferocious bunch of hardnuts.
All they dream of, it seems, is the great glory of dying on the battlefield for Sparta.
Well they get their chance at Thermopylae when the fate serves them up the slightly poofy Persians, a foe they really ought to be able to walk all over.
The trouble is, though, that the Persians come in fairly limiltless supply while the Spartans number a meagre (but very butch) 300 - all of which sets the scene for a heroic last stand.
For the most part, it makes for pretty grim viewing. The Spartans are a fairly joyless lot, incapable even of saying goodbye to their wives as they trot off to their deaths. No, that would show too much weakness.
And the Persians aren’t much more interesting - though they do have some pretty weird and wonderful creatures that they throw at the Spartans.
But once you’ve seen one severed head go flying up in the air, you’ve seen them all, and the limb-hacking and general impaling start to seem all a bit relentless and dull - until things start to stir rather more genuinely towards the end.
The virtual backgrounds certainly give it all an epic feel, and the final scenes are fairly rousing, but it’s difficult to think of too many reasons to go and see this film.
Phil Hewitt
Premonition, Chichester Cineworld (96 mins)
I’ve got a premonition that this film is going to give you a headache. It certainly did me.
Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock) is seemingly leading the perfect life when her husband gets killed in a car crash. The next morning, however, she wakes up and there he is watching TV and munching on his cornflakes.
But that’s not the end of it. The next day he’s dead again and poor old Linda finds herself being committed to a psychiatric hospital on the not unreasonable grounds that she has completely lost the plot - a feeling by now engulfing the audience.
Next morning, however, he’s back again.
But fortunately, with the aid of a marker pen and a home-made wall-chart, she works out that the days aren’t exactly wrong; they’re just in the wrong order - a theory which explains why she finds herself meeting complete strangers who somehow seem to know her. It’s just that they’ve met her on a different day in her jumbled life.
Linda starts to get the hang of what is happening and starts madly trying to prevent something which may or may not yet have happened, depending on which particular day comes out next.
One day she’s discovering she’s thrown out tablets she didn’t yet know she had; the next she’s clearing up a very messy dead blackbird which she hasn’t seen die yet.
Phew, its quite a relief when it’s all over. It’s not a bad film by any means, and it’s even got its good moments, but at the end of the day (well, this particular day) it’s just too brain-strainingly nutty to live with for long.
Phil Hewitt
Becoming Jane, Chichester Cineworld (PG) (121 mins)
Instead of yet another big-screen adapation of an Austen novel, this time we get the story of how Jane became Jane.
But it amounts to pretty much the same thing.
A spirited girl always with something clever and witty to say is attracted to a dashing, slightly dangerous chap as she flies in the face of all the stuffy proprieties.
But the trouble, as ever, is lack of money. Can you just follow your heart or should you yield to the social pressures and seek a match that will bring in the cash?
This is Jane’s dilemma - one she will endlessly pass on to her creations once she becomes - as she is poised to do by the end of the film - a novelist.
Anne Hathaway offers an appealing portrayal of the young Austen, warm-hearted and alive; man-of-the-moment James McAvoy (Last King Of Scotland, Starter For Ten etc) is even more impressive as the young Irish lawyer she falls for.
And Laurence Fox - superb on TV as Lewis now that Lewis himself has become Morse - completes the triangle as the dull guy with the personality bypass but plenty of dosh.
It’s all beautifully shot, with wonderful costumes, detailed interiors and some sumptuous countryside.
But by the time you get to the obligatory dance scene - in which the characters walk in stilted little circles around each other while lashing out with their sophisticated wit - you feel you’ve been here before and already got the T-shirt.
For those of us still trying (not very hard) to shake off a sixth-form aversion to Miss Austen and her strange, strange world, this is a film which soon becomes fairly tiresome - for all its outward beauties.
Phil Hewitt
The Illusionist, Chichester Cineworld (PG, 109 mins).
Seeing is gullibly believing in The Illusionist, a film which will hoodwink you in the most satisfying of ways.
Even if you approach it in a take-nothing-for-granted frame of mind, it will probably still stitch you up with all its opulent late-19th-century Viennese artifice.
Childhood sweethearts Sofie and Eisenheim are forced apart for all sorts of social reasons. She becomes the fiancee of the cruel braggart Crown Prince Leopold. He becomes an illusionist plucking the most amazing tricks out of thin air.
