Review: It's Complicated (2009)

Director Nancy Myers returns to familiar territory with this semi-farcical comedy about middle-aged divorcees falling in love again. It's Complicated may be the title of the film but no one could accuse the plot of being so. In fact, it is dangerously overloaded with cliches and crowd pleasing touches.

However, it just about succeeds more often than it fails. This is in no small part due to the marvellous performance of Alec Baldwin as ex-husband Jake who convinces himself that falling in love with his former wife Jane (Meryl Streep) all over again is the best thing that could happen to him, when in fact it is clear he is speeding towards the inevitable tragedy.

Review: Gomorra (2008)

It is hard to imagine a more downbeat anti-glamorous gang film than director Matteo Garrone's Gomorra. Its ultra-gritty view of run-down Naples in the grip of warring factions of Mafia-like organised criminals is chillingly unromantic.

In style, it owes much to the documentary. The structure is fractured as several storylines compete for screen time with some overlap of narrative and a great many loose ends. All the while it is blending two very different camera styles - static wide shots and claustrophobic hand-held close-ups.

Review: The Boat That Rocked (2009)

By far and away the best thing about director Richard Curtis's The Boat That Rocked is the soundtrack. The film, sadly, is unable to live up to the string of legendary 60s hits that accompany it. In many ways, it is unreasonable to expect it do so. Classic status is acquired over the years; so, the music has a head start on the film.

However, there is no prospect of this immature, plot-free, mess of a film ever being considered a classic.

Review: Nowhere Boy (2009)

Former Beatle John Lennon continues to hold endless fascination for biographers, documentary-makers and the general public at large. However, until director Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy, such consideration in film has tended to focus on his Beatles years rather than the unusual circumstances of his upbringing.

By covering his adolescence, she smartly avoids the typical music biopic pitfall of trying to capture an emerging talent in a single dramatic scene - usually shown as the artist sitting with an instrument on a quiet summery day while picking/blowing/tinkering with strings/keys/valves.

Review: The Odessa File (1974)

Film themes come and go, but onscreen Nazis never die. As the Second World War passed into history, so screenwriters successfully dreamed up new and imaginative ways of keeping fresh the cinema's most bankable villains.

During the 70s, Nazis on the run was the vogue option. Of course, many former-SS soldiers were still relatively young and therefore a potential threat to civilisation - if only as part of a contemporary version of the secret society conspiracy theory.

Adapted from Frederick Forsyth's bestselling novel, The Odessa File, is a particularly fine example of the Nazi thriller.

Review: The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

Despite the best efforts of the Hollywood tradition of modern fairytale telling, few people actually view the escort industry as emotionally fulfilling. So it is hard to know what director Steven Soderbergh was hoping to achieve with The Girlfriend Experience.

The film is presented as a series of vignettes, all of which display a procession of unintroduced shallow, empty characters, obsessed with self, material and image. Its choppy timeline serves only to confuse and to hint at narrative weight that, in the final analysis, is simply not present.

Review: Eastern Promises (2007)

Continuing his run of apparently mainstream movies, director David Cronenberg sets out a tale of violent London gangs and those innocents caught up in the aftermath. But Eastern Promises is no Cockney geezerfest, owing much more to the work of Martin Scorsese than Guy Ritchie.

While retaining flourishes of the body horror for which he is renowned, Cronenberg cranks down the style, aiming for a tired urban look, where even middle-class homes are dark and cramped with dated furnishings.