Arthouse and alternative cinemas

The capacious, messy 333 was one of the first clubs to colonise this corner of town, and did as much as any venue to put the neighbourhood on London’s nightlife map. It’s no longer the be-all and end-all of East End clubbing, and the programme in the main room is a little thinner than in previous years. Even so, this two-floored clubbing institution still draws queues for indie-rave and R&B mash-ups at weekends. The basement’s dark and intense, which works well for the dubstep talent on show. Upstairs is the tatty Mother Bar, responsible for countless lost evenings. There’s no food up there besides the iconic nut machines, but really, if you’d eaten earlier, you probably wouldn’t have wound up there in the first place.

Fine dining restaurant set in what was once the Great Eastern Hotel's ballroom (now the Andaz hotel) serving locally sourced British dishes such as Devon crab tartare with mango and coriander, Gressingham duck with spiced pineapple and Welsh lamb with wild garlic purée.

Wood-panelled walls and a black and white checkered floor make for a striking entrance hall at this swanky 5-star hotel, which is a mixture of stylish, monochrome decor and high-quality furnishings.  Each bedroom has a handmade mattress, air-conditioning and luxury linen bedding. There are on-demand movies, iPod docks and marble bathrooms with bathrobes and Penhaligon's toiletries. These are rooms befitting its Buckingham Palace location, opposite the Royal Mews and just 500 metres from London Victoria Tube and Train Station. Perfect for exploring nearby sights, Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament and Piccadilly Circus. If your journey has left you a bit peckish, there's a generous supply of free snacks and canapés, including fresh fruit, crisps, and a selection of dried fruit & nuts, sweets, chocolates and toffees. Once you've dined in the glass-roofed exec lounge you'll feel like you're part of an exclusive London club.  

23 is located in West London and just 5 minutes’ walk from West Kensington Tube Station. It offers en suite rooms and free WiFi in the reception areas.Accessed by stairs only, each modern room at 23 has a flat-screen TV, a hairdryer and towels. The rooms also benefit from an en suite shower room.Olympia Exhibition Centre is a 5-minute walk from the property. Kensington Palace, The Science Museum, The Royal Albert Hall and Hyde Park are within a 30-minute stroll from 23. Nearby attractions include The Natural History Museum and the V&A.London Paddington Railway Station is a 20-minute Tube journey away, while Heathrow Airport can be reached in less than hour via the Piccadilly Line.

A wine bar-cum-restaurant in the downstairs deli at Fortnum & Mason, offering a menu put together by the group's development chef, Shaun Hill. The room's design comes from the David Collins Studio, and the name commemorates the year of Fortnum & Mason's foundation. There's a short wine list, with most available by the glass. 1707 does invite guests, though, to purchase a bottle from the adjacent F&M Wine Department to drink for a £10 corkage charge. 

In a library-like atmosphere of dark wood and low lighting, the bar staff at the Gore Hotel in South Kensington go about their business of providing drinks and bar food to an affluent clientele. The drinks list is extensive, with a large set of original cocktails playing a major role. Wines are international in scope, and the champagne list begins with Beaumont des Crayères and rises through Bollinger and Taittinger to the expensive heights of Krug, Dom Perignon and Cristal. There is a large selection of single malt and a slightly smaller one of rum. Bar food ranges all over the globe, and takes the form of sandwiches, salads, tapas and other small plates, large platters. Prices for both food drinks are around the average for a place at this level of luxury, around £10-11 for a glass of bubbly or a cocktail, and tapas at £4-5.

A two-floor American pool bar in Clerkenwell with four full-size tables, a separate basement bar downstairs, cocktails and a food menu taking influence from cuisines across the globe. It's even got its own resident pro pool player - World 8-Ball Trickshot Champion, Steve Daking.

75 offers accommodation in London, 1.5 km from Islington. The property features views of the garden and is 1.8 km from The British Museum. Additionally, Angel underground station is a 5-minute walk from the property.The kitchen comes with an oven. A flat-screen TV is also offered.Hoxton Square is 2.1 km from 75, while Dominion Theatre is 2.2 km away.St Pancras International station is 1 km away.The nearest airport is London City Airport, 12 km from 75.

52-2 offers accommodation in London, 2.3 km from O2 Arena and 3.7 km from Olympic Stadium. The unit is 5 km from Greenwich. Free WiFi is provided .There is a dining area and a kitchenette complete with a dishwasher, an oven and toaster. Towels and bed linen are featured in this self-catering accommodation.Victoria Park is 5 km from 52-2, while Greenwich Park is 5 km from the property. London City Airport is 2 km away.

