While We're Young (2014)

Husband and wife forty-somethings find themselves caught between two worlds — that of their procreating couple-friends, and the hipster orbit of a couple of twenty-somethings whose grooviness reinvigorates them — in this really very funny comedy with witty things to say about Gen Xers getting old and having to "hurry up because they've changed the rules, honey."

★★★★★

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You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Woody Allen movies, and perhaps especially his romantic comedies with their thrown-together ensemble casts, ad-libbed dialogue, seemingly made-up-on-the-spot characters, and voiceover narrations of questionnable value, can give the impression the director isn't even trying, and so it is here in this romantic comedy which in its first half rambles breezily on about the love lives of seven or eight Londoners, appears to jump the shark in the middle with a sudden 'plagiarist writer' development, but finally ties everything together with lots of belly laughs and the idea that the tall, dark stranger of the title is ourselves trying things on in desperate moments, and of course there is the renewed conviction that even though it can sometimes appear he is just churning them out, Woody Allen's movies are always worth a look.

★★★☆☆

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J. Edgar (2011)

Like the film's montage depicting J Edgar Hoover crime-busting, bursting in on organised crime gangs and making arrests, director Clint Eastwood jumps in and machineguns through the details of the life and controversial career of the founder and long-term director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, creating an interesting but hollow highlight reel that slows only occasionally to exaggerate theories of what motivated the man: a Norman Bates-style homelife, apparently, and - an aspect of the man's life not all historians agree upon - his homosexuality.

★★★☆☆

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Birdman (2014)

What we tell ourselves and what our critics tell us, what the truth is and whether or not we or them or anyone else really gives a sh*t are the ideas tossed around in this "talky, depressing, philosophical bullsh*t" about a superhero movie celebrity trying to open a Broadway production, anxious about how it will be received.

★★★★☆

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Movie 43 (2013)

Perhaps compiled from footage recovered from the SNL cutting room floor, this laugh-free sketch comedy compilation is remarkable only for the incredible number of A-list Hollywood stars who were willing to appear in its appalling skits about excrement, sperm, grubby sex practices, incest...

☆☆☆☆☆

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St Vincent (2014)

After an unpleasant first twenty minutes of vice, noise and yelling, this comedy drama in the vein of 'Little Miss Sunshine' hits a more palatable bittersweet note with its story of a kid being looked after by a cranky old man; fans of Bill Murray and Little Miss Sunshine will forgive the movie's conceits and excesses.

★★☆☆☆

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The Impossible (2012)

A family holidaying in Khao Lak in Thailand (including a very young Tom Holland aa the son of Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts) is caught up in a natural disaster in a movie which perfectly illustrates the power and destruction of tsunami in comparison to the feebleness of human life, but the movie does not sustain beyond early disaster special effects.

★★★☆☆

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Funny Games (2007)

Michael Haneke displays his penchant for themes grim beyond belief with this rivetting story of torture for kicks, with the main antagonist, one of a pair of odd young men terrorizing a family, breaking the fourth wall to torture viewers with fleeting glimpses of American movie hope.

★★★★☆

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