SHORTCUTS

NEW RELEASES

X-Men: Days of Future Past: Matthew Vaughn and a superb cast reinvigorated the franchise with cool retro style and globetrotting intrigue in 2011’s X-Men: First Class. The series’ original director, Bryan Singer, continues that momentum in this entertaining film, which ups the stakes by threatening the genocide of the mutant population. ★★★★ Under the Skin: True to its title and thanks to director Jonathan Glazer’s superb control and a mesmerising performance by Scarlett Johansson as an alien seductress who preys on hitchhikers in Scotland, this creepycool exercise possesses a sinuous, insinuating power to burrow into the viewer’s consciousness. ★★★★ Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return: This film is animated in form, but completely listless in content. This is a musical that borrows tangentially from some of the most imaginative source material in the history of children’s stories and weaves elements of that material into a tale with zero stakes. ★ Grace of Monaco: Art gives only a sketchy imitation of life in this luminously good-looking, but ultimately rather shallow study of the Grimaldis, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace (played by Tim Roth and Nicole Kidman), at war with each other, as well as “la belle France” next door. Kidman makes a wholly believable Grace. Roth does a decent job, too, but the solidity of the performances is undermined by a flimsy script. ★★ Walk of Shame: The sight of Elizabeth Banks clad in a short, tight, clingy yellow dress for most of the film is the primary pleasure of director Steven Brill’s one-note comedy in which the actress, much like her hapless character, does her best to survive under trying circumstances. ★★

ON CIRCUIT

Godzilla: This version of Godzilla is way better than the 1998 flop, but still falls short of a triumph, except perhaps a triumph of special effects over personality. ★★★ Filth: In an impressive shift away from his usual clean-cut roles, James McAvoy plays a corrupt police officer riding a drug-fuelled roller-coaster. He plays a diabolically unpleasant antihero, but somehow McAvoy and writer-director Jon S Baird make us feel sympathy for the devil. ★★★ Last Days on Mars: This is an atmospheric chiller that unleashes zombie peril in space. Far more sober than that premise suggests, the unapologetically derivative sci-fi outing doesn’t have the scripting muscle to deliver on its early promise. But the solid cast, led by Liev Schreiber, keeps it reasonably gripping. ★★★ Heaven is for Real: After surgery, the young son of a pastor claims to have experienced visions of the afterlife. It’s is a tough-minded portrait of a man wrestling with his faith. ★★★★ Devil’s Knot: Atom Egoyan’s film is a dramatisation on the period between the murder of three young boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, and the conviction of three teens who clearly didn’t kill them. This infuriating tale of injustice features Reese Witherspoon and Colin Firth. ★★★ Lone Survivor: Based on the memoir of Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell (Mark Wahlberg), it tells the story of Operation Red Wings, a disastrous US mission to kill a prominent Taliban commander in Afghanistan. A cast of thinly sketched characters results in the absence of something, or rather, someone, to care about. ★★ Tokarev: A reformed gangster (Nicolas Cage) takes on Russian mobsters after his daughter is murdered. ★ Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy: The Tinker Bell movie is a tribute to female friendship and girl power. ★★★★ Ain’t Them Bodies Saints: A beautiful, densely textured elegy for outlaw lovers separated by their own misdeeds, this film will put directorwriter David Lowery on the map as one of the foremost standard-bearers of the Malick and Altman schools of impressionistic, mood-drenched cinema. ★★★★ The Colony: Survivors of a new ice age grapple with deadly disease and feral cannibals in this uninspired sci-fihorror mash-up. ★ The Other Woman: Although this film nibbles around the edges of revealing truths about relationships, it leaves most of that potential behind, instead pursuing easy, exhausted clichés about zip-less marriages, upper-class suburban drudgery, cynical careerism and dumb-but-sweet blondes. ★★