Odeon Manchester

Brideshead Revisited

The big-screen adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel about a family of aristocratic Catholics sees Ben Whishaw as Sebastian,...

City of Ember

Gil Kenan’s scary animated movie ‘Monster House’ acknowledged its young audience’s ability to engage with a surprisingly...

The Dark Knight

Nolan’s sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins internalizes the schism between serious aims and summer-movie duties. The problem isn’t the admittedly jaw-dropping Sturm...

Death Race

It would take a team of semioticians to explain why Statham is somehow more compelling when obscured by an iron mask. But he is, as “Frankenstein,” this vicious thriller’s Web-celeb racer,...

Drona

Bollywood’s ‘Harry Potter meets Indiana Jones’ is a fantastic failure. Adi (Bachchan) is unaware of his superhero powers as he sings a song in an unnamed Eastern European city. When the camp...

Eagle Eye

Let’s see if your eagle eye is working: After being falsely accused of high crimes (North by Northwest), our heroes find the whole of modern technology turned against them...

Flashbacks of a Fool

In a scene reminiscent of the ending of Robert Altman’s ‘The Long Goodbye’ – where Sterling Hayden’s suicidal writer strolls out into the sea from his Malibu house – Simon Pegg) used to poke fun at celebrity culture in his left-field London mag, but, now...

Kidnap

Mean and lean Kabir (Khan) does something terrible (see title) to Sonia (Lamba) the skimpily-clad teenage daughter of Vikrant (Dutt), a millionaire Indian businessman. Dutiful dad and kiddie...

Mamma Mia!

Throughout the screening of ‘Mamma Mia!’ I kept clocking the security guard in the corner. What was he thinking, I wondered, as Pierce BrosnanAl Pacino and Robert De...

RocknRolla

Wrong-footed by the new credit-crunch zeitgeist, but with recovered fluency after the hiccups of ‘Revolver’ and ‘Swept Away’, director Guy RitchieWill Ferrell is 41. Assessing his emotional age from comedy to comedy is also fairly easy:...

Taken

Written by ‘Leon’ director Luc Besson and directed by Pierre Morel (‘The Transporter’), ‘Taken’ is a...

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

The son of a Nazi officer befriends a concentration camp inmate in this harrowing, inspiring drama.

The Duchess

If you’ve seen the posters for ‘The Duchess’, you’ll know that they recall the marital woes of another Spencer, Princess Diana, born two centuries after Georgiana (David Gordon Green has a keen eye for landscapes and a...

The Women

Diane English’s abysmal remake of George Cukor’s 1939 femme classic will have fans of the original growing claws....

Tropic Thunder

Attention, fans of Pineapple Express: Here’s the real transgressive comedy of the summer—more or less Stiller’s version of The Last Movie....

You Don't Mess with the Zohan

No Adam Sandler movie could bring peace to the Middle East, and this baggy, shoddily FX’d star vehicle—the story of...