Hugo

Hugo is an orphan who lives in the Paris train station, where he looks after the clocks whilst trying to mend an automaton his father left him. When the automaton begins to work Hugo finds a mystery which leads him into the history of cinema.

This is essentially a love letter to early cinema, and on that level it works somewhat. But as a movie, it's rather a letdown. Hugo doesn't have any real story arc - he sets out repairing this machine because he thinks it will resolve his father issues, yet it doesn't do anything of the sort. Once he fixes it the whole dead father story line is simply dropped, and we get an exploration of one of the pioneers of early cinema instead. Overall it felt horribly indulgent and bloated, the use of 3D more than once strays into the "throw things in your face" territory, and Sacha Baron Cohen's horribly, horribly, horribly performed railway policeman is a character stuck in there purely to allow the occasional chase scene to prop up the audience's interest.

Immortals

Theseus the peasant is caught up in a war which King Hyperion is fighting to recover the magical Epirus Bow, which he will use to release the Titans from captivity. These immortals will then take on and destroy the gods themselves, who Hyperion blames for failing to save his family from death.

This is one of the worst films I've seen in the last five years. Virtually everything about it is preposterous and stupid. The hero fails in every single thing he tries to do, the bad guy wins - and then the movie pulls a rabbit out its ass by making it so that the bad guy fails even though he wins, showing that essentially his plan was pointless all along. The acting is poor, the action is poor, nothing about it makes any sense. You can't even laugh at how awful it is, though you can at least laugh at the absolutely ridiculous hats that half the people in the film wear.

Anonymous

Elizabeth I, "The Virgin Queen" is approaching her end and the country is rife with speculation as to who will succeed her. The Earl of Oxford, an illegitimate and unacknowledged son of Elizabeth, plots to gain the throne himself. To whip the public mood up in his favour and direct it against his enemies, he hits on the idea of using the most popular entertainment of the day - the theatre. To that end he has written dozens of plays, comedies and tragedies which contain thinly veiled political messages to the people. But since Oxford cannot be seen to be openly advocating such messages, he must hide his identity. This he accomplishes by allowing another to take credit - a stupid and rather oafish actor who can't write one word of his own, one William Shakespeare.

A decent film which weaves intrigue and plots around some illusions to the work of the Bard. The so-called "Oxford theory" concerning Shakespeare's work is a genuine one proposed by real historical scholars, although not widely accepted.

In Time

In a future world, everybody is genetically engineered to be born with a one year countdown clock on their arm. It starts running when you hit 25, and you will never age from that point forward - but when the clock hits zero, you drop down dead. Time is thus the new currency, and as long as you end each day one day in profit, you will live forever. Yet with 20 minutes to get yourself a cup of coffee, or a year to cross a state line, this is very much a society of haves and have nots - and having not is instantly fatal. When Will Salas inherits a whopping hundred years from a rich businessman he determines to use the wealth to avenge the death of his mother at the hands of the system. He journeys into the world of the ultra wealthy with but one aim - to smash the whole system.

Fascinating idea, this, and the film does a decent job of exploring the wrinkles of such a system. It's rather obviously a parable on modern capitalism, and on that basis, in some ways it is starkly successful but in others really not. Overall it's worth a watch.

Margin Call

It's a late night in 2008 and a young worker for a major American bank is running some simulations on a new computer model of the market when he realises the awful truth - the way the bank has been calculating investment risks is badly flawed, so badly that even a normal fluctuation in the market will now leave them bankrupt. As the night drags on his work is shown to the company executives, who come to the conclusion that the only sensible thing to do is dump the worthless investments on the rest of the market, saving their own company for the moment at the cost of inflicting massive financial loss on everybody else.

A fascinating look at how the world of high finance works. Well worth seeing.

The Three Musketeers

Classic adventure story of young D'Artagnan and his quest to follow in his father's footsteps and become a King's Musketeer. It's a wonderful combination of slapstick comedy and action, with a rather endearing hero at the centre of it all. A classic!

The Four Musketeers

The sequel to The Three Musketeers follows the continuing exploits of Porthos, Athos and Aramis and their younger comrade in arms, D'Artagnan. This one doesn't quite live up to the first, but it's still a pretty decent ride.

The Three Musketeers

The 1993 version of the story brings in Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland Oliver Platt and Chris O'Donnell as the heroes. It's the same basic story, but it lacks any of the subtlety and excellence of the 1970s version. Everything is ramped up to 11, and the result is a film that is more extreme and less enjoyable.

The Three Musketeers

If the 93 version of the story was over the top, the 2011 version goes all the way to 15. We're given flying warships, Musketeers with ninja skills, a Milady who can flip around doing karate and killing people... a giant pile of nonsense.

Paranormal Activity 3

Yet another entry in the Paranormal Activity franchise, this time covering Katie and Kristi's childhood experiences.

