film reviews
Graham Fuller

Beware the ids of kids: Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze's film of Maurice Sendak's seminal children's picture book, centres on a hyperactive nine-year-old boy, Max (Max Records), who’s so angered and frustrated by the reverses of a winter's day that he destroys a keepsake he gave his adolescent sister and ends up biting his single mother (Catherine Keener) while she’s entertaining her boyfriend at home.

Graham Fuller

Though he has yet to make a perfect film, the director Tim Burton’s choice of Gothic and fantasy subjects and his deadpan, post-expressionist approach to them rightfully designate him an auteur of considerable genius. His 14 movies to date have earned him a cohesive retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

sheila.johnston
Lost souls: Michael Keaton and Kelly Macdonald find salvation, of sorts
It has hardly been a vintage year for Christmas movies so far (click here and here to read our respective reviews of Nativity! and A Christmas Carol). But Michael Keaton's absorbing first film as director, in which he also stars, finally nails the true spirit of the festive season: it is about a suicidal hitman.
joe.muggs
German Depeche Mode fan in video re-enactment costume

In a pirate television (pirate television!) broadcast from 1992, a large group of Russian youths in flat top haircuts and leather jackets discuss Depeche Mode's appeal. “It's romantic style,” suggests one with absolute assurance, “it's music for the lonely.” It is just one touching, funny moment in a film packed with them, but it also sums up what The Posters Came From The Walls is about. This “music for the lonely” by a band of awkward blokes from Basildon has brought this group of young people together, as it has all the legions of devoted lovers of the band that we see throughout the 58 minutes.

anne.billson

Looks can be deceiving. The first thing you should know is that Richard Kelly's third film isn't really about the box at all. It's more about what's inside, which is a big red button. The place is suburban Virginia and the time is 1976, for no reason I can fathom other than this was the heyday of the paranoid conspiracy thriller and Kelly fancied giving us the heebie-jeebies with some truly terrifying 1970s wallpaper.

sheila.johnston

The porn star Sasha Grey - turned mainstream actress in Steven Soderbergh's new film - is a bit better looking than the schlubby, chubby hero of The Informant!, also directed by Soderbergh and released just two weeks ago (click here for our review). More attractive also than the unkempt and ultra-hirsute Che Guevara in SS's epic diptych about the Cuban revolutionary.

Matt Wolf
Luke de Woolfson as Alex: low budget is no guarantee of depth in a subpar 'This Life' gone gay,
London builds on its metrosexual status in Mr Right, a dreary gay-themed indie in which the metropolis by default becomes the star. There's nary a homophobe in sight - not to mention a traffic snarl-up or tube strike - in brother-sister filmmaking team David and Jacqui Morris's view of the capital, which looks giddy and rife with possibilities throughout. Shame, then, about the script.
Jasper Rees

A filmgoing acquaintance has personally drafted a set of guidelines to increase her chances of a good time at the cinema. It’s a fairly hardline set of strictures. No sequels, for one. Not to mention the ban on cartoons. And in the most random cull, she will see no film with a two-word title in which the first word is “The”. It’s by no means a foolproof system. She gets to miss The Godfather on rule three and The Godfather 2 on rule one. The Godfather 3 is additionally outlawed under rule two.

Adam Sweeting

Low-budget horror movie, comprising supposedly "found" video footage depicting freaky supernatural events...  it's Blair Witch 2! Indeed, writer/director Oren Peli has taken discount film-making to new extremes, using his own home in San Diego as his sole location, restricting the cast to five (I can't even remember the "Girl on Internet" mentioned in the cast list), and bringing the piece home for a ridiculous $15,000.

Veronica Lee

How do you make a road movie set in several European countries for just £1million? Set it inside your lead character’s head and use strikingly inventive visual imagery to conjure a world full of the weird and wonderful, that’s how. And if the previous sentence rings a bell for The Mighty Boosh fans, it’s because Paul King, the BBC television comedy’s director, wrote and directed Bunny and the Bull, his first feature. He shot the film entirely in studios in London and Nottingham, and he tells the story with the kind of richly detailed, dreamlike shots that Boosh fans will instantly recognise.