Dave Evans’
MINI – MOVIE REVIEWS

Smokin’ Aces

Jeremy Piven’s is cruising his wave of Entourage-success and is seemingly confident enough to risk sharing the screen with Ben Affleck, an actor whose recent films have proved as popular as syphilis. Here Piven plays a snitch who finds himself on the run from any number of potential assassins. Slick and entertaining, this is above-average comedy-action fare.

Blood and Chocolate

Director Katja von Garnier has her work cut out trying to keep her story of a werewolf torn between love and family loyalty from slipping over into absolute farce. She’s not always successful and the film is never thrilling, frightening or exciting enough to take off but the young couple, Hugh Dancy and Agnes Bruckner have promising faces.

Catch and Release

Jennifer Garner stars as a recently bereaved woman struggling to come to terms with her husband’s less than saintly past and find new love with one of his childhood friends. This is every bit as uninspiring as it sounds and really does make one wonder how Garner has achieved star status. Supporting turns by Kevin Smith and Juliette Lewis do nothing to alleviate the tedium.

Epic Movie

From the writers responsible for the Scary Movie franchise and the yet-more-lackluster Date Movie comes this parody of Hollywood’s most bloated products. It’s lightweight trash but the targets of this silly satire are worthy of attack and the cast seem to be enjoying themselves enormously. Jennifer Coolidge shines like the comic star she is.

The Hitcher

Graduating from One Tree Hill to the big time B-movie world of the horror remake, Sophia Bush plays the female lead in this remake of the 1986 ‘classic’. The story’s simple enough: young, happy couple pick up ghoulish looking stranger with predictably unfortunate results. Sean Bean, once flying high as a strong British export, crash lands as the murderous title character.

The Dead Girl

Brittany Murphy plays the eponymous corpse whose demise brings to light various other strands and characters who hold the clues to her murder. The film’s focus could do with being tighter and perhaps enough isn’t made of the excellent cast (including Giovanni Ribisi and Toni Collette) but with some stunning and tender moments, Karen Moncrieff is certainly a director to watch.

The Good German

Steven Soderbergh returns with this heart-on-sleeve homage to Carol Reed’s classic The Third Man. Although this never reaches the dizzying heights of that classic, George Clooney plays a convincing lead as a hapless American journalist who falls into a murder-mystery. Strong support comes from Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire and the excellent Tony Curran.

Freedom Writers

Hilary Swank continues her streak of deathly dull, soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated, social justice stories with this tale of a young teacher trying to improve the lot of her class of at-risk children. It’s not that this is bad but it feels too much like painting-by-numbers for all involved, especially in the light of last year’s similarly-themed but extraordinarily realised Half Nelson.

Happily N’Ever After

Surely, to the delight of nobody, this heralds the steady continuing stream of CGI films. Here things hit a new low with CGI plagiarising CGI in this suspiciously Shrek-like story. Cinderella (voiced by Sarah Michelle Gellar) must battle her evil step-mother (Sigourney Weaver) for control of the fairytale world. Tedious and clumsy.

Miss Potter

Having perfected her English accent for the Bridget Jones films, Renee Zellweger gets the chance to whip it out all over again in this literary biopic of children’s author, Beatrix Potter. This is delightful fare with Zellweger acting with a subtlety and tenderness she’s not shown before. The supporting cast, headed up by the ever-wonderful Ewan Macgregor and Emily Watson, do her proud.

Arthur and The Invisibles

CGI once again but this comes with a slightly different pedigree. Luc Besson, director of 1994’s superb Leon and the flawed but visually fascinating The Fifth Element, turns his attention to a children’s book of his own writing concerning a ten-year-old boy and his adventures with garden fairies. It’s by no means great but it lacks the cynical and easy recycling of much of contemporary children’s cinema.

Stomp the Yard

The director of I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, Sylvain White, turns his eye to somewhat more realistic concerns in this film about stepping and African-American college fraternities. DJ (Columbus Short) plays a freshman, trying to recover from the death of his brother and ultimately finds his life transformed by the community he finds in college.

Alpha Dog

This is a flashy biopic of the young Southern Californian drug-dealer Jesse James Hollywood, from Nick Cassavetes, the director most recently responsible for loveable schlock-romance The Notebook. Cassavetes is great at handling his mostly young cast and the film manages to engage with what is attractive about that lifestyle without simply glorifying it.

Code Name: The Cleaner

Cedric the Entertainer, Lucy Liu and Desperate Housewives’s Nicolette Sheridan join forces to fill in for the lack of an A or even B-list lead in this absurd action comedy. Cedric plays Jake, a man who wakes up having lost his memory and somehow bumbles his way into a government conspiracy. Straight-to-video.