Total Film Reviews

Prometheus

Wed, 30 May 2012 16:30:00 GMT

He refused to show us an Alien in the sensational trailers (‘Aaaaah! Aaaaah!’), he wouldn’t even use the word ‘Alien’ in the title, but Ridley Scott gives us one almost immediately in Prometheus’ opening scene. Not the kind you’re expecting, mind.  

Breathtaking stereoscopic shots swoop across a gorgeous landscape. Black mountains wreathed in volcanic steam, glassy lakes and, at the top of a crashing waterfall, a tiny man. Only he’s not tiny. He’s not a man. Like an extra-terrestrial Greek titan, this tower of muscle flexes inside smooth pale skin. And then dies. 

Creation and destruction are the twin-burners of Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof’s ambitious screenplay, which bricks up an epic new mythology around the tantalisingly unexplained image of the space jockey in Scott’s original 1979 space-horror.   

It’s 2093, three decades before Ellen Ripley’s first bug-hunt, and we’re aboard another starship funded by sinister mega-corporation Weyland Industries. Joining the 17-man crew are scientist couple Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green), who’ve discovered that etchings from every ancient civilisation on Earth have all left clues to the same faraway planet.

Their mission: to discover where we come from – and why.  Once they touch down, we’re on familiar ground: the crew begin exploring a giant hollow labyrinthine of tunnels and, uh-oh, something sticky leaking from countless cylinders stored deep within one of the chambers... Game over, man, game over. But if we’re been here before, Prometheus inhabits the host mythology without becoming suffocated by it.

Pulling its own twists on many of the queasier elements of the quadrilogy, it tightens its grip slowly, making us wait until what’s out there gets in here.   Proving how wasted she was in Sherlock Holmes: Game Of Shadows, Rapace is a gentle, driven proto-Ripley who mirrors nicely with Charlize Theron’s glacial mission leader Meredith Vickers, strutting tightly in a witty silver-grey suit.

But it’s the brilliantly constructed character of Prometheus’ android – sorry, synthetic person – David (Michael Fassbender) that provides much of the movie’s dramatic frisson. We first discover him alone on the ship, spinning a basketball on his fingertip, bleaching his hair and - in the movie's loveliest invention - studying Peter O’Toole’s performance in Lawrence Of Arabia.  

Owning every scene he steps into, Fassbender once again proves a truly magnetic screen presence, balancing Bishop’s even-mannered likeability with Ash’s unsettling lack of empathy. Now if only they’d cast O’Toole himself as Peter Weyland instead of Guy Pearce, unrecognisable behind melty-faced prosthetics.  “I didn’t think you had it in you,” quips David, in a wry moment that Prometheus could have used more of.

Truth be told, the rest of the cast – Idris Elba’s effortlessly sardonic captain aside – are bug food for the film’s skin-crawlingly effective antagonists. Ooze trickles, tentacles coil and gore splatters, not least in the movie’s standout scene, involving Noomi Rapace and some desperate surgery.

 Back in the sci-fi genre for the first time since 1982’s Blade Runner, director Ridley Scott has always been more at home with Big Spectacle than Big Ideas. And sure enough, once people start dying, Prometheus’ ambitious thematic payload goes straight out of the airlock.

But Scott's movie is flawlessly designed, with the beautiful 3D cinematography contrasting the clean white futurism of Prometheus' interiors with the black corporeal surfaces of the alien catacombs.  It might not pack the unbearable menace or blazing horror of the saga’s first two movies, but it utterly eclipses the last two. It’s exciting, tense and fully impregnated for sequels…

Prometheus News and Features

The Fall Of The Louse Of Usher

Wed, 30 May 2012 16:10:00 GMT

Ken Russell’s Poe adap doesn’t lack spirit – remote-control gorillas and sex-doll orgies both feature – but is torpedoed by fatally low production values and a general sense of arsing about.

The Fall Of The Louse Of Usher News and Features

Sing Your Song

Wed, 30 May 2012 13:30:00 GMT

Harry Belafonte's career as actor and singer takes a back seat to his impassioned social activism in a detailed portrait of the ‘Day-O’ crooner that looks set to rival Marley as 2012’s definitive showbiz documentary.

