Black Death

Plague is ravaging the whole of Europe - and young Monk Osmund is letting the beautiful Averill shelter in his monastery. The two have fallen in love, but when plague penetrates the walls he sends her away into hiding. Thereafter a ragtag group of knights arrive; word has spread of a nearby village which has been spared the plague because the inhabitants have rejected God. Osmund accepts the task of guiding them to the village so that the knights can deliver justice to the heretics... but the journey will bring horror and death to all involved.

Pretty fair movie that creates a suitably gloomy atmosphere for the time and plays on the religious themes quite well.

Bridesmaids

Annie is a woman whose life seems to be at a dead end. Her business has collapsed, her boyfriend uses her for sex and then practically kicks her out the house afterwards, she has the housemates from hell... all of which is not helped when her best friend Lillian announces that she is getting married and wants Annie to be her Maid of Honor. What should be a fun experience is largely ruined by Lillian's new friend Helen. Rich, beautiful, successful and intensely competetive, Helen immediately muscles in and takes over the planning of the wedding, pushing Annie more and more to the sidelines and making her feel ever more isolated and unwanted. Can she bounce back and take control of her life?

Comparisons to the Hangover are inevitable, but this is really a very different film. And frankly, it's considerably funnier.

Hanna

Teenage Hanna lives with her father in a remote snowy forest. He spends his days teaching her all about life... including intense training in combat skills. When he thinks the time is right, he shows her a radio device which he claims will summon hostile forces from the outside world. Curious to learn about the world she has never experiences, Hanna flips the switch - and starts an adventure that will lead to her learning the truth of her own origins at the end of a journey littered with corpses.

Decent action thriller, but in the end it really doesn't amount to a whole lot.

Your Highness

Thadeous is a prince, living the high life in his medieval kingdom - but nevertheless he feels overshadowed by his daring and brave older brother, Fabious. When an evil wizard captures Belladonna on the day of her wedding to Fabious, Thadeous determines that he will go on a quest to save her.

This is possibly the most tedious, unfunny movie I've ever seen. Aggressively unenjoyable.

The Beaver

Walter Black is a wreck. A business executive with a wife and kids, he has been suffering for months from severe depression. His family is disintegrating, his business is collapsing, and Walter can't bring himself to do a thing to save them. Eventually his wife throws him out of the house, and he begins to drink himself into despair.

Then he chances upon a beaver hand puppet in the trash and takes it home with him. When he wakes after a failed suicide bid he finds himself taking through The Beaver - and the puppet has a personality all its own, without any of Walter's misery. Quickly the Beaver personality manages to turn his business around and even starts to repair his relationship with his family. But as the Beaver becomes more and more successful, will Walter lose his own mind to it completely?

This is a truly odd film, and although the acting is good it never for a moment rises above its absurd premise. No matter how hard everyone tries, in the end you're just left sitting watching it and thinking "But... he's got a puppet on his hand..."

To be honest, it comes across as something Jodi Foster did to try and regenerate the career of her pal Mel Gibson.

Pirates of the Caribbean : On Stranger Tides

Captain Jack is forcibly recruited to locate the lost Fountain of Youth. Along the way we meet Mermaids who eat men (and not in the good way), mysterious lost islands and general hijinks galore. It's silly fun, but to be honest at this point the whole thing has gotten a bit tedious.

Thor

Thor is the hero of Asgard, hailed by all and looking forward to further glory when his father Odin retires and confers on him the title of King. But when the Frost Giants attack, Thor rejects his father's caution and leads an attack on their homeland, prompting a declaration of war. Odin casts Thor out, stranding him on Earth where he must struggle to learn to live as a Human. Asgard is in the hands of Thor's brother Loki following his departure, but Loki harbours a terrible secret - he is a frost giant himself, stolen from their land by Odin at the end of the last war with them. Can Thor regain his godhood and return to Asgard to defeat the treacherous Loki? Of course he can!

Not the greatest superhero movie ever made, not even close really, but this is a pretty decent flick that does pretty well on all counts.

X Men : First Class

The early life of the mutants and formation of the X Men is depicted in this fun little movie. To be honest it almost comes across as an Austin Powers style comedy - there's a lot of lighthearted stuff here, and the villain and his plan are straight out of fantasy. But there's plenty of mutants doing their stuff, and for the most part it's good fun. It does trample heavily over the history laid down by the previous movies, though, so you might want to think of this far more as a reboot than a prequel.

It's a minor thing, but it made me smile - anybody who knows anything about the military will laugh more than once at the depiction of the Cuban missile crisis. Half the hardware in use on both sides wasn't invented or wasn't in service at the time. Still, it's a minor quibble.

The Troll Hunter

A film school crew are on a project - a poacher is believed to be killing bears, and they want to track the man down and interview him. They succeed in finding him but he refuses all requests for an interview, so they decide to follow him covertly. To their amazement they find that he's not hunting bears... he's hunting trolls!

