The Hurt Locker has had a very strange reception. Following a decidedly luke-warm response from the major American industry press at the Venice Film Festival last year, over the last 12 months it has come to be hailed as many things ranging from the best film on the Iraq war to the best film of the year so far. It seems the initial reaction was more on the mark than the way the reception has mutated since.

The film follows a group of men who are bomb disposal experts working for the US Army in Iraq. Sadly no more plot can be divulged because that's pretty much it, there's no real narrative to speak of and the film is a string of half a dozen or so missions in no real order. We follow the new leader James, played by Jeremy Renner (not to be confused with Belgian actor of note Jérémie Renier) and the two men under his direct command who are inspired by and annoyed with his reckless approach to a very serious job.

War films can work on multiple levels, but sadly this film fails to engage in every area. As a character study it is decidedly useless as all the characters are either completely 2-Dimensional or so thinly drawn it borders on caricature. Another way it could succeed is as a straight out action film, but the majority of the missions are so ponderous, so devoid of tension that they are dull and make the film drag interminably. The other way this film could hit home is through its message, but the point made here in the opening title card that "war is a drug" and addictive is something which was made better than here (and in about 90 seconds) by Terrence Howard's character in The Hunting Party, so building a 2 hour-plus movie around this is decidedly lightweight and pretentious.

Kathryn Bigelow directs the movie and she has delivered quite the hack-job in the process. Having made her name with Point Break (and buried it with the likes of K-19: The Widowmaker), she would seem the actiony-type person to inject some life into this film ("story" would be a better word ... but there isn't one) but her approach is so artless and trite. Seemingly realising the lack of inherent substance in the set pieces she resorts to techniques for those with ADD, not letting her camera rest for a second. She also delights in showing slow motion shots of explosions (not realising that just because you blow something up doesn't automatically make it exciting) and things like shell casings falling - something which was cool about 10 years ago when The Matrix first hit screens but is incredibly stale now. As a result she has fashioned a film in the image of her approach: style over substance, nothing new, interesting or meaningful and as a result as deep as a puddle. Sometimes first impressions rather than retrospective hyperbole are the most accurate gauges.

Following on from the first "half" of this two-film portrait of French gangster Jacques Mesrine, Public Enemy No. 1 feels like a different movie in every way, but is fundamentally dependent on its forerunner (Mesrine: Killer Instinct) to give it any real value. This is because the second of the two entries takes everything that was wrong with the first film and amplifies those problems.

In the first film, while the problem was that the characterisation was scant, at least there was a semblance of a dramatic arc, following Mesrine from getting out of the army, through generally being a hood, then gradually becoming worse and worse. Here Mesrine is exactly the same character throughout, in exactly the same situations (doing jobs, getting nicked, escaping then pandering to the press), which coupled with the same narrative glitches really stops the film even getting up to average. Just as before the relationships are skated over then a one-liner will retrospectively fill you in after the fact, it's very shoddy stuff.

Acting wise this is far less interesting than the first effort, Vincent Cassel's Mesrine seems rather divorced from his performance in the first film, probably because it's so one-note. Ludivine Sagnier is asked to do very little other than disrobe, but then again that is what she does best. Even the ever-reliable Mathieu Amalric is wasted in a nothing role, unable to elevate the cardboard cut-out nature of his character. The direction is different to that of the first film stylistically, it's all over the place and much more of a mess, and sadly that's emblematic of the film as a whole.

Probably the most annoying thing about this conclusion is that at times it's so easy to see how the filmmakers missed a trick with it all. They open the first film with Mesrine's assassination, using multiple cameras and utilising split-screen and creating a very stylish opening in the process. They end this film with the same scene, but from the perspective of the police, but any tension they try to create isn't there because they've already shown you what happens. Had they swapped the scenes and ended the second film with how they opened the first (and vice versa), you'd still get the style in the Mesrine point of view, but you'd actually get the tension for the police's version, and you'd get a lot more pathos seeing it from Mesrine when you know how it's going to happen.