Be it civil rights, apartheid or famine in Africa, the indefatigable octogenarian can always be depended on to fight the good fight, even when dealing with such thorny modern concerns as black incarceration and gang violence.

No wonder that Susanne Rostock’s film proves an inspiring watch, even if it does rather gloss over how his wives and children fit into the picture.

Sing Your Song News and Features

The Pact

Wed, 30 May 2012 11:49:00 GMT

The ghost in Nicholas McCarthy's low-budget debut is tech-savvy, using webcams and GPS apps to drum up scares, but it isn’t quite enough to save spruced-up clichés from lapsing into kitsch.

After her mother’s death, Nicole (Agnes Bruckner) moves back to her childhood home then vanishes after ghostly goings-on; when sister number two (Caity Lotz) arrives, the bumps in the night get louder as she digs into family secrets with a detective (Casper Van Dien).

It works hard, and the first half hour is textbook creepy, but the oldschool grab-bag of shocks struggles to jolt a dour script to life.

The Pact News and Features

Woody Allen: A Documentary

Wed, 30 May 2012 11:27:00 GMT

If Wild Man Blues was a snapshot, Woody Allen: A Documentary is a photo album. From his early days in Brooklyn via stand-up comedy to his 47 years making movies, “America’s foremost humorist” (as first wife Louise Lasser dubs him) gets a thorough going-over from Curb Your Enthusiasm director Robert B. Weide.

Illustrated with clips and talking heads aplenty (not least Allen’s), A Documentary starts enthusiastically. Running through those “early funny ones”, the Oscar-winning Annie Hall and critical darling Manhattan, the first half is, accordingly, a joy to watch. While early collaborators Tony Roberts and Diane Keaton make appearances, ’80s muse/partner Mia Farrow is unsurprisingly absent.

Their high-profile split during 1992’s Husbands And Wives is covered – in the same brisk manner with which everything else is addressed. Likewise, recent lesser works – “the clunkers” as Mariel Hemingway calls them – are assessed, briefly, by critic F.X. Feeney. Weide largely keeps a respectful distance – which may explain why he gets access to Allen on the set of You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger and in the cutting room.

The funny/serious quandary and Allen’s philosophical/religious beliefs are ticked off, with newer collaborators chipping in. But it results in a sanitised portrait that avoids the difficult questions. As Allen says, “Despite all these lucky breaks, why do I still feel screwed somehow?” Those wanting more might feel the same way.

Woody Allen: A Documentary News and Features

The Source

Wed, 30 May 2012 10:55:00 GMT

Director Radu Mihaileanu (Le Concert) brings his usual feel good humanism to this comedy-drama about Muslim women on love strike.

In an unspecified Arabic-speaking village, the wives – who’ve long had the dangerous task of fetching water from a mountain spring – take action, refusing their husbands sex until they persuade the government to pipe water there.

The mix of female empowerment and Middle eastern colour is kept just on the right side of schmaltzy by firecracker turns from Leïla Bekhti as the headstrong strike-leader and Biyouna as a formidable widower.

The Source News and Features

The Deadly Spawn

Wed, 30 May 2012 10:26:00 GMT

Space beasties overrun a small town in a creature feature that’s a home movie in all but FX budget. The gnashing monsters are the stars, but Critters and Bad Taste would have it for breakfast.

The Deadly Spawn News and Features

Casa De Mi Padre

Tue, 29 May 2012 15:31:00 GMT

Non-stop satire of Mexican melodramas assembled by Funny Or Die bright sparks? It sounds like a recipe for insufferable smugness. But Casa De Mi Padre escapes that fate, being a joyous, ramshackle celebration of sloppy filmmaking and cheapo production design.

One of its best jokes is casting six-foot Will Ferrell as Armando Alvarez, the dim-witted progeny of a south-of-the-border rancher clan. The actor rains down buffoonish chuckles by the simple act of vocalising his entire role in Spanish – a language he can’t actually speak.

Revelling in the gloriously tacky excesses of telenovelas, Casa features a procession of unabashedly crappy sets dressed with fake plants, painted backdrops, stiff staging and ‘animals’ including a D-grade animatronic white cougar.

