A small office of downtrodden real estate agents is shaken up when “downtown” decides it’s time to give them a kick up the backside. By the end of the month, the top two salesmen will get to keep their jobs, while the other two will be fired. The message is delivered as part of a brutal sales seminar by cut-throat über-slimeball Blake (Alec Baldwin). The rest of the film follows the four salesmen throughout the rest of the evening and the next morning, as they come to terms with this new hand fate has dealt them.

The film is adapted from a play by David Mamet, and director James Foley handles it with a very small-scale, theatrical touch. The story is played out mainly through dialogue in a handful of closely connected locations. The all-star cast put in tremendous, intense performances, but in the end I didn’t find myself emotionally connecting with them. It’s undoubtedly a good film, but I enjoyed it primarily in a critical sense.

A slice of wish-fulfilment cubicle humour with dozens of sharply observed digs at office life and office habits, and more quotable lines than you can shake a stick at. The plot backbone is only so-so, but when the script and the cast are firing on all cylinders, sometimes that’s all you need. Gary Cole as Lumbergh is just perfect.

I was surprised by how much this film didn’t strike me as an off-the-cuff pastiche of the original TV show. Yes, there are perm and disco jokes. Yes, they make a big deal of the car. Yes, the camera work deliberately mocks “classic” seventies zoom shots and outboard chase-cams. But overall, this felt like a comedy that could stand on its own two feet.

Ben Stiller in particular makes the character of David Starsky his own. Owen Wilson plays Hutch as his standard cuddly, flaky rogue, and the dynamic between the two heroes is good. The story is simple, but it doesn’t go for Naked Gun-style absurdity: the bad guy (Vince Vaughn) is a serious drug dealer (with some decidedly odd henchmen–Will Ferrell is subtly excellent as Big Earl), not a madman with a crazy plot to take over the world.

I think that’s what makes the difference: the comedy flows from the story, rather than the other way round. It also clearly has a lot of respect and affection for the Starsky & Hutch TV show. It allows you to laugh at it without making you feel embarrassed about having enjoyed it the first time round. That’s a good trick.

Black but ultimately sweet comedy about intelligent and talented high school student Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) who nonetheless fares appallingly poorly in his academic subjects at the exclusive Rushmore Academy. When he sets his mind on winning the heart of teacher Rosemary Cross, his obsessive devotion to her leads him into conflict with his friends, and threatens to destroy the extraordinary reputation he has built for himself.

It’s a clever and subtle film that delights in misdirecting the audience’s sympathies. Max is much more than the stereotypical high school dork, and the film isn’t afraid to show him indulging in the nasty and sometimes creepy side of infatuation. All the while, though, it remains funny, with absurd humour cropping up in the strangest of places. Very worthwhile.

It’s 1917, the Great War is raging, and children are being evacuated from London. Robert, Cyril, Anthea, Jane and baby Lamb go to stay with their eccentric Uncle Albert (Kenneth Branagh), while thier father, a pilot, goes to fight in France. While exploring Uncle Albert’s sprawling mansion, a secret passageway leads them to a beach where the discover a sarcastic Sand Fairy with wish-granting powers.

I haven’t read the book it’s based on, but taken on its own merits, this is a sweet little film. It skips over a host of plot details (such as where Thursday and last October vanished to, and exactly what the housekeeper knows about the Sand Fairy) in favour of delivering a simple story about family bonds, magic going wrong and lessons being learned. My favourite scenes, though, were those with the Sand Fairy. Eddie Izzard provides its voice, and does so with his characteristic sly absurdity. “Have your parents tried boiling you?” Nice, but not quite a classic.

Gratuitious succession of gun fights and car chases, strung together by a weak-ass script, and directed with an utter lack of visual flair. The action is big, dumb, and careless. The verbal sparring between Martin Lawrence and Will Smith was funny in the first Bad Boys outing, partly because of the switched identity sub-plot, but also because it was better written. Here, the interplay relies on an anger management character angle, and it breaks down into “Oh yeah?” “Oh yeah?” shouting matches right from the start. The villain is stupid, and the main plot lines don’t come together for an hour and a half; which is exactly the length this film should have been if the production team hadn’t taken their eyes off the ball.