Their paths cross when the Prince decides to come to see one of his shows and offers up - wholly unwittingly - Eisenheim’s ex-sweetheart as the illusionist’s volunteer in a grim trick about death.
Grim because old romance is rekindled with deadly consequences...
Edward Norton is first-class as the illusionist who weaves a spell far larger than you’d think; Rufus Sewell is equally impressive as the Prince, a man determined to bring Eisenheim down a peg or two - and that’s before he’s discovered that Eisenheim has got a good thing going with Sofie.
The whole piece is beautifully shot, and that’s a big part of the charm of this thoroughly entertaining movie, a film which keeps you guessing and disappoints only in the very gabbled way it unravels its own mysteries right at the end.
But that doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s firmly in my favourite category of films - the kind of film that you want to watch again straight away, just to see how it led you so enjoyably up the garden path.
Phil Hewitt
The Number 23, Chichester Cineworld (15) (98 mins).
Suddenly everywhere he looks, with varying degrees of contrivance, Walter Sparrow starts seeing the number 23 - the title of an obscure book he is given for his birthday.
And the more he sees the number, the more he becomes convinced - with deadly consequences - that the book is echoing and dictating his life.
Jim Carrey is suitably manic as Sparrow, a man well on the way to madness as his obsession engulfs him. He looks for the evidence and he finds it in abundance.
But it is a long old time before the film grips and before the wilfully obscure sequences, both dream and flashback, start to take on any sense at all.
For the most part, rather like Sparrow himself, you’re left to wonder what on earth is going on.
But when it does pull together, things pick up considerably, the film mostly staying the right side of the line thin between the genuinely clever and the completely daft.
That damned dog which keeps turning up - all part of the number 23 obsession - often gets a laugh from the audience rather than the shiver or terror director Joel Schumacher presumably intended.
And there are lots of other things which threaten to drag it all towards the risible rather than the thrilling.
But Schumacher just about holds it all in to deliver a film which is utterly bizarre but ultimately strangely compelling, the kind of film you instantly want to watch again just to see quite how it all comes together so neatly.
Phil Hewitt
Music & Lyrics, Chichester Cineworld, PG,104 mins.
A genuine feel-good ending lifts Music & Lyrics just when you start to fear for the worst.
Hugh Grant is in his usual romcom territory, this time as Alex Fletcher, a has-been 80s pop star touring the fairgrounds and peddling nostalgia.
A chance to make it big again suddenly surfaces when the latest pop idol - a nutty singer who mingles orgiastic writhing with Buddhism - demands a new song and wants Alex to write it.
The poor chap doesn’t know where to turn - until it turns out that his slightly batty plant-waterer (Drew Barrymore) is actually - surprise, surprise - a wonderfully-gifted, intuitive pop lyricist with a total understanding of just what a pop song needs.
The lyrics flourish as does the romance. Which is more or less where the interest flies out the window - particularly when they start to fight over pop integrity as their precious creation gets handed over.
You start to shuffle in your seat as Grant goes through all those oh-so-familiar Grantisms. Just as dull, Barrymore tries to suggest depth to her supposed-cutely fey Sophie, a girl who has been plagiarised in a best-selling novel by a heartless ex-boyfriend.
Grant’s is a consistently witty creation and he’s on generally good form - but the movie seriously sags before director Marc Lawrence finally grabs it by the scruff of the neck to engineer a really enjoyable finale.
And it gets even better in the closing credits - which offer a hilarious look back at the boy band days Grant’s character is supposed to have come from. Terrific fun which sends you out on a high.
Phil Hewitt
Notes On A Scandal, Chichester Cineworld (15) (90 mins).
A brilliant film. Absolutely brilliant - totally engrossing, chillingly acted and deeply unsettling.
Judi Dench is mesmerising as Barbara Covett, the bitchy, jaded, cynical, scheming, predatory frustrated lesbian who latches onto Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), the uncertain, attractive art teacher who joins her school.
Narrating the story through a diary which mixes spite and loneliness in equal measure, Covett believes she has found the love of her life in the vulnerable Sheba.
When Sheba foolishly embarks on an affair with a student, Covett senses she can entrap Sheba forever as the keeper of her secret.
