'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire', 'Blue is the WarmestColour', 'Jeune & Jolie', 'All is Lost', 'Diana', 'Nebraska', 'KillYour Darlings'; and 'Frozen': review round-up

Not got a functioning computer at present, so here's some belated reviews as written on an annoying touchscreen keyboard on a tablet... for that reason they will be short.

'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire' - Dir. Francis Lawrence (12A)

The first film in the series was a solid, if unremarkable, adaptation of Suazanne Collins' teen fiction novel The Hunger Games, which succeeded mostly due to the marriage of a highly watchable, young star (Jennifer Lawrence) with an engaging high concept (a dystopian future sees poor communities forced to sacrifice their children to a Battle Royale-style deathmatch, which is then served back to the populace as a gaudy reality TV show) - further boosted by memorable supporting turns from the likes of Woody Harrelson and Stanley Tucci. However, this follow-up - based on the second book in the trilogy, Catching Fire - is much improved, providing a superior dose of hi-octane blockbuster entertainment, cranking up the stakes far beyond just the survival of the principle cast, and doing a lot of interesting world-building along the way.

As with the novels, this is the chapter in which the wider world of Panem is fleshed out and the political ramifications of Katniss' defiant attitude during the last games are explored - and it makes for more interesting viewing as a result. With Katniss now touring the various dishevelled districts of her world as a reluctant, all-conquering champion, the book's first person narrative - and in turn the film's - can now take in a far broader world view. And now that her arena rival/love interest/neighbour Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), well-meaning PR guru Effie (Elizabeth Banks) and alcoholic mentor Haymitch (Harrelson) are established characters she's known for a year (as opposed to sources of varying levels of irritation), there is more room for fun and warmth amidst the story's oppressively bleak setting.

This is a teen-focused blockbuster in which riot police shoot a helpless old man in the head for whistling, in which handsome bore Gale (Liam Hemsworth) is bloodily flogged to within an inch of his life, and in which a frail old woman is corroded to death by a cloud of poisonous gas. So being able to care about the central relationships, and take a certain amount of pleasure in them, is a huge plus. Lawrence is terrific again in the central role, playing a Strong Female Character TM whose strength is not solely found in her toughness and aptitude with a bow, but in the fact she is written with considerable character flaws. She's stubborn, calculating, sometimes extremely cold, but no less a hero, and that combination unfortunately warrants pointing because multi-faceted female characters are still so rare in mainstream blockbusters. Katniss likes bows and hunting and boozing with Haymitch and tormenting her country's sinister president (Donald Sutherland) on national TV, but she also enjoys dresses and hunky boys and adores her young sister. She's a wonderful creation and one that seems particularly well suited to Lawrence's strengths as an actor.

'Blue is the Warmest Colour' - Dir. Abdellatif Kechiche (18)

Loosely adapted from a well regarded graphic novel by Julie Maroh, this tale of the rise and fall of a romance between two young women garnered the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Fittingly Steven Spielberg's jury took the unusual step of giving the prize to the lead actresses, Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, as well as director Abdellatif Kechiche, and it's easy to understand why as both are superb. Particularly Exarchopoulos, who plays her namesake Adele over a span of several years - taking her from naive, teenage schoolgirl to lovelorn, primary school teacher, subtly adapting her mannerisms and posture along the way. Seydoux is comparatively under-served by the story - as the blue-haired Emma she's a tempestuous object of affection, as seen through Adele's eyes - but she's nonetheless an engaging presence.

The film's quieter character moments, as Adele deals with the different stages of her relationship with Emma, navigating interactions with her friends and family, are great work. Certainly the two "dinner with the in-laws" scenes, that do so well to contrast Adele and Emma's backgrounds, education, interests and aspirations, all through attitudes to food and parental interactions, are miniature masterpieces. However, the film falls down when it comes to some extremely long sex scenes that stretch the running time in an unfavourable direction and which break from the film's otherwise naturalistic tone by presenting sex in a way which suggests you've stumbled onto Channel 5 post-watershed.

It feels as though (perhaps commendably) Kechiche has sought to confront viewers with a lot of quite graphic sex so as to honestly portray this on-screen homosexual relationship, without presenting this passionate love affair as chaste or being seen to shy away from the subject matter. But that approach backfires spectacularly when sex ends up being presented in such a perfectly posed and idealised way, without a hair out of place or merest suggestion that bodily fluids are involved. As a result it's a far from perfect, Jekyll and Hyde of a movie, that goes disappointingly from intense, emotional and immaculately acted scenes of dramatic honesty to tedious and downright laughable depictions of the physical act of love. Adele Exarchopoulos might have given the year's best performance, but the film itself falls some way short of her greatness.

'Jeune & Jolie' - Dir. Francois Ozon (18)

Perhaps this one's 'Blue is the Warmest Colour' in reverse, as frank depictions of and attitudes towards sex are undersold by a lacklustre drama which feels a little too detached and bloodless. Writer-director Francois Ozon's portrayal of an underaged prostitute named Isabelle (Marine Vacth), whose apparent indifference to love and sexual intimacy leads her to exploiting her obvious sexual power for quick cash (or perhaps in a self-destructive bid to feel something), is certainly non-judgemental and interesting enough to sit through, but there's definitely something missing. A bit of commentary or satire or maybe even a bit of fun.

My podcast co-host Toby King commented that it wasn't trashy enough to have much fun with or serious enough to really satisfy on a dramatic level, and there certainly is a strange tone to the piece that makes me wonder if there's a bit of sly, nuanced humour involved here if you're a native French speaker. Something lost in the translation perhaps? I certainly wouldn't put that past Ozon, a director who usually crafts much more cerebral and provocative films than this, such as this year's incredible 'In the House'. There's an interesting opening shot which sees Isabelle's brother ogling her on a beach through a pair of binoculars as she bathes topless, hinting at something about voyeurism and the gaze of male audience members, themselves invited to gawp at this gorgeous and frequently-naked 22 year-old model, portraying a girl just turned 17. Yet there's nothing in the rest of the film which seems to suggest an ambition to challenge the spectator in any way. Not a failure, but an unsatisfying watch in retrospect.

'All is Lost' - Dir. J.C. Chandor (12A)

I'm generally a great admirer of movies like this. Little movies that feel like exercises in discipline and restraint, with a couple of limited sets and a few characters. Polanski's 'Carnage' was a terrific example last year, with four great actors arguing in a New York apartment for just over an hour. A few years back 'Moon' similarly entertained me with its two Sam Rockwells, old fashioned special effects and the disembodied voice of Kevin Spacey. This time it's veteran Hollywood star Robert Redford alone on a small boat for a whole movie, trying to survive tidal waves and hold off the inevitable suggested by the title. It's a solid premise, backed by a seasoned screen actor - a bona fide movie icon. There's no dialogue or contrived human drama: it just begins with a random accident and we follow the steadily worsening aftermath. It sounds brilliant.

It isn't.

Being a tight, disciplined little movie of this kind only works if you have enough compelling story to tell or enough of a character to develop over 90 or so minutes. 'Moon' packed in a high concept and a devestating emotional twist, to go with an interesting aesthetic. 'Carnage' uses four variously bitter and unlikeable human beings to explore social mores, affectations and middle class hypocrisy, with a savage wit. By contrast 'All is Lost' is, for the most part, a man in tan chinos looking increasingly grumpy as he stares out to sea, eating beans from the tin. Director J C Chandor, who also made the execrable Wall Street drama 'Margin Call' (a film similarly concerned with the plight of the wealthy and the WASPy), has so little to actually say in this film that several different scenes play out multiple times in a way which would be a veritable screenwriting crime in a movie with more business to take care of (note the two identical scenes in which Redford sees a big ship, fires a flare, shouts, and is not rescued).