Coming in for equal ribbing is the genre’s arch theatricality, with crash- zoom close-ups, abrupt musical numbers, protracted death scenes and a love scene made up entirely of bare-bum shots.

The plot may be a mere springboard for the absurdism, but still smuggles in a splash of social critique (americans addicts are “shit-eating crazy monster babies”) and topicality, as the Alvarezes’ land becomes a killing ground for drug lord Onza (Gael Garcia Bernal).

Everyone’s in on the joke (including Diego Luna, as favourite Alvarez son Raul), with Ferrell at his most likeable, bringing sincerity to the onslaught of idiocy.

Veterans of sketch comedy, director Matt Piedmont and scripter Andrew Steele keep the laughs flowing (albeit with several damp squibs along the way).

Knowing a premise this wafer-thin will swiftly reach cracking point, they call a halt at 85 mins – meaning viewers get to leave wearing a big grin rather than a pained grimace.

Casa De Mi Padre News and Features

The Innkeepers

Tue, 29 May 2012 15:16:00 GMT

A haunted hotel on the verge of closure, choking its dusty last over one final weekend as the ghosts of residents past mournfully stalk the corridors and hallways... Welcome to the unlikeliest romcom of 2012!

OK, Ti West’s latest chiller, following his excellent satanic-panic period piece The House Of The Devil, isn’t a cheesy chick flick, but behind the nerve-shredding (and it is terrifying) The Innkeepers is an indie slacker-com at heart. Think Clerks meets The Shining.

Set and shot in The Yankee Pedlar inn – a real hotel in Connecticut locals believe is actually haunted – it follows Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy), 20-something, college-drop-out would-be paranormal investigators charged with manning the front desk and taking care of the remaining guests before the hotel shuts down for good.

First and foremost a character piece, it hangs out with Luke and Claire as they kill time chatting, drinking and laughing at the annoying local barista (an excellent cameo from next-big-thing Lena Dunham). They also dick around with EVP equipment, pretending to be ghost hunters and freaking themselves out with tales of spook-in- residence Madeleine Mallory, ‘The widow of the Pedlar’, said to roam the halls.

Miles from her Last House On The Left/Shark Night scream-queen persona, Paxton is goofy and pixieish, while Healy’s a loveable nerd. It’s largely a two-hander with interludes from the eclectic guests – most notably an unselfconscious turn from Top Gun icon Kelly McGillis as washed-up actress turned spiritualist Leanne Rease-Jones. If there’s an over-reliance on false scares in the first half, it’s rectified by the final act, as playful ghost games turn menacing.

The location is a gift, a kitsch mix of chintz and glitz which suits West’s storytelling perfectly. Set in the modern day, steeped in Victoriana, with an unhurried, finely crafted early-’80s feel, The Innkeepers is both old and new, fresh and gorgeously nostalgic.

Just like in The House Of The Devil, The Innkeepers takes its time to build, cranking up the tension as your sympathy for Claire and Luke deepens. But unlike House, The Innkeepers’ pay-off completely delivers. Wincingly frightening, sad and satisfying, at its heartbreaking conclusion The Innkeepers treads a carefully ambiguous path which resonates long after the creepy final coda. It’s one of the scariest, and best, horror films of recent years.

The Innkeepers News and Features

Arirang

Tue, 29 May 2012 15:16:00 GMT

In 2008 the lead actress in Kim Ki-duk’s (The Isle) last movie Dream almost died when a hanging scene went wrong. Since then the director’s been living in self-imposed exile in a rundown cabin.

This indulgent, self-shot doc delves into his fractured mental state as he literally talks to himself in a rambling video diary.

From doing straight-to-camera “You talkin’ to me?” monologues to bitching about past collaborators, it’s a confessional portrait of the artist as a nutty middle-aged man and a rare insight into a controversial director who’s as divisive as the 38th Parallel.