Dench is superb, deeply damaged and damaging. She calls herself a battleaxe but her weapons are much more subtle and sinister as, Fatal Attraction like, she sets out to ensnare.
But Blanchett is no less impressive as Sheba, foolish indeed but still fundamentally decent. She’s no saint, but her sins are simply that she is unfulfilled and needy - a wife trapped in a marriage going nowhere.
The result is one of those films that you just can’t take your eyes off. Richard Eyre’s direction is superb. Everything about this film is superb, especially the deeply-scary plausibility at the centre of it all.
Phil Hewitt
Bobby, Chichester Cineworld, (15) (116min)
On the night of June 6 1968, US Senator Robert F Kennedy was gunned down at the Ambassador Hotel.
But that’s not really what this strange, slightly disappointing film is all about.
Instead it centres on 22 people who were in the hotel at the time, a motley collection ranging from jaded cabaret singer to philandering hotel manager, from aspiring girls on the switchboard to acid-taking political workers in the Kennedy camp.
Their lives intertwine for a couple of hours as the hotel readies itself for the unseen Kennedy’s great arrival - the point at which he gets killed and the film ends.
The frustration is that none of it leaves you any the wiser about Kennedy, just why he was such a great political hope.
But that wasn’t the film Emilio Estevez was making. Which would have been OK if the lives of his bunch of hotel people were actually more interesting than the life of the man about to die.
But they aren’t.
None of the 22 characters in the film really comes to life; and though Estevez creates a certain amount of expectation as the Kennedy arrival looms, it’s not enough to bind it all together.
Emilio Estevez himself, Martin Sheen, Christian Slater, Demi Moore, Lindsay Lohan, Elijah Wood and Anthony Hopkins are among the stars.
But the end result is considerably less than the sum of its parts.
Phil Hewitt
Black Book, Chichester Cineworld (15) (145 mins)
Betrayal, sacrifice, terror, torture, Nazi uniforms, lashings of violence, lots of sex and a deep desire for revenge... this is a film that has got the lot.
Paul Verhoeven’s World War Two thriller is a romp from first to last, mostly Boys Own but with the odd bit of Carry On thrown in - a terrific tale told at a licking pace with oodles of action and plenty of tension.
It’s gripping stuff in a kind of old-fashioned action-adventure movie type way - not too much navel-gazing, just a plot that rattles along nerve-janglingly.
Based apparently on true events, Black Book is the tale of Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) a young, pretty Jewish woman who gets drawn into the Dutch resistance after her family - believing they are about to escape - are brutally gunned down in a Gestapo trap.
Clearly there is a traitor somewhere along the line - and the resistance want to know who. Asking her just how far she is prepared to go, the resistance leaders get Rachel to infiltrate Gestapo HQ by seducing a high-ranking Gestapo officer (Sebastian Koch) who has already fallen for her in a chance encounter.
Rachel, it turns out, is prepared to go all the way, but as events spiral out of control, Rachel finds herself just as much at risk from the resistance as she is for the Germans. Moreover, her tame German - so reminiscent of Richard Burton in his German officer roles - turns out to be a pretty decent kind of guy, unlike some of her resistance colleagues...
Meanwhile, a number of the resistance workers have been captured and are facing execution the following morning.
Betrayal is heaped upon betrayal; Germans turn on each other, as do the resistance workers; Rachel is ever more hemmed in in her fight for survival.
All the elements are there, and Verhoeven mixes them up to great effect, building it all to a conclusion which doesn’t disappoint.
Phil Hewitt
The Last King Of Scotland, Chichester Cineworld, (123min) (15).
A fictional Scottish doctor is the device by which Kevin Macdonald explores the charm and the terror of the despotic Idi Amin is this disturbing, gripping thriller.
James McAvoy is superb as Nicholas Garrigan, the callow young medic who takes up a mission job in Uganda just as Amin sweeps to power.
And like the people on the streets, Garrigan is wholly taken in by this charismatic leader who promises everything and tells the crowds “I am you”.
Garrigan is initially hesitant when he gets the call to be Amin’s personal physician, but it’s not long before he’s enjoying the high life, becoming Amin’s personal adviser and private champion, standing up for the man in the face of Britiish Foreign Office doubts.
Slowly though the evidence mounts - so much so that not even the naive Garrigan can dismiss the horror of what is happening around him, a horror crystallised when Garrigan unwisely starts an affair with one of Amin’s wives.
