Empire Leicester Square

Epic

The folks behind the 'Ice Age' series deliver another animated romp, this time with a strong eco-theme, as a teenage girl, voiced by Amanda Seyfried, is exploring the Amazon with her scientist father and finds herself caught up in an age-long battle...

Mud

The Beach Boys’ feelgood jukebox standard, ‘Help Me, Rhonda’ is played twice in ‘Take Shelter’ director Jeff Nichols’s third feature, amplifying the sense of sunkissed nostalgia present throughout this amiable but over-familiar coming-of-age story –...

I'm So Excited

One litmus test for auteurism could be whether a director is able to do his or her thing in a tightly confined space. ‘Stagecoach’ and ‘Lifeboat’ are unmistakably the work of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, despite being largely confined to, well, a...

Olympus Has Fallen

Hollywood’s funny way of celebrating Barack Obama’s re-election is to put the White House through as much hell as possible just to prove its resilience. In September, Channing Tatum will hold the fort against an invasion in Roland Emmerich’s ‘White H...

Side Effects

The latest film – maybe the last; more on that later – from Steven Soderbergh is a slippery one. It’s a pacy, sleight-of-hand thriller that satisfies as unabashed, borderline schlocky genre fun. It’s also full of sly digs at consumerism and the love...

Spring Breakers

It’s not just the ample teen flesh that’s a little tender in the new film from Harmony Korine – the impish American filmmaker who wrote ‘Kids’ (1995) when he was around college age and directed ‘Gummo’ and ‘Mister Lonely’. Korine’s last full-length f...

All Stars

We’ve had ‘Streetdance’ (twice). Now meet ‘All Stars’, the UK’s latest attempt to ape America’s lucrative tween dance scene (in 3D). Ethan (Theo Stevenson) is a cheeky schoolkid who throws a talent contest to save the local youth club. His own dance...

Wreck-it Ralph

Perhaps the best reason to go and see ‘Wreck-It Ralph’, Disney’s spangly attempt to beat daughter company Pixar at their own high-level game, isn’t in the film itself: rather, it’s ‘Paperman’, the Oscar-nominated seven-minute short that precedes it....

GI Joe: Retaliation

‘GI Joe: Retaliation’ is the second instalment of a movie franchise based on a kids’ toy, so it’s fitting that it feels like it could have been written by a seven-year-old, albeit one with an unusual interest in global politics and heavy artillery. A...

Royal Opera House: Donna Del Lago

The British Museum Live: Pompeii