Reviews

'Dead Space' is a unique third person shooter. You play Isaac Clarke, an engineer going to investigate a distress call from the mining vessel Ishimura. Once there you become separated from the rest of the salvage crew when you're attacked by strange, mutant creatures called Necromorphs. You now have to travel through the stricken Ishimura to find out what's going on and locate your ex girlfriend Nicole who was on the ship.

What makes 'Dead Space' unique is the mechanism of the game. Shooters usually rely on you the play pumping shots into an enemy until they die. The Necromorphs are different. Shooting them doesn't work. Instead you're required to dismember the attackers by strategically blowing off limbs. Each particular enemy has a different weakness and as an engineer you use work tools instead of guns as your weapons.

Added to this new way of playing there are also areas where gravity is turned off. You point to where you want to go, hit a button and throw yourself from surface to surface. This is brilliant fun and disorienting. As well as these areas there are also vacuums, areas with no oxygen. These are designed to make you hurry as your suit has limited oxygen capacity.

Spread throughout the ship are stores where you can buy equipment and supplies. There are also work benches where you can upgrade your weapons. This is where things get slightly complicated. There are links between the upgrades, so you need to take a more balanced approach rather than just going for maximum damage and ammo capacity. The system works beautifully and is worth taking your time over.

EA have a brilliant game in 'Dead Space'. The new features will challenge hardcore gamers, but this will mean a casual gamer won't be able to get into it as well. Although it's a survival horror game there aren't really any 'jump out the seat' moments. What the game does have is plenty of gore though.

It's also worth getting the animated film 'Dead Space: Downfall' if you want to see what really happened on the Ishimura.

A really good game, well worth a look.

In Albion a young child is encouraged to buy a magical musical box by a mysterious stranger. This brings the child and sister to the attention of Lord Lucien, the ruler of the land, who wants to use the box to bring back his dead wife and daughter. Tragedy strikes and the child (your character) is left alone. Taken to a hidden camp you're brought up by the mysterious Theresa until one day she suggests it's time to go and hunt Lucien down.

'Fable 2' is the sequel to one of the best games on the original Xbox, a game I thoroughly loved. The makers have delayed the release a few times, promising that the game would be huge and a real living land. Here they fall short. The original was short, six to eight hours to fully explore the land. 'Fable 2' took me around twelve to fourteen hours, including time spent after the main quest finished to wrap a few things up. This isn't the game promised. Yes, the levels are bigger and more beautiful, but there isn't much aside from finding hidden treasures to do after the game is done. The missions are varied and well paced enough. Compared to 'Elder Scrolls: Oblivion' this game is small.

The voice acting is great. The script is well written and has a lot of different shades that can draw you in. Although your character never speaks, you have a soul that as a player you can believe in. Interactions with the world do have consequences, changing things forever. You can choose your path, for good or evil, and the decisions alter the character physically. There is no customisation, a feature found in all RPG's these days, so the lack here is awful. Your pet dog, which is supposed to be a creature you can project emotion onto, is only good for sniffing out hidden treasures. Even if you level up its fighting ability it turns out to be useless.

Some of the areas from the original are back, but changed. It's a thrill remembering how things were and comparing them to what there is there now. Again you can get married, but this time you can have children and have to raise the family as well as saving the world.

The achievements are a puzzle. As a Microsoft game the awards are huge for merely progressing in the game. If you play online with a friend they can also benefit from your hard work and get the same achievement for just being there and watching. It is fun looking in on someone's world to see how their choice has shaped the land. You also cannot die. Although your life can get knocked down to nothing all that happens is you spring back up with the loss of some experience. It means there's no sense of achievement in defeating a boss with clever tactics. You can simply charge in and just bash away until you win through. This is obviously aimed at casual gamers who don't want to be constantly having to retry parts of the game they can't get around.

A good game, but flawed, this is the game that the original 'Fable' should have been and it doesn't address the problems I had with the original. Could have been so much better than it is and the main quest could have been much longer.

When his daughter (played by Maggie Grace) goes to Europe and is kidnapped, Bryan (Liam Neeson) goes to investigate. Bryan used to work for the CIA doing dirty jobs nobody else wanted. Skilled in combat and torture techniques he uses his skills to hunt the kidnappers down.

Liam Neeson showed a lot of promise in his early career. The high watermark of his career so far has been 'Schindler's List' and from that point on its been a downward spiral (with the possible exception of 'Batman Begins'). Here he's badly used as a tough guy trying to help his estranged daughter. Although he does well, this isn't a role Neeson is suited for. He has too kind a spirit under character to pull off being an enthusiastic torture and killer. Maggie Grace is also awkward in the film. She's trying to play a 17year old, but doesn't do it with any skill. The rest of the supporting cast try hard with the material but also come off looking at times lost.

This is Pierre Morel's first shot at a big studio film. Teaming up with Luc Besson (writer/producer here) might not have been the best move. The film seems rushed in places and the emotional moments look really bad. There's also a very odd ending that doesn't seem to belong to the same movie, tacked on so the audience can go away happy.

