Damsels in Distress (2011): review: 1/10

Three women proffer advice to newcomers in an American campus, running a self-styled Suicide Prevention Centre and trying to initiate a dance craze. There is also a conflict with the campus newspaper`s editor.

With a dead performance from Greta Gerwig as central actor, and a dud script with little plot, the film presents nothing more that a hail of obscure snobberies.

Like many US films, Damsels suffers from a claustrophobic insularity: it is surely pertinent that the villain of the piece is a foreigner, specifically a French sodomite.

I think what made the other Stillman films effective was that excentric and, occasionally snobbish, characters were placed in challenging environments: either abroad as in Barcelona, or in New York. Thus, we could see  them as an outsiders, and feel a certain sympathy for  their individualism. In this film, the outsiders are now insiders: their elitism becomes considerably less likeable as a result.

People Like Us (2012): review: 1/10

In California, the father of a self regarding young salesman dies. The salesman meets his father's illegitimate daughter and despite already having an attractive partner, becomes emotionally embroiled in her life, and that of her son.

The film degenerates rapidly into a soap opera format, with contrived melodramatic exchanges. The lead exudes self satisfaction, as if he would really prefer to be in an advertisment for hair shampoo. The others actors are not much different. The plot is preposterous. No one can act, and they are all too good-looking.

Utterly phoney: avoid.

Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009): review: 1/10

In New York, a journalist finds great delight in shopping and as a result has a great many credit card debts: she therefore attends a shopaholics anonymous group. Ironically, she is hired to write for a financial magazine: she forms a romantic attachment to her editor.

Inept, graceless romcom with little to reccomend it: the plot rambles hopelessly, and the "comic" scenes have something horribly forced about them. Worse, the central romantic couple make an absurd combination, having zero sexual frisson.

The subsidiary characters seem pointless. The starring actress is two-dimensional: one can feel no pleasure in getting to know her through the film.

Heartbreakers (2001): review: 1/10

A mother-daughter team find rich men to marry and then divorce, thus makng a good living.

A real stinker of a film featuring:

1. a charmless performance from Weaver, who adopts a very unfunny Russian accent for much of the film.

2. a dull and obvious performance from Hackman

3. lifeless dialogue

4. very unattractive characters

5. a meandering plotline whcih completely fails to intreague, having a "make it up as we go along" quality.

It is also considerably overlong, and invites very unflattering comparasions with "Some Like it Hot".

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010): review: 1/10

Notorious financier Gecko is released from prison, writes a book and gives lectures. His dreary daughter is having a relationship with a young broker with an effeminate manner*  and big dark eyes: thanks in part to Gecko this fellow sees the light and rejects the wicked ways of speculative capitalism.

This results in the usual macho posturing in boardrooms as well as supposedly creepy meetings and conversations with his mentor.

This is a long, preachy and joyless film, an utter stinker, which even Douglas cannot save from tedium.

*Don't you think he looks rather like the Marc Almond in his "Tainted Love" days?

Full Frontal (2002): review 1/10

Actors playing actors in Hollywood, including improvised sections. They are all very full of themselves.

Charmless, pretentious film which confirms that films about actors and film-making are generally to be avoided.

Eureka (1984): review- 1/10

A prospector strikes it rich in Alaska, then builds a mansion in the Carribean where he lives with his unpleasant family, and is approached by speculators wishing to develop his island.

A dogs' breakfast of a film, boring and absurd (it even has a mystical element!), illustrating in its failure the tenet guiding all good pictures: concision and clarity are virtues in art.

One From the Heart (1982): review- 1/10

Unhappy suburbanites make for a rudderless film with weak, uninteresting characters, whose meagre plot is suffocated by the set design.

Not even Tom Waits's music or Nastassja Kinksi in suspenders can save it.

Alice in Wonderland (2009): review- 1/10

The Disneyfication of a British literary classic sees it ruined, with a tiresome feminist message and the total absence of the wry wit that makes the book so beguiling.

Everything becomes exaggerated, nothing has grace, and the characters become caricatures. The clever animation which is impressive at the start of the film later turns tiresome, as if it is an end in itself.

Director Tim Burton should be taken and shot for this.

Life or Something Like It (2002): review- 1/10

Even Angelina Jolie's pretty laugh cannot save this dismal, overlong film.

A vagabond predicts the death of a Seattle t.v. reporter in 10 days, prompting her to re-evaluates her life priorities.