Iron man (15):
There is meant to be just one superhero in Jon Favreau’s Iron Man. Robert Downey Jr, donning the shiniest suit in Marvel’s comic universe, is the picture’s main provider of thrills and spills.
When New York playboy Tom (former teen heartthrob Patrick Dempsey) decides to turn his back on a life of womanising and propose to best pal Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), he finds himself pipped to the post by charming Scotsman Colin McMurray (Kevin McKidd).
After 24 Hour Party People and Anton Corbijn’s superb Control, cinemagoers must be close to bagging a collective PhD in the life and times of the titular Manchester band. When placed beside its dramatic predecessors Grant
Gee’s documentary is a fairly
hum-drum business, but the
story is one that
can bear retelling.
Jodie Foster, last seen pounding New York’s meaner streets in vigilante thriller The Brave One, takes a break from reality in this likeable fantasy adventure. The double-Oscar winner plays author Alexandra Rover, creator of an Indiana Jones-style fictional hero.
Franck Khalfoun’s shlock horror is the latest in the rapidly growing young-women-being-terrorised-by-striplight genre. Rachel Nichols is the blonde simply asking for trouble by being hard-working, ambitious, and parking her car under the office on Christmas Eve.
Persepolis (12A): Persepolis won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year, then cleaned up at the box office across France and was subsequently nominated for Best Animated Film at this year’s Oscars.
Hollywood has been quick off the mark to make movies that directly engage with the Iraq War, compared to the 10 years it took Tinseltown to start on Vietnam, but none of them have proved popular with cinema-goers.
The English whodunnit meets The Da Vinci Code in this mathematical murder mystery set in and around the the dreaming spires of Oxford. John Hurt and Elijah Wood play a professor and student who apply their shared passion for logic to the investigation of a series of killings.
As glossy and sleazy as a pornographic magazine, this erotic thriller is a throwback to trashy American movies of the 1980s such as 91/2 Weeks and Fatal Attraction.
The Judd Apatow film factory continues to churn out slacker/ nerd comedies whose quality runs in inverse proportion to their frequency. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, produced by Apatow and written by its star Jason Segel, represents a new low.
Slapstick comedy and soul-searching drama are uneasily wed in this tonally uneven but engaging Britflick. Skinny Englishman Mackenzie Crook and burley Irishman Colm Meaney make a watchable odd couple.
This weird and whimsical film from South Korea’s Chan-wook Park marks a change of tone – if not style – for the feted filmmaker who secured his place in world cinema with his shocking revenge trilogy Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Old Boy, and Lady Vengeance.
Hollywood’s pillaging of Asian horror cinema continues apace with this remake of Hong Kong filmmaking brothers Danny and Oxide Pang’s exercise in ocular terror.
Happy-go-lucky (15): Just how bubbly is the heroine of Happy-Go-Lucky? Well, if you parachuted her into EastEnders she’d be greeted as the Antichrist. If you could bottle her spirit the makers of anti-depressants would go bust in a day.
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