All in all not a great cinema experience. If you're reading reviews in order to get an impression whether to see this film on the big screen then my advice would be to wait for the rental DVD release early next year instead

Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) is a NASCAR driver. Convicted of killing his wife (which he didn't do) he's sent to Terminal Island Prison, where the warden Hennessey (Joan Allen) has set up a competition where the convicts can race cars in order to gain freedom. Needing a boost to ratings the warden has brought Ames in to compete.

In order to race the drivers need navigators, hotties brought in from the local womens prison. Case (Natalie Martinez) is introduced to Ames as his navigator/love interest. She's also the ex-partner of the last champion Frankenstein. Can Ames win the races, get his freedom and get his daughter back? Paul W. S. Anderson hasn't had the best run in Hollywood. In my opinion the last good film he made was 'Event Horizon' back in 1997. Since then its been dross after dross. Although 'Death Race' isn't brilliant it shows he can make a good film. I was initially sceptical about the film, being a fan of the original 'Death Race 2000'. Although David Carradine has a cameo as Frankenstein (in honour of the role he had in the original) the two films have no connection apart from the similar titles.

Statham plays the role of tough survivor well. It's a role he seems to keep getting in Hollywood and plays to his strengths. Although I'd love it if he'd done all the (brilliant) driving work himself most of it seems to be stunt drivers. The inclusion of the hot girls seems a stretch too far. Obviously the film would have been too homoerotic if it was just guys, but sometimes you need to keep things simple. The support cast, including Ian McShane do well with the thin dialogue and obvious plot twists.

The action and driving sequences are probably the best part of the movie. Although you'll have seen most of it done before, here Anderson has gone to town and the action scenes save the movie from being an utter disaster.

Popcorn action. If you don't take the film too seriously then you should enjoy it. Not a patch on the original, but the best thing Anderson has put out in ten years.

Ex cons One Two (Gerard Butler) and Mumbles (Idris Elba) are trying to get onto the London property ladder. Unfortunately as criminals they can't get legitimate funding so turn to gangster Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson) for money. When the deal falls through they find themselves in debt and needing to find £2 million in a hurry. Step in shady accountant Stella (Thandie Newton) She knows her boss, a multi billionaire Russian, has the money and liking the danger puts One Two onto a scheme to steal the cash. Multiple double crosses later involving a painting and a 'dead' rocker and everyone wants to find and kill everyone else.

At the start of his career Guy Ritchie was compared to Tarantino. This isn't a good comparison. Where Tarantino can write great plots and fantastic dialogue, Ritchie is rubbish at plots, but good at putting words into peoples mouths. Here there are too many double crosses and back handed deals, the plot drags under the weight of the 'clever' plotting. When Ritchie learns that this doesn't work and simplifies his work he really will be a great writer/director. At least it isn't as bad as 'Revolver' was.

The acting for the main characters is great. They play well rounded characters that spit fantastic dialogue. The secondary characters are too thin and I honestly can't remember a single thing any of them had to say. The camera work is frantic and energetic at just the right times.

Good work, but this still isn't a match for 'Lock, Stock...' or 'Snatch'. B+. Room for improvement.

Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) is on the run from the American military. Holed up in a favela in Rio, he's trying to live a calm life while searching for a cure for his 'condition' when through a complete accident he's discovered. A snatch team are sent to pick him up, led by Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), and all hell is let loose.

Having escaped Brazil and finding himself on his way back to America, Banner finds his old love Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) and the passion is reignited. But Blonsky wants revenge for the beating he took when first sent to catch Banner.

I want to like this film. I really do. If ever there was an actor who was good at portraying tortured souls, characters with inner demons, it's Norton. So why does his try at the ultimate tortured soul with the mother of all inner demons not work? I think that's the question that'll hang over this film.

The highlights are Tyler, the emotional heart of the film. She and Norton have a chemistry, but even this can't seem to light the film up any. Roth also shows his talent and brings an essentially two dimensional character to life, until he vanishes under a tonne of CG.

The effects are good and well used. The direction is okay. The action scenes (certainly the first two big chases are), but the finale is poor and doesn't live up to what's come before.

The film seems to try to make a fresh start, including a montage at the start covering the origin story as it now stands. But there are a few places where it seems to try to tie into the Ang Lee film and it sits uncomfortably.

It's not bad, but there's so much more it could have been. And don't sit through the credits waiting for an extra scene.

Out to show his tribe that he can be a great leader, a man sets out to hunt mammoth in the wilds of the distant past. When slavers raid the village and take captives back to their distant city the man follows to save his loved ones.

Basically this film is a rubbish version Mel Gibson's 'Apocalypto'. The plot is essentially the same, but in all other respects the film doesn't live up to the spectacle of Gibson's film. The chief reason for this is the poor acting by the human cast. There isn't a single character that, by the end, I cared about a tiny bit.