The filmmakers don't have that kind of insight, there's just a lack of thought and depth to this film and they seem more intent on packing as much in as possible and making things "cool" rather than giving them meaning. This entry, on its own, is a soulless, vapid drag through the latter years of this man's "career" and relies on the subject matter to give the film interest rather than creating it dramatically. The first film was decent but very flawed, this is just very flawed, whether you've seen the first film or not.

Right, three films to blast through before I get back on with the cinematic offerings. First up Over Her Dead Body, which I watched due to chronic fatigue on Tuesday night (clicking the remote was a serious challenge ). Set up is Eva Longoria dies and then as a ghost tries to prevent hubby Paul Rudd from moving on with another woman. It's not very funny at all, but there are a few chuckles the longer it goes. It's surprisingly watchable in that ... you keep expecting it to be a complete train wreck but it's actually not *that* bad. Far from good, couldn't recommend it, but I did keep watching it as it's rather inoffensive.

Moving on, after Milan were getting their asses handed to them last night by Jose's Inter out of sheer depression I flicked over to the Steve Coogan Around the World in 80 Days. I'd heard two things about this, first that it had bombed at the box office and second that it wasn't that bad (and certainly more entertaining than the oscar winning effort from the 50s). I'd go along with both of those assessments, Jackie Chan's fight scenes are always fun and despite the tone being balanced towards silly (as it's geared towards the kids) it does shift along. The big shock though was seeing Cécile De France in it as I wasn't aware she'd done anything in English. She's the most appealing I've ever seen her and it's rather a shame this did so poorly at the box office because I preferred her presence in this to most of the things I've seen her do in French.

Lastly The X-Files: I Want to Believe has started on Sky Premiere this week and I'm probably the exact type of person this film was aimed at - someone who used to watch the show but whose interest faded as the years went on and didn't see the series through to its conclusion. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson reprise their iconic roles as Mulder and Scully, now former FBI agents who are drawn back into their old world of paranormal investigation when a psychic (Billy Connelly) is leading investigators to clues in the disappearance of an agent. It's a stand-alone piece without much/any knowledge of the series' ongoing storylines requiered, and it's a decent yet disappointingly average entry in the genre. Duchovny snoozes through it all and Anderson, who has really pushed on as a dramatic actress since the series, seems trapped between her increased ability now and the character she used to play. It's fine, but without a previous investment in the characters, not much for outsiders to gain from discovering them now.

Pedro Almodóvar is quite the anomaly, a critically acclaimed, well respected maker of (melo)dramatic foreign language films who regularly gets them shown in multiplexes in the UK - in short, an art-director able to cross over, although casting Penélope Cruz allows him to do that much more easily. Here he has created a very atmospheric film and one of his most intriguing in the past decade, if not the best executed.

It follows a blind screenwriter "Harry Caine", who is the pseudonym of a film director of note, Mateo Blanco. On the day a famous entrepeneur has died, a man claiming to be a filmmaker has a meeting with "Caine", wanting him to write a script for him. It turns out he was present on the set of a film Blanco made 14 years ago, which was financed by the entrepeneur as a means to please his mistress (Cruz) who had designs on becoming an actress.

One of the problems Almodóvar has is the cutting between the present day and the past, it's not consistent and the present day narrative is fairly useless for long stretches. He makes up for that writing deficiency through his skills as a director, creating such a noirish mood to the 90s storyline and utilising the unendingly talented Alberto Iglesias's score (and at one point a Cat Power song) to superb effect. A second problem again stems from the writing arm of Almodóvar, having fairly limp charactersation for all involved. Thankfully that again is made up for, this time by the ensemble cast who give uniformly fine performances even when not being stretched that much.