It opens with a little monologue in which Redford talks about a life of mistakes and wanting to make amends and achieve forgiveness and ends (SPOILER) with a flash of white light as he's (take your pick) rescued by fisherman or taken into the afterlife by God. So there's a bit of strained religious guff in there if that floats your boat - pun very much intended - but otherwise this film, marketed as being about "endurance" and "survival" is really just an extended, unwelcome glimpse into the life of an uninteresting older chap as he looks very confused at sea.

'Diana' - Dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel (12A)

From the director of 'Downfall' comes another drama about the final days of a mad person with a strange cult of personality, as Naomi Watts joins a no-star cast for mass career suicide in 'Diana'. A film so bad and so funny that it caused me to reevaluate my position that so-called "funny-bad" movies don't exist. It's tone deaf (strange Richard Curtis style rom-com that ends in a fatal car crash), absolutely bonkers (Diana becomes a stalker and, at one point, disguises as a scouser she calls Rita Johnson), gravely offensive (British people stop whenever she enters a room and gawp at her, with a maddening degree of reverence. One man even says "cor blimey!"), and very likely entirely made up. "Wall to wall 22-carat bollocks" to quote Watts' Diana, and surely it must be as one of the world's most famous, continually followed people (whose death was perhaps even caused by the hounding of paparazzi) spends every other sequence alone in a London park or wandering around a public hospital talking about how operations are "exciting". At one point she stands outside her lover's house shouting in the middle of the street. I would bet my 22-carat bollocks none of this ever happened. It's pretty funny though. Destined for cult status, perhaps.

'Nebraska' - Dir. Alexander Payne (15)

A late-career highlight in the career of star Bruce Dern, 'Nebraska' sees the veteran actor taking on the role of Woody Grant: a retired, cold and hard-drinking Montana resident who develops an unhealthy obsession with a sweepstakes letter that claims he's due a $1 million prize, to the consternation of his concerned family. After several attempts to walk to Nebraska on foot - in order to collect his winnings from the company that sent the letter - his extremely meek and kind-natured son, played by comedian Will Forte, agrees to drive him to the offices himself. Along the way Grant Snr passes through his hometown, running into old acquaintances and seldom seen relatives, all of whom suggest they are due a portion of his winnings.

Though not written by director Alexander Payne (the film was penned by Bob Nelson) the film has a great deal in common with his other work, being most successful as a low-key character piece. Scenes involving the extended Grant family are especially funny, and feel very true, whilst Dern's guileless, bewildered character becomes heartbreaking as his son uncovers more about his past and compromise of a relationship with his cantankerous mother (played to great effect by June Squibb). It hits a few bum notes along the way, with some of the more outlandish comic beats feeling out of place and with one subplot resolved in a way that jarred against the otherwise affable spirit of the piece, but Dern's performance is something special and there are moments of genuine greatness.

'Frozen' - Dir. Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee (PG)

Taking obvious and direct cues from the recent success of 'Tangled' - arguably the first computer animated movie to really click for Disney Animation Studios following a string of mediocre (and consequently forgotten) duds - 'Frozen' is the tale of a another princess who is forced to grow up locked away from the outside world by her parents. This time, however, there isn't a wicked crone in sight, with this film's kindly monarchs spiriting away Elsa, their eldest daughter (and heir to the throne), because of fear about her magical ice powers. Meanwhile their younger daughter Anna, who's (through no fault of her own) also been raised in this slightly abusive 'Dogtooth'-esque set-up, is a perky, Manic Pixie Dreamgirl type who longs to marry a prince and can't understand why her older sister is so remote and serious. Then the ice powers make a mess of coronation day, people freak out, Elsa runs away and a succession of Broadway-style power ballards of variable quality begin. There's a toyetic talking snowman called Olaf and a reindeer named Sven, because Disney animated musical.

If I seem uncharacteristically dismissive here - given my love of quality animation (which this undoubtedly is) and classic Disney musicals - it's because 'Tangled' and 'Wreck-It Ralph' have raised the bar after years of relative disappointment and 'Frozen' doesn't quite hit the mark. It feels like a nakedly cynical attempt to replicate 'Tangled' and cross it with the runaway Broadway success Wicked (about a good and a bad witch, the latter having been most famously portrayed by Elsa voice actress Idina Menzel). I love a good musical, when the songs hit their mark, but I left 'Frozen' humming the songs from 'Tangled' and honestly couldn't remember how any of the many power ballads went if pressed. That's not to say it's a bad movie. In a disappointing year for animation it's probably the pick of the bunch, at least out of Hollywood's output. It's also fair to say that the ending is satisfying and fairly progressive.

'Kill Your Darlings' - Dir. John Krokidas (15)

Chronicling the beginnings of the Beat Generation of writers and poets, from the early meeting of the key figures up until David Kammerer's murder at the hands of Lucien Carr, 'Kill Your Darlings' focuses on the relationship between Carr (played by the unsettling young Michael Shannon that is Dane DeHaan) and Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) - though it also makes a feature of their friendship with William S. Burroughs (Ben Foster) and Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston). It's solid and unspectacular stuff about a group of interesting people though, as with that recent abysmal adaptation of 'On the Road', it does make all involved seem like irritating pricks as opposed literary pioneers or great wits. That's not to criticise the performances though, with Radcliffe, DeHaan and Foster all putting in a good shift. It's just not that stunning a film, despite revolving around a bunch of 20th Century celebrities and their involvement in a grizzly murder.

There's a little bit of half-hearted stuff here about anti-semitism (Ginsberg is mocked for being Jewish, whilst WWII lurks in the background, as gleaned from radio bulletins) and homophobia (gay men being arrested in clubs and Carr using a hideous "honour killing" law as his defence against having killed his male lover) but it never comes to anything particularly and the film doesn't ultimately feel as though it has a point it wants to make about anything. Just another bit of "weren't the Beat Generation interesting?" guff and, to be honest, I'm starting to doubt that they were...

'Gravity', 'Thor: The Dark World' and 'Hannah Arendt': review round-up

'Gravity' - Dir. Alfonso Cuaron (12A)

It's been a long wait since Alfonso Cuaron's last film, with modern masterpiece 'Children of Men' coming out all the way back in 2006, but at least it's been worthwhile: 'Gravity' is comfortably one of the year's stand-out pieces of cinema. It's an unrelentingly tense amusement park ride of a film that has the courage to wear its heart of its sleeve and which could even revive mainstream 3D from its complacency coma, with perhaps the most compelling use of the technology seen to date. As well as being a showcase for jaw-dropping visual effects, 'Gravity' also shows us a more kinetic and violent depiction of outer space than we're used to, with astronauts smashing into things and endlessly spinning in the void with no way of slowing down. It's perhaps destined to be to the space movie what 'Saving Private Ryan' has long been to pop culture depictions of the D-day landings, acting as a lasting cinematic reference point and a representation of the truth in the public imagination, whatever its actual (and completely irrelevant) scientific inaccuracies.