A Willesden Green restaurant specialising in Indian and Nepalese dishes. Its name doesn't just represent the venue's address on the High Road - they donate 33 percent of their profits to three Nepalese children's charities: the Everest Child Care Home charity, the Bloom Organisation and SOS Bahini.  The food menu ranges from vegetable samosas, naan breads and pani puri to to chicken tikka, mutton chops and marinated chicken cooked in the clay tandoor oven. Keep an eye out for the momo dumplings too - an authentic Nepalese snack traditionally eaten with tomato pickle.  One of the aims of the restaurant is to set up a school in Nepal. Any person or organisation donating the £300,000 needed can have it named after them. Sounds like a good way to spend some money if you have it. 

In a prime location in the Hammersmith and Fulham district of London, 65 is situated 800 metres from Hammersmith Apollo, 800 metres from Riverside Studios and 1.7 km from Olympia Exhibition Centre. The accommodation offers free WiFi throughout the property.The nearest airport is London Heathrow Airport, 15 km from the bed and breakfast.

Modern bromance edges towards the serious with this comedy-drama about a Seattle radio exec, Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who develops a rare form of cancer, and the goofy best friend, Kyle (Seth Rogen), who urges him to turn his frown upside down and use his newfound condemned-man cachet to pull chicks.Questions of poor taste are partly sidestepped by the fact that writer Will Reiser was inspired by his own battle with the big C, and although his script never gets to grips with the ugly reality of the disease, it has the ring of truth to it. The acting, too, is mostly superb, especially Gordon-Levitt in a tricky, often unsympathetic lead role.Elsewhere, ‘50/50’ runs into trouble: Jonathan Levine’s direction is sitcom-flat and the soundtrack is stuffed with predictable indie whinge-rock from the likes of Radiohead and Pearl Jam. Most damaging of all, the film’s female characters run the gamut of misogynist cliché: Anna Kendrick is sympathetic but non-threatening as the love interest, while the treatment of Adam’s flighty, unsupportive ex-girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard) develops from dismissive to vicious, a bitter streak also reflected in Rogen’s bullish, unlikeable turn and a shrill, throwaway appearance by Angelica Huston as Adam’s flappy mum.So, on the one hand there are a brace of memorable one-liners, some powerhouse performing and an infectious sense of joie de vivre in the face of extreme duress; on the other, a sad lack of cinematic ambition and some shady gender pol

In Peter Morgan’s script for 2010’s ‘Hereafter’, a glimpse of the beyond linked disparate individuals across the globe: this time his notional modernisation of playwright Arthur Schnitzler’s warhorse ‘La Ronde’ is the catalyst for an international chain of interpersonal connections. Following a cash-strapped young Slovakian woman (Lucia Siposová) to Vienna, we meet an errant English businessman, Michael (Jude Law), and through him the story moves to London, where his faithless spouse (Rachel Weisz) has a liaison with a young Brazilian (Juliano Cazarré) – whose complicated love life in turn whisks us even further afield.Since Morgan (‘The Queen’) is a capable miniaturist, the performers are decent enough and Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (‘City of God’) has an eye for colour-supplement chic, it’s pleasant enough viewing. The overall design, however, is a shaky construction, since we never spend enough time to bond with each participant, and no matter how much the film tries to draw out a key theme about the significance of making your own decisions in life, it’s only too obvious its outcomes are all skewed by the storyteller’s contrived need to keep adding links to the daisy chain of his story. As the meet-cutes and air miles rack up, there’s little sense of increasing momentum or escalating stakes, just more of the same mini-melodramas. Anthony Hopkins makes the most of his spot playing a recovering alcoholic, while twitchy Ben Foster seriously overdoes it as a waveri

Spielberg's extravagant folie de grandeur, a madcap comedy recreation of an allegedly true story, with Hollywood suffering from mass panic when it's thought that a Japanese submarine is about to lead an invasion force into California. The period sets are wonderful, the cast full of bright talent, and Spielberg's expertly choreographed slapstick is wondrous to behold. There is a problem, however, in that it isn't actually very funny: one feels that Spielberg was concentrating his powers so much on the mechanics of timing, cause and effect, that he forgot that what makes the best comedies funny is human reaction. Here the characters are too cartoon-like ever to win our attention (though Stack's military bigwig obsessed with Disney's Dumbo is the touching exception who proves the rule).

