The director of Freaky Friday (the recent Lindsay Lohan version, not the Jodie Foster original) turns in a winning combination of fantasy and domestic drama that features such terrifying creatures as evil goblins and bickering parents.
Annie Leibovitz has become the celebrity photographer to celebrities. From Jagger to Hillary, Clooney to Whoopi – you’re nobody till Annie’s lens has loved you. This documentary, directed by her sister Barbara, retraces her life and career to show how AL made her name.
Jia Zhangke’s subtle drama, winner of the Golden Lion in Venice in 2006, shows a China where life is anything but still. Han, a coal miner from Shanxi province, has arrived in the Three Gorges region to look for his estranged wife. Shen, a nurse, is trying to find her husband.
"Had it been in the Old Testament, Harry Potter would have been put to death.” So beginneth the lesson at an evangelical summer camp for children in North Dakota at which youngsters pray, dance
to Christian rock, and smash crockery for Christ (a protest against political suppression, apparently).
A tragedy occurred during the press screening of this spectacularly lame spoof of knickers-and-sandals extravaganza 300. Several critics, deafened by the silence greeting the antics on screen, failed to hear the approach
of a giant tumbleweed blowing across the auditorium. The poor devils were crushed like grapes.
Hollywood gloss meets European sensibilities in Krisztina Goda’s stirring drama. Set in Hungary during the 1956 uprising, Ivan Fenyo plays Karcsi, a sporting golden boy with nothing on his mind but an Olympic medal.
There’s enough hair swirling around in Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster to choke a plug-hole the size of France. The cavemen have dreadlocked bonces, the mammoths are rugs on legs, even the sabre-toothed tiger looks in need of a vigorous combing.
Marilyn Monroe invites Michael Jackson to stay in her Highlands home with the Queen and Abraham Lincoln. Not the beginnings of a joke but the plot of Harmony Korine’s oddball comedy drama.
Lars von Trier, the Danish director of Dogville and Dancer in the Dark, is not one of cinema’s natural-born giggle generators, so to have him helming a comedy is an event in itself.
Three 15-year-old girls stumble through the badlands of adolescence in Celine Sciamma’s beautifully realised debut. Floriane (Adele Haenel) and Anne (Louise Blachere) are members of synchronised swimming teams.
Your critic was at something of a disadvantage at the Sunday morning public preview of this 3D concert movie. It wasn’t just being five times the audience’s average age, or flagrantly breaching the dress code of pink and spangly.
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