The best thing in the film is the CGI animals. That's the problem with the film, the computer characters are more interesting than the human cast.

Roland Emmerich used to be a sure bet for a good film. Although some of the action is still top class, the rest if the film is dire. Partly its the generic script, partly its the similarity to 'Apocalypto, partly its that someone forgot to tell the cast to act.

Avoid like the plague.

This is a film about a boy who discovers, after an accident, that he can transport himself anywhere as long as he has some idea about the place he wants to land. After running away from home (on a bus mind) he breaks into a bank and after stealing piles of money sets himself up with a new life in New York (and just about everywhere else in the world). He then comes to discover that everything isn't as he thought it was and there's a war going on between the Jumpers and a group of religious fanatics called the Paladins.

Hayden Christensen takes the lead as David Rice. His arch enemy Roland is played by Samuel L. Jackson. Here's the thing with that casting; Jackson has a tonne of personality where Christensen has almost zero. He spends the short run time of this film delivering lines in a monotone, a pained look on his face that's probably supposed to be emotion. When they're on screen together Jackson blows Hayden out of the water.

Then throw in a love interest for David Rice, the girl he fancied so much at school before he scrams. Millie (Rachel Bilson) is a good looking girl, but there's also no chemistry between her and her leading man. When Rice just turns up in her life she decides to go away to Italy with him after a conversation lasting all of about twenty minutes. We don't even see her go home to pack and pick up her passport.

So, the two most interesting characters are the bad guy (Jackson) and the Jumper sidekick Griffin (Jamie Bell). Bell does a great job with the action and his slightly world weary view of things is a nice counterpoint to Rice's naive view.

The action is well choreographed and directed. The effects are top notch and the locations are brilliant. It's a shame that it all doesn't hang together just when it needs it. I'm sure they'll iron out the problems for the undoubted sequel.

I'm not a fan of the books, but I have read them.

The story follows Lyra, an orphan girl caught up in a plot between the religious ruling class and Lord Asriel, a free spirited adventurer who wants to free mankind from the tyranny they currently live under.

Chris Weitz should be whipped through the streets of America for the poor work put into this film. After that he should be locked in a cage with a real, hungry polar bear. The plot has been dumbed down and looks to be designed by committee. Several people have clearly read the book and picked scenes they think should be in the movie and dumped the rest in the bin. While the book was an epic this 'lite' version just seems too short. It isn't exactly like the film's too long. At just 113 minutes there was at least another 30 minutes before it'd be uncomfortably long. The quick pace should have given the story spring, but with the characters seemingly just jumping around the globe with no real good explanation it doesn't feel right.

Daniel Craig as Lord Asriel is probably the best thing in the film, all twenty minutes he's on screen. Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra is an amazing find and clearly has a great future in front of her in movies. Sadly she could have done with a better starting point. Kidman as Marisa Coulter is stunningly beautiful, but as the main villain doesn't quite have the sinister punch needed.

CGI was obviously the only way to create the daemons (the persons soul manifested as an animal companion) and this works well. The scenery and brilliant cinematography save this from being one of the few 1/10 movies I've rated on here.

To sum up: a shockingly poor effort at what should have been the building block for a great franchise. With any luck New Line will find a new director for the next part.

Jennifer (Elisha Cuthbert) is a model/actress living the high life. She has the annoying handbag dog, nice car, great apartment. She also has a history of stalkers.

At a charity function one night her drink is spiked and as she stumbles for help she's snatched from the club. Waking up in a basement made to resemble her apartment she's given a collection of clothes to wear. When she reuses the captor shows exactly how far he's willing to go to get her compliance. Add to this another, male captive, Gary (Daniel Gillies) and you have the recipe for an interesting story.

Unfortunately what you actually get is a film that borrows quite a lot from the feel of 'Saw' and 'Hostel', the captive genre of horror films that are doing the rounds at the moment. This never sails to the heights the first 'Saw' film did. Although 'Captivity' does have a claustrophobic feel, it never totally exploits it. Sure, seeing the villain blend up parts of previous victims might have shocked ten years ago, to the new hardened audience now this isn't anything special.

I've never been a fan of Cuthbert, but she seems to be setting herself up as a new queen of scream. She did show some promise in the woeful 'House Of Wax', but looking at who she was acting alongside there wasn't a great deal of competition.

Gillies is okay as the handsome boy toy in this, but is mostly acting on autopilot. *SPOILER* Pruitt Taylor Vince was a good choice as the villain of the piece (well, one of them), but is terribly wasted after a short stint on screen.

Not the worst film this year, but desperately average even for this already stuffed genre.

Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer picks up where the previous outing finished. Finally getting married Sue Storm (Jessica Alba) and Mr. Fantastic's (Ioan Gruffudd) wedding is interrupted by the arrival of the herald of the super villain Galactus into New York. The Silver Surfer may be the challenge to the Four that finally defeats them. Add to this the return of Von Doom and you've got a really tense situation.