Johnny Depp is good; Antonio Banderas is bad; the story–insofar as there is one–is even worse. Robert Rodriguez is credited for writing, directing, and editing this motorway pile-up of a film, so at least I know exactly who to blame for it.

As Dreamworks’ Antz was to Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, so is their Shark Tale to Finding Nemo. In the Pixar movies, the characters and stories are drawn from the animal kingdom. In Finding Nemo, for example, the plot revolves around Nemo being taken from his home on the coral reef and plopped into a dentist’s aquarium. By contrast, the Dreamworks characters are more anthropomorphic in terms of their behaviour and outlook on life. The stories and the humour flow from the incongruity of human traits mapped onto other creatures. This is emphasized even more by the use of recognizable big name actors in the lead roles, which forces the animators to act more like costume designers than graphic artists.

Shark Tale takes this approach to extremes. Oscar, played by Will Smith, is the streetwise a small fish with big dreams. He’s in hock to blowfish Sykes (Martin Scorcese), who in turn is beholden to the shark mafia (with Robert De Niro as the capo). By accident, Oscar gets a reputation as a sharkslayer, and he plays this up for all it’s worth so he can live out his bling-bling dream. But how long will it be before the lies catch up with him?

The plot is weak, the mafia sterotypes are tired (even in a fishy guise), and the animation doesn’t elevate it in any way. The visuals are lovely, but no-one goes to the movies any more just to admire the pretty computer graphics. In 1995 when Toy Story came out, yes; in 2004, no. Pixar hasn’t so much raised the bar as removed it. Beautiful CGI is now a given, and in order to distinguish themselves, animated features now have to fall back on the time-honoured technique of being good films. Unfortunately, Shark Tale isn’t.

Alex is an ordinary teenager in East Berlin. In the turmoil leading up to the collapse of the Wall in 1989, his mother has a heart attack and falls into a coma. She remains unconscious for the next eight months while the world she has known undergoes massive social and economic change. When she awakens, her doctor fears than another heart attack would kill her. He recommends that she stay calm, and not be exposed to any kind of excitement. Alex’s mother was an active and dedicated Socialist, and Alex decides to take her home and build an elaborate fantasy bubble around her in which the Wall never fell, and where the DDR is as strong as ever.

Good Bye Lenin! is a witty and touching family drama. It has strong comedic elements, but even though the main story revolves around an elaborate deception, in never descends into simple farce. It much prefers to to explore the limits of white lies: where does kindness end and cruetly begin? This theme is present throughout the plot in several other guises, and it comes full circle in the end, with moving results.

Jack Black plays Dewey Finn, a layabout musician with dreams of being a rock star. When he gets kicked out of his band, and his flatmate starts pushing him to pay his share of the rent, he fakes his way into a job as a teacher at a prestigious primary school. At first he tries to get by with a minimum of effort, but when he realises that some of the kids in has class are decent musicians, he starts secretly training them to enter a rock band competition.

Just as the character of Dewey Finn is too much in love with his guitar solos, so the film is a little too preoccupied with Jack Black solos. I know it’s a star vehicle for him, but it still felt like too much of him, especially when the film didn’t need an excess. The script is good, the situation is funny, and the supporting cast–especially the kids–are strong enough that they could have carried more weight. For all the manic rocking energy on display, the production itself felt very tight and controlled.

That’s not to say it isn’t any good–it is. For a film that has school kids so much at the heart of it, it’s not just for children. There are plenty of jokes that require some knowledge of Rock history to appreciate, so all of us thirty-something parents will appreciate it, too. It comes together as a strong all-round family-friendly comedy. Not an all-time great, but very entertaining nonetheless.