The Amityville Horror (2005): review: 4/10

An attractive young couple find and purchase an substantial Victorian property for an unually low price, and move their with two children, a blonde boy and girl spawn of the female's previous dallaince. They also bring a dog, which happens to belong to the boy.

There follows a series of harrowing incidents, often involving taps, in which the boyfriend reveals intense dislike of his obese stepson and his dog. The mother, who has become quite anxious, attempts to seek the assistance of a priest, but he proves quite useless and the family reluctantly choose to abandon their dream home and sail off in a speedboat.

The Open Road (2009): review: 4/10

A baseball player's mother is ill. At her insistance, he goes to find his father- a famous baseball player, drunk and egotist- to bring him to her, taking along an ex-girlfriend for company.

This is a road movie with some beautful scenery, concerning the triangulated relationship of the three. It is well-acted, but laboured and overlong, with Jeff Bridges in particular overplaying his hand.

Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006): review: 4/10

A road movie in which three characters wander through a Post-suicidal purgorory which is a joyless post-industrial landscape.

The film is on the edge of being very good, but there is something not quite right about it.

This is connected to the lack of depth of the acting, and a certain drowsyness to it all.The drowsyness comes from the film not exploring the central and obvious question of why they committed suicide and  from the fact that the central imaginative premise of a post-suicidal world which so utterly resembles the real world is hard to acccept.

 Tom Waits appears, but his acting is stilted and his fuction unclear., The film contains an absurdist element, but it doesn't carry forward because there is such lack of compulsion to the character's car trip.

V for Vendetta (2006): review: 4/10

In London, in the future, a dictatorship with a censored tv service and police curfews is challenged by a masked rebel: he forms a relationship with beautiful Evey whom he has rescued from the brutal police...

Though it's always a pleasure watching Portman, this film is little more than a reshuffling of dystopian cliches.

Mayor of the Sunset Strip (2003): review: 4/10

Rodney Bingenheimer is a "sort of somebody" in LA, known to many stars, including David Bowie, Cher and Courtney Love.

The films interviews these people, Mr Bingenheimer's family, and Mr Bingenheimer himself, whose principle accomplishments seems to be playing records, running a bar, collecting autographs and meeting these celebrities.

He is a diminutive fellow, melancholy and tired- the films traces his interest in celebrities to his childhood abandonment by his mother.

The film suceeds in describing an LA of mindless celebrity idolatory and sad superficial relationships.

The film is overlong by half an hour. I suspect Bingenheimer seemed to offer more potential interest when the filmemakers were researching the film than transpired during its filming.

The Fall (2006): review: 4/10

"Googly! Googly! Googly!"

In a hospital in LA, an injured stuntman and a small girl entertain each other with heroic tales.

Both stuntman and girl are most beguiling, as are the fantastic shots from India, but the film is simply too long, so it's charms become lost as ideas are repeated or over-explored, rendering them wearisome.

Thus the film sadly serves to illustrate the wise artists maxim "concision is a virtue in art".

Beautiful Losers (2008): review- 4/10

The story of a group of artists who displayed work in a particular New York gallery and who achieved commercial success.

The documentary consists largely of interviews and captures the mood of a Generation X art crowd, whose work reflects their interest in grafitti, popular advertising, signs and cartoons.

The artists percieve themselves as "outsiders", but then become very successful, and therefore definate "insiders", an irony that the film-makers do not dwell upon sufficiently.

But then the film does not really ask any difficult questions either of the viewers or of the subjects or of their work: it is essentially designed to celebrate, and is therefore less interesting than it might be.

It is also overlong, by about 20 mins.

The Blind Side (2009): review- 4/10

In Memphis lives a blonde wealthy woman with a big house and big hair and gaudy taste and Christian attitudes who speaks to people as if they are dogs. She meets and insists on saving a black boy who has been made homeless, and he joins their family.

None of the characters rise above their status as "types": the result is that the film has a certain sterility, as if the roles have not really been "inhabited" emotionally.

However, the reason the characters are so two-dimensional is that the subject of the film is not how black people think or feel (they scarcely say anything anyway and when they do it is simply to confirm the expectations of white characters).

The true subject of this film is the guilt feelings of rich Southern whites: hence the grimness of Sandra Bullock's demeanor throughout the film: she is on a mission to redeem herself and her culture, and she sets to do this with missionary zeal. There is something de-humanising about this (as if the subject of her zeal and his feelings are irrelevant), and it is appropriate that the means used for the advancement of her black pawn is American football, a peculiarly brutal and humourless sport in which the players' faces are largely hidden by protective helmets.

Dancer in the Dark (2000): review- 4/10

Bjork plays a Czech immigrant who is going blind from a congenital disorder. She works in a factory and saves her money to pay for an operation for her son, to prevent him too from going blind. When her landlord tries to steal this money she kills him: she is subsequently found guilty of murder and hung.

The film includes various songs, written and performed by Bjork, and is essentially an anti-capital punishment film.

The film is a mish-mash, featuring shaky camera work, improvised acting, questionable singing, sketchy dancing and a strange limping pace. At times all this is touching; at others, it is just amateurish. It is also rather too long.

Fast Food Nation (2006): review- 4/10

Didactic but not unenjoyable film about meat production, Mexicans and student activists in Colorado.