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.

This is the story of two mountain climbers, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, who attempted an ascent of the West face of Siula Grande in Peru in 1985. It was a difficult climb, but they made it. It was on the way back down that their troubles really started.

Touching the Void is the documentary reconstruction of their climb and descent, based on Joe Simpson’s book. It uses actors in the reconstruction, but the narration is provided by Simpson and Yates themselves. Occasionally the film cuts to head shots of them talking, to emphasize the strength of their emotions as they remember the events.

It’s a stunning story, and an extraordinary film. The beautiful cinematography and constrasts starkly with the loneliness, terror, and pain they faced on the mountain. Simpson’s emotional journey to the brink of madness and despair–and beyond–is stripped of heroism and the sentimentality it can inspire, and instead portrayed with naked honesty. It’s intense, harrowing, touched with humour, and gives whole new meaning to the word “gripping”. A must-see.

Matt Whitlock (Denzel Washington) is the chief of police of a small town in the Florida Keys. He is having an affair with his old school sweetheart, who is now married to another man. When she and her husband are murdered, Whitlock finds himself having to cover his tracks to avoid becoming the main suspect, at the same time as trying to figure out what happened to them. Of course, things are not as they seem.

It’s a one-trick plot, but it’s very well executed. The script is tight, and the pace is fast. Denzel Washington gives a terrific performance as a man under unbearable pressure, and the supporting cast breath enough quirky life into their characters to give the film interest beyond the main storyline, and to add a touch of humour to the situation. (John Billingsley, probably best known as Dr. Phlox from Star Trek: Enterprise, is particularly amusing as the laid-back, slightly shifty medical examiner.) It’s a well-balanced and very entertaining movie.

I’ve been playing a lot of Burnout 3 recently, and this film is the game’s perfect companion. There’s a wafer-thin plot involving ex-cop Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) going undercover to bust gangster Carter Verone’s money-laundering operation, but that’s just padding. The real point of the film is to show fast cars driving fast. With pretty blurring effects from all the fastness.

Unfortunately, the driving sequences show little originality, and they are only rarely good enough to make up for the lack of, well, anything interesting. So for all its swagger, sultry pouting, and brash attitude, the movie ends up just being rather dull.

Dreadful script, and the acting is hammier than a butcher’s shop. The amount of editing that has been done to make Connery’s two major fight scenes seem at all realistic is enormous, and deserves special recognition. The number of shots where you see him both throw and land a punch can be counted on one hand. The rest of the time it’s all lunge, sound effect, and cut to a different angle. I’ve tried hard to think of any redeeming features the film might have…and failed.

A bit more plot (not that it’s great) and fewer gratuitous set pieces (not that there aren’t any) make this a better film than the first one (not that that’s hard). It benefits greatly from having Lara’s former lover Terry Sheridan (Gerard Butler) around as a parner/sidekick–at least this allows for a small measure of characterisation. The final act, which is only ever hinted at in the trailers, could have been rather good, but is let down by an enormously cliched showdown.

The film is also topped off with nine minutes of credits. Nine minutes. On a 103 minute film. I had to double-check the DVD to make sure I had the numbers right, but the counter didn’t lie. Nine minutes. Really.

Silly but fun. Off-the-wall characters, absurd plot, lots of cameos, and plenty of in-joke film references. The comic timing felt a bit off, though, and the pacing was uneven. I thought that in places the film was too eager to highlight its spoof status, and took its eye off being a good film in its own right. It never really caught its full stride, instead being satisfied with a collection of funny moments. If you like Ben Stiller (I do), you’ll probably like this.

Tight little emotional thriller about two illegal immigrants in London who disover a secret trade in human organs while struggling just to get by in life. The interplay of plot and characterisation is beautifully balanced, and the twists in the last half hour keep you wondering just how happy or sad the story can possibly turn out. Strong performances from Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tatou combine to round this off as an intense and sympathetic drama.

Silly and muddled, but not without a certain amount of goofy charm. The exposition to keep the plot moving is hopelessly leaden, and the straightforward comedy scenes are forced and clumsy. It’s the slapstick action scenes that work best, and produce the most laughs.

The script feels like it has been brutally hacked about to a) recognize Jackie Chan as the star power behind the film with a sub-plot equal in stature to the main story, b) accommodate the numerous cameos necessary to rival the 1950s David Niven version, and c) still fit within the 2-hour format. Personally, I didn’t mind seeing Passepartout as a kick-ass kung fu hero returning to China to save his village, but it’s the cameos that dragged the film down. There’s an easy 20 minutes that could have been spent better on smoothing out the plot jumps, or on the relationships between the characters. As it is, it feels like Steve Coogan and Jackie Chan are acting in seperate movies.