In the past Pedro has treated sex quite flippantly, but here in multiple scenes he seems to have matured a great deal in that aspect. Rather than being amusing or silly as those kind of scenes normally are in his films, here they are unusually sensual, understated and evocative. These are the aspects of the film as a whole that make Broken Embraces so inherently appealing, even in spite of its shortcomings. It's interesting, it entices and drags you in, the story may not deliver on all that it promises, but that it promises so much is testament to the director's inimitable talents. Cruz will get a lot of people through the door this time, but Almodóvar is the one who'll get people to keep seeing his films, as even the ones like this (which aren't quite at his top level) are still so distinct.

The Sundance Film Festival occupies a very strange position in the film calendar. It comes around every January when the American industry is in the middle of patting itself on the back and spending millions of dollars trying to get voters from various bodies to see films from the previous year. Despite this, Sundance is frequently a launchpad for films, in the middle of all the voting madness, to get sold and do distribution deals to get noticed the following year. Sin Nombre was not one of those films, having Focus Features involved from a very early stage with the financing, but having won prizes at this year's Sundance it has seen writer/director Cary Fukunaga shore up his career for the immediate future having done deals for future films with various studios.

The film cuts between two storylines, which eventually, inevitably meet: one follows a pair of young lads in a local gang in Mexico and the other shows three Hondurans trying to "go north" and emigrate to America. The casting of this is basically the two gang lads are played by novices/non-professional actors and the surrounding cast are mostly more experienced performers and sadly it does show as the central character El Casper requires much more than a very game Edgar Flores is capable of delivering. Paulina Gaitan as the Honduran girl Sayra, whose fate becomes intertwined with Casper, gives a nice little turn and is the best thing on show, giving some heart and subtlety to a very underwritten role.

Therein lies a lot of the problems, the film isn't very focused and doesn't know whether it wants to be a gang expose in the vein of City of God, or a Maria Full of Grace-style journey to America fraught with danger. It has neither the visual style and brio which made the former so appealing to many, nor the depth of tension and intrigue or knock-out central performance of the latter, and as such it's a bit of a half-breed of a film. As a look at attempted immigration to America it's nothing new and as a critique of gang life it lacks the incisiveness required as it doesn't show how or why the characters become involved with (and are seduced by) the lifestyle.

Some of the writing tricks are trite and stale, the characterisation is overly simplistic and as such the relationships forged lack depth and smooth development. It's shot very nicely and the editing does shift it along, but the narrative focuses on things which don't really pay off later and raise more questions than answers. So a film that is very competently put together but is just too lightweight and undercooked to really cash in on the dramatic potential in the subject matter.

Quentin Tarantino, depending on who you ask, has not been relevant for a while (5, 10 or 15 years, depending on your level of contempt), and after the very public misfire that was Grindhouse, for a celebrity-director like him it must have been difficult to bear. In his latest film he's cast one of the most famous men on the planet, Brad Pitt, and that ensures his new venture, Inglourious Basterds, will be far less likely to be ignored. It follows the paths of a hitsquad of Jewish American soldiers, the much famed "Jew Hunter" Hans Landa, and a young French cinema owner called Shosanna.

The film is split into five chapters; the first showing Landa interrogating a French man about the whereabouts of a Jewish family, the second introduces us to "the basterds", the third shows Shosanna meeting a young German soldier, the fourth introduces a very famous German actress into the mix and the fifth is ... well, the finale. The cast are all fine but nothing too out of the ordinary. Pitt sleepwalks through his role, Diane Kruger has proven quite the scene stealer in the past in films like The Hunting Party, but she's not given much to do here. Daniel Brühl is a very fine actor, but utterly wasted here and none of Pitt's "basterds" have any real opportunities to shine. Mélanie Laurent has been a promising actress for a number of years and she's her usual natural self, giving the best performance on show. Sadly that isn't saying much as Christophe Waltz as Landa is the only other member of the cast to scrape above average in a very deliberately quirky turn.