My biggest problem with the first film was the poor script and low rating (PG in the UK). The action is hamstrung by the inability at that rating to actually show anything. Here is a film with another poor script. A lot of the writers from the first were kept on and it shows, the same complaints I had with the first film are here again.

Another problem is Gruffudd. He has an awful rabbit-in-the-headlights look on his face all the time. As the leader of the group he needs to have testicles and be a strong force. Unfortunately he is the wimpiest member of the group and seems to be permanently gawping at the things going on around him.

Again Alba and Michael Chiklis (The Thing) are wasted. Alba showed great talent at times in the sadly cut short Dark Angel series. Her talent is currently being wasted by Hollywood, always seeming to want to slap her in either skin-tight rubber or in a bikini. Her make-up and hair in combination with the contacts make her look very alien and made me not want to connect with her. Chiklis should also be doing better. He's a great actor with an expressive face that's hidden behind a pile of prosthetics. Yes, he does get time without the make-up, but it isn't long enough. Chris Evens (Human Torch) is again just so-so.

The best thing in the film is the Surfer. Physically acted by Doug Jones and voiced by Laurence Fishburne he shines through the rest of the duffness. There are a few good action scenes, but as I've said, the low rating prevents there being anything really meaty in them. At least the movie's only just over an hour and a half long. The chase with The Human Torch and the Surfer through the city is impressive, as is the confrontation between Von Doom and the Four.

Don't bother seeing this at the cinema. Wait for the DVD and rent it. Hopefully that'll send a message that we don't want a third instalment that is probably unfortunately coming.

I have to admit that I actually waited for the DVD release before seeing Eragon because of the critical and fan panning the film received.

Set in a fantasy land where dragons once ruled the skies, Eragon follows the adventures of a simple farm boy who comes across a mysterious stone in the forest while out hunting one night. Taking it back home the 'stone' hatches and inside is a dragon. The evil king Galbatorix then sends out his 'best' henchmen to kill the boy and is dragon, seeing them as a chance to unite the people against him.

This film, although a fantasy, is very much a copy of Star Wars with some minor changes to setting. I now dare anyone to watch the film and not spot Obi Wan, Han Solo and Leia among the characters. I'd very much like to blame the cast for this awful mess, but without good source material and clever directing an awful script will always result in an awful film.

The blame for this disaster should be laid squarely with Christopher Paolini. On the special features he says that his original inspiration for writing Eragon was he'd read all the fantasy books in his local library. It shows.

This is very much a fantasy lite film. With the massive LotR epics out there and even the marginally good Chronicles of Narnia as competition this film doesn't square up. John Malkovich is massively under used in the film, getting only ten minutes (if that) on screen. If anyone could have saved this it would have been him. Robert Carlyle as Durza does a good job as the sub-bad guy, all evil grins and mad eyes. On the side of good there are bigger problems. Edward Speleers as Eragon is maybe a bit too young to carry this role. Although filmed mainly in order he does start to grow into the role towards the end of the film he is just a bit too naive and 'innocent' to carry it off.

A good way to mindlessly pass a Sunday afternoon, don't watch this expecting a masterpiece.

I got Twilight Princess on launch day and have been trundling through it ever since. Now having finished it I feel it's the right time to say what I thought of the game.

You play Link, a simple boy from Faron Wood's. On your way to deliver a present to the castle you are pulled through into a dark, twilight world. Transformed into a wolf you find yourself at the mercy of Midna, a cryptic being who seems to know a lot about what's happening. You now have to battle through the usual dungeons trying to restore the world to order.

I loved OoT, the first Zelda game for the N64 about eight years ago now and seeing a Zelda game available on launch of the Wii I decided I should get it. There are a few problems with the game for me. The look is very last generation. It isn't a dramatic improvement on the OoT. Also having an Xbox360 I'm used to brilliant colours and great resolution. Here things are muted and slightly soft-focus. The controls are also not very responsive. The Wii remote is supposed to make you feel part of the game, but for me it was distracting. I ended up buying the Game Cube Twilight Princess in the end and then playing the game on the standard controller which was vastly better.

There are the ever present 'puzzles' and monsters you'll have seen in any previous Zelda games. Mid- and end-of-level bosses all have the usual weak spot you need to find and attack. Keys for dungeons need to be sought out.

What makes this better than a standard platform game is the scope of the world. Maybe this Zelda game is a bit more focused and you're channelled into completing tasks rather than being free to just wander and take in the sites, but there are so many things to see.

So, the Wii controls are bad, but the game pulls it back by being everything I'd hoped for in a Zelda game.

This extremely badly put together mess is supposed to show how the Hannibal Lecter we all know from 'Silence Of The Lambs' came into being. The story starts in 1944 when the retreating German army are crossing Lithuania pursued by the Russians.

