As others have pointed out, the plot of Cars is a rehash of Doc Hollywood: hot shot rookie racing car Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) is on his way to the big final race of the season when he gets separated from his support truck, and is pulled over for speeding through the sleepy town of Radiator Springs. He is sentenced to fix the town’s main street, and in the course of serving out his time, he finds friendship, love, and a certain amount of humility. The small-town core of the film is bracketed on both sides by a sports underdog plot that can’t help but stir the heart.

Outstanding computer animation is commonplace these days, but Pixar still manages to produce films that are–visually, at least–a cut above the rest. Cars is probably the most beautiful film they have done to date, but because they make it seem so effortless you probably won’t even realize it until the film is over and you think about some of the sequences. It isn’t as complex a film as The Incredibles, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s a perfectly judged classic family film, the like of which is hard to find these days. The story is rich and well paced, the characters are memorable and likeable, and its wholesome themes are so well integrated that they don’t trigger waves of message-induced nausea. When it (inevitably) becomes a daily feature in our living room as soon as it is released on DVD, I won’t object in the least.

I know I’ll incur the wrath of Superman and Bryan Singer fans everywhere who loved this, but I’m afraid that Superman Returns didn’t do anything for me. (WARNING: significant spoilers ahead.)

Throughout the movie, I just didn’t know what I was supposed to feel. I couldn’t find its emotional centre. Was it Clark Kent’s/Superman’s struggle to pick up the pieces of his life after being away for five years? Was it Lois Lane’s struggle to figure out if she is still in love with the Man of Steel? Is it the stress inflicted on Lane’s marriage by the introduction of an impossibly perfect third man? Is it the discovery of a new father-son relationship? Is it the tension of the battle with Lex Luthor?

In an effort to turn Superman Returns into a complex superhero story for grown-ups (the holy grail of a Superhero Date Movie), director Singer seems to have lost sight of the fact that Superman is the ultimate comic book superhero. Personally, I’ve never found him particularly interesting because he is too powerful and too infallible. Clark Kent’s bumbling secret identity has always felt like a gratuitous affectation to counterbalance Superman’s extraordinariness: there is super-strong and there is super-weak, but the ambiguous middle levels are left for other comic books to handle.

However, taking the film on its own terms–as an attempt to create an emotionally rich and deep Superman story–there are two things that stood out for me as particular failures. The first is Lex Luthor. When he first appears, he is dripping with menace, a character of ruthless planning and selfish intent. By the time the credits roll, he has been reduced to a Scooby-Doo-style incompetent villain, a figure of mere ridicule. And yet, as the Bad Guy, he has to be capable of coming close to defeating Superman. His (dubious) comedic presence distracts from the film’s attempts to be serious.

The second failure is the screenplay’s refusal to treat the Superman-Lois Lane-Richard White (the man Lois married in Superman’s absence) love triangle seriously enough. In the “classic” version of such a tangled relationship, Lois Lane would have married the Wrong Guy. Richard White would have been handsome, rich, glib, and a total rotter under the hood. He would make his son call him “sir”, and he would be out womanizing in clubs and bars while Lois stayed home to take care of her child. Superman would return, Lois would realize that White was a bastard, and would walk out on him with a cutting farewell speech that highlighted all his failings as a human being.

But this Richard White isn’t that character. He is portrayed as a handsome, rich, ambitious, and rather decent guy. He loves his wife and son, even though he realizes that Lois once loved Superman and may still be in love with him. He is thoroughly human, but he still ends up saving Superman’s life. What kind of anguish is he going through?

In writing classes, writers are often suggested to ask the question: “where’s the pain?” Pain and suffering lie at the heart of emotionally significant stories, and the person I see as being hurt most by this love triangle is Richard.

Okay, so the film is Superman Returns, not Lois Lane’s Husband’s Heartache, but the fact that Richard White is developed to this extent, yet deprived of any opportunity to show his side of the story, emphasizes again the film’s lack of credibility as a “serious” piece.

So does it work as a crash-bang superhero flick, then? No. There was only one set piece I found genuinely thrilling, and that was the airplane sequence. The hair on my neck stood up when Clark Kent ran out of the bar and revealed the suit beneath his clothes, and the rescue he pulls off is amazing. But measured by that moment of brilliance, the disaster scenes at the end felt mundane, and the final continent-hauling came across as implausible.

The final indictment I have is that the closing scene, where Superman pours out his heart to his sleeping son, brought neither a tear to my eye nor a lump to my throat. Since becoming a father, even the slightest cinematic display of father-child tenderness makes me blubber. But here? Nothing. A film that leaves me cold in the face of such an apparently significant emotional outpouring is a poorly constructed one indeed.