Arirang News and Features

Red Tails

Tue, 29 May 2012 14:43:00 GMT

Long Time ago in an airbase far, far, away… the first African-American fighter pilot squadron was formed. Battling Nazis zeroing in from one side and racial discrimination on the other, the ‘Tuskegee airmen’ became heroes at home and abroad. Deserving an Eastwood epic full of sombre insight and elegant understatement, the brave men of the 332nd get the full Lucasfilm treatment instead.

Picking newbie director Anthony Hemingway, producer George Lucas oversees a rip-roaring, flag-waving, barnstorming comic-book adventure that’s as silly as it is fun. Knocking the landing gears off the plot and keeping things barrel-rolling through the immaculate CGI skies, the film allows little time for you to get to know – or care – who anyone is.

Whiskey-sipping college boy Marty ‘Easy’ Julian (Nate Parker) and daredevil ‘Lightning’ Joe Little (David Oyelowo) take the lead behind the machine guns, whilst Cuba Gooding Jr and Terrence Howard do a lot of chin stroking and pipe chomping on the ground. There’s a brief history lesson in a Washington boardroom – and a daft romance in an Italian villa – but the sound of propellers is never far away.

Set in the same clean, colourful WW2 era of Indiana Jones and taking its cockpit cues from Star Wars, the presence of the great beard is keenly felt behind every frame. Sadly, that also means dialogue so corny that the kids would have laughed at it in 1941 (a pivotal moment is ruined by an Aryan snarl of “die, foolish American!”). Luckily, it’s not the script that anyone is going to remember.

Despite looking like the pilots never left the comfort of the green-screen, the frenetic dogfights are some of the best-looking aerial action scenes since Lucas’ original Saturday matinee redux. Twinned with an odd score that mixes Williams-esque bombast and head-thumping techno, the whole thing looks and sounds strangely like a 1940s Top Gun, for better and worse.

Red Tails News and Features

Snow White And The Huntsman

Mon, 28 May 2012 15:19:00 GMT

Naturally, it begins with “once upon a time”. And yes, along the way there’s romance, a poisoned apple, a stimulating smooch and a queen with a heart as black as coal.

But despite Kristen Stewart’s pasty-faced princess catching the covetous moongazes of at least two would-be suitors, this fantasy epic’s more about kicking arses than kissing them.

This isn’t the same gilded fairy-land Tarsem Singh upchucked with his yawny Mirror Mirror. Within minutes we’re neck-deep in a bloody battlefield, where King Magnus (Noah Huntley) discovers the bedazzling Ravenna (Charlize Theron), takes her as his new queen, then finds himself at the wrong end of a very sharp blade.

Seizing the throne for herself, Ravenna banishes her step-daughter Snow White (Kristen Stewart) to a dank cell and plunges her kingdom into a rotting fug. When Snow comes of age, she flees the castle, only to have Ravenna send the strapping, booze-glugging Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) into the Dark Forest after her. Will it all end happily ever after?

It’s never really a question. Though first-time feature director Rupert Sanders is keen to subvert the original Grimm tale for goth-action thrills, he shies away from all-out revisionism.

A former ad man (he directed an impressive Halo 3 commercial), Sanders got the gig on the strength of a promo reel he stitched together to show off his idiosyncratic vision for the film.

That vision is SWATH’S main strength. Haunted woods, Theron bathing in a vat of creamy milk, then smashing apart into dozens of flapping ravens... The images are stark and effective, and SWATH heaves with tangibly craggy landscapes that are part Dagobah, part Winterfell, entirely believable.

Sadly, the story never matches the exhilarating optics. While Theron’s mental, soul-sucking queen offers theatrical menace, and the numerous action clashes easily get pulses pumping, the plot’s limited to a series of encounters between Snow and often unremarkable B characters.

Of those, Sam Claflin’s useless Prince William (no really) comes off the worst, while poor old Lily Cole puts in a blank, blink-miss performance. Even Hemsworth’s loveable lug is lumbered with an off-kilter Scottish burr.

Leave it to Bob Hoskins and Ray Winstone’s octet of mushroom-loving dwarves to lighten the often funereal mood. Singing, dancing, adorably savage, they brighten up SWATH’s second act with warmth and humour.

In a film more in love with its eye-catching terrains than its characters, that’s no shortcoming.

