Utterly bizarre, yet compelling film about the Australian self-styled psycho criminal folk hero Mark “Chopper” Read. The contrast between Chopper’s callous, casual violence and his matey ebullience is striking. He’s a hair-trigger nutcase who just wants to be loved. Eric Bana turns in a wonderfully natural performance, portraying him as a man who bounces between boundless self-confidence and utter confusion about why his friends (and the rest of the world) treat him like they do. Off-beat and quirky in a quintessentially Australian way.

This “re-imagining” (yeah, whatever) of the 1969 film is the exact inverse of the original. On the one hand, it doesn’t have the same set of timeless quotes that every movie buff will still be referencing in thirty years’ time. The set pieces are intricate and clever, but they aren’t iconic. On the other hand, it works much better as a film. The revenge-based plot is strong and nicely paced. Mark Wahlberg as Charlie Croker isn’t a patch on Michael Caine, but the peripheral characters are all well-developed and highly entertaining, turning the gang into a true ensemble. It’s not a classic, but I have no doubt which version I would rather watch again.

I don’t watch many scary horror films. I can handle the lightweight, jump-out-of-your-seat stuff, like Scream, Event Horizon, or Cube, but I’m not too good with the films that really set out to disturb and unsettle. It took me months to recover from The Blair Witch Project, and after seeing the 1978 version of Invasion of The Body Snatchers as an impressionable teenager I still can’t deal with having plants in the bedroom. People keep telling me how good Ring and its Japanese original Ringu are, but I have no intention of ever seeing either. Nuh-uh.

So I’m not really sure why I wanted to see Dawn Of The Dead. Maybe I wanted to expose myself to a little zombie culture before catching Shaun Of The Dead, which looks like a blast. Maybe my inner film fan wanted to compensate for never having seen the George Romero original. Maybe it was the only alternative to Starsky and Hutch that Abi found palatable…. Whatever. We saw it last night.

The first fifteen minutes or so are intensely unsettling. Before it all gets really hectic and bloody, there is a period of quiet and uncertainty that you know can’t last. It’s just a question of when the stillness will be punctured. When that moment comes, you’ve spent just enough time building up empathy with the characters that it is thoroughly shocking and disturbing. Especially if you’re a parent whose kids have a habit of getting up and scratching at your bedroom door in the middle of the night. Thanks, Alex. That was a 4am wake up call I could have done without.

Once the zombies break cover, though, the film turns into a more conventional spot-the-survivor thrill ride. A small gang of uninfected people barricade themselves in a mall, and try to figure out how to escape. They have to overcome their own bickering and paranoia, but apart from a few moving scenes, they don’t dwell on their personal losses. Their focus is on action and hope rather than on fear and despair–for which I’m glad, because I don’t think I could have coped with a whole film that was as scary as this one’s opening act.

I’m now also reconsidering my interest in seeing 28 Days Later. I did enjoy Dawn Of The Dead, but one really scary movie every few years is quite enough for me.

Very black comedy about a group of soldiers in 1980s West Berlin, who are into all the trouble they can make for themselves, from stealing supplies and selling them on the black market, to processing and distributing heroin. Joaquin Phoenix puts in a great performance as Ray Elwood, chief clerk to the base commander. Elwood is a corrupt wheel-greaser who finds his comfortable enterprise spinning out of control when he tries to deal in weapons instead of cleaning liquid. The top brass puts arrow-straight war hero Sergeant Lee (Scott Glenn, doing grizzled and menacing) in place to try and clean up the base. Elwood falls in love with his daughter, which gives the Sergeant even more reason to stomp down hard on him. None of the characters are particularly likeable, but you end up feeling sympathetic towards them nevertheless. It’s a caustic and wry look at the military, and how peacetime can sometimes be no better than war.

Perfectly competent action thriller. Jim Street (Colin Farrell) is the lead character, but it’s essentially a “team” film. Sgt. Hondo (Samuel L. Jackson) builds an underdog team, and then trains them into a superteam. The team is thrown into action. The team faces adversity and betrayal, but pulls through in the end to save the day. Jim Street’s personal vendetta ends up intricately tied to the team’s battle, and the two plot lines converge in a satisfying climax. The editing is a bit rough in places, but apart from that it puts a solid tick in all of the action thriller boxes and ends up as a thoroughly entertaining couple of hours of cinema time.

Michael Caine plays Thomas Fowler, an English newspaper reporter in Vietnam in the early 1950s. Brendan Fraser is Alden Pyle, the “quiet American” of the title. He is a medical aid worker who befriends Fowler, and then falls in love with Fowler’s young Vietnamese mistress. It’s unquestionably a beautiful film, with understated yet powerful performances from both Caine and Fraser, but it lays on the allegory too thickly. The three main characters play out a love story that substitutes for the recent history of Vietnam itself. The love triangle breaks apart (as it must), but just as Vietnam’s history didn’t end in the 1970s, the lives of those involved in the love story don’t wrap up neatly, either. The lack of resolution has meaning, but it also left me feeling less than completely satisfied.

I was more impressed by Hulk immediately after I’d seen it. Now, a week later, some of the shine has gone off it. What remains is still a very good film–just not a new superhero benchmark. The plot builds slowly in the first hour of the film, spending a lot of time on the characters and their backstories. Because you know that the Hulk is just sitting there waiting to be unleashed, the tension keeps on building. And when it emerges, it doesn’t disappoint. The creature effects are excellent–much better and more believable than you’d think from the trailers. But don’t go to see the film expecting an all-out action flick. It’s far more introspective than that. As Bruce Banner says after the first transformation, “It was about rage, power, and freedom.”

The film explores these themes in the context of a man coming to terms with his unrestrained alter ego, and his father’s dark past. There are some powerful emotional moments, but also a few over-the-top melodramatic clangers. The ending feels unfocussed, abstract, and confused. It really could have used an extra half hour or so to explain some of General Ross’s silly decisions, and to make the whole finale seem less stage-managed. Maybe in a director’s cut? All round, it’s a fine attempt to make a different kind of superhero film, but that isn’t necessarily what the genre needs right now.

Longer, with more secondary plot lines than the first film, it felt like a good “superhero film”, but it just didn’t excite me in the same way. I kept waiting for a bigger climax to happen, but eventually it didn’t. There have been a lot of really good superhero films lately. Am I just feeling spoiled by quality, or disappointed that this wasn’t the new Matrix film?

Silly crime caper, but very entertaining. George Clooney and Brad Pitt are always watchable, and the rest of the ensemble cast look like they were having a good laugh. Very little in the way of plot, but it’s fun to watch how the heist will play out. But what on earth was up with Don Cheadle and the rubbish cockney accent?

Enjoyable romp, with nicely executed set pieces. The first half is soggy and slow: a succession of sketches of Hogwarts life that don’t lead anywhere until much later. Branagh hams it up wonderfully as Gilderoy Lockhart. At 2hrs 41 mins, though, it’s far too long.