The week's new films reviewed and rated: Russell Crowe, a festival prizewinner and a young Mussolini

Tom Huddleston presents a new weekly round-up of all the week’s film releases, big and small.

Summer season started in earnest two weeks ago with ‘Iron Man 2’, but hoping to knock Tony Stark off his flight path this week is Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe’s ‘Robin Hood’, which hopes to do for England’s favourite radical archer what ‘Gladiator’ did for the Romans. We wish them luck, though its unlikely this stern, grubby boys-own adventure will do much to challenge the shiny Hollywood glitz of Downey Jr and co.

Two of the week’s big arthouse releases hail from Israel, but otherwise they couldn’t be more different: ‘Lebanon’, which takes place entirely within the belly of an Israeli tank rolling into trouble during the 1982 war, took home some major awards last year, but falls short of the likes of ‘Das Boot’ in portraying the claustrophobic terrors of combat. By contrast, ‘Eyes Wide Open’ is a quiet, restrained but affecting drama focusing on forbidden love among ultra-orthodox communities in Jerusalem.

The week’s other major arthouse release is ‘Vincere’, a melodramatic, highly effective look at the early life and loves of dictator-to-be Benito Mussolini, painting a vivid picture of life in pre-war Italy. And if it’s grandstanding loudmouths you’re into, check out ‘American: The Bill Hicks Story’, a superbly structured documentary biopic of the deceased rage-comic.

Further down the list, BFI Southbank presents a welcome reissue of Brit director Albert Lewin’s 1950 romantic fantasy, ‘Pandora and the Flying Dutchman’ alongside a retrospective of this underrated helmsman’s work. Elsewhere, there’s a smart but horribly seedy portrait of white trash life in the South African suburbs in ‘Triomf’, while the ICA presents a ghostly art-doc on Canada’s biggest oil refinery in ‘Petropolis’.

Tom Huddleston on 'Robin Hood'
'The film just feels huge: genuinely epic in a way few movies have since "Lord of the Rings".'

 

 

 

Dave Calhoun on 'Eyes Wide Open'
'Slow and often silent, it’s an extraordinarily disciplined film (the photography alone is impressively careful and controlled) that respects, if not honours, the milieu of its story

 

 

Dave Calhoun on 'Lebanon'
'Maoz prefers straight, undignified reconstruction to telling a story through the prism of memory. His aim is admirable, his project intriguing and his film a fair testament to the nightmare of war – but it never feels as convincing or as suffocating as it should.'

 

David Jenkins on 'Vincere'
'Marco Bellocchio delivers an operatic slice of historical muckraking which exhumes the tale of Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), spurned wife of the lantern-jawed lothario who would become Il Duce (Filippo Timi)'

 

 

David Jenkins on 'American: The Bill Hicks Story'
'Even those who shrug at his combative style of humour won’t be able to deny that this is a model of detailed and distanced biographical filmmaking.'

 

 

 

Dave Calhoun on 'Petropolis'
'This hallucinatory, 43-minute film is more of a protesting art piece than a docu-essay'

 

Tom Huddleston on 'Triomf'
'A film lacking in sympathy, which offers up a smart, scabrous portrait of four repellent individuals but never gives us a reason to care what happens to them.'

 

 

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