Hannibal and his family have escaped from their castle home to a small cabin. When a Russian brigade stop to take on water they're spotted by German bombers and Hannibals parents are killed leaving the young boy to fend for himself and his sister. They are discovered by looters and his sister is killed.

Flash forward about ten years. Hannibal (Gaspard Ulliel) is now in a boys orphanage (which 'ironically' is set up in the old Lecter castle). Hannibal doesn't talk anymore and is the victim of bullying by the toughs of the institute. Escaping he makes his way across Europe, over the Berlin wall and into France, where he catches up with his aunt (played well by Gong Li). Sent to medical school he begins to plot his revenge against the men who killed his sister.

This could have been a brilliant genesis story, where we see how an innocent boy is turned by events in his early life into the monster (albeit a charming one) we came to know in previous films. Where this film starts to go wrong is the rather bland way things are presented. There's blood alright, but a lot of the killings go by off camera. One of the better events happens early on after an incident in a market and is probably the one killing that sticks in the memory. As Hannibal butchers his way through the men that killed his sister there is an escalation in the brutality and sadism involved, but you don't actually see that much. I largely blame the awful writing and cackhanded directing for all the problems.

The stand out actor (unfortunately for the film) isn't Gaspard Ulliel, but Gong Li as Hannibal's icy Japanese aunt.

All in all a waste of time and film. Harris's script is slow and predictable, Peter Webber's directing plain amateur. Avoid like the plague.

This film has been called a reboot of the series, taking Bond back to the start so the franchise can try to rebuild after the mixed feelings and reviews of Die Another Day. It works.

The pre-title sequence shows the two kills Bond (Daniel Craig) makes in order to earn his '00' rating. One is a down and dirty hand-to-hand fight in a gents toilet and the other, the more cerebral, thinking man's set piece that has become a Bond trademark.

After this is a new style of opening title. My initial reaction was to hate it, but as the (relatively) short sequence gets running I started to enjoy the novel visual style it uses. It won't be to everyone's taste however.

On his first mission things start to go seriously wrong. After being tasked to track down and bring in a bomber for hire his mission is compromised. This leads to a vertigo inducing chase up and then down two half-built buildings. Cue explosions and gunfire aplenty. When he finally catches up with his quarry Bond has to break into an embassy to bring the man down. Caught on camera doing the job he finds after his escape he's now earned the displeasure of his boss M (Judi Dench).

After being told to vanish for a while for things to blow over Bond follows a lead to Nassau. Here he comes across Alex Dimitrios (Simon Abkarian), an arms dealer with shady connections around the world. Falling for Dimitrios's wife Solange (Caterina Murino), Bond tries to find out who's behind these men. Again the mission goes badly leaving Solange and Dimitrios dead.

While following the leads Bond manages to prevent an attack in Miami. Back in favour, although only just, M brings him in and informs him of a link between the Dimitrios and a terrorist financier Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen). Bond's foiling of the attack in Miami has cost him dearly and in order to get his money back Le Chiffre has had to enter a high stakes poker game at The Casino Royale. The Government, through Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) are going to back the best card player in the service in order to bankrupt Le Chiffre.

I won't spoil the rest of the plot.

This film starts high action and, apart from a few sections, maintains the pace. It has all the things that Bond films should have, the fantastic locations, the beautiful girls, the ridiculously expensive cars, the action. From the stunning building chase to a too brief car chase, the action scenes deliver. But, even better than these are the tense face offs over the card table. Poker is the real action here. the battle of wits between Bond and Le Chiffre is great. There are breaks from the table in which there are even more fights and a heart stopping moment for the main man.

The acting is well done. What you see for the first time is Bond change and grow through the film. Here he gets angry and lashes out. He blows missions spectacularly and somehow manages to pull things around. The man you see at the end if changed from the man you see at the start. Craig is, if not the best, then soon will be the best Bond.

The supporting cast is good. Eva Green is stunning. Her acting is really good, especially in the vulnerable moments she has. There's nowhere this is shown better than at the casino where Bond has dispatched some third world thugs with Lynd right there with him. Finding her distraught in the shower moments later there is one of the most tender scenes in any Bond film so far.

I loved the film. Why it got 9/10 was for two things: length and the appalling product placement that went on. There are few films that merit a run of over two hours and this isn't one. Twenty minutes could have easily been shaved off and still left it great.

Go and see the film as soon as you can. For real fans or first timers it's a treat.

In the late 1940's two LA cops are teamed up to bust criminals with outstanding warrants. When Bucky Bleichert (a miscast Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) go on a seemingly normal bust they don't realise that only a few hundred feet away a crime scene has been discovered that will live in popular memory almost sixty years later.

The horribly mutilated body that's just been discovered is that of Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner), a wannabe actress from Massachusetts. Within an hour the whole LA police department, especially Bucky and Lee, are trying to figure out who the girl was and how this awful thing had happened to her.

