Poseidon (2006)

The string of action setpieces that makes up Wolfgang Petersen's 2006 remake of The Poseidon Adventure, including high-up tightrope walks over flames, underwater traversal of long winding corridors, and crawls through air ducts and elevator shafts, keeps the adventure, um, buoyant, but it is hard to care much given the disaster movie's, um, lack of depth: the uncharismatic group of survivors we follow through the upturned cruise liner are nothing more than faces - a sad-duck daughter of a former New York mayor, the former New York mayor, a stowaway, and a grifter of some sort - and we get no bigger picture of them or of the disaster itself - how, for instance, does the group know which way to go; do any of them have anything they care about back on land; why do they only encounter a next and a next obstacle and not, say, other people, and what is happening at all anywhere beyond their confined-space sphere of action - in the ballroom or in a rescue operation team somewhere, say, or, say, anywhere else in the world?

★★★☆☆

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The Holiday (2006)

Two separate movies spliced together, Nancy Meyers' loooong episode of Wife Swap (or Life Swap) tells the stories of two unlucky-in-love professional women who do a holiday switcheroo and finally meet the loves of their lives - Cameron Diaz's Amanda lands a handsome widower who fixes coffee machines, while Kate Winslett's Iris shows some affection towards a musician but falls head-over-heels in love with modern home interiors.

★★★★☆

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Casino Royale (2006)

From its opening scene, a vertiginous dash through a construction site, the pace and excitement of this 2006 film of Ian Fleming's first Bond book never lets up, except perhaps for the card game where an effort is made to keep things moving with stairwell fisticuffs, a shower trauma, some defibrillator nonsense, but James has a card game to play and so the action is interrupted by really quite ridiculous scenes of the agent with a licence to kill repeatedly returning to the card table, coolly adjusting his cuff while a look of muted surprise appears on the face of bad guy Mads Mikkelsen.

★★★★★

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Firewall (2006)

This is one of those thrillers like Panic Room and Red Eye that is built around a criminal's diabolical - but from the get-go ludicrous - plan that descends into chaos before it even begins, but still it goes on and on, and as Paul Bettany's archvillain looks less and less (and less) likely to get anything for the enormous amount of trouble he has gone to (kidnapping Harrison Ford's banking security expert's family, distributing spy camera biros, stealing epipens, doling out poor dietary choices of biscuits, spending a long couple of listless days on his victim's couch eating cereal and watching Fred Flintstone) still he persists with the chaos, to the end carting around the yappy family dog, keeping people alive for no reason, and resolutely ignoring the fact that his criminal gang is destroying itself from the inside as the family of victims rests and listens to their iPods.

★★☆☆☆

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Apocalypto (2006)

Mel Gibson turns his story of clashing civilisations into a thrilling chase - a Mayan The Fugitive - and shows his complete assurance as director with unflinching depictions of brutality including not just one, not two, but three unhurried scenes showing the heads of human sacrifices being bowled down the side of a Chichen Itza-like pyramid, brutality decried by critics as historically inaccurate and racist, but the movie is nonetheless remarkable for having been a huge box office success despite its decidedly un-box-office 16th Century setting and its cast of mostly non-actors speaking the Yucatec Maya language.

★★★★☆

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Scoop (2006)

A journalist, a magician, and a ghost investigate the possibility a killer-on-the-loose is well-to-do man-about-town Peter Lyman in this very minor Woody Allen comedy mystery that gives the distinct impression of having too quickly made the transition from Allen's notebook to the screen because none of the elements of the story hold together very tightly (and you feel with a bit more trouble things like tarot cards, fortunes, magic, death and careers would) and everyone is ad-libbing really badly.

★★☆☆☆

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The Da Vinci Code (2006)

Everything about this potboiler irks me, from the pained expression plastered throughout on Paul Bettany's psycho albino monk's face to Tom Hanks' academic hair, not to mention the preposterous pairing of History Channel Templar history with 'Harvard scholar' code-breaking of the "hold it up to a mirror" and "invisible lemon juice ink" variety, and besides, who can enjoy a movie associated with the marketing brouhaha that erupted in the media in 2006 over Dan Brown's book's theories involving the Catholic Church when in fact these controversies about Opus Dei and Mary Magdalene pale in comparison to real-life scandals and cover-ups?

★★☆☆☆

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Charlotte's Web (2006)

A young girl befriends a piglet and, er, saves his bacon and then a spider befriends that piglet and, er, saves his bacon, in this animatronically enhanced, treacly film version of the beloved - but for me, even as a kid, mystifying - E B White children's book: what is it the humans think is happening and why isn't it Charlotte who is celebrated?

