An immensely likeable cast gets pushed to breaking point and beyond in Girl Most Likely, a Kristen Wiig quasi-romcom that is preposterous and obnoxious in turn. The tale of a playwright called Imogene (Wiig) who starts over by returning to her New Jersey home and to Zelda, her former go-go dancer of a mum (an unplayable role here foisted upon the great Annette Bening, if you please), the film wants to be distinctively quirky and merely ends by shutting the audience out.
There is a life-size cardboard cut-out of Colin Firth in Austenland. He blends in very nicely. The only way you can tell him apart from the other actors in this cloth-eared, cack-handed romantic comedy of paramount awfulness is you can't see the despair and self-loathing in the whites of his eyes.
An update on Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcare Named Desire, it isn’t essential to have seen that work on stage to enjoy this pithy homage from Woody Allen. However, revisiting the iconic 1951 film version starring Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh and Kim Hunter could very well make Blue Jasmine even funnier. This is because Allen treats the audience as equals to the tragic in-joke of familial impact and the damage left in its wake.
Sometimes, a little bit of everything amounts to a whole lot of nothing. RIPD features a standard buddy cop caper bolted on to a heaven-can-wait drama channelling a body swap comedy also starring a CGI cartoon element. There’s even a heavy dollop of the old Wild West and a splodge of Armageddon alarmism. You get a grab-bag of half a dozen film styles jostling for attention. It must be like this teaching a classful of needy reception kids with ADD.
Build My Gallows High, Farewell, My Lovely: Cold Comes the Night. The cod-profound, slightly tortured syntax of its title is in the lineage of downbeat pulp fiction Tze Chun’s film aspires to.
A film once touted as surefire Oscar bait instead looks set to clean up at the Golden Raspberry awards (or Razzies) if this preposterously inept biopic of the world's best-known woman finds the fate it deserves. Cloth-eared, cynical, and not even blessed with a persuasive star turn to show itself off, Diana seems destined to become the stuff of camp: the sort of thing the Prince Charles Cinema might be screening before too long to gleeful hordes chiming in on cue with the script's multiple howlers.
Kieran Evans’s debut feature, adapted from the novel by Niall Griffiths, achieves a rare and accomplished sense of place in its depiction of Liverpool. It’s a place of chilly but not actually threatening cityscapes, with an air of space and windy sunshine, from which the film’s eponymous protagonists retreat into a private bedroom world.
Eleven life stories, and memories stretching back more than half a century. The protagonists of Sebastian Lifshitz’s Les Invisibles (The Invisible Ones) tell their different stories of growing up homosexual in France in years when their sexual identity was far from accepted by society. What a kaleidoscope of experience they have behind them, how moving a perspective they present as they view the lives they have lived from age. This is a film as much about looking back, about le temps perdu, as it is about the ramifications of sexual orientation.
The malign influence of the big city on countryside folk has fuelled filmmakers since cinema had the means to produce feature-length productions. In 1927, with the America-made Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, F. W. Murnau brought the disruptive forces of the urban to a farmer in the form of a woman. Following her back to city, he suffered the consequences. In this tradition Metro Manila, filmed in the Philippines, has nothing affirmative to say about the islands’s capital city.
If you're going to make a film whose title mocks a particular tone of voice, it helps to have a voice of your own. And that turns out to be one of the many hugely beguiling aspects of In A World ... , the actress Lake Bell's first film trebling as writer-director after years playing goofball also-rans in films starring the likes of Meryl Streep. A wry look at Hollywood and the (sometimes) wonderfully whacked-out people who inhabit it, the venture takes its name from the doomily spoken opening words beloved (or not) of movie trailers.