Essentially 'Gravity' is the story of one human's clawing, panting, sweaty fight for survival against desperately long odds, as Sandra Bullock's Dr. Ryan Stone - a small-town medical engineer with minimal NASA training - tries to avoid being struck by a calamitous cloud of satellite debris and somehow make it back to Earth without a spaceship after her mission goes horribly wrong. Though Stone has some very real, physical challenges to overcome - such as a depleting oxygen supply and the aforementioned debris field - the chief obstacle she faces is her own weary indifference to life itself. The film is about what it takes for this person to make the difficult decision to live when lying down and dying would be much easier - and, even, more comforting. Through various visual metaphors and lines of dialogue we come to see Stone as someone eager to shut all of the world out in some doomed bid to return to the womb: where George Clooney's charismatic, veteran astronaut sees wonder, Stone appears indifferent and complains of feeling physically ill. At its heart this is a small-scale story about an introverted, deeply personal problem - albeit projected onto an epic and exciting story.

I'll perhaps write more about the film and its themes when more people have had the chance to see it. In the meantime I'll just tell you that it had me awestruck, terrified, nervous and thrilled, pretty much for its entire duration.

'Thor: The Dark World' - Dir. Alan Taylor (12A)

Despite the strain of having to serve as the sequel to two different movies and enduring a fraught production history which saw original director Patty Jenkins replaced by TV veteran Alan Taylor, unhappy stars, last-minute re-writes and several rounds of re-shoots - 'Thor: The Dark World' is a pretty decent bit of summer fun. It's not necessarily the most cohesive or consistent entry in the Marvel Studios canon - not as exciting as 'The Avengers', as funny as 'Iron Man 3' or as perfectly formed as 'Captain America: The First Avenger' - but it's still a damn good time at the pictures, mostly thanks to the performances of, and chemistry between, Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddlestone as feuding Norse god brothers Thor and Loki.

The film recovers from a fairly pedestrian (and overly serious) first act as soon as the fan-favourite, trickster is unleashed upon the movie in a big way, with Loki and Thor forming an unlikely and completely terrific buddy comedy partnership which (all-too-briefly) elevates the movie to a higher stratosphere. The rest of the film is entertaining, to be sure - especially when supporting characters under-served by the first film come to the fore, such as Jaimie Alexander's Lady Sif and Ray Stevenson's Volstagg - and the action is also suitably exciting throughout, especially during a London-set climax that borrows much from the finale of the original 'Monsters Inc.' to fun effect. It's overall a solid bit of action-comedy fare. But there's no denying it's only when Loki is on-screen that it really feels like anything genuinely special is happening.

So great is Hiddleston's presence in the role that he overshadows everything else that's going on in the movie, relegating Christopher Eccleston's villain Malekith to the role of peripheral irritant rather than that of the desired world-ending threat. His increased presence here also sidelines Natalie Portman and the Jane Foster-Thor love story, which was a hugely enjoyable part of what made the first film tick. It's perhaps no surprise that one Shanghai theatre accidentally displayed a fan-made poster in its lobby, depicting Thor and Loki embracing: their's is the real love story here, albeit one that is tragically doomed. For what it's worth, 'Thor: The Dark World' does successfully feel like a sequel to both 2011's 'Thor' and last year's mega-hit 'The Avengers', addressing how events fit in to the immediate aftermath of both stories in ways that should satisfy fans of the overriding Marvel Cinematic Universe arc. It's an entertaining, sometimes brilliant, often muddled misstep, but one that leaves the "franchise" in an exciting place and will leave fans longing to see what happens next.

'Hannah Arendt' - Dir. Margarethe von Trotta (12A)

This brisk and tightly focussed biopic of the Jewish-German philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt, portrayed charismatically and without much in the way of showy affectation by Barbara Sukowa, looks specifically at the period of her life for which she is perhaps most famously remembered: her controversial coverage of the 1961 trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Israel for The New Yorker. Margarethe Von Trotta's compassionate film looks at the ensuing controversy over Arendt's dismissal of the Nazi, who would be executed for his role in the Holocaust, as a petty bureaucrat and as evidence of the "banality of evil": essentially that the greatest threat of society and morality is those individuals who refuse or are unable to think for themselves. Those who hide behind procedures and rules and orders in an unthinking way, paying little interest in the consequences. It's a compelling idea and one that the film explains and explores well.

It's frustrating watching a thinker being chastised by intellectuals and educators for trying to think, as opposed to merely behaving in a reactionary and crowd-pleasing way, yet in showing this 'Hannah Arendt' paints of a picture of its subject as a brave and fascinating genius whose various published works should be eagerly sought out. A German-language film, albeit set in New York with several American actors, sometimes the English language scenes feel clunky, and it does seem to present Israel as some sort of romantic idyll, but overall this is a really interesting drama about the perils and pitfalls of daring to think and of the calamities that await our species should we refuse to. It may be a period piece, but the subject matter is timeless.

'Philomena', 'Captain Phillips', 'Le Week-End', 'The Pervert's Guide to Ideology', and 'How I Live Now': review round-up

'Philomena' - Dir. Stephen Frears (12A)

It's a testament to star Steve Coogan's screenplay (written with Jeff Pope), Stephen Frears' light-footed direction and Judi Dench's nuanced lead performance that 'Philomena' isn't the most depressing film of the year, even if it's still a reliable tearjerker. It's based on the heartbreaking real-life story of just one of many teenage girls became indentured servants to nuns in 1950s Ireland after falling pregnant, many having their babies taken from them by the Catholic church - and sold to wealthy families overseas. It's a story almost tailor-made to provoke outrage, indignation and buckets of tears from an audience - and rightly so, but the strength of this film adaptation lies in its steadfast refusal to wallow. In fact it's frequently quite funny amid the weeping and ruminating on the pros and cons of religious faith, as Coogan - playing journalist and former Blairite spin doctor Martin Sixsmith (upon whose book the film is based) - and Dench's Philomena Lee go on the road in search of the latter's long lost son.

When I say the film looks at the nature of "faith" I don't mean that it does so in that nebulous, infuriating, shallow way most movies use the term - as a byword for all that's good and noble, and insisting that those without "it" are less fully realised individuals. No, 'Philomena' genuinely looks at the nuts and bolts of day-to-day faith and how it can impact on a person's interactions with the world around them, for good or ill. How it can be both a great help to Philomena in her times of need and, in some cases, a great hindrance - giving her lingering feelings of institutionalised guilt and shame where none need exist. Her unwavering Catholicism also prevents Lee from seeing her continued abuse at the hands of the church for what it is, as nuns conspire to withhold information from her and cover their tracks decades down the line. Coogan is restrained and effective as Sixsmith, eschewing anything like Partridge mannerisms or phrasing (something which couldn't be said for his portrayal of Paul Raymond in 'The Look of Love'), whilst Dench just about steals the show creating a compelling, fully-formed character unlike anything she's played in recent memory.