The film does several things dead right; there's no lengthy build up this time, it pretty much zips into the action within the first five minutes or so. Whilst there's nothing wrong with building a story slowly, by now we all know what to expect from this series, and the decision to just get on with it is very welcome.

The exploration of the kid's childhood is also a good one. There's nothing worse than a sequel that forces more story out by distorting or overwriting the original - Highlander II is perhaps the very worst offender. But here, the backstory for the girls was given to us in the very first film so we're filling in a blank that we always knew was there.

The film even manages to get the whole camera aspect right. Back in the 80s video equipment wasn't a common or small thing - but the film provides a plausible reason for it being around by making the taping of wedding videos the father's business. They even come up with a couple of new twists on using the cameras - my favourite is the one that is mounted on a desktop fan so that it pans slowly back and forth, a trick that is used to spring more than one good surprise.

They also avoid the issue of the previous film with cameras catching amazing things that the people then never bothered to look at. Here, the characters routinely check up on the footage and are suitably amazed and frightened.

Overall, whilst it lacks the originality of the first film this is a step up from the second.

The Thing

A prequel to Cameron's classic 80s horror movie. This is a decent stab at serving as a remake / prequel; they openly show that this is not just the same story told over, tying explicitly into Cameron's film in many ways. Yet ultimately this is the same basic story, just retold.

I find that it works quite well as a standalone piece. It is a bit too concerned with getting to the monsters and not quite concerned enough with establishing the characters, and there are a couple of oddities thrown up by the prequel nature - most notably the filmmakers decided to omit the idea of the Norwegians blowing up the ship by accident whilst trying to excavate it, setting up a very different story for their climax. It also takes a couple of viewings and an assumption or two to see how the climax leaves things as the next film finds them. That said, I don't mind the fact that this film decided not to be 100% slavishly tied into the other so that didn't bother me.

I've seen a lot of talk about how fakey the CGI effects look compared to the original physical effects. Here's my take : can I tell that the CGI is CGI? Yes, I can. But then, go watch the original movie again. Those rubber monsters look like exactly what they are, rubber monsters. The effects were revolutionary for their time, certainly, but they do NOT look like real living creatures. I'm sorry, but they just don't. Both sets of effects are flawed, each in different ways. I enjoy each for what it is, and I smile at the flaws of each for what they are. By all means prefer one to the other, but recognise that it's simply a subjective bias and not an objective flaw in the film.

Real Steel

Charlie Kenton tours America with his fighting robot, scratching a living by performing matches in low-rent fights around the country. But his overconfidence gets his robot smashed permanently beyond repair, leaving Charlie broke. Fortune shines in the shape of his ex, who is looking to get him to give up custody of their son so that she can make a new family with her new husband. Charlie pulls a fast one and gets the new guy to pay him a ton of money for the kid, who he will hand over when the pair return from an extended holiday.

With his new cash Charlie buys a robot and gets to work trying to break back into the circuit, with kid in tow. But a disastrous bout destroys this robot too, leaving Charlie with nothing but an old sparring model he steals from a scrap yard. Amazingly, the clunker proves to be the little robot that could - and Charlie finds himself bonding with his son as they rise through the ranks of robot fighting for the ultimate showdown.

A surprisingly decent movie, not really a great film but it hits all the right buttons along the way and does a decent job of telling a routine story.

Moneyball

Billy Beane is struggling to achieve any kind of success as the coach of the Oakland baseball team, despite having a mere pittance to work with. A chance meeting with Peter Brand leads to him embracing Brand's theory - that the reliance on scouts who make subjective judgment calls about a player's usefulness is badly flawed. Instead, Brand makes mathematical models that show how many runs their presence actually achieves, regardless of how they achieve it or whatever personal quirks they might have that put the scouts off. As a result Billy thinks he has a chance to assemble a successful team from those considered misfits by the sport - and maybe, just maybe, take them all the way.

As somebody who knows next to nothing about baseball, this film had a bit of a hill to climb with me. But it does so quite successfully, creating an engaging story without getting bogged down in the technicalities of the game. Worth seeing.

Drive

Ryan Gosling is The Driver, a man with superb driving skills who is trying to break into the professional race circuit whilst running a profitable sideline in acting as the wheel man for criminals. However, when a job goes wrong and puts him on the wrong side of some organised crime bosses, he must struggle to stay alive.

A great film, this. You expect it to be all about massive high action car chases and thrills, but it really isn't. The Driver does what he does largely through knowing things like how to drive in a manner the cops won't take as suspicious, where the traffic will be light, how to hide from a helicopter, where to ditch a car. He puts his foot down as a last resort only, and when he does his single thought is how fast he can stop rushing around and go back to being inconspicuous.

Outside that, it's the characters that sell the film. You really want the Driver to succeed, and you genuinely worry that he might not. Well worth seeing.

Shark Night 3D

A group of teens head off into the swamps for some party time. Of course, there are sharks of various kinds just waiting to take a bite.

This is a terrible film, utterly silly and with virtually nothing to recommend it. Do not watch!