★★☆☆☆

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The Wicker Man (2006)

This dreadful remake of the original mystery thriller of 1973 - a sinister movie about a policeman investigating a child's disappearance from a creepy, cultish remote island community - updates the story by wheeling out a big, hollow wooden figure at the start the movie, too: Nicolas Cage in Edward Woodward's police officer role.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Tell No One (Ne Le Dis A Personne) (2006)

This Harlan Coben adaptation is like a gritty French The Fugitive but a great deal more complex because the doctor whose wife is murdered only goes on the run eight years later when two further bodies turn up at the scene of her disappearance, casting doubt on the theory that his wife was the victim of a serial killer.

★★★☆☆

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The Good Shepherd (2006)

Great spy stories, like Graham Greene novels, operate on two levels with agent protagonists juggling individual, emotional sides with their detached organisational spy roles, but the focus of this thriller is unrelentingly trained upon Edward Wilson's job with everyone everywhere a whispering agent or double agent, and for too long the only human side on show is in the fleeting scenes Wilson shares with his girlfriend, wife and son, and given he exhibits an emotional detachment that warrants psychological intervention, things quickly become dreary and that is a shame given the calibre of the actors in this and the potential of the story spanning decades of American history.

★★☆☆☆

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M:i:III (2006)

Number 3 is a return to form after the lamentable John Woo-directed second in the M:I series, and although it is slightly histrionic, Mission: Impossible 3 benefits from a chilling turn by Philip Seymour Hoffman as a sociopathic villain and is also aided by a threadbare plot centred around a McGuffin that allows action and spy thrills to come to the fore.

★★★☆☆

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The Pink Panther (2006)

Steve Martin steps into the role that Peter Sellers made his own over seven of nine previous Pink Panther instalments and he is not any more or less funny - the entire series is a bit wet - but despite yourself you'll laugh at the daggy dad-jokes as the bungling Inspector Clouseau somehow manages to track down a murderer and the legendary jewel, The Pink Panther.

★★☆☆☆

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The Illusionist (2006)

Childhood sweethearts are reunited in adulthood when she, now fiance to the Austrian Crown Prince Leopold, is called up on stage to participate in his David Copperfield-style magic show, in this very romantic mystery that slightly frustrates with its NQR historical context too blurry to justify the morally ambiguous implications of the movie's twist.

★★★☆☆

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The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Anne Hathaway is Andrea, the skeptical fashion magazine employee not fulfilling her role as assistant to Meryl Streep's editor Miranda Priestley, a monstrous, hilarious melding of Anna Wintour and Cruella de Vil, but after some soul searching and styling by Stanley Tucci, Andrea steps up, work life changes for the better, the way she walks improves - she starts strutting - but on the other hand her relationships suffer.

★★★★☆

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The Departed (2006)

Some tension is eventually delivered in Martin Scorsese's remake of the terrific 2002 Hong Kong action suspense thriller, Infernal Affairs, but only after a long and unconvincing set-up featuring too much farcical humour, too many implausibilities and inconsistencies, and too many Hollywood heartthrobs and not enough gravitas for the cat-and-mouse story of a crooked cop and an undercover agent.

★★☆☆☆

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The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

A man hits rock bottom trying to onsell the luxury medical items he has unwisely invested in, splitting with his wife in the process and ending up sleeping rough in subway toilets with his young son, but none of these social horrors is enough to dent the film's faith in the American Dream and the idea that determined men (for example, Will Smith) achieve happyness so long as they eventually gain employment in the corporate world.

★★★☆☆

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My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006)

This likeable, only mildly amusing but harmless comedy has fun with the question that never entered Lois Lane or Mary-Jane Watson's head, "What happens when you want to break up with a superhero?"

★★★☆☆

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Lady in the Water (2006)

Awful to the point of being unwatchable is this self-indulgent movie from M Night Shyamalan based on a bedtime story he told his kids, apparently, featuring only completely cracked characters, residents of an apartment complex with a swimming pool that is home to a mermaid-like creature. 

★☆☆☆☆

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Babel (2006)

With a change of tone from moribund to comical, this well-intentioned miserable load of nonsense could easily have been a sequel to Lemony Snickett's Series of Unfortunate Events, presenting a ridiculous account of a day Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett really shouldn't have gotten out of bed.

★☆☆☆☆

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