There are a couple of problems with this film that stop it being anything above average and the first is the writing. Many scenes in the film consist of characters waffling on, and waffling on, and when they've finished waffling on they waffle some more and it frequently stymies the film. Also, what is broadly going to happen in a lot of the scenes is fairly predictable so it doubly has the tendency to drag things out. For example in the opening credits the one actor whose character is named by Tarantino is Laurent's Shosanna, so when halfway through the opening scene it is said one of the family (who it is obvious long before Tarantino shows us are hiding in the house) is her, it kills any tension as you know she's going to live.

This brings on the second major problem. Pretty much all the key scenes in the film (be they the opening inquisition, Shosanna meeting Landa later on, or the big scene with Diane Kruger's character in the basement) all rely heavily on tension to prevent it just being characters who haven't any detailing at all just talking endlessly ... and Tarantino the director fails to infuse any genuine atmosphere or tension into the piece at all. It's a very uneven effort from him, especially given his use of music. In the past he's used his magpie-esque abilities to fuse his influences, but here flicking from Sergio Leone use of Ennio Morricone to David Bowie only creates a jarring effect.

So it is a film with a decent cast who aren't asked to do much, they are given an extremely wordy screenplay without much action to break up the monotony and Tarantino executes in a fashion which exacerbates rather than irons out the shortcomings coming from the blueprint. For the most part it's watchable and the editing is good enough to ensure it doesn't necessarily feel its two and a half hour length, but it does drag and doesn't entertain through the dialogue as his films have done in the past. This means when you're waiting for the scant bits of action to kick in, there's not a tremendous amount on offer. As such what should have been a fun, fast, ferocious film is relegated to an empty and occasionally turgid offering that the good bits, when they eventually come, fail to elevate too far: and it means Quentin will just have to handle still being called irrelevant for a good while longer.

Right, a bit of news I suppose before I crack on with the films I've been seeing. It looks increasingly on that I'm going to Italy in a couple of weeks for the 2009 Venice Film Festival. I'll be going for 6 nights for basically the second half (it's a little more than that, but that's basically it) and I'm not sure if I'll take a laptop with me or find an internet cafe and blog from there, or wait til I get home, but everything I see (I'm aiming for about a dozen films) will eventually get on here. I might do a little preview of what I'm expecting to see at Venezia 66 in a future entry, we'll see how it goes.

Anyway, I've not been watching a tremendous amount recently (hence why the blog stalled for a week) and also with my starting to do DVD reviews I've been holding off on some things. I have a box set of italian neorealist films which have far too many for me to go into detail on the actual films when I review that, so I'll take Umberto D. (which is a first time viewing for me) here now. I'd seen parts of this in Martin Scorsese's mammoth documentary My Voyage to Italy but it didn't detract from the film at all. Director Vittorio De Sica extracts a stunning performance from non-actor Carlo Battisti and the film is a wonderful blend of simple characters dealing with social issues. Deliberately paced, subtlely rendered, this is a lyrical, moving film which is just a first rate example of the era.

What else ... oh yes, saw Fatal Attraction for the first time in over a decade and ... well it hasn't held up at all. The acting is fine, but it's just the direction, it's so poor. When the big moments come they're so melodramatically presented, so over the top that the only thing to do is to laugh at it. The last 30 minutes have ensured that culturally this is a film that has a reputation which has lasted over the now more than 20 years since its release, but there's some very shoddy filmmaking from Adrian Lyne in there.

Onto a film that made its premiere extremely quickly on terrestrial tv last night, namely JCVD, which got a horrendously small theatrical release (coinciding with the dvd release) earlier this year. The advance word on this was basically that this was the first time Jean-Claude Van Damme had actually given a good performance, portraying "himself", who gets drawn into the robbery of a local post office in Belgium. The premise of this, with Van Damme playing a version of himself, and the situation referencing and mocking his films in the process is rather cleverly done, but it's not as well executed. It looks very nice, but it doesn't move freely and does tend to get bogged down for long stretches. Van Damme's much vaunted monologue shows some real acting chops, but it, like individual moments that are very funny, are sadly not there consistently throughout.

