film reviews
Jasper Rees

This isn’t Atom Egoyan’s first road accident. In The Sweet Hereafter he portrayed the agony of a small rural community after a school bus crash deprives almost every household of its young, like some disembodied edict from King Herod. This time it’s the other way round: in Adoration a child has lost his parents to a mysterious car crash, leaving him and the uncle who brings him up to live in its long dark shadow. But that’s not the main difference between the two films. The Sweet Hereafter was based on a novel.

sheila.johnston
Streetwise: Gabourey Sidibe in Lee Daniels's Precious
What an odd and provocative coincidence that black women - hardly a demographic over-represented in mainstream cinema - should be at the centre of two high-profile American films opening this week. One is The Princess and the Frog, also reviewed today on theartsdesk. The other is the multi-award-winning Precious. In the former, the princess is a brunette edition of Disney's pretty Barbie prototype. Near the beginning of Precious, by contrast, when you first spy this sullen, seriously obese figure waddling into view, you might be forgiven for asking, "Do I really want to spend 110 minutes in this character's company?" The answer is not a foregone conclusion.
Veronica Lee

For those of us brought up on classic Disney animation - from the first, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, through The Jungle Book and Lady and the Tramp to, more recently, The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast - it’s sad to think that a whole generation of children have seen animated films only through CGI and Pixar. But now comes The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s first entirely 2D, hand-drawn animation since 2002, which, with its sumptuous drawings, soft colours and Jazz Age setting, could almost be seen as a retro exercise.

Adam Sweeting
Mel Gibson as Detective Thomas Craven, on the hunt for his daughter's killers

If you were looking for a director for the movie version of Edge of Darkness, you'd have thought you couldn't do better than Martin Campbell, who made the original 1985 series for BBC television. He's now a bona fide Hollywood ace, with a string of major TV credits and hit movies like Casino Royale and the Zorro flicks to his name. But not even a Tinseltown budget can bribe lightning to strike twice, and whatever fortuitous combination of timing and subject matter turned the BBC series into an instant historic event, it's difficult to imagine that happening to its big-screen incarnation.

sheila.johnston

Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Sam Shepard and, in a tiny role, Carey Mulligan: yes, yet again the stars are lining up to live through the agony of America's presence in Iraq and (here) Afghanistan. Closely based on Brødre, by the Danish director Susanne Bier, Jim Sheridan's remake tells of the sibling rivalry between a decorated Marine and his feckless jailbird brother.

Matt Wolf
Clive Owen gives us Father's Day in January
Boys will be boys, and, eventually, grown boys as opposed to men. That's the cheerful (depending on how you look at it) message of The Boys Are Back, in which Clive Owen pours on the not inconsiderable charm as a father suddenly left having to care for his two sons. That  women barely enter into the scenario - and when they do, emerge as so many killjoys - will appeal to the eternal adolescent in a movie that aims to make eternal roustabouts of us all. Let's face it:  wouldn't you rather sit on the bonnet of dad's very, very speedy car instead of - ugh! - doing the dishes?
anne.billson

A Prophet is a different sort of prison movie. Jacques Audiard's follow-up to The Beat That My Heart Skipped is another dip into the criminal underworld, and mostly takes place in a French jail. Nearly every other film or TV series I can think of which is set behind bars (Prison Break, The Shawshank Redemption, Papillon and so on) is concerned with escape. Even the two most celebrated French prison movies, A Man Escaped and Le trou, are about finding a way out.

ryan.gilbey
Don't drink the water: Crude explains why.

Far from being the premature biopic of Frankie Boyle that its title might suggest, Crude is the latest and subtlest in a run of environmentally concerned documentaries. To stand out in this newly lucrative genre, you must adopt an original tack: the celebrity-fronted lecture has been done (An Inconvenient Truth), as too has the thriller (The Cove) and the prankster comedy (the Yes Men films). So anyone for the straight-shooting, no bells-and-whistles approach - “Just the facts, ma’am” as Dragnet’s Joe Friday would have put it?

sheila.johnston

By trade Ryan Bingham is something called a Termination Facilitator. I'm not entirely sure if that's meant as a euphemism, but it sounds kind of scary and in fact, played by George Clooney with lubricated charm, Bingham is a hit-man contracted out to fire people from companies who don't have the cojones or the courtesy to break the bad news themselves.

Adam Sweeting

Startlingly, it’s 10 years since Sexy Beast, the infernally cunning gangster movie with a terrifying performance from Ben Kingsley at its core. Now Beast’s screenwriters Louis Mellis and David Scinto are back with their new brainchild 44 Inch Chest. That authorial pedigree is written all over the screen (and in the way the air is turned perpetually blue), but this isn’t Sexy Beast II.