Snow White And The Huntsman News and Features

You Only Live Once

Wed, 23 May 2012 16:19:00 GMT

When someone mentions “the stain of the world” in a Fritz Lang film, it doesn’t wash out easily.

A moral ambivalence about systems of justice runs deep in the M director’s second US film.

Henry Fonda’s ex-con tries to go straight with his pregnant lover (Sylvia Sidney); Depression-era circumstance and society stack up against them.

The poignancy combines with Lang’s expressionist shadows, setting a moody standard for all later ‘criminal lovers’ flicks. Bonnie And Clyde owes this indelible tragi-noir a big one.

You Only Live Once News and Features

Top Cat: The Movie

Wed, 23 May 2012 15:52:00 GMT

Re-dubbed from the original Mexican, this feature-length frolic for Hanna-Barbera’s felonious feline had only a few pesos to rub together judging by its primitive toonery and makeshift 3D.

Yet what really raises the hackles are its tatty attempts to update the character to a modern New York filled with mobile phones, surveillance cameras and robot cops.

The latter are the brainchild of a vile new police chief whose plans to revolutionise the force impact on kindly Officer Dibble. But why revive an old fave if (a) the tweaks soil the original and (b) you lack the means to do it justice?

Top Cat: The Movie News and Features

The Turin Horse

Wed, 23 May 2012 15:17:00 GMT

Hungarian maestro Béla Tarr has a cult following among arthouse fans who can’t get enough of his long, slow camera movements.

Comprising only 30 shots, his latest depicts the grindingly repetitive lives of an elderly man and his daughter in their godforsaken homestead.

As a ferocious wind roars outside and their steed refuses to pull its cart, there’s a creeping sense that the end of days is approaching.

Tarr risks self-parody with recurring scenes of the pair tucking into scalding potatoes, but if you’ve got the stomach for it this is an intoxicating vision of life at the end of its tether.

The Turin Horse News and Features

Himizu

Wed, 23 May 2012 13:48:00 GMT

Love in this teen flick is less like a red, red rose than a bloody nose.

Retooling a popular manga, it offers a surreal slant on post-Fukushima Japan where aggression lurks in every scene - even the romantic ones between high-schooler Yuichi (Shôta Sometani) and his stalker classmate, Keiko (Fumi Nikaidô).

As director Shion Sono (Love Exposure) homes in on a society buffeted by violence – natural and man-made - his absorbing if erratic comedy is menaced by Dolby-battering audio, neo-Nazis, Yakuza thugs and dream sequences shot on location in the tsunami’s wake.

Himizu News and Features

Death Watch

Wed, 23 May 2012 11:59:00 GMT

Set in Glasgow and Western Scotland, Bertrand Tavernier’s only purely English-language movie to date (made in 1980) is an offbeat sci-fi that uncannily prefigures the rise of ‘reality TV’.

In a world where disease has been all but banished, Romy Schneider’s gutsy heroine contracts an incurable illness.

She goes on the run – but unscrupulous TV boss Harry Dean Stanton, determined to exploit her final days, sends after her lenser Harvey Keitel, who’s had cameras installed behind his eyeballs.

It’s let down by preachy dialogue, but makes striking use of the Scots locations.

Death Watch News and Features

What To Expect When You’re Expecting

Wed, 23 May 2012 10:54:00 GMT

A pregnancy guidebook gets an adaptation to dangle over our cribs in this ensemble piece loose-linking the stories of five mothers-to-be.

Jennifer Lopez is a baby photographer trying to adopt, Cameron Diaz is well-cast as a jolly TV fitness instructor and Anna Kendrick is a food-truck chef facing an unexpected pregnancy, though Elizabeth Banks steals the laughs as a baby boutique owner.

But its overview of the baby experience is obscured by a family-values lens – no single/same-sex parents - resulting in an awful ensemble comedy to complete that Valentine’s Day / New Year’s Eve box-set, complete with sexist clichés.

