Jones: I enjoyed Guillaume Canet’s new film very much. It seeks to emulate, and perhaps gently send up, The Big Chill and other similar works where a group of close friends get together and shoot the breeze, mostly about eachother. This group is summering (and simmering) in a seaside villa near Arcachon while one of their number is lying mortally sick in Paris after a horrific accident – not one of the crew seems willing to give up the holiday to stay with his/her great friend and, as in all close-knit groups, there are tensions. Some of the situations seem a little forced, especially the passion one of the male protagonists suddenly professes to feel for his male friend of fifteen years standing, despite the fact that they both have wives and children. The  gay aspect is well-handled and it gives rise to some funny lines and business, but it doesn’t ring quite true. The funeral at the end is somewhat mawkish and bathetic but intentionally so, I think. The ensemble cast is spot-on, Francois Cluzet standing out as the neurotic and controlling host at the villa, and Marion Cotillard touching as a woman incapable of commitment. Glib and glossy, then, and without quite the depth of the films it’s trying to copy/send up, but still a really enjoyable, though long at 154 minutes, evening at the cinema with a great classic rock soundtrack.

Smith:  I can’t say it better than that.  Well done Jones.

Now why was I slightly disappointed by Source Code? I found it vaguely unsatisfying, and everyone else has seemed to rave about it. It is pacey, elegant and smart. Its four main characters are well-cast and do their jobs extremely well, but still I was left with the niggling feeling that, though I had suspended an awful lot of disbelief, once I had suspended it, the story still tried to stretch its alternate truth beyond the limits of my re-aligned credibility. Jake Gyllenhall, handsome, winsome and immensely likeable is repeatedly thrown back into the last eight minutes of a train journey, about to come to a horrible conclusion caused by a una-bomber figure whom he has to try to identify. He is being sent back by a strange organisation run by Jeffrey Wright, and his liaison within the organisation is the excellent Vera Farmiga – their relationship, by far the most interesting in the film, is reminiscent of that of David Niven and Kim Hunter in A Matter of Life and Death, but without the romantic entanglement (the other films that I kept being reminded of  were, of course, Groundhog Day, and also an obscure British film of the 1940s, The Interrupted Journey). Within the confines of these eight-minute interludes, whilst desparately searching for the bomber, poor, brave, doomed Jake also manages to find time to fall in love with his travelling companion, Michelle Monaghan, and herein lies the problem – he, understandibly, doesn’t want her to die. But in the supposedly real world, she already has died – he is only being sent back to try to identify the bomber to stop future atrocities, not to tamper with one that has, to all intents and puroposes, already happened. The niggling unsatisfactoriness comes from the way the film deals with this seemingly insurmountable problem of time-travel (though we are told that this is not really what is happening ) altering the past.

Perhaps I am being too fussy. Go to the film. Enjoy it for all its extremely good things – it is sensationally shot and looks wonderful; it is exciting, sometimes funny and, occasionally, moving. Ignore the niggles and you will have an entertaining evening in the cinema.

Well, what is there to say about Limitless? It’s pacey and entertaining. Once one has accepted the not totally impossible (given the speed at which modern science is moving) premise everything else makes pretty good sense, and one is not given much time to consider the things that happen deeply anyway. It deals with two issues affecting modern life – greed and addiction – though, as the greedy addict seems to win out at the end (though we are not certain for how long), it’s not, perhaps, a very helpful or informative way of commenting on these problems. It seems futile to carp about it, really – it has no pretensions to being a film of great art or great social comment. It is an entertaining film, slickly made and with high production values, enjoyable while you are watching but pretty instantly forgettable once you’ve left the cinema. In fact, as you can probably tell from this review, though I enjoyed it at the time, I’ve pretty much forgotten any details of what it was about………….

So, Matt Damon is now middle-aged?  Who knew?  And by the way, what does that mean for me?  But I digress.

The Adjustment Bureau in a nutshell – Matt Damon plays a washed up politician who meets the the very charming and funny Emily Blunt.  Damon falls hard for the English lass,  but the keepers of fate decide it was never meant to be and try their best to keep the two apart.  Our man Matt’s not having it though and pursues his girl until the bittersweet end.

The story line is thin, but the chemistry of Damon and Blunt make this film work somehow.  Blunt belongs to the Lucille Ball, Debra Messing school of comedic heroine. Her timing is fresh and her beauty present but accessible.  Damon, once again, shows us that Boston charm that has allowed him to go far on very little.  This film is a medium-speed action adventure on foot.  Run Matt. Run.  It doesn’t strive for very much and for that reason succeeds in delivering something worth watching.

Nothing else to do? Yeah, why not.  Give it a go…

The thing about commercial film these days is that there’s so much hype around the major releases before you get to the  cinema.  The weeks before Howl opened were filled with pronouncements of actor James Franco’s lack of physical similiarity with Allen Ginsberg, of Franco’s ability to cleverly catch the essence of the Beat poet’s placid radicalism, and of the capricious mix of live shot and animated segments that comprise the film.

Franco has been a visible presence on TV and radio with much being made of his intelligence – demonstrated by his studies at Oxford and his current status as a candidate for a Phd in English literature at Yale.  Here, at last, is an actor with the intelligence and acting skill to bind the subtle threads of the sensitive radical that was Allen Ginsberg.  Or, at least, this is what we were told.

Howl is adventurous.  It attempts to take the literally minded film-goer used to concrete images and  fully-developed characters and throws him into a world where the walking Ginsberg, unlucky in love, poised against the establishment, is adroitly juxtaposed with the creative carver of verse.  Lewdly and incisively yet truthfully and simply he writes of his love, his lust, his street, your street.  The film is successful in presenting the overlapping influences of  family, love, and social revolution on the poet’s life and work without being pedantic.

Franco, however, was disappointing.  His portrayal of the urban bard smacks of the smarmy brainiac who thinks he can do anything well – probably because the rest of us tell him that he can.  Well, he can’t.  Our Yale hero shows acting as imitative truth without an understanding of what it means to be marginalised and fighting, ugly yet beautiful, lonely yet adored.

Credit  should be given to all involved for the attempt, but this film is a lesson in the need for film casting to be less concerned with star quality and more concerned with casting leads who have a connection with the material.  I’m not saying that Franco is too young, too pretty, or too smart for the role.  I’m saying that he isn’t Ginsberg and lacks the qualitities needed to become Ginsberg – if only for a couple of film hours.

The film is worth seeing – but not cheering.