'Captain Phillips' - Dir. Paul Greengrass (12A)

The unlikely hybrid of a hi-octane, shaky-cam Bourne thriller, an Oscar-baiting "true life" drama, and the 'Home Alone' franchise (courtesy of some nifty booby-traps), Paul Greengrass' 'Captain Phillips' - which stars beloved everyman Tom Hanks as the title character and based on his controversial memoir - manages to turn failure, incompetence, regional strife and neo-colonialism into a great American success story. Whereas this year's other Somalian piracy film, taut Danish thriller 'A Hijacking', provides a fairly dry, procedural account of a modern piracy ordeal, mostly focussing on the shipping company board room and their reluctance to lose too much money versus the unravelling mental state/physical health of a crew incarcerated for months on the open ocean, this is (in the pejorative sense I usually stay away from) a very "Hollywood" account of similar events.

There's a selfless hero, punch-ups, gun battles, booby traps, and even little on-ship espionage missions as the plucky crew battle the intruders like an elite counter-insurgency outfit. There's lots of army hardware on show too via lengthy and gratuitous tracking shots of aircraft carriers, shots of marines suiting up for duty, and of army men jumping out of planes for reasons that aren't clear but presented in a way that hopefully looks cool. By the time the climatic half-hour is playing out there're no less than three huge American warships, a squadron of gunboats and an air-dropped platoon of elite commandos versus a tiny (distractingly cute) orange lifeboat manned by four variously rubbish Somalian pirates. It's a bold and unconventional storytelling technique to try and get you to root against the underdog. Maybe this is an accurate account of how it all went down, but it's difficult to stomach all the bluster and bombast regardless.

Though credibly performed by Somali non-actors, the pirates each have one defining personality trait and narrative purpose. There's the angry one who's a potential liability, the delusional leader with a little man complex, the young, doe-eyed one we're given permission to feel empathy towards, and the guy who drives the boat and says or does nothing else of note (poor bastard). Meanwhile our hero is your average all-American ship captain, which we know because of a ludicrous monologue to his wife (Catherine Keener, no less) at the start of the film, which gives us plenty of "life is hard" truisms about the state of modern America to let us know he's just a regular schmo like the imagined audience. For his part, Hanks delivers a fine performance, especially when dealing with the post-event shock at the film's conclusion - even if his Mayor Quimby-style Boston accent comes and goes.

To give 'Captain Phillips' its due it's a technically "well made" thriller with its share of tense moments, though - for me at least - a lot of that tension evaporates once the pirates are off the ship (about half-way through the movie) and the bulk of the crew are safe. Again, 'A Hijacking' is compelling because it's about helplessness and a complete lack of control for a frightened crew effectively abandoned by those in authority, whereas this one's about a single, brave hero - a leader of men - trying his best at every turn to outsmart, outmanoeuvre and out fistfight his captors. It's hard to feel as much concern or empathy for that, especially when Captain Phillips himself is the only thing at stake for more than half the movie. And as the American warships circle, and reconnaissance drones fly overhead, we're all too aware that he comes out OK, because the damn thing's based on his book. That leaves the pirates as the sole "victims" of the film's last act, as we grimly wait to see how the mightiest military force in history will erase them from existence with sick inevitability.

'Le Week-End' - Dir. Roger Michell (15)

From writer Hanif Kureishi and director Roger Michell - collaborators on 'Venus' and BBC TV series 'The Buddha of Suburbia' - 'Le Week-End' is a bittersweet comedy about an old married couple whose kids have finally left home, leading them to go to Paris to see if anything at all remains of their love aside from a pathetic mutual dependency. Played to perfection by Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent, Meg and Nick Burrows are an all-too recognisable middle class English couple, quietly despairing and getting on each other's nerves. Both are charming and infuriating in almost equal measure, though you wouldn't necessarily want to spend any time with these people - especially when they are together. The film's at its best in a quiet and considered first half during which they squabble about hotel wallpaper and ponder which Parisian restaurant to eat in - careful not to pick one that's too touristy. This stuff is nuanced and compellingly watchable.

However, the film suffers from excess amounts of contrived incident and an over-reliance on coincidence, as if somebody at a meeting somewhere along the line decided something more traditionally filmic had to take place for fear we'd all get bored. A compromise in the name of box office that would be entirely in keeping with Michell's half-hearted desire to make the film in black and white that resulted in two versions of the movie appearing in some cinemas (I saw it in colour, for the record). It becomes bogged down by grand gestures, big, public displays, and contrived wacky happenings involving Jeff Goldblum (funny though his appearance here may be) that distract from a very honest and real depiction of relationships that had been taking place up to that point. It ends up feeling like a missed opportunity, though Broadbent and Duncan are reliably brilliant throughout so it's never a slog to sit through.

'The Pervert's Guide to Ideology' - Dir. Sophie Fiennes (15)

Essentially it's over two hours of Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek directly addressing the camera, broadly outlining some of his cultural theories in a wry manner for the documentary camera of director Sophie Fiennes. He shows a lot of movie clips to illustrate his points - citing examples of his theories in everything from Nazi propoganda documentary 'A Triumph of Will' to forgettable Will Smith vehicle 'I Am Legend' - and frequently appears in costume on mock sets of various films as he analyses them, but enjoyment of this hinges entirely on one's interest in the nature of ideology - or at least this man's particular take on it.

For my part, with an amateur interest in philosophy, I found it interesting though a little scattershot in approach, darting quickly between ideas before I felt they'd been adequately explained and at times making broad, unsubstantiated statements that could have benefited from a more rigorous engagement with the subject matter. But overall - speaking as someone not previously acquainted with Žižek and not well-read on philosophy in general - it was a decent and illuminating way to spend some time. Though I do know a few philosophy students who thought it was facile and a complete waste of time, so take my view on this subject with a great big chunk of salt.

'How I Like Now' - Dir. Kevin MacDonald (15)

Perhaps Meg Rosoff's original novel is worth a read, with a glance at Wikipedia confirming it's very different from this movie adaptation, but this film is boring, laugh-out-loud stupid and pretty darn cynical in its attempts to milk pennies from the 'Twilight' crowd with its tween romance plotline - with shirtless falconry and well-lit cow-whispering uncomfortably dominating proceedings that otherwise include: children being executed, an atomic bomb going off in London (killing "thousands" apparently), and a grisly rape scene. It also doesn't help that our "hero" Daisy, played by Saoirse Ronan, is a terrible prick for no reason at all (unless we buy into the film's hand wave explanation of "daddy issues") - moving to England to stay with her cousin's and being nakedly horrid to all of them immediately upon arrival in the face of constant kindness.

The tone is jarringly all over the place, the characters make no sense, and the near-future dystopia depicted is lacking in any commentary or satire: all that we're supposed to care about is whether Ronan will be able to continue bonking her hunky cousin once the ill-defined "terrorism" stops. This is a film where a young boy starts swigging alcohol from a previously unseen hip-flask during one supposedly poignant scene and we're not supposed to laugh. It's a film in which the lead character says the title out loud. A film where handsome farmhands display an unexplained - and never again mentioned - ability to communicate with cows, which is brushed off with a shrug and another surly pout from our infuriating, charisma-less lead One of the year's very worst - and I'm a self-confessed sucker for an apocalypse movie.

'Blue Jasmine', 'Rush', 'In A World...', 'The Great Beauty', 'About Time' and 'Riddick': review round-up

'Blue Jasmine' - Dir. Woody Allen (12A)

The words "a return to form" seem to have been ascribed to every Woody Allen film since the mid-90s to the point where I'm genuinely surprised any professional critic would actually use them in a review. But what that curious phenomenon seems to show is that however lacklustre some of his recent canon have been perceived as by many - including, from time to time, this reviewer - they've always managed to feature enough reliably great performances, some sharp lines of dialogue and often an ingenious central concept that means they're always somebody's "best since Manhattan" (or whatever the yardstick for Woody greatness is this month). In other words, every 'Curse of the Jade Scorpion' or 'Scoop' has something to recommend it and, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Allen's decline have been greatly exaggerated.