The film then becomes the story of Garrigan’s attempt to escape - a white-knuckle, against-the-clock fight against ghastly cruelty.
But the enduring image of the movie is Forest Whitaker’s towering performance as Amin, successively charming, vulnerable, unstable, terrifying and demonic, a breath-taking bravura performance.
At first Whitaker shows us an Amin seemingly high-minded and affable, but the monster breaks through - and the portrayal is mesmerising, a brilliant piece of acting which must put Whitaker right up there among the Oscar hopefuls.
Phil Hewitt
Miss Potter, Chichester Cineworld, (PG), (93 mins)
Your heart sinks a little when Beatrix Potter in Chris Noonan’s new film announces that all those bunnies in blue jackets aren’t remotely imaginary.
No, they are real. And what’s more, they are her friends. Even worse, they occasionally and rather pointlessly sniff the air and leap off the page at her.
But fortunately, Noonan’s and Potter’s line in whimsy is kept largely in check by the rest of the film which turns out to be a mostly charming love story - a story of doomed love which fights off class barriers only to succumb to a cold caught at a rainy railway station.
The victim is the great love of Potter’s life, her publisher Norman Warne, excellently played by Ewan Mcgregor.
There are moments when one might wish that the Potter and Warne were Harry and Shane respectively; this is a film which wallows in its own restraint.
But for all the fact that the period charm is laid on with a trowel, Miss Potter is a film which wins you over strongly, beautifully acted, beautifully shot and genuinely touching in its portrayal of a feisty lady who conquers the public but is forced eventually into taking second best when it comes to love.
Renee Zellweger is occasionally irritating as Beatrix, rather too smug, rather too full of herself in a performance hampered also by the fact that as soon as Zellweger pouts and goes all English, you can’t help but expect her to rattle off her daily calorie count and hormone levels a la Bridget Jones.
But all that is balanced out by the fine performances all around her, particularly from Bill Paterson who is superb as her mutton-chopped humane and very nearly enlightened old dad.
Phil Hewitt
The Holiday, Chichester Cineworld, (12A), (138 minutes)
If you fancy going all mushy and gooey for Christmas, then this is just the film – a chocolate-box fantasy all about love, actually.
Amanda Woods (Cameron Diaz) and Iris Simpkins (Kate Winslet) have reached an all-time low as the film opens. Amanda’s boyfriend has been playing away from home and the rat who won’t let Iris shake herself free has just got engaged.
Both need a change of scene, which is when they hit on the idea of swapping homes for Christmas, Amanda jetting off from LA to picture postcard Surrey and Iris passing her mid-Atlantic.
If there is a weakness in the film, it’s that for the most part Iris has the less interesting time of it – from the viewer’s point of view at least. She gets involved with an elderly Hollywood screenwriter and magnanimously helps him live again. It’s not until Jack Black turns up towards the end of the film that things really start to get going for her.
Meanwhile, Amanda is picking her way through the gorgeous cottages, wonderful scenery and endless snow of Hollywood’s version of the English home counties.
It’s not long before she runs into Iris’ brother (Jude Law). Things stir romantically right from the off – thanks largely to Amanda’s forthright approach to what happens between the covers.
None of this is happening in a world that any of us is ever likely to inhabit ourselves. Plenty of obstacles get thrown in the way of the emerging two couples, but you never really doubt that they are heading for festive happiness – and that’s a big part of the charm of this soft-toned, sentimental wallow.
It’s beautifully shot and beautifully played, and amid all the fantasy there are moments which are genuinely moving. Director Nancy Meyers certainly knows how to stoke up the emotions. The characters are likeable and you easily get sucked in, willing them on.
Maybe it’s ten minutes or so too long, but it’s witty, engaging and really rather sweet – absolutely perfect for the time of year. All those log fires, all that snow, all that love… you’ll soon be purring with pleasure.
Phil Hewitt
Stranger Than Fiction, Chichester Cineworld, (12A) (113 minutes)
Stranger than fiction indeed, and stranger than pretty much anything else you’ll come across this year.
Harold Crick is a very boring tax inspector who leads a very boring numbers-dominated life until he suddenly starts to hear the voice of his creator - the woman author who dreamt him up and is now commentating on his every move.