There is always a certain amount of expectation on any film made from a very popular book, and The Time Traveler's Wife certainly was that. Selling millions of copies (as well as the film rights even before the book had been released), this story of a time traveller called Henry and the effect his ability has on his wife Clare is obviously something with a lot of appeal right off the bat. Casting Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams in the respective roles was a shrewd move as Bana is such a fine actor and McAdams probably the most chameleonic actress in her age group. Both the central performances are fine and at all times watchable, but neither of these talented people are being stretched very much dramatically at all and that is a shame. They aren't asked to give too much of themselves because what they are giving themselves to is so consistently being distilled down to the bare minimum.

Firstly, given that this is a film which is ostensibly (and has been marketed as) first and foremost a romance, the psychology and bedrock of the couple's relationship is extremely questionable. She loves him because he's been visiting her since she's a little girl and is her "best friend" yet they get together by him meeting this random woman who professes to love him and he has sex with her pretty much on sight. Now this is not to say that the average male wouldn't do that when faced with the proposition of Miss McAdams being so obviously available, but romantic it hardly is. This is then accentuated because the filmmakers do not get into the basic fundamentals of the relationship. They can't focus on McAdams' character too much because then you'd just have a movie about a guy in his 40s grooming an 8 year old girl which would make it weirder than it already is, and they don't flesh out at all if or why Bana has any strong feeling for her. When he proposes to her he does so saying how he doesn't feel alone any more, but when they haven't explored that aspect of his character before, it leaves the moment flat.

This is sadly a theme for most of the film and that is also down to the structure of the narrative. By flitting between his and McAdams' perspectives and having her tell him things he will later come back and do, and seeing him actually come back and do things, whilst basically running forward in real time, it divorces these moments from their emotional aftermaths. This means that for the most part you see her experience something with him being from the future, but then don't see what it means to him as we normally don't then go to him getting back and seeing where it fits in with his emotional state. An example of this is their wedding day, shortly before they get married he time travels somewhere, then another Henry from the future steps in and experiences the moment, but we never see what finally getting to do that meant to him or how they as a couple then finally had that "shared" moment when his experiences catch up to hers. There are exceptions to this (for example on their wedding night we see him come back from seeing her as a child), but this just highlights the uneven approach to the storytelling and prevents a lot of moments from taking hold as they are not shown in their proper context, whereas others are.

What all of these problems show is not that this is a bad film, far from it, but the ways in which it is not as good as it could have been. The end is emblematic of this as it just isn't as emotionally hitting as it probably should be on paper and that is down to the consistent lack of depth in the way the relationship has been initially drawn and shown throughout. Apparantly there is a different ending in the book which surely would have more of a payoff, but as American test audiences couldn't recognise McAdams in age make up it was ditched and the film delayed for a year as a result trying to patch up a different ending. This missing of what is important is seemingly central to the direction, writing and production of the film. In a film like this, the romantic relationship is paramount and the filmmakers cut it off at the knees as much as they humanly can (even suggesting at one point neither of them ever had any choice in getting together and they'd be better off apart). The film looks nice, there's a lovely score, the acting is fine and it's very watchable for long stretches, but the sense of loss, of chances missed, of potential unfulfilled permeates throughout this intriguing, yet misfiring film.

This film, or to be more accurate first part of two films, arrives in UK cinemas with a not inconsiderable amount of prestige around it. Multiple major wins at the Césars (France's industry awards), namely for Best Director and Best Actor give what would normally seem to be a run of the mill commercial gangster flick added gravitas. It has been pushed as "the French Scarface", but given it is in fact a biopic of sorts as it chronicles the rise and fall of a real life criminal, it probably has more in common with Goodfellas on paper. Sadly that's where the positive similarities between those two particular films end.