Thompson's evocation of the spirit of the '60s protest is most moving when it abandons the soapbox and concentrates on domestic discord. We follow the fortunes of college buddies Ralph (Downey) and Scott (Sutherland), opposed in temperament but united in ideals. They both despise American involvement in Vietnam, but Scott's the one with a social conscience, while Ralph likes to get stoned and strip down to his underwear. Inevitably the two rebels clash with their parents, inspiring support from their mothers (splendid perfomrances from Cassidy and Hartley) and hostility from Scott's gung-ho father (played with conviction by Dern). The film effectively recreates the fear and defiance which accompanied Nixon's support of the draft lottery, with 19-year-olds designated as the first for the slaughter.

Restored and re-released at the BFI Southbank this week, ‘81/2’ is one of Italian director Federico Fellini’s greatest films. Released in 1963, it’s wildly fun and frenetic but also a penetrating portrait of a filmmaker (Marcello Mastroianni) in a creative rut. Inventive and imaginative, ‘81/2’ has been much copied, but this is the real thing. See it. 

McMullen's film about the Paris Commune offers a stirring rendition of the 'Internationale' sung, at a moment of seeming defeat, by the actors in Ramborde's Theatre in Paris, as reactionary government forces close in to remove, as it were, the masses from the stage of history. McMullen depicts the events of those heady days - from the assassination of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico in 1867, through the crazy Franco-Prussian war, to the crushing of the communards - as a farcical theatrical event, taking his cue, no doubt, from Marx's famous remarks about how history repeats itself (his words themselves repeated imperiously by a black Marx played by director Med Hondo). In and out of Ramborde's Theatre or the nearby Café Anglais, a gallery of historical cut-outs impersonates the various mighty forces at work in society. It's a grand, ambitious, three-act, sub-Brechtian affair, which exhibits the McMullen trademarks: a painterly eye, an unashamed taste for Big Ideas and allusive puns, and a tendency to lapse into obscurity and pretentiousness.

A modestly engaging, low-key feminist movie about an unmarried actress in Munich who becomes pregnant but decides against marrying the child's father, and eventually moves in with a more agreeable man she meets on a winter sports holiday. In the end she determines to live and raise her child alone, a decision which, considering the men in the movie, seems eminently reasonable. Don't get the impression that this movie has it in for men; it's much harder on the parental generation, and very sympathetic to kids who find themselves unwitting victims of middle class domestic unrest. Heidi Genée worked as an editor with the first wave of new German directors (Kluge, Sinkel), and has a keen eye for the absurdities of domestic life as well as a good ear for comic lines.

It's 1979, and naive adonis Shane O'Shea (Phillippe) is sick of his grey New Jersey existence. Entranced by a photo of soap star Julie Black (Campbell), he visits her New York hangout, Studio 54. Club boss Steve Rubell (Myers) takes a fancy to him, and soon Shane's a busboy, enjoying a new life with sexy couple Anita (Hayek) and Greg (Meyer). He thinks things can only get better, but... The strange truth about 54 is that it's almost great; its best moments have a bleak, blasted energy reminiscent of Boogie Nights and Blue Collar. There's a political sensibility at work here. Ultimate exclusionist Rubell provides the perfect means to study America's race and class divisions, and Myers exploits every vicious, self-hating line that comes his way. All Rubell's scenes are beguiling. The problem is, the other characters - straight in every way, their highs and lows come over like the twitterings of Fame.

This long-standing live music venue is one of few surviving spaces to catch a gig in Zone 1. Across its two spaces you can expect to catch the cream of the touring indie scene, jazz acts and themed club nights. There’s also a gallery space on the site.

A new restaurant from Borough Wines - the group behind L'Entrepot nearby and five wine shops dotted around town. It takes over the site of the recently closed Mayfields - a restaurant also owned by the group. Wine is expected to be a strong point, complementing a menu of bar snacks, small plates and mains taking influence from across Europe. There is a range of craft beer on offer, too.

Made for ESPN’s ‘30 for 30’ strand in the US, this is a functional documentary about the controversial men’s 100m final at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. It’s a moderately interesting tale, focusing on the rivalry between Carl Lewis and Ben Johnson, and on the doping scandal that saw Johnson stripped of his gold medal. Director Daniel Gordon has done his groundwork and every one of the key players is interviewed, including our own Linford Christie, whose bronze medal was upgraded to a silver. But the film’s TV roots are too obvious: it’s essentially a parade of talking-head interviews and fairly standard archive footage, with little effort made to place these events within the wider context of sports doping. The best sporting docs are those that take the time to persuade viewers with no vested interest in athletics to care about the characters and their story. But ‘9.79’ (named for Johnson’s ‘winning’ time) isn’t willing to run that extra mile.