The females scattered throughout the film include Lee's girlfriend Kay Lake (an awful Scarlett Johansson) and a mysterious woman that Bucky comes across in his investigations (Madeleine Linscott played by Hilary Swank). As the investigation begins to get more intense Lee begins to lose his mind. It's at these points the really good actors show their colours.

De Palma is a brilliant technical director, of that there's no doubt. What he can't do is develop character. The film falls in to roughly three parts. The first is a good, gripping, gritty look at LA just after the war. Then it gets to the second third and it starts to feel like you've been sitting watching the film for hours. The actors all seem to be starring in different films and the director hasn't noticed. The final third takes the film into Twin Peaks territory. There are huge twists as the writers tie up loose ends and begin to decide who the killer of Short was. Throw in corruption, slum housing, paintings and some sex.

This isn't dreadful by any stretch of the imagination but it isn't worth forking out the money to see in the cinema either. Johansson stars in yet another late summer stinker though. this should have been a strong role for her, but she seems to be trying so hard that everything is forced. The real weak link is Hartnett. He walks around with a dumbfounded look on his face the whole time and although sweet for five minutes is painful and annoying in a two hour film. Swank should have turned her role down as well. Although a beautiful woman she isn't exactly a femme fatale, what her role needs.

So, good camera work but let down hugely by an awful cast and that's what will always sink a film. It's also too short. Given an extra half an hour De Palma could have probably made a the ending if not better then at least satisfying.

Edward Malus (Nic Cage) is a cop traumatised after he witness an accident in which a mother and daughter are killed. While on leave he receives a letter from an old flame who's daughter has gone missing. Travelling to Summersisle to try and find the missing girl he finds himself among an isolated community where things clearly aren't what they seem. As his investigation starts he finds age old practises have been unearthed, including human sacrifice on the isolated island. Rapidly finding himself out of his depth he begins to lose control of his situation with devastating consequences.

Anyone who loved the original Wicker Man like I do should steer well clear of this awful mess. While this is an interesting (to start with) psychological drama with some interesting twists it rapidly drops into farce. At several points I found myself, along with almost all the rest of the audience, laughing out loud. Not what you should be doing in a film billed as a horror/thriller.

Cage is okay as the weirded out cop with a past. Kate Beahan as Sister Willow, his lost love, is striking but a character you want to slap every time she's on screen. The rest of the assembled weirdo's you can distrust right from the start. The outstanding cast member (and not for the right reasons) is Ellen Burstyn as Sister Summersisle. What a waste of talent. A veteran of films including The Exorcist, she's one of the most laughable villains in recent years.

Why a 5/10 then? Sadly it does entertain for all the wrong reasons.

Avoid like the plague or wait until it hits the rental shops.

Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) is an apartment building superintendent. He knows all the residents of The Cove and goes about his job with pride and skill. One night he discovers a girl swimming in the complex pool and she turns out to be something truly wonderful for everyone in the building.

Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) is from another world, one that had deep connections with the human world until mankind began to drift away and eventually lost it's connection. Now she is trying to fulfill her destiny and has to find a writer somewhere in the complex who is on the verge of writing something truly world changing.

M. Night Shyamalan is a true original. Love or hate his work he always comes up with something original in his film scripts. What differentiates this work from his other films is the relatively meekness of the contents if you don't look deeper in to the work.

About fifteen minutes into the film I was honestly preparing to walk out. The early pace is dreadful. M. Night's pacing in films has always been awful at times, but here it was at it's worst. I then decided to stick it out having forked out for a ticket.

What you get if you stick with it is a real emotional journey. Dark and complex with a few of the trade mark turns this doesn't have the outright twists that, say, The Village or Sixth Sense had, but it works on the emotions beautifully.

One thing that I didn't like was M. Night casting himself as the writer who was going to change the world. Everything is a matter of opinion, and as good as I think he is this is stretching things a bit far. He can act though.

Howard shines as Story. She is so ethereal and other-worldly that her casting is perfect. Giamatti is good, but he's done better things in the last year, films he'll always be remembered for. The rest of the cast are generally freaks and odd-balls, most of them actually forgettable despite this.

If you're the right person watching this film at the right time in your life Lady in the Water will sweep you away with it's beautiful message and original thinking. Unfortunately I picked a moment that wasn't right. It's an okay film, but some of it is so sloppy and the pacing so slow it'll drive you to distraction. Unfortunately you'll have to see the film to know whether this is the right time or not.

After astronomers find Krypton in the furthest reaches of the galaxy Superman (Brandon Routh) decides to see his home world and find out if anything survives. Blasted back to Earth he once again crashes on the Kent family farm. Once back he finds that the world had moved on and may no longer need him. Meanwhile Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) has had a child and settled down. Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) is out of prison and planning another evil scheme involving stolen Kryptonian technology.

One of my most anticipated movies of this year. I always loved the Christopher Reeve version and have a great deal of respect for the super hero adaptations that Bryan Singer has developed up until now.