I often wonder if, say, 'Melinda and Melinda' had been by a new filmmaker whether critics would have been much more impressed. We'll never know the answer to that one for sure, but it's difficult to argue against the idea that Woody is to some extent a victim of his own successes. That's not to say all of his movies have been golden (there are one or two I can't stand *cough* 'You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger' *cough*), just that we need to have a little perspective. He's a 77 year-old man who still manages to write and direct  a new feature every single year. I don't single out his advanced years to be patronising, but rather to point out that he's still vital, creative and seemingly just as concerned with pondering the human condition as he was in the 60s - at an age when most of us close ourselves off and become reactionary Daily Mail readers (huge generalisation, but you get my point). Anyway, I say all this to cover my ass before getting into his latest film.

I'm gambling that displaying an awareness of the critical discourse surrounding his movies will lend me a bit of credibility (or else let me off the hook) when I somewhat inevitably say: 'Blue Jasmine' is a triumphant return to form! Woody's best since 'Sweet and Lowdown'!

And it is. To my mind, it's his most perfect movie since 1999. Its closest contender for that accolade, 'Midnight in Paris', is easy-going, charming, inventive and often very funny - but 'Jasmine' vaults over it by virtue of genuine dramatic heft and, with Cate Blanchett in the title role, a lead performance for the ages. It's rare for a Woody Allen film - even a vintage 70s/80s one - to be so tragic, sad and consistently tense as this. It made me uncomfortable and anxious throughout, and the funny lines don't feel like jokes or witticisms in the Allen style, but are born of great characterisation. There's a lot of heart and feeling in this one and no easy answers about life's troubles, nor is there an Allen surrogate figure making sardonic wisecracks to soften the blow. It's a brave and disturbing movie, whilst still feeling like a Woody Allen film - unlike some of his previous attempts at prioritising drama over comedy, such as artistic misfires 'Match Point' and 'Cassandra's Dream'.

Blanchett gives a titanic performance as a force of nature who sweeps through the film delivers lines like "there’s only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming" with an intensity that's nearly frightening. Her part is fantastically well-written to begin with, but she takes the material to another level and manages to make Jasmine a sympathetic character in spite of her selfishness and self-defeating attitude, probably because she really nails representation of the character's mental problems and crippling dependence on drink and pills. The supporting cast is also brilliant, with Sally Hawkins particularly good value as the sympathetic sister and comedian Andrew Dice Clay giving a surprisingly effective performance as her wounded ex-husband. It's a difficult film to find fault with, though I might have taken issue with Hawkins' beautiful San Francisco home (which can't be cheap) being dismissed so often as some kind of shameful hovel had the film not convinced me so thoroughly in every other respect.

No question, this is one of the year's best and it's safe to say we have a clear favourite for the Best Actress Oscar.

'Rush' - Dir. Ron Howard (15)

In keeping with Howard canon to date, this F1 racing biopic - which explores the 70s rivalry between brash, womanising Brit James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and clinical, cold Austrian Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) - is a polished, competently put together crowd pleaser that doesn't take any risks. A decent crop of actors, giving charismatic performances, in a "based on a true story" tale of man's triumph over adversity, the will to win and every other hackneyed sports movie cliché available. I'll say this for it: 'Rush' races by, no pun intended, and isn't at all boring, but it's very difficult for me to pinpoint why that is. Maybe it's because it's loud and there are lots of fast cars in it? Perhaps it's all the gratuitous female nudity that serves neither plot nor character? It's probably got the most to do with the pleasure of seeing Brühl's Lauda being relentlessly dickish to various people. Yeah, it's probably the last one.

Peter 'The Queen' Morgan's screenplay leaves nothing unexplained, with race commentators and track announcers enabling the writer to commit the cardinal sin and tell even as he's showing, more or less at all times. You'd expect a bit of hokey exposition in the race commentary, explaining the sport to those unfamiliar or establishing the context of various races in the drivers' careers, but Morgan and Howard go further - having an almost ever-present commentary that updates us helpfully on the simplest of things. I'm exaggerating slightly but the commentary at times says things like "here are the two rivals, the by-the-book Austrian Niki Lauda and his playboy British challenger James Hunt. Of course, they don't like each other all that much after the incident in the last scene you saw, but they both want to win here today, with points to prove on their various competing philosophies on life. One thing's for sure though: the duo have a grudging, mutual respect that will really come into the fore in the third act." And when the commentary isn't doing that the soundtrack is, notably as Bowie's "Fame" plays during a montage of Hunt being famous.

Everything is technically top-notch but there's no character or originality to the way this movie's been put together. You always get exactly what you've come to expect and no more. It is literally a longer version of the trailer. Stylistically it's a collage of bits you've seen (over)used elsewhere. Such as the obligatory bird's-eye shot of crowds holding umbrellas in the rain (because it's pretty) and the low-angle, over-exposed shaky-cam shots of Hunt drinking beer that show us he's on an out of control bender driven by despair. It's like every scene in the screenplay caused Howard to ask himself "now, how has this been done well before in other people's movies?"

'In A World...' - Dir. Lake Bell (15)

The promising directorial debut feature of writer and actress Lake Bell, 'In A World...' is a smart comedy about a vocal coach, Carol Solomon (Bell), who dreams of breaking into the male-dominated world of voice-over work - with no gig as prestigious as narration for the trailers of epic movies. It's a vocation her competitive and egotistical father, Sam Soto (Fred Melamed), is at the top of and - as a terrible sexist with no faith in his daughter - he's grooming another man, Gustav Warner (Ken Marino) to take his place in the industry. So Carol, with the help of a sound technician played by meek, niceguy comedian Demetri Martin, goes against the odds, and against her father's advice, to try and win the chance to say those famous words of the title over the teaser trailer for the film adaptation of a Hunger Games style teen-lit phenomenon.

The voice-over industry squabbling is pretty funny, but the film's trump card is the presence of Bell herself as a confident, likeable lead. Carol is the sort of silly, immature, wisecracking character women don't normally get to play in Hollywood - usually consigned to playing tutting shrews in comedies about 30-something man-babies and rarely getting the funniest lines. It appears Bell's answer to that particular imbalance has been to make her own damn film - and I'm glad she did. Especially as it means we have a female character whose relationships with her father and vague love interest (Martin) are demonstrably equally important as that with her sister (Michaela Watkins). In other words, she isn't defined exclusively by her relationship to male characters even if the film is about her relationship with a male-dominated industry.

Light and breezy, consistently funny and overflowing with charm, the film's only misstep is a final ten minutes in which too many moral lessons are learned and the film's female-empowerment message is spelled out in clunky fashion, when it was already implicitly clear from the synopsis. It's also jarring to see [SPOILER WARNING] the film let Carol's father off the hook in such spectacular fashion when he's spent the entire movie not only discouraging his daughter but actively placing obstacles in her way. Don't get me wrong, you expect some kind of father-daughter reconciliation, but Sam's speech - in which he expresses pride in his daughters' achievements - feels disingenuous after what precedes it, and therefore it doesn't quite pack the feel-good punch you feel the movie is going for.