What To Expect When You're Expecting News and Features

Michael

Wed, 23 May 2012 10:14:00 GMT

An unflinching look at a hard-to-stomach topic, Austrian writer/director Markus Schleinzer’s unforgettable debut takes its stylistic cues from the calculated cruelties of Michael Haneke (for whom Schleinzer worked as a casting director), and its inspiration from the real-life horror of kidnappers such as Josef Fritzl.

The title character (Michael Fuith) is an office drone of no distinction who spends his evenings watching TV with the 10-year-old boy he keeps locked in his basement. Though what follows gives new meaning to the term “the banality of evil”, believe us: you will flinch.

Michael News and Features

The Angels' Share

Tue, 22 May 2012 09:48:00 GMT

The Glasgow tourist office must be getting fed up with Ken Loach.

From My Name Is Joe to Sweet Sixteen and Ae Fond Kiss, his films have hardly shown the brighter side of the Scottish city. Once again penned by Paul Laverty (their tenth feature collaboration), The Angels’ Share may be billed as a bittersweet comedy but it’s hardly going to encourage you to head there for a Saturday night’s drinking.

An early episode where delinquent protagonist Robbie (Paul Brannigan) is forced to confront a young man he savagely beat in a street brawl for no other reason than he was high on cocaine is one of the most visceral, shocking scenes Loach has ever filmed.

Sentenced to community service, Robbie only finds redemption when his supervisor Harry (John Henshaw) introduces him to the pleasures of whisky-tasting.

Robbie soon learns the meaning of the film’s title – the tiny amount of alcohol that evaporates during the ageing process. It’s also a metaphor for the small percentage of those in Robbie’s world that escape the cycle of poverty and violence – a prospect the plot’s second half hinges on.

Via an almost Ealing comedy-style turn of events, Robbie and fellow offenders Albert (Gary Maitland), Rhino (William Ruane) and Mo (Jasmin Riggins) set out on a good-natured whisky heist that might just set them up for life.

The transition from the earlier, harder-hitting scenes is seamless, while the cast is superb (not least TF writer Tom Dawson in a silent-yet-deadly cameo in the crucial auction scene).

Brannigan makes a potentially unlikeable character sympathetic, while Ruane and Maitland provide much-needed comic relief. And that should be remembered. For all its bleak edges, The Angels’ Share warms like a sip of the good stuff.

The Angels' Share News and Features

Moonrise Kingdom

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:29:00 GMT

With a sideways-tracking shot so cheekily dry you might want to add an olive, Wes Anderson here returns to reclaim droll home turf.

We’ve seen many films under Wes Anderson’s influence: deadpan comedies of family dysfunction and/or precocious youth, from Submarine to The Art Of Getting By and Black Pond.

But his first live-action feature since 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited proves no-one ‘does’ Anderson so well as he does. Scrupulously composed but brimful of vim, this is a comeback from a director in joyous command.

We know we’re in Wes-world because the New Penzance setting is an island unto itself, like his films. The year, 1965, evokes an America of hippie naivety and political awakening, perfect for Anderson’s retro-hipster groove and interest in that innocence/experience cusp.

Twelve-year-old lovebirds – Jared Gilman’s Sam Shakusky (survival-skilled scout, bed-wetter) and Kara Hayward’s Suzy Bishop (blank-eyed fantasy-fiction aficionado) – cause a manhunt when they flee their coops to run free in the woods.

Inevitably, Bill Murray appears, but also present are flavours fresh to Anderson. The kids make fine cast newcomers, sweet and poker-faced. So do Bruce Willis as a cop, Ed Norton in shocking shorts, megaphone-packer Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton as invading bureaucracy’s embodiment.

As scouts arm themselves to catch the runaways, Moonrise summons an unlikely thought: ‘Wes Anderson’s First Blood’. When a storm hits, it becomes his first natural disaster film.

But the director’s post-Darjeeling hiatus (Fantastic Mr Fox aside) is as good as any change; his quirks fizz with revitalised energy. The watery colours and artful compositions delight in details; ditto dialogue. Anderson’s pan has never been deader than on zingers about “beige lunatics” and bimbos.

Having forged his own world, he knows how to move in it. The storybook establishing shots are frame-worthy but the plot is never static, galvanised by brisk Britten music and split-screen exchanges.