When he learns that she is contemplating his imminent death, he is understandably perturbed and that’s just about it, a wafer-thin pretext which would probably be fine for a short story or even a short film.
But, movie-length over two hours, it all starts to seem horribly contrived and horribly drawn out.
Part of the problem is that the film simply doesn’t explore the interesting notions of autonomy it throws up. Instead it shows Crick unexpectedly getting a life of his own just at the very moment he’s seeming doomed to lose it.
As an essay on the creative process, it’s tolerably watchable, but it is downhill all the way once Crick, having failed to get answers to his dilemma from a pyschologist, turns instead to a professor of literature.
It all gets just too clever by half to evince any genuine emotional involvement even when Crick starts to fall in love with a law school drop-out turned baker who’s convinced - not unreasonably - that cookies are the way to a happier world.
Meanwhile in the background, author Karen Eiffel is chain-smoking her way out of her writer’s block and so edging Crick ever closer to the moment he meets his (other) maker.
It’s not long before it all starts seeming just a touch tedious. The only lift it gets is when That’s Entertainment suddenly crops up on the soundtrack. Another little bit of irony perhaps, albeit unconscious this time.
Will Ferrell, Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson star. None will look back on it as their finest moment.
Phil Hewitt
A Good Year, Chichester Cineworld, (12A) (117 minutes)
For once, he isn’t splicing the mainbrace, duffing up opponents in the ring or indulging in gladiatorial conflict.
No, Russell Crowe is in much gentler territory in A Good Year - and still he acquits himself admirably.
OK, the fake plummy Brit accent grates from time to time and there are moments where he’s not totally at home with the comedy.
But he’s key to the success of this delightful film, the story of a brash brattish businessman’s discovery of the finer things in life after he inherits his late uncle’s estate in Provence.
Initially, Max Skinner (Crowe) simply sees the house and vineyard as an asset to be realised, but despite all the obstacles that France throws his way, he starts to see that there is more to life than making money.
Albert Finney is superb as the late uncle seen in flash-back, an eccentric old boy who teaches the young Max lessons he doesn’t learn until adulthood.
Throw into the mix a recalcitrant local, an alluring beauty, a mystery wine and the sudden arrival of Uncle Henry’s long-lost daughter, and you get an asborbing movie, one you genuinely don’t want to end.
It helps of course that it is so beautifully shot. full of rich, warm vistas and the seductive charms of France, not the least of which is Marion Cotillard as Fanny Chenal. But there is also a winning humour to the piece.
It’s not a film which breaks new ground, and the contrast between the shallow world of business and the deep pleasures of the rural idyll is probably fairly simplistically drawn.
But with its fine performances, its loveliness on the eye and its uplifting feel, this is definitely a film to savour.
Phil Hewitt
The Devil Wears Prada, Chichester Cineworld, (PG) (109 minutes)
Is this one for the ladies? I’ve no idea. It certainly isn’t one for the blokes.
It’s difficult to work out which is the more bizarre - the fashion world which the film depicts or the fact that someone somehwere thinks there’s entertainment to be had from an hour and three quarters watching some poor girl endure the boss from hell.
Small-town girl Andrea (Anne Hathaway) somehow manages to take a job that apparently millions of girls would kill for - second assistant to New York fashion magazine editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep).
She’s an ice queen and a first-class cow, and yet people are just desperate to work for her, mixing terror with awe as they try to anticipate her every wish.
Andrea is initially detached. Wearing her chunky sweaters, she feels comfortably above all the sillinesses of the world of fashion. At least, to start with. And then she gets drawn in, corrupted by the glamour and brow-beaten into becoming nearly as bitchy, shallow and self-seeking as all the rest.
All the while, you just want to shout out ‘Why?’. She’s supposed to undergo some kind of ugly-duckling style transformation when she gives in to the world of designer labels, but frankly she looked better before in her woolly pullies. But more damaging to the film, you just can’t imagine why anyone with half a brain cell - as she clearly has - would put up with Miranda.
Of course, it all leads to havoc in her homelife. The sweet, scruffy boyfriend is sidelined, and a hard-nosed handsome hulk skulks in the wings.
Will she see through it all in time? Who cares? Meanwhile, icy Miranda is at last showing that she is capable of just a little emotion. But so what? It’s a dog-eat-dog world, it seems, and the emotion doesn’t last long.