Great little movie that takes all the myths and fables of the troll and plays them absolutely straight-faced. Hilarious stuff!

Transformers : Dark of the Moon

Well, doing it in 3D means the camera work has to be toned down, which is nice. And Leonard Nimoy! Yay! Doing Star Trek in-jokes! Double yay! Plus, the new "pretty girl part" actress is rather prettier than the old "pretty girl part" actress.

Beyond that, it's more of the same. Bad looking robots run around attacking one another, fighting over an ancient something or other that will bring dire consequences if the baddies get hold of it. Blah blah blah.

Green Lantern

A dying alien passes his "Ring of power" to Hal Jordan, fighter pilot extraordinaire and all around hero type. The ring allows Hal to manifest anything his mind can imagine using the "green power of will"; such rings are created by an interstellar organization of superheroes, the titular Green Lanterns. But will Hal's newfound super powers be enough to save the Earth from a malevolent entity which feeds on fear?

Rather a silly movie, this one. For a start, Hal Jordan comes across as rather a Dick. His backstory is so overdone that it honestly wouldn't have been out of place in a Hot Shots movie, and his "Maverick" attitude comes across as so reckless that you wonder how his career could last more than days. We see him make one flight in this film - and in it, he both sacrifices the life of his partner (simulated, fortunately), and then breaks the rules he's working under, resulting in the crashing of his massively expensive aircraft for real.

Of course by the end he overcomes his douchiness and does the whole hero thing, but it's all rather contrived and a bit unconvincing.

Super 8

Young teen Joe Lamb is struggling with the loss of his mother in an industrial accident, something that haunts both him and his father. He is helping his friend Charles Kaznyk to make an amateur horror movie to enter into a competition; several friends are in on the project, including Alice, who both boys have a crush on - but whose father had a hand in causing the death of Joe's mother.

One night they are filming their movie at the train station when a train derails nearby in a spectacular accident. They witness a mysterious creature escaping from the wreckage, something that appears to be not of this Earth. Soon the military have the town surrounded and are hunting for the alien monster.

This typifies both the good and the bad of modern Spielberg movie making. It's very well produced, very well acted, and the tale of teen angst works pretty well. On the other hand, it's really all stuff we've seen before - watch E.T. and then watch this movie. Broken family, check. Teen whose parents have no time for him, check. Alien appearing in town, check. Boy must find a way to help the alien escape the military and return home, check. Mawkish sentimentality overload, check.

What's odd is that the alien here is sold partly as a monster, and then partly as just some guy from another planet trying to get home. The moment when Joe gives the "it's just trying to get home!" speech is very nice... but rather undercut by the fact that not thirty seconds earlier this alien that we're now meant to empathise with was walking around with a person's leg sticking out of its mouth!

Trust

Annie is a typical 14 year old girl living a happy family life. One of her closest friends is a 16 year old boy named Charlie, who she knows only from the internet. gradually he gets closer and closer to her... and slowly begins talking about sex, before admitting to being 20, then 25. Annie agrees to meet him in secret and is shocked when he turns out to be a 35 year old man. He sweet talks her into going to a hotel room and coerces her into sex. When Annie confesses to a friend at school the story leaks out, causing a devastating impact on the entire family.

This is a creepy, deeply disturbing movie - made all the more so when you contemplate the fact that this kind of thing is actually happening, right now. There are no over the top scenes of gun toting revenge, no pat happy ending, but at the same time the movie doesn't hesitate to show the reality of the situation. Sadly, this film could almost be a documentary. Parents would do well to watch it.

Vanishing on 7th Street

One evening a mysterious event causes virtually everybody in the world to simply vanish - only those who had a light source on them at the time remain. The disappearances continue - shadows literally appear to be reaching out for people and snatching them away. Worse, the batteries and power sources are failing fast, and the sun is rising later and setting sooner every day.

An interesting premise, this, and the first 15 minutes or so are quite creepy, with shadows crawling around the edge of the screen like living things. But once it sets up, it really has nowhere else to go and little to say. The "event" itself makes no real sense, and the movie gives us no real answers concerning it. Ambiguity can be used well in a film, but here it really isn't; nothing natural could fit, so you're reduced to basically shrugging and saying "okay, ghosts or demons or the devil did it." Worst of all, the characters are flat and uninteresting and you just don't care all that much if they vanish.

American Psycho 2

A direct to video sequel which is a sequel in name only. Rachael Newman is a student on a prestigious course about the psychology of serial killers. The top student in the class is almost always picked for the FBI's serial killer unit, and Rachael is determined to be that student - and if that means killing everybody in her way, so be it!

A curious movie, this one. It's actually quite decent, and if they had stripped out the first couple of minutes and changed the title it would have made a perfectly good if uninspiring little film. The blatant cash-in aspect is a bit of a millstone, frankly, and you're best to put it out of your mind. It's also interesting to see Mila Kunis here, knowing that she has since gone on to bigger and better things.