Belfast, 1971, and Gary (Jack O'Connell), a young private in the British army, is thrown in at the deep end of the Troubles; more than that, his hands are tied and there are bricks in his pocket. This quiet lad from Derbyshire has barely been in Belfast a day when he finds himself in the middle of a violent street riot sparked by a heavy-handed house search by police in a Catholic area. Matters turn worse when he becomes separated from his colleagues and has to flee down menacing alleys and up war-torn streets to escape with his life. As night falls, the stark reality of the situation begins to look more like something from a foggy, street-lamp-lit nightmare. This is the first feature from French-born, British-based TV director Yann Demange, and it recalls Paul Greengrass's 'Bloody Sunday': same country, same period, same in-the-moment shaky camerawork and sense of escalating terror. But as darkness comes, ‘’71’ offers something more atmospheric and ambitious than mere documentary-style realism. Gary has the weight of the Troubles on his shoulders, and Gregory Burke’s script sets out to capture all the rifts and loyalties of 1971 Belfast: a thankless task, perhaps. So, the local Republican paramilitaries want Gary’s scalp, but there are splits among the Catholic extremists. Also in play is a small unit of morality-free, undercover Brits (their chief number played by a menacing Sean Harris) who think the life of a mere private may not be worth saving if it means exposing thei

This low-key but engrossing doc is a powerful reminder that the current hot-button issue of individual rights vs state surveillance is no new development. In 1971, the theft of FBI files from an agency office in Pennsylvania led to historic revelations lifting the lid on the activities of J Edgar Hoover’s agency. The information was leaked to The Washington Post, which detailed wholesale illegal FBI infiltration and disruption of leftist students, black activists, anti-Vietnam protestors, even feminist groups. The agency’s moral authority took a major pasting, all thanks to the theft perpetrated by the self-styled ‘Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI’, whose identity has never been revealed – until now. In a major scoop, the ordinary householders, academics and even a cab-driver who planned and executed the raid appear on camera recalling how they did it, and their subsequent years of anxiety when its significance became apparent. It’s fascinating, very human testimony, and though the film could work a little harder to draw out the parallels/differences to today’s security situation, it still offers a remarkable insight into people power in action.

Protests and strange accidents spread panic among the cast and crew of a man's (Simon Abkarian) play about the Armenian Genocide.

Straightforward transfer of the Broadway musical by Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone about the conception and passing of the American Declaration of Independence. Suspense mounts as the nays change to yeas, and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson do a one-two-three-kick routine. They also sing. Everybody sings. Amazingly plastic film-making. The mind boggled, gave up, and enjoyed it. They've even included the slavery cop-out. Very long at 141 minutes.

Kovacs' episodic attempt to evoke the trippy, dippy and momentous days of '68 centres on San Francisco, where Hungarian exile Zoltan Szabo (Tecsi) and family are putting the final touches to their newly acquired ethnic restaurant. Throughout, radio bulletins, television broadcasts and posters conveniently announce that this is the year of the Tet offensive, the Chicago Convention, etc, but that's as deep as it goes. Zoltan puts his faith in his two sons, but law student Peter (Larson) is soon dropping out, turning on, wising up and getting laid, and his brother (Locke) comes out as gay to beat the draft. Shot like a pastiche of '60s soap opera, it finally peters out in a bathetic happy resolution of sorts.

Before '10' was released in America, its producers were so certain it was a clinker that they tore up contracts for two other Blake Edwards pictures. The miscalculation was understandable. Much of the film comes on like a Jill Clayburgh picture someone rewrote for Bob Hope, with Moore playing an ageing Unmarried Man who pursues lubricious women (rating them out of an ideal ten) to stave off menopause. Technically it's atrocious, trading on absurd coincidence, lame slapstick, and some peculiarly ugly photography. But the studio failed to see that Edwards had hit on a subject (male sexual insecurity) which was bound to strike a chord with the post-Clayburgh audience. The climactic love scene - in which Moore proves utterly unable to perform when he gets his emancipated dream woman (Derek) to bed - is very funny and represents a real catharsis in the history of Hollywood romance: Dudley Moore became the first actor to turn screen impotence into superstardom.

Shot entirely from the dashboard of a car and using (with one brief exception) just two camera angles - one trained towards the driver's seat, the other towards the passenger's - Kiarostami's digital film looks like fly-on-the-windscreen documentary, but isn't. Rather, it explores the predicament of six women and one child