'The Great Beauty' ('La belleza grande') - Dir. Paolo Sorrentino (15)

A total and utter cinematic treat from the supremely talented director of 'Il divo', Paolo Sorrentino, 'The Great Beauty' stars Toni Servillo as a once promising author who got sucked into the decadent Rome party scene after his one great success, 40 years prior, and is now deeply unfulfilled - his lifestyle lacking any real beauty or appeal. He's a man who, in his own reckoning, "wanted not just to be the king of parties, but the power to make them failures": and in that respect he has been a great success. A dominant presence amongst the city's fading intellectual class, all equally unhappy in secret - an isolated, self-loathing and hopelessly vain bunch who you feel have been playing out the same social gatherings for decades.

It's a beautifully sad film punctuated by a bouncy, euro-dance soundtrack, which perfectly encapsulates the gilded cage that Rome has become for its protagonist. And it's also capable of being extremely funny, and more than a little wise with some really pithy dialogue worthy of future quotation. As you might expect from Sorrentino, it's sharply observed and offers a stinging, satirical rebuke to aspects of contemporary Italian culture: from a conveyor-belt approach to cosmetic surgery to the empty pretension of Rome's young avant garde set. Yet it's also a tender and sincere piece in which sex, death and the Catholic church all play a part. And gosh is it pretty to look at.

'About Time' - Dir. Richard Curtis (12A)

It's difficult talking about Richard Curtis' latest twee, upper-class comedy 'About Time', because though I really didn't take much from it, didn't find it at all funny and found elements of it's central premise a little troubling - I'm reluctant to tear a strip off something so faultlessly kind. Yes: Curtis paints Britain as a strange fantasy world, supremely exportable to foreign cinema markets and alien to most people that actually live there, and he does (infamously) tend to whitewash what is - and has been for centuries, by the way - a multi-cultural country. What's more, the idea that only men in the film have the power of time travel is more than a little sexist, and in a peculiarly contrived sort of way - which literally robs female characters of agency during this story. However, I really do think he means well. I think he's overall a kind sort of person with broadly decent intentions, even if I don't seem to share his world-view, and whilst that doesn't make me like his films any more than I otherwise would, it does make me baulk at the idea of kicking them in the groin quite so hard as I might usually enjoy.

One of the peculiar features of 'About Time' is that there is really no conflict at any point... at all. Domhnall Gleason's character begins the film a decent chap and ends the film more or less an unchanged (if slightly older) man. When the plot presents him an opportunity to cheat on his luminescent girlfriend (Rachel McAdams) he wisely refuses it first time around. He's ultimately supposed to be imparting some lesson to us about not wasting what little time you have, punctuated here by his using time travel to get to spend more time with his dapper, wise old father (Bill Nighy) - yet Gleason's character always makes the most of his time with his father throughout what we see of his life. He is seemingly not a man with any regrets and, quite honestly, he's a pretty much the last person in all of fiction worthy of the gift of time travel, given that he pretty much just likes life the way it is. For a film ostensibly about time travel, there are incongruously long stretches where none takes place. Personally I find this lack of any antagonism or conflict refreshing: maybe there should be more films where people are basically decent and are allowed to like each other. But it isn't really the stuff of great drama or, it turns out, comedy.

Yet there's something genuinely sweet about a film where, during the inevitable wedding speech (as compulsory in a Curtis as the American girlfriend, kooky sister and well-meaning but mad old relative) the best accolade a father can bestow upon his son is that he is a kind man. Not a clever man or a wealthy man (though Gleason's character is shown to be both) but a kind one. You can (and should) find fault with many aspects of this film and of Curtis' wider filmography - certainly in his representations of social class and evident institutionalised sexism - but we could all do with a little more kindness and it be very churlish of me to spit from a great height upon something as painfully well-intentioned as this bit of old dross.

'Riddick' - Dir. David Twohy (15)

I'm going to start this one with the positive and then get on to the regrettable, regressive and wrong-headed sexual politics later on, because what 'Riddick' gets wrong it gets so catastrophically wrong that if my kinder comments followed they could seem in bad taste by association. OK? Let's go...

'Riddick' is the third entry in a series kept alive only by Vin Diesel's 'Fast and the Furious'-led star-power, as he attempts to ham-fistedly bludgeon his character from the well-received 2000 sci-fi/horror 'Pitch Black' into pop-culture significance. The logic seems to be that if night-vision afflicted convict-turned-anti-hero Richard B. Riddick(TM) appears in enough movies and video games, and is presented as a sufficient enough "badass", he is guaranteed to enter the pantheon of cult movie heroes, alongside Bond, Indy and the dog from 'Marley & Me'. It's an interesting theory, even if it doesn't seem to be panning out that way (there's no evidence people are any closer to caring). Regardless, Diesel has his fans and 'Riddick' does enough to satisfy that audience - even if it's destined to do next to nothing for anybody else.

That said, there's something strangely hypnotic about the film's opening 40 minutes in which a mostly-silent Riddick (a wise scripting choice, given Diesel's difficulty emoting and reading lines) stalks the arid wasteland of an anonymous alien world killing increasingly large CGI beasts. Birds, fish, dogs, giant scorpions: Riddick can best them all when it comes to punching and stabbing and running and grunting. Like a survivalist's wet dream, Riddick spends a significant chunk of the movie living in a cave, crafting weapons out of bits of bone. In all seriousness, it seems like it might be an attempt to chronicle ancient man's assent to the top of the food chain, as he's tormented by various creatures before becoming the area's main predator. At which point he sets his sights on greater quarry: man.

Then we get the slightly less compelling, but still oddly watchable second act in which Riddick is mostly absent and presented as some sort of horror movie monster (we occasionally see an outstretched hand), as he stalks two teams of bounty hunters who have been dispatched to the planet to capture him. One of them is a lady (Katee Sackhoff) and, as we learn through clunky and grotesque banter, she is a lesbian. This will be important later. In this section the film feels like a low-budget, over-lit, cheesy-as-fuck version of the original 'Alien', with Riddick filling in as the unknowable antagonist. Which is pretty jarring and unusual given it's a movie called Riddick and the third film in which this character has appeared, but I've got to admit I have a lot of admiration for this because it's so unexpected as to verge on brilliant.

A 'Wall-E' style first act in which our hero barely speaks and doesn't interact with any other humans, and then a second act in which he mostly disappears and the film shifts focus to being about a bunch of new characters. That's sort-of marvellous. Note: also of considerable joy to me, there's no more to the plot of this movie than the fact that Riddick is stuck on an alien world and wants to get off it. It's simple and doesn't waste time with an unnecessary, convoluted nonsense: the goal is clear and when it's reached [spoiler warning!] the movie ends. Right away. That sounds like a very simple thing to praise a movie for, but it's amazing how many modern films can't tell a simple story and don't know how to end without half an hour of various characters meeting to say goodbye. It's as if studios think we view every movie as some beloved relative and it's feared we all need sufficient closure before we can let go.