Emotions drift between mirth and melancholy and the two are seamlessly blurred as a bare-bellied, wine-wielding Murray drifts across the screen in gob-smacking trousers. How’s that for a tragicomic image to distil adult disappointment?

Anderson doubters might moan that we saw similar in Rushmore, but an alternate view is to see Moonrise as the return of a distinct voice in wry, refined and high style. And that kind of homecoming is always worth celebrating.

Moonrise Kingdom News and Features

Men In Black III

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:10:00 GMT

Rumours of script problems, cast changes and shooting delays have circled MIB3 since the cameras started turning. So it’s hardly a surprise to find Barry Sonnenfeld’s belated threequel an average affair that, while improving on MIB2, makes you wonder why he bothered.

Things kick off promisingly with a jailbreak sequence that has hairy villain Boris (Jemaine Clement) sprung from a maximum-security moon prison by a slinky Nicole Scherzinger.

Back on earth the torpor sets in, something hardly alleviated by writer Etan Cohen’s baffling decision to reintroduce Will Smith’s J and Tommy Lee Jones’s K as grieving mourners heading to a memorial for Rip Torn’s Zed.

K’s inadequate eulogy is meant to initiate a story arc predicated on J’s desire to know his taciturn partner better. But all it does is steep the first third in a funereal mood exacerbated by Boris leaping back in time to erase Jones from existence.

A shoot-out in a Chinatown eaterie typifies the tonal uncertainty, the pleasure of watching Rick Baker’s wacky aliens zapped into slime undercut by the off-puttingly sadistic sight of K slapping the manager’s face with an extra-terrestrial crustacean.

Determined to prevent Jones’s obliteration, Will jumps back to 1969 and contacts the younger K (Josh Brolin, amusingly replicating Jones’s minimalist mannerisms).

Weirdly, however, what follows fails to take advantage of the new pairing or the retro setting as J and K Junior chase Clement from Coney Island to Andy Warhol’s Factory to the Cape Canaveral launchpad of the Apollo 11 moon module, there to make a fateful discovery that has the whiff of a last-minute, Smith-instigated rewrite.

With a mouth full of teeth and a quip for all occasions, the Flight Of The Conchords star is the most successful addition. MIB3 could have used more of Clement and less of Michael Stuhlbarg’s Griffin, an alien clairvoyant who can see every parallel ’verse simultaneously – including, presumably, the preferable one in which it wasn’t greenlit.

Men In Black 3 News and Features

Tiny Furniture

Thu, 17 May 2012 13:28:00 GMT

One-to-watch Lena Dunham writes, directs and stars in this SXSW-slaying existential ode to the directionless angst of early adulthood.

The Seinfeld-esque satirical swipes help make up for the absence of plot.

Tiny Furniture News and Features

No Saints For Sinners

Thu, 17 May 2012 11:50:00 GMT

The ghosts of the past haunt an ex-Republican Army footsoldier in this low-budget thriller that takes a jaded IRA man (Rick Crawford) from Belfast to Bel Air.

Hiding from the Irish buddies he double-crossed, Crawford is working an LA bar when he gets mixed up with a wannabe drug dealer (Colin Sutton).

Apart from one chilling moment in a Chinese restaurant that’s straight out of Saw, this gritty but pedestrian outing lacks novelty and never convinces us that its bad-boy hero deserves his shot at redemption.

No Saints For Sinners News and Features

Cocaine Unwrapped

Wed, 16 May 2012 11:45:00 GMT

"I'm only harming myself," reckons one of London's casual cokeheads. Oh yeah? Rachel Seifert's rigorous doc follows the "war on drugs" from Colombian jungles to Wire-tapped Baltimore to highlight the appalling human cost involved in snorting the occasional gram.

Interviewing everyone from presidents to prisoners, Seifert lays bare a flawed system where military force and blanket criminalisation perpetuate a terrible cycle of violence... but also showcases the reforms transforming the fortunes of farmers, mules and addicts.

Even so, a hopeful future depends on stifling demand - and this is a compassionate, considered plea to weekend warriors to think twice before choosing charlie.

Cocaine Unwrapped News and Features