Good, stupid fun, full of unnecessary action and implausible stunts. I felt that Alex Pettyfer (who plays Alex Rider) was too bland to be sufficiently heart-throbby, but maybe that’s because I’m a) straight and b) old enough to be his father. Alicia Silverstone is still hot, even though she plays a housekeeper whose main role seems to be to shout “Alex!” repeatedly in a variety of exasperated tones. Bill Nighy is the best thing in the film, though. Worth watching just for the way he munches a biscuit.

For the first ten minutes or so I found it hard to see past Christian Bale’s radical physical transformation into a horrifyingly emaciated stick figure. I had heard about him losing an enormous amount of weight for this role, but I didn’t realize just how far he had gone.

In the film, he plays Trevor Reznik, a factory machinist who is losing his mind. This is the cause of his weight loss. He hasn’t slept in a year, and has developed obsessive-compulsive cleaning behaviours. At work, his concentration is shot, and he is starting to see things. Or is he?

The story follows Reznik as he struggles to come to terms with a reality that is fragmenting around him, and lies squarely in the territory covered before by films like Jacob’s Ladder, Memento and Fight Club. It deals with the layers of (un)reality in a much more “arty” way, though: the direction and cinematography is beautifully sparse, but quite self-consciously so. The twist at the end is predictable, but still satisfying. It’s a movie for the mind, rather than for the heart.

There’s a point in Poseidon not long after the ship has capsized (I hope that didn’t come as a surprise) where the camera focuses on a pair of corpses apparently rising up from the dead. It turns out that there’s survivor beneath them, pushing them up and out of the way, but for a moment, I thought: wow, there’s going to be zombies in the film. How awesome would that be? Not only would the heroes have to make their escape from an upside-down sinking ship, they’d also have to avoid legions of the living dead, eager for human flesh.

And from that point on, whenever the camera would move through a corridor, panning past the bodies of passengers and crew, I couldn’t help but think…and now they’ll rise up!

But no. No zombies. Just a well put-together disaster movie remake. I like Josh Lucas. We need to see more of him.

I haven’t been keeping up with my film news, so I walked into this film not realizing that it pulls a Matrix Reloaded at the end, i.e. it doesn’t end. It’s two-and-a-half hours of lead-up to a big cliffhanger. They don’t actually roll “To Be Continued” ahead of the end credits, but they might as well have done.

I DON’T LIKE THIS STYLE OF FILM MAKING. If you’re going to tell a story in that way, make it into a big-budget mini-series for TV, or string it out for a whole season. A week between episodes, I can just about handle (although I’m much more likely to watch it on DVD). But don’t make me wait a whole fucking year to find out how it ends. I don’t have that kind of patience. I’m happy to come back to the cinema again and again for more stories about the same characters (e.g. Bond, Mission Impossible, Harry Potter), but give me a nice self-contained story with a beginning, middle, and an end.

That said, the film is amusing enough for its duration. The word I couldn’t get out of my head while I was watching it was “spectacle”. The production values are astounding. The action sequences are brilliantly staged, combining thrills and laughs in equal measure. The make-up and effects for Davy Jones and his crew are grotesque and seamless. This is what a big-budget film should look like: absolutely fantastic.

But to counterbalance that, the script is lacklustre, and the characters are weak. The separated lovers are bland and devoid of on-screen chemistry, and even Captain Jack Sparrow with all his swagger isn’t as engaging the second time round. The themes driving the story are greed and desire, and it’s only towards the end that other elements such as honour, duty, and an emotionally significant betrayal start to creep in around the edges. It’s a good thing that is such a spectacle, because otherwise it would be a pretty soulless affair.

I only hope that the next episode (Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End, due in 2007) will somehow justify having used all of this one as an extended opening sequence.

It’s the 70s, and Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) is San Diego’s top news anchor. He has it all, women, friends, respect, women… But his world is turned upside down when Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), an ambitious journalist joins the news team and starts pushing for his job. It’s silly fun; full of laughs but not quite bursting with them. The focus is too strongly on Will Ferrell as Ron, when the other characters have huge reserves of comic potential. The best of the secondary characters is Brick the clueless weatherman (Steve Carrell), who catches many of the funniest moments. It’s not a classic, but highly entertaining nevertheless.

While on a fashion photo shoot in remote Alaska, photographer Bob (Alec Baldwin), billionaire Charles (Anthony Hopkins), and Bear Food (Harold Perrineae) find themselves stranded in the wilderness after their plane crashes. Charles suspects Bob of coveting his fashion model wife, and Bob suspects Charles of being a rich asshole. They’re both right, but they must work together to survive or die. There are bears, and Bear Food (odd name, but an appropriate one) gets eaten. There is hunting. There is rivalry and shouting. There is male bonding and betrayal. It’s massively contrived, and fails the suspension of disbelief test. Hopkins’ stuffy and reserved gentleman shows a decent transformation into Man Of The Wild, but Baldwin’s performance is hammy enough to be served by the slice. Everyone involved can do so much better.