If the film is trying to tell us that the fashion world is ghastly, superficial and stupid, then that’s nothing we couldn’t have guessed. Which all makes the film just a little bit pointless.
Phil Hewitt
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, Chichester Cineworld, (90 minutes) (18)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is exactly what you’d expect it to be, so it seems a bit dim to criticise its excesses.
But here goes...
Heaping gore upon gore, the film rapidly reaches a point where it’s surely legitimate to start wondering why so much effort has been lavished on something so stomach-churningly revolting.
If there were genuine tension or a genuine storyline, you could perhaps start to justify it. But there is neither. Whatever story there is is simply a pretext for scenes of blood-splattering nastiness. It’s impossible not to wonder at the people who dreamt it up and, worse still, at the people they’re aiming it at.
There’s a nice little moment of black humour near the start when the nutty uncle suggests that Mr Chainsaw isn’t so much a “retard” as tragically “misunderstood”; and when two fat ladies take tea at a table under which one of the victims writhes, you can’t help but smile.
But apart from that it’s unremitting violence, repeated beatings and human vivisection all the way through.
Loosely, two couples have stumbled on a remote farmyard peopled by weirdos, weirdest among which is him with the chainsaw, a towering, menacing figure seemingly tipped over the edge when he loses his job at the local meat packaging works.
With blood squirting everywhere and body parts tumbling, you wonder if it can possibly get worse. It does. Mr Chainsaw decides to give himself and one of his victims a bit of a face-lift.
Which is when I left - not that it was unwatchable, more that the gore was becoming a bit of a bore.
Worst of all, though, is the fact that for some bizarre reason someone has given Mr Nasty the name Hewitt. How could they besmirch such a noble name?
Phil Hewitt (no relation).
Click, Chichester Cineworld (12A), (107 minutes)
That old saying about being careful what you wish for gets blended with a non-festive Christmas Carol in Frank Coraci’s weird new film.
Weird because it is so annoying, occasionally so infantile and at least 20 minutes too long. But weird too because it is actually quite thought-provoking, occasionally amusing and really not bad at all.
Adam Sandler is Michael Newman, a busy architect who finds it impossible to put the charms of his family before the demands of his job.
If only he had some kind of universal remote control which would allow him to juggle all the various balls in his life, whizz forward through the bad bits and avoid the flak.
And lo and behold that’s exactly what he gets, thanks to Christopher Walken’s bizarre inventor Morty (here’s a clue - just think about his name).
Suddenly life’s seeming wonderfully easy for Michael. But then the comedy stops. If you miss out the bad bits, then how can you be sure that you’re not also missing out on the good bits?
And that’s when the film takes a nosedive into the gooey mess of its final hour.
The running jokes (randy dog, annoying kid next door, hunk in swimming trunks etc etc) run ever thinner as Michael gets a prolonged Ghost-of-Christmas-yet-to-come style look at the future which awaits him if he doesn’t rethink the priorities he’s tumbled into.
It all gets a bit nightmarish, which is precisely the point. But the trouble is that it also gets increasingly nightmarish to watch.
The film is essentially a good idea stretched almost to breaking point. Almost but not quite - because you still walk away thinking about the bits that mean the film remains just the right side of worth watching. Plus the fact that no film with Kate Beckinsale in it can ever be truly bad.
Phil Hewitt
The Queen, Chichester Cineworld (12A) (97 minutes)
It’s difficult not to approach this film without the profoundest of misgivings. It’s even more difficult not to come away profoundly admiring it... before the misgivings return.
Think about it in advance, and you wonder whether you really want to see (someone pretending to be) the Queen waking up in the morning, wandering around in her dressing gown, uttering an expletive when she prangs her car and shedding a tear at the sight of a stag.
Even more troubling, you can’t help wondering about the ethics of putting on screen real people who are still in post and about the ethics of presenting as historical fact what at best - however good the research - can really only be informed conjecture.
So I was prepared to hate this film. But I didn’t. Stephen Frears - focusing on the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death - has produced a remarkable film, balanced, sympathetic and persuasive, all built on some remarkable performances.
Helen Mirren delivers an astonishing portrait of the Queen, showing her complacently convinced that she knows exactly what her people want but then crumbling in the most human of ways when she starts to realise she has seriously misread the situation.