For Mesrine: Killer Instinct is not Goodfellas at all and the reason for that is the script. In Martin Scorsese's genre defining classic, there was a voiceover that took you right inside the main character, fleshing out his motivations and dilemmas, which put everything into context. Several fascinating characters were drawn, but the bonus was that structurally it was very daring - Scorsese would cut between scenes from the cause to the action, for example in one scene you'd see a couple get married and in the next you see them months later arguing as a married couple, cutting all the unnecessary aspects out, creating a streamlined, focused narrative. Here the screenwriters attempt to hone it down but the craft isn't there. Mesrine's first wife leaves him off screen then it's casually mentioned later, later on he meets Cécile De France's character then we cut to them robbing places together. It's only a whole while later a romantic angle between them is shoe-horned in after the fact, there's no consistent flow to the storytelling.

This is a problem which effects the characterisation as well as the storytelling as the writers constantly play catch-up with what drives Mesrine as a person. At one point, after his first incarceration, we see him attempt to go straight for the good of his family. The second he later gets made redundant he's shoving a gun in his wife's mouth saying how he'll always take the gangsters over her, the leaps are jarring and that's not even something they actively try to pursue as a characteristic of his. Mesrine even says circumstances change but the man does not, yet the character has not been drawn that way by the writers. It's shoddy work.

Which is a shame because Vincent Cassel has given a very committed performance and his most immersive since he was similarly mustachioed in Read My Lips. Gérard Depardieu has a very 2D role as the local gangster boss who breaks Mesrine into the underworld, but he has a lot of fun with it. Sadly the lovely Elena Anaya is wasted as Mesrine's wife, with very little to do in a skated over part of the story. The direction is fairly smooth visually and borrows some split screen techniques which would make it seem like it would have a 60s feel to it, but in the end it's just a less consistent version of Tony Gilroy's approach to Duplicity.

This lack of a sense of roots is emblematic of the film as a whole, whilst essentially being a "period piece", it never really evokes the feel of the late-50s and 60s, this could be set in the 70s or 80s and wouldn't necessarily seem out of place. More thought is given to the action set pieces and they are done very well, especially the prison scenes. In the end, this is the kind of film that looks and feels like it's what would happen if Michael Mann, in the 90s (key point there), tried to remake Goodfellas whilst having a much worse script than the original. It's smooth, it looks nice, it's well acted and the action is fine when it comes, but the writing prevents it being as good as it could, and perhaps should have been. It does have enough going for it to merit seeing the second film of the pair to see what happens to this man, even if we don't really know him at all.

Right, going out to the cinema later so I'll get these out of the way now, first up a couple of biopics, then a couple of helpings of schmaltz. I finally got around to seeing Melvin and Howard, which I've been intrigued about for years due to Mary Steenburgen's performance as she won the Oscar, Golden globe and every major critics award for it. It's a take on the real life story of a man who claimed to have given someone claiming to be Howard Hughes a lift in the desert and then discovered a will naming him one of Hughes' beneficiaries. The acting all round is fine but nothing out of the ordinary (and the praise Steenburgen received is simply mind-boggling) as is pretty much every aspect of the film technically. It's a Jonathan Demme movie so as usual there's no specific style to speak of, it's just one of those gentle, watchable little American films with neither much wrong with, or a lot going for it.

After that highly questionable piece of cinema in terms of historical accuracy comes an absolutely risible one in those terms, namely Jesse James. Starring Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda as Jesse and Frank James (respectively), it's a mythologising romanticisation which borders on hagiography making the notorious outlaw as sympathetic and blameless as humanly possible. Power is decidedly limp as the gunslinger and Fonda utterly wasted in a nothing role as his brother. Nancy Kelly works her socks off and really delivers in a couple of scenes, but it's one of those functional, generic old westerns which passes the time rather than entertains or informs.