I've got to say, if that's all the film was - and if the last act was just Riddick punching mercs and monsters and stealing a spaceship - then 'Riddick' would probably get a mostly enthusiastic review from this critic. However (and it's a huge however), you run into difficulty when your edgy, amoral, loner anti-hero starts dispensing rape threats and it's not something the film can ever (read: should ever) expect to recover from. When Riddick is captured by mercs at the start of the third act, he grimly explains - in tedious and predictable fashion - how he's going to kill various male elements of the cast. But for Sackhoff's lesbian, tough-girl he has something else in mind: basically he says he's going to "go balls-deep" in her, and she's going to ask him to "real sweet-like". He also gloats that he saw her nipples earlier in the movie, perving whilst she was showering (in a gratuitous topless scene). This is just creepy. Not charming. Not funny. It's unpleasant and leaves a very bad taste. He is trying to intimidate (and simultaneously woo?) a woman by bragging about seeing her tits to room of her co-workers whilst she is present. That's literally what our hero is doing in that scene. She is defiant, at first. But... you know how the film ends, right? Of course you do.

Sackhoff's lesbian straddling Vin Diesel and asking him to fuck her is the film's sad, loserly idea of the ultimate display of masculinity for our hench male hero. He turns a lesbian whilst ascending into a spaceship from a battlefield strewn with the corpses of all the space aliens he killed. Teenage male empowerment fantasies simply don't come any less subtle or mature than this. It's the highest possible calibre of gross, macho bullshit. It spoils what is otherwise a pretty weird and (if not always for the intended reasons) entertaining movie.

Why I (Mostly) Quit Writing on the Internet: Hit-Baiting, Churnalism and Reactionary Bollocks

At the start of the year I said that, at some point in the future, I might write a post here about how I fell out of love with wanting to be a full-time movie critic/"journalist" and why I basically stopped maintaining this blog with anything like the frequency of the first two years. I hadn't bothered to do so to date because that's obviously a very self-indulgent thing to do, even by blogging standards, and - quite honestly - who cares about why I decide to do anything? Yet over the past couple of days, in the run-up to the (in gamer circles) highly anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto V, I've started receiving (not entirely unjustified) negative comments on Twitter and elsewhere about an article I wrote on the game for a reasonably widely-read pop-culture website nearly two years ago - which people are obviously coming across on Google now that the game is a hot topic once again.

Basically, I wrote a self-consciously inflammatory piece about the upcoming game long before any footage or screenshots of it had been released (a fairly douchey thing to do, I know), basically outlining a series of flimsy, uninformed and troll-baiting reasons why it would be terrible. I'll get around to explaining why in a moment, because that's sort of the most important part of this whole saga.

That article, which solicited (arguably deservedly, in this instance) typically morale-boosting comments like "wow. That's the worst article I've ever read", was not entirely motivated by snarky cynicism as I originally conceived it: at first I was genuinely interested in having a reasonable discussion about how I feared growing negative feeling about GTA IV, which (somewhat against the grain of fandom) I like and consider a huge step forward for the series, could lead to developer Rockstar taking a backwards step, just as their best-selling series had started to mature. I worried we'd see something more shallow, less focussed and a return to the kind of knock-about, irreverent shenanigans of earlier games in the series. This was me post-The Dark Knight but before The Dark Knight Rises: when the idea of something being dark and grounded had more currency for me than it does now, trite as it's become. But, if I'm honest, I always knew GTA V would turn out to be a polished, entertaining product and that it'd probably be a great game well worth looking forward to.

The finished game, out this month, may or may not have ended up like I feared, though I'm sure it's a lot of fun regardless. (To be honest, I don't really have time to play games to the extent that I used to and don't really care one way or the other about GTA V.) But the article could have been, in theory, a reasonable piece of commentary saying "I fear [X], but on the other hand [Y]". The troll-baiting snarkyness came from trying to be something I'm not: it came from pressure to attract those all-important "hits" that generate the ad revenue necessary for website owners to make money. Which had just become my problem for the first time.

You see in the run-up to writing that article I had gone from working for the site completely for free - as many young writers, hungry for opportunity are happy/compelled by a penny-pinching industry to do - to being made a sort of sub-editor told that I stood to make X-hundred numbers of pounds per week depending on the number of hits I attracted to the site. At first I attempted to meet this responsibility as I'd always naively imagined it: idealistically commissioning what (I thought) were "worthy" articles about film-making and wider pop-culture (as per the remit of the site). Mostly celebratory, labour-of-love stuff about the wide array of things the site's huge pool of (volunteer) writers were passionate about, from comic books to arthouse movies to sport.

Alas, these things weren't at all compatible with an economic model based around attracting hits via search engines and, for one miserable week, I was spending from 8am to 10pm hunched over the computer with little to show for it - creatively or fiscally. It was an uphill struggle to get good quality work on that site (from people working for free), not made any easier by the fact that new content arrived so fast it tended to push less popular items off the front page within an hour or so of publication - quickly dooming less bombastic pieces to the archive.

In short: "10 Reasons Why [X] Will Suck" is worth more to such a site than something more nuanced and reasonable. If you wonder why online discourse is frequently so antagonistic and perpetually ALL-CAPS shouty, the blame doesn't lie solely with angry readers, hatefully abusing their anonymity: editors encourage articles that solicit this response because they get people talking. Because people share them on Facebook and Tweet about them and thus attract more hits, bringing in more revenue. Navin R. Johnson came to a similar realisation in 'The Jerk'.

Hence the reasonable article I originally planned on never appeared. It didn't have a title that would work with Google or anything like enough punchy bullet-points to sustain the casual engagement of the imagined skim-reading public. To be clear: I'm not blaming this on the editor/site owner at all. The article was my idea. I pitched it and I ultimately made it sensationalist crap. But I did so because I was worried about getting enough hits to get paid. Volume of traffic is what counts and not the quality of it. To put it into context, so you don't assume I'm a money-grabbing-shyster who'd do anything for a quick buck, the sort of articles I like to write frequently attracted only a couple of hundred hits each.

These were, quite often, interviews with directors and actors which required hours of preparation, travel up to London, then several more hours transcribing words from a scratchy dictaphone (not fun at all), before then writing and formatting a finished article. And then you get a few hundred hits if you're lucky - at least on the site I wrote for (we're not talking The Guardian here), which was at that time dominated by share-friendly list articles proclaiming the "10 best this" and "100 worst that". In contrast my terrible article on GTA V currently has several hundred thousand views, over a hundred comments and lots of all-important "re-Tweets" and "shares". These are stats which make me sad about the state of online journalism and made me increasingly reluctant to want to devote much more of my life to it, because they actually highlight an existing disincentive to spending the time it takes producing work of quality.

Be honest: if your income was directly linked to how many hits you attracted, would you spend a considerable part of your working week posting an interview with Werner Herzog or Noah Baumbach that ten people care about, or would you spend the equivalent time bashing out a dozen terrible list articles that will each attract several hundred times that of an interview and take minimal time/brain power to write (at least when done badly by me)? It's that question I didn't want to have to answer any more, basically.

Now the circumstances leading up to the creation of my article, which was merely lazy and cynical rather than outright offensive, weren't the only reason I stopped wanting to write in this field on anything like a professional day-to-day basis. I also didn't appreciate being asked to effectively re-type other site's news stories, which - alongside lists - was part of that site's bread and butter in the absence of any actual investigative journalists. The embarrassing and ethically questionable practice I've seen described as "churnalism". Then there was the day, shortly before I left, that I received a mass e-mail asking for submissions from the writing pool for an article about the "top 100 babes" or something similar. Which is gross.