There are a lot of problems with the film. Because Clark Kent/Superman are fairly quiet, unassuming characters both the villain and Lois Lane have to be a bit bigger than life to provide interest. If either of these characters are below par then the whole thing falls flat. Previous Lois' (I'm counting Margot Kidder and Teri Hatcher here) have understood this. kidder was manic, running around getting in to trouble. Hatcher was a 90s feminist icon career girl who never listened to advice. Bosworth was a really bad piece of casting for the role in this film. She walks around poi-faced taking the material too seriously. There's also a lack of chemistry with Routh.

The next, more major problem, is the lack of action. There's an eye-popping scene in the first third of the film then everything after that is a bit smaller and less thrilling. For a summer blockbuster you need more action than a viewer can physically take. Then there's the climax. It's a real anticlimax. The set-piece that should end it is a waste and doesn't let the film end with a bang. This is followed by almost 30 minutes of epilogue giving an already plodding film a real dull and drawn out ending.

Singer should be mainly blamed for this whole mess, and this is coming from someone who loves his previous films. He's done this type of movie brilliantly before and somehow screws it up. Perhaps the Man of Steels lack of a dark side means there's nowhere to go, and Singer likes his dark characters. Perhaps I'm more cynical these days and need a hero who has some of this in him to relate to.

Saying all this I hope that we see Routh again in films. He does a brilliant job in both roles. Spacey can play villains, we all know this, and he does a great job.

I hope this doesn't sink Singers career. But at the same time I hope the bad business this has done and the bad reviews sink any hopes for a sequel.

On their wedding day Will (Bloom) and Elizabeth (Knightley) are arrested by Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander) for helping Captain Jack Sparrow (Depp) escape in the previous film. To save themselves Will is given the task of tracking Sparrow down and coming back with his compass. Jack, however, is having problems of his own as an old debt comes back to haunt him (literally).

This is a good film. One immediate problem I have is its length. At 150 minutes it's only a touch longer than the original, but it feels like 2 1/2 hours.

Where the first film was funny in a sly way PotC 2 tries to be funny, and this never works except in spoofs. Trying to bring back so many of the original cast, especially Lee Arenberg and Mackenzie Crook as light relief doesn't work and their scenes could be largely cut to save time.

The original cast (Depp, Bloom and Knightley) slip back in to their original parts well. My one criticism is that Bloom's naive, put upon Will is trying now. Where he should have grown and matured he still walks around with a slapped puppy-dog look for most of the time and it doesn't work anymore. Depp is brilliant.

The villains. In this type of film you need to be slightly pantomime to not get lost under the weight of the films premise. Bill Nighy as Davy Jones looks a little lost under the weight of make-up and CG needed for his character. A little bigger performance would have gone down a treat. Tom Hollander's Beckett is good, but again the twists and turns of the plot seem to bury him. Maybe he'll really get some screen time and something worthy to do in the last part.

Brilliant action scenes both on land and at sea fill out the summer blockbuster criteria. From the slightly comic, tongue-in-cheek fights between Depp, Bloom and the returning Jack Davenport as Norrington to massive, ship smashing clashes between The Flying Dutchman and The Black Pearl as well as an appearance from the Kraken, a huge sea monster raised by Davy Jones. You really feel these set-pieces.

A good night out, but as the middle part of the trilogy it feels slightly incomplete and needs a little more bite. Go and see it, it'll leave you wanting the final part.

A cure, a way to suppress the mutant gene that gives the new race its super powers has been found and is being offered to anyone who wants it. Magneto sees this, because of his childhood experiences, as a genocide aimed at wiping out the mutant race. He decides to take the fight to the Homo sapiens and destroy the mutant who is the source of this cure.

First off I think the film was okay. If anything it was too short, and that isn't something I find myself saying too often these days. An extra 15 minutes wouldn't have been too much of a stretch.

Ratner isn't a great director. Unfortunately he's following on from a director who got this franchise off the ground with two fantastic films that built on characters as well as having some nice pieces of action. Ratner uses the people to link bits of action together and the film is weaker for it. A lot of the story relies on you the viewer knowing the past two films quite well to fill in the blanks. Ratner has what seems to be a check-list of things to put it: Love triangle? Check. Super villain? Check. Hero's fighting amongst themselves? Check. Big action? Check. In jokes? Yep.

The characters may be a weakness, but the action is where the strength lies. The action sequences start within the first hour and there are some casualties, thinning the ranks from early on. The real eye-popping fight happens near the end when Magneto and his army of angry mutants turn up at the lab where the cure is being held to destroy the place. Cue burning cars being used as weapons.

As a summer blockbuster this is a really good movie. As the 'last' instalment of the current X-men franchise it doesn't do a good job. Go and see the film, enjoy it.

And wait until after the credits for a bit of hope for the future of the series.

I've got to be honest from the start. I haven't read the book, I'm not a big Tom Hanks fan and the last film Ron Howard directed that I enjoyed was Willow. I've also avoided all the press attention so that this is all my own opinion.

