SHORTCUTS

Amour: Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke’s meticulous portrait of an elderly couple facing the end of life chronicles a chapter that many viewers either have experienced or are confronting. They don’t need to be reminded of the unconsoling truths Haneke brings to light – about illness, decline, devotion and grief. Indeed, the ideal audience for Amour might be those lucky, head-over-heels young couples on the cusp of saying “till death do us part”. ★★★★ World War Z: Oddly entertaining, World War Z is an exercise in expectation management. Forget those trailers suggesting a rock ’em, sock ’em, blow-it-all-up extravaganza. Instead, be prepared for a relatively grown-up, modestly intelligent and refreshingly un-bombastic thriller that owes as much to medical tick-tocks such as Outbreak and Contagion as it does to 28 Days Later and the seminal works of George Romero. ★★★ The Company You Keep: A former Weather Underground activist, who has been in hiding for 30 years after a violent crime, has to go on the run after a fellow radical is arrested. It’s a good, solid thriller about a fugitive trying to clear his name. ★★★

NEW RELEASES

The Internship: Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, playing their customary characters (the motormouth and the straight man), are salesmen who lose their jobs and somehow snag internships at Google, despite their lack of tech knowledge. ★★★ I Give It A Year: Snarkier than your average Hollywood romantic comedy, this fitfully hilarious British outing seeks to slice up happily-ever-after tropes with a hacksaw. It winds up rather inelegantly shoehorning salty humour and abrasive sentiment into a genre template, but an above-average number of laughs compensate for the