Yesterday I caught the latter 2/3rds of Heartburn, which I've wanted to see for a while as it stars Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. That it is directed by Mike Nichols and written by Nora Ephron should have immediately sent up the warning signs. Missed the opening act, but from where I caught up with it it was very obviously written, cheesily directed (it's SO 80s ), but saved by a very game Streep. Jack was ... well not "Jack", but definitely in snooze-mode and it was hilarious to see a young Kevin Spacey as a punk robber, but outside of Streep not much of value.

From there I caught the director's cut of Cinema Paradiso. Now I'd seen the original version about 8 years ago and thought it was quite good but underwhelming given its reputation. On approaching this (long overdue) rewatch it had got to the point the only part of it I could actively remember was the kisses being cut out of the films the projectionist shows, so it's basically a fresh viewing. The first hour I wasn't in love with the tone of the film and the boy (Salvatore Cascio, who incredibly won a BAFTA for this ) was the wrong side of cute, frequently punchable. For the second hour they actually managed to find someone to play the teenage version of our protagonist who makes Orlando Bloom look like Richard Burton . When it came to the final part though I began to recognise more aspects from my first viewing and whilst extremely manipulative it really does work. The shocking thing was that the extended scenes not originally there completely made the film for me and without them I would have been decidedly underwhelmed.

It's so strange because I can completely see the argument that adding these takes away from the focus of the relationship between the boy and the cinema projectionist (played very nicely by Philippe Noiret), and I actually do think the way the romantic relationship in the middle section was drawn was rather hackneyed. Despite all that though, the whole of the 3rd act really hits home emotionally on multiple levels and it's just such a shame the two hours that preceeded it were so schmaltzy and loose in tone and unhinged by the performances of the actors playing the younger versions. So 2/3rds just about watchable, but without that extended final act (which bumps the film into the quite good range) it would be rather tedious.

Upon returning from seeing Coco avant Chanel I was asked by someone what I'd been to see. I told them that it was a biopic of Coco Chanel, to which they replied "Oh, well she had a very interesting life." If only the film could have been as interesting. For this is a film, as the title suggests, which focuses on the period of the iconic French designer's life before she became famous and what results is something which completely ignores fascinating aspects of her life such as her relationship with Igor Stravinsky and her Nazi collaboration during the war, instead focusing on a generic, flaccid love triangle.

Starring Audrey Tautou (herself a representative for Chanel, having done adverts for them like Nicole Kidman), it follows the rags to someone else's riches tale of Chanel, who is portrayed here more as a social climber than anything else. The director is Anne Fontaine, who carved out somewhat of a niche for herself as a genre filmmaker in the early part of this decade specialising in slow burning thrillers (but lacking the atmosphere of, say, a Claude Chabrol). She has fashioned a rather elegant film, which more than leans on the evocation of the period and setting, combined with Tautou's charm as an actress.

The cast are uniformly fine, Alessandro Nivola is probably the pick of the bunch brooding away as Chanel's lover, with Benoît Poelvoorde (so stunningly restrained in Fontaine's In His Hands) trying his utmost against a very 2-Dimensional character. Marie Gillain is utterly wasted (and not made to look her best so as not to upstage Tautou) as Chanel's sister, but Emmanuelle Devos fares better in a memorable turn as a famous actress and Chanel's first "client".

One of the more surprising things about this film is the length (105 minutes), as usually these kind of biopics are overstuffed well past the 2-hour mark. Even more surprisingly, it feels overlong as the arc of the story is so slight, going from poverty to moving in with an aristocrat and then falling for his best friend ... and that's it. There's just so little to the story, it's so devoid of any natural dramatic tension or compelling character arcs that it drags and limps its way to its overdue conclusion. The central performance, delightful score by Alexandre Desplat and gorgeous techs ensure this film is always watchable, but it's a by the numbers look at the beginnings of a woman who was far more intriguing in the time after the film finishes.