The Da Vinci Code (for anyone who doesn't know) sees Prof. Robert Langdon (Hanks) thrown in to a criminal investigation when the curator of the Louvre is found dead in the gallery having written Langdon's name in his own blood. Surrounded by mysterious symbols and cryptic writing Langdon is teamed with a code breaker Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) as he tries to find out exactly what's going on. His search for the truth puts him in opposition with the church and a mysterious monk Silas (Paul Bettany). With a great secret at stake, a secret 'that if revealed it would devastate the very foundations of mankind' there's everything to play for.

I saw the film at a late night screening. What I got was 150 minutes sitting in the dark being slowly bored to death. The film is described as 'a thriller' but lacks any actual thrills. The main problem is how Howard tries to get the ideas and complex information on to the screen. James Cameron, talking about The Terminator, stated that any exposition (explaining how and why things happen) works in a book but kills a film stone dead. The whole length of the film is Hanks explaining to Tautou what's going on.

There are action scenes, but they are so badly edited together you lose where you're up to. Probably the 'best' is a car chase with Audrey at the wheel. One minute she's a mild mannered investigator the next she turns in to Jason Bourne with the driving skills of a rally champion. Hanks clings on for dear life looking like his lunch is about to come back up, a look he keeps for most of the movie.

Why 6/10 then? Two people made me stick with this mess: Sir Ian McKellen and Bettany. As the albino monk Bettany is the most menacing villain I've seen in a while. He draws the eye in to the film brilliantly. As Sir Leigh Teabing, McKellan is there to give more plot points and point Hanks and us in the right direction. His screen presence is fantastic and his slightly tongue-in-cheek delivery of the hokum makes for some lighter moments.

Howard is extremely heavy handed with the direction. A light touch would have helped make the film feel less than it's actual running time. Having people running places rather than having barrages of talking would also have helped.

There's little to recommend the film on the big screen. It feels like a feature length episode of The X-files. There were even cheers and laughs from the audience when the big reveal comes towards the end.

As one of the most anticipated films of the summer its a disaster.

**SPOILERS!** Aeon Flux is a film based on an MTV cartoon series from the mid-90s. The heroine is a super tough spy/assassin working for a group of freedom fighters against a totalitarian regime that's dominating the last human city left.

After her sister is killed in a police action Aeon is sent to kill the leader of the regime, Trevor Goodchild. But when it comes to the moment to take her revenge something happens to stop her.

This film isn't without its good points. The future world is well realised and the scenery beautiful. But, like the utopia shown, scratch below the surface and you find it's all a great big cover up.

The problems start with the script. In the very first run of the cartoons Aeon was silent. As soon as she starts to speak in the film everything starts to get by turns dull and boring. The plot should have been simple and straight to the point, but the writers decided to bring issues of cloning and worries about the environment to the party as well. What you end up with is something that doesn't engage. Theron is good but wasted.

Don't worry about seeing this in the cinema. Wait until the DVD comes out, you'll get better value for money that way.

I should start by saying I love Peter Jackson's films. The LoTR trilogy are some of the best movies ever made up to now. He is one of the best story tellers in cinema today and the hope for the future.

King Kong is the story of a film maker Carl Denham (Jack Black) who is running away from his creditors to an island that's thought not to exist, but for a map that's come in to Denham's possession. To complete his latest film he needs a female lead. As time is running out to get out of New York he comes across Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), the perfect woman for the part. Once on the island things start to go wrong. Seriously wrong.

Three hours (just over if you sit through the credits). That's a big ask for a relatively simple plot and it gets stretched tissue paper thin. The LoTR films deserved this length and commitment from the audience because of the complexity of the story. But after an hour I was starting to look at my watch to see how much more I had to put up with.

The film is well acted with the exception of Jack Black. What was needed for his part as Denham was some subtle acting with the occasional outrageous burst of manic energy. What you get is mugging and face pulling. The other extreme is the Jack Driscoll character (Adrien Brody), played fantastically and with great relish. An unlikely hero and part of the most bizarre love triangle you'll see on film. Brody has a wonderful chemistry with Watts and Black, a relationship that pulls the film back and gives you something to sit through the boring bits for.

The star is always going to be the 25 foot ape. Kong is brilliantly realised with CGI and is helped by the great physical performance from Andy Serkis (Kong/Lumpy). The interaction between Kong and Darrow is fascinating and beautiful. Obviously having someone to act opposite helps hugely when you're going to be sharing the screen with a CGI character (take note George Lucas).

The rest of the CGI is good and I can suspend my disbelief for most of it. It's the action scenes that really do it. Brutal and amazingly kinetic, they are the equal of anything else you'll have seen this year.

A good film, there are amazing parts to it, but it's just too long and a lot of the scenes feel like padding. Go and see it for the action and to see how digital characters should be done. Don't be surprised if you find yourself wondering how much longer you have to go.