Getting on for three decades ago Lasse Hallström was introduced to audiences outside his native Sweden with My Life As a Dog. An emotionally continent, directorially restrained picture of the pains and pleasures of a rural childhood, it was Hallström’s ticket to Hollywood. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, featuring a coltish young Leonardo di Caprio, retained some of Hallström’s snappy weirdness when he moved into English, since when he has wandered into the mainstream and can’t seem to locate the exit. His signature is to take a popular work of fiction and coat it in a thin film of simplifying Read more ...

On the tip-off of an art-loving West Country amigo, Miss April and I took a day out of our Easter hols to visit the recently re-opened Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, in Exeter.We’d missed the exhibition of French and British impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and some Englishmen), so we took the opportunity to wander aimlessly round the satisfyingly manageable building and reacquaint ourselves with that childlike enthusiasm for the Wonder House (as the natives call the Devon museum). Despite its rooms full of Egyptologica, taxidermised birds, Grand Tour bling, Congolese Read more ...

Terence Davies's screen treatment of Terence Rattigan's play gets plenty of things right, not least its smoggy evocation of the seedy, exhausted London of the early 1950s, with its shabby colours, peeling paintwork and bomb damage. The piece is essentially a three-hander, and Davies's lead trio acquit themselves admirably. Rachel Weisz may be a little too fresh and luminous as Hester Collyer, repressed wife of High Court judge Sir William Collyer, but her determination to break free from her background and claustrophobic circumstances through her affair with ex-fighter pilot Freddie Page Read more ...

"Find your inner soldier and stop the alien threat before it's too late!" runs the blurb for Hasbro's Battleship computer game. The movie of the game seizes this basic idea by the scruff of the neck, and pumps it up into a cacophonous effects-crammed military yarn with a deafening heavy metal soundtrack. Alien forces have landed in the Pacific, and the US Navy is forced to fight Pearl Harbor II.Director Peter Berg (pictured below) is the son of a US Marine, and he hasn't stinted on the patriotic flag-waving. Military veterans from World War Two and recent Middle East conflicts have been Read more ...