Initially adamant that Diana’s death is a strictly private family matter, the Queen - in Mirren’s interpretation - falters, showing a deeply-touching vulnerability without ever losing her dignity. Mirren is magnificent.
Similarly impressive is Michael Sheen as Tony Blair. Initially he plays him as a grinning idiot, but in the crisis he comes into his own, instantly reading the mood in a way the Queen can’t. In this clash of traditional and modern, it’s Blair who shows the shrewdness - and also a great sensitivity and loyalty when he realises the implications of being right when your monarch is wrong.
The result is a fine film, finely balanced and finely acted - a portrait of a sad but also deeply fascinating moment in our history.
But then the misgivings return. The film is so real and so persuasive that you walk away somehow imagining you’ve actually seen behind the closed doors of power. And that’s the danger of a film like this. Brilliantly done, but still at heart a sleight of hand - speculation presented as fact, the lines blurred between the imagined and the real.
Phil Hewitt
The Children Of Men (15), Chichester Cineworld
Alfonso Cuaron’s film of P D James’ rare foray into sci-fi puts us in a grim, colourless, not-too-distant future, a generation after the world’s youngest citizen was born.
And it starts just as that citizen is killed at the age of 18, plunging miserable humanity into ever-deeper despair.
A birth defect suddenly robbed women of their fertility.
Extinction isn’t simply on the horizon. It has already begun, prompting anarchy and a scary new London riven by warring factions, driven by racial prejudice and brutally repressed.
And then at last there’s a ray of light. A refugee falls pregnant. Can she be saved?
Clive Owen is Theo, an office worker, once a revolutionary and forced to become one again if humanity is to have a future.
The refugees fear that the government will steal the baby if its existence becomes known – a big weakness in the film’s logic, a logic which refuses to acknowledge that the baby could in any way be a unifying factor.
Instead, the film descends into street warfare amid a series of ever-grimmer streets which eventually outstay their welcome. The Children Of Men is a barren and horridly*bleak evocation of just what might happen in a world without children, but after an hour or so you start to feel that the point has been sufficiently made.
Obviously, the pregnancy offers hope, but you can’t help feeling it’s going to take rather more than this one baby to redeem anything about the desolate, miserable world the film creates.
Clive Owen gives a good performance as a dogged survivor drawn into something almost in spite of himself, and the film has certainly got its moments of tension.
But amid all the destruction, the unrelenting violence and the bloodshed of the final scenes, you can’t help wishing for the end to come quickly.
Phil Hewitt
Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (12A) (150 minutes)
For sheer fun, wit, imagination and mad, spectacular adventure, Pirates Of The Caribbean a couple of years back was one of the best films in years.
Johnny Depp’s creation of the swaggering, swaying, bumbling, hapless, hopeless but skin-of-his-teeth-indestructible Keith Richards-inspired pirate captain Jack Sparrow was pure comic genius.
And that’s probably as good a reason as any not to give us a sequel. There was no way it was ever going to be equalled, let alone bettered.
Dead Man’s Chest certainly starts brightly enough, and the opening hour pretty much evokes the first film, but then it all starts to sink rather sadly, getting increasingly bogged down in the complexities of its over-complicated plotting.
The sparkle and the laugh-out-loud funniness of the first film are pretty much lost as the second film goes on… and on and on.
Geoffrey Rush’s spookily-evil pirate of the first film has been replaced as the big baddie by Bill Nighy’s weirdly-impressive sea monster, but Davey Jones’ chest and all its significance soon starts to seem fairly unfathomable in a story which gets horribly convoluted.
And most disappointing of all, we aren’t even given a proper ending. The final moments simply serve to set up the third film in the series.
Of course it’s nice to see Captain Jack again, but in truth we’d have been better off going back to the first film – a movie which should have been left alone as a terrific one-off piece of brilliance. It’s sad to see it diminished by a succession of unwanted sequels.
Dead Man’s Chest doesn’t give Jack the freedom he needs, and while there are some wonderful set pieces (sea monsters, the fight in the spinning wheel etc), movie number one seems increasingly perfect in comparison.
Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley as Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann add the love interest in swashbuckling style and, just to spice things up, in Dead Man’s Chest, there are some nice little hints of something bubbling up between Jack and Elizabeth.
But ultimately the film just hasn’t got the humour or the focus – or indeed the menace – of its superb predecessor.
Phil Hewitt
