Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Sam Shepard and, in a tiny role, Carey Mulligan: yes, yet again the stars are lining up to live through the agony of America's presence in Iraq and (here) Afghanistan. Closely based on Brødre, by the Danish director Susanne Bier, Jim Sheridan's remake tells of the sibling rivalry between a decorated Marine and his feckless jailbird brother.
film reviews
Matt Wolf
Boys will be boys, and, eventually, grown boys as opposed to men. That's the cheerful (depending on how you look at it) message of The Boys Are Back, in which Clive Owen pours on the not inconsiderable charm as a father suddenly left having to care for his two sons. That women barely enter into the scenario - and when they do, emerge as so many killjoys - will appeal to the eternal adolescent in a movie that aims to make eternal roustabouts of us all. Let's face it: wouldn't you rather sit on the bonnet of dad's very, very speedy car instead of - ugh! - doing the dishes?
anne.billson
A Prophet is a different sort of prison movie. Jacques Audiard's follow-up to The Beat That My Heart Skipped is another dip into the criminal underworld, and mostly takes place in a French jail. Nearly every other film or TV series I can think of which is set behind bars (Prison Break, The Shawshank Redemption, Papillon and so on) is concerned with escape. Even the two most celebrated French prison movies, A Man Escaped and Le trou, are about finding a way out.
ryan.gilbey
Far from being the premature biopic of Frankie Boyle that its title might suggest, Crude is the latest and subtlest in a run of environmentally concerned documentaries. To stand out in this newly lucrative genre, you must adopt an original tack: the celebrity-fronted lecture has been done (An Inconvenient Truth), as too has the thriller (The Cove) and the prankster comedy (the Yes Men films). So anyone for the straight-shooting, no bells-and-whistles approach - “Just the facts, ma’am” as Dragnet’s Joe Friday would have put it?
sheila.johnston
By trade Ryan Bingham is something called a Termination Facilitator. I'm not entirely sure if that's meant as a euphemism, but it sounds kind of scary and in fact, played by George Clooney with lubricated charm, Bingham is a hit-man contracted out to fire people from companies who don't have the cojones or the courtesy to break the bad news themselves.
Adam Sweeting
Startlingly, it’s 10 years since Sexy Beast, the infernally cunning gangster movie with a terrifying performance from Ben Kingsley at its core. Now Beast’s screenwriters Louis Mellis and David Scinto are back with their new brainchild 44 Inch Chest. That authorial pedigree is written all over the screen (and in the way the air is turned perpetually blue), but this isn’t Sexy Beast II.
Matt Wolf
Meryl Streep feasts once again at the shrine of foodie-ism in It's Complicated, this time playing a California caterer who juggles two men - one of them her ex-husband - in between rolling pastry dough. "Complicated"? Perhaps in terms of decision-making: what to bake? whom to bed? But the abiding fact of writer-director Nancy Meyers' latest foray into the world of adult chick flicks is how far from complex the worlds of her characters often are.
sheila.johnston
He thought he owned his property - he had the title deeds to it, after all - but suddenly the ground shifted under his feet and there came an aggressive bid to snatch his home away. His savings became worthless in the economic chaos; the social order was crumbling. The nightmare has become all too familiar over the last 18 months. But in Mike Campbell's case there was a further cruel turn of the screw: he lived in Zimbabwe. Recently named Best British Documentary of 2009 and shortlisted for an Oscar, this film tells the remarkable story of how Campbell singlehandedly took Robert Mugabe to an international court to defend his right to his farm; and won.
Jasper Rees
The list of plays that have successfully migrated from the stage to the screen is not so very long. If Exam doesn’t belong on that list, it’s not quite for the reason you’d expect. With only ten characters and one windowless set, it has the shape, size and claustrophobic intensity of something that began its life in the theatre. But unless it has kept its roots very well hidden, the screenplay by Stuart Hazeldine appears here in its original incarnation. A film which doesn’t go anywhere spatially puts a whole lot more pressure on itself to perform in other areas. Does it pass the test?
anne.billson
Hey-ho. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the cinema, it's the end of the world again. Where mankind would once have contemplated the apocalypse and its aftermath by way of triptychs and frescos, now it's repeatedly faced with its own extinction in widescreen, with Dolby Digital sound. And if you thought the collapsing CGI cities of 2012 were frivolous, never fear. John Hillcoat's The Road, adapted from the Pulitzer-prizewinning novel by Cormac McCarthy, is guaranteed to wipe that smile off your face.