Will Ferrell's newest offering is the latest in a seemingly unending conveyerbelt of films based on tv series from the 60s and 70s. Based on the American children's tv show, this Land of the Lost is a comedic take on its subject. Replacing the kids from the original show with Anna Friel and Danny McBride gives more opportunity for adult humour and storylines, which the filmmakers actively go after.

The story follows a disgraced scientist (Ferrell) and his only believer (Friel), who whilst on a field trip are given a tour of a local cave by a man (McBride), and following an earthquake they all become transported into another dimension (thus proving Ferrell's theories). Sound stupid? It is, but the only question worth asking is "Is it funny?" and it is that too. Ferrell is decent, it's far from his best peformance but he holds the whole thing together nicely. Friel has very little to do except look appealing in shorts (this is obviously a pay-cheque film for her) and McBride routinely steals the show.

The special effects are fine, but are a little at odds with the obviously hokey outfits for the "aliens" they meet, conceptually the filmmakers seem indecisive as to whether do a full-out B movie pastiche or make a $100m blockbuster. One could argue that this approach mirrors the environment our trio finds themselves in, a mixture of things from various times - or it could just be an uneven take for an uneven film.

While not hysterical it does frequently amuse. It's not an actors' piece and it's hardly a piece of cinema that will be studied decades from now. That said though it does exactly what it says on the tin - it's entertaining "shut your brain off" cinema, that's a decent enough way to spend a couple of hours if you fancy a giggle. Nothing really to write home about though, hence the brevity of this entry on it.

Right, I should get through these fairly quickly, first up is My Winnipeg, which I was tempted to see on its theatrical release (as there were comparisons with La Antena) and very surprised to see on television so quickly, being shown on SkyArts last week. It's an irreverent take by native Winnipeggian Guy Maddin on his link to the city he lives in, but apparantly can't stand. Maddin's visual style is a very unique fusion of silent cinema aesthetics with modern techniques applied, usually in the form of a burst of images, edited together in clusters. First and foremost this film is, at times, riotously entertaining. Hearing Madden (via his voiceover) lambast the NHL and seeing him recreate family scenes from his past (he rents his childhood home for the setting ) is extremely amusing.

Almost inevitably, given the style, it's a bit hit and miss - certain sections work better than others as his style meshes with the content with varying success. So an uneven film to be sure, but so funny when it all comes together that it's well worth checking out. I'd seen a short of Maddin's before (pretty sure it was The Heart of the World) and had detested the editing in it, and that is what had put me off seeing this film in the cinema, so maybe because of that My Winnipeg was surprisingly watchable for me as the cutting wasn't so frenzied. I have no idea what it would be like going in cold turkey and the style could very well put a lot of people off. One of those where you'll only know if you'll like it by watching it.

After that Film Four showed Les enfants du siècle at stupid o'clock in the morning, so I taped it then watched it the next day. It's a period drama biopic about two 19th century writers, starring Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel. The technical side of things is first rate, the sets and costumes are gorgeous, but this was the original french 135 minute cut rather than the version released in America which was half and hour shorter, and this does suffer from pacing problems and drags on. Binoche in particular is fine and Magimel gives a committed performance but director Diane Kurys utterly wastes wonderful talents like Karin Viard and even more reprehensibly, Isabelle Carré in glorified cameos. The romances shown are rather unconvincing, the characters are neither likeable nor fascinating enough to retain an inherent interest, but it is very nice to look at.

Lastly, The Cottage, which I watched (as I always say when I talk about an atrocious film here) as it was on tv and I had nothing better to do. It's almost impressively poor. Paul Andrew Williams made quite an introduction for himself with London to Brighton, which probably contained the finest teenage performance in a British film since the one Tim Roth extracted from Lara Belmont in The War Zone in 1999. Sadly though, on the evidence of this, that could very well have been a complete fluke. It's really not even worth my intellectual time in slating it in detail, every aspect of the film fails spectacularly.