But probably the worst thing I came across was during the London riots. As they unfolded live on TV - as several decades of disenfranchisement of the inner-city poor and ethnic minorities created a sorry, pointlessly destructive spectacle of raw human ugliness - I was horrified (not a word I use here lightly) when one of the site's owners excitedly sent round an e-mail soliciting articles about the best weapons to use on rioters (I seem to remember tear gas was a suggestion), hoping to cash-in quickly on the turmoil. I can imagine the same guy suggesting an article with the title "10 Weapons We're Excited To See Dropped On Damascus!" That I didn't quit writing for them that instant remains a source of shame, but you're always reluctant to burn professional bridges when you're just starting out and I was grateful for many of the opportunities the site had given me in the past. I suppose I'm bridge-burning right now, though I've tried to do so without causing undue embarrassment or offence to anybody involved.

So yeah, I wrote a stupid article about something I didn't care that strongly about in an attempt to impress my boss, earn some money and subsidise dead-end articles about things I actually do care about. It's not something I'm proud of, but at least I stopped doing it very quickly and I haven't done it again since. Now you know why I fell out of love with doing this stuff. I hope it was worth your time! Thanks for reading.

'Upstream Color': review

In order to satisfy a verbal contract I've made with myself, I try to write something amounting to a "review" of every film I see at the cinema. For that reason I feel obliged to write a little bit about the universally acclaimed 'Upstream Color' - written and directed by its star Shane Carruth, who also provides the music. For what it's worth, it was a film I was really looking forward to. It's the story of [anybody's guess really, Google one of the many detailed descriptions if you're curious]. You probably gather by now that the film did nothing for me. In fact I'm willing to admit I didn't follow it very well at all, either on a plot level or as a metaphor, so oblique was it - hence my reluctance to spend much time talking about it. Apologies if you came here genuinely seeking some sort of proper analysis.

Friends of mine who did enjoy it have since directed me to pages devoted entirely to explanation of its themes and basic story, but I gain nothing from that, personally. For me, the film needs to speak for itself and needs to make me feel something. Or maybe it doesn't? Who's to say you can't make films catering to a very specific niche of people, and with little regard for or interest in a bulk of the audience? Perhaps there's a place for 'Upstream Color' and plenty of hardcore Thoreau fans out there to lap it up. Certainly lots of people I trust seem to think it's one of the best of the year. It's just not for me, I guess.

'The Way, Way Back', 'Elysium' and 'Planes' (sort of): review round-up

'The Way, Way Back' - Dir. Nat Faxon & Jim Rash (12A)

The words "Twentieth Century Fox Searchlight presents" or (better still) "from the makers of 'Little Miss Sunshine'" rarely herald something good. There's a certain quirksome, brightly coloured, ensemble cast-powered American Indie - usually with a sun-faded blue and yellow poster - that comes out every year bearing these stark promotional slogans (or warnings, as I call them). They usually have boring-straight-man-Steve-Carell in them somewhere ("I'm an actor!", these appearances seem to scream) and Alison Janney is never far away - though she's completely superfluous in the latest of these jangly guitar music laden monstrosities, 'The Way, Way Back', which adds to the feeling that a perfunctory box ticking exercise has informed some of the decision making from writers-turned-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash.

This one can be summed up as being about a kid (Liam "one expression" James) who is entirely miserable and unsympathetic in the face of constant, unearned kindness and compassion from almost everyone he meets. Sam Rockwell runs a water park and wants to be this kid's best friend, for... reasons, I guess. It's never clear why. He just starts following him around and smiling at him in a way that should register as creepy. Likewise, everyone at the water park - customers and employees - loves him. Amanda Peet wants to dance with him. Alison Janney is desperate for her son to be friends with him, while her daughter (the three first-name sporting AnnaSophia Robb) is equally desperate to be his summer girlfriend, hanging around looking longingly at him in spite of his clear lack of social graces and charisma.

The cherry on the cake here is that he hates his mother's (Toni Collette) new boyfriend (Carell), as children his age are liable to do. But whereas most kids in his position form an irrational hate they can't reasonably express about a person who's probably decent enough, this kid actually has sees first hand evidence that this guy is a douchebag and gets to shout about it at a garden party - re-framing the story from "angsty teen who needs to grow" to "crusader teen who knows better than the grown-ups about everything".

He should be a sympathetic character. We've all been awkward, moody teenagers. But this kid is his own worst enemy in a world that's throwing nothing but well-intentioned metaphors and sunshine in his direction for the most part... and he doesn't even really learn anything or change at all by the time the credits roll. He enters the film a moody, entitled little shit and exits the film in the same fashion. At the start Carell tells the kid he's a 3/10 and that he needs to put himself out there more and smile occasionally. Well, this is the story of a kid or goes from three to, charitably, a four and a half over an hour and forty minutes that will have you thinking "shit, even Sam Rockwell is bad in this" and "did these guys really write 'The Descendants'"?

'Elysium' - Dir. Neill Blomkamp (15)

It isn't 'District 9' but Neill Blomkamp's follow-up is as ambitious and imaginative as it is clunky. There's a lot of ham-fisted, panto-quality, over-acting involved - notably from Brazilian actor Wagner Moura as "Spider" and Jodie Foster, who seems to be playing a Disney villain in a film happening in her own imagination - while the childhood flashback sequences are a bit cheesy and obvious and, I'll concede, its movement between irreverent, splatter-gore comedy and cloying, string-music backed scenes of children on crutches in peril speak of a tonal mishmash. But it's also got some decent dystopian world building and spectacular design work, as well as some interesting politics for a mainstream blockbuster - with our hero, Matt Damon, framed as an insurgent against the robot drones, unhinged mercenaries and satellite surveillance footage of the film's privileged bad guys - white, wealthy elites living far above a shanty town and predominantly Hispanic Los Angeles in the shiny, clean space station paradise of the title.

The man who once nearly directed a Halo movie, based on the Microsoft video game, continues to borrow heavily from recent sci-fi hits of that medium - notably with elements of Mass Effect and Halo itself. There're some very video gamey future-weapons too, and the plot sees Damon effectively level-up into an augmented mech warrior for some hi-octane fight scenes against Sharlto Copley's crazed henchman that make me question whether I'd rather be playing 'Elysium' than watching it. But it's a solid and entertaining action movie with ideas and a high-concept, so overall I'm enthusiastic about it despite a great many shortcomings.

'Planes' - Dir. Klay Hall (U)

Now, I can only kind of review this - so take my opinion with a greater than usual pinch of salt - but I took my aviation-obsessed 2 1/2 year-old brother to see 'Planes' and he got bored after about 15 minutes, and we left the screening after 30. So I haven't seen the entire movie and usually wouldn't give too strong an opinion based on that. However, I wanted to note that this movie seemed to fail with its target audience: on a plane-mad toddler who will patiently watch actual YouTube footage of a helicopter take off with wide-eyed glee for a very uneventful ten minutes. Sadly, he just couldn't be bothered with the exploits of Dusty the Cropduster and I can't really blame him.

From my end I can only say it's very clear that the film was produced by Disney's straight-to-video people and not by Pixar. It's flat, not particularly detailed and the animation lacks finesse. And, on top of that, it's basically a re-make of the first 'Cars' with a less flawed, more bland central character. That's right: a re-make of 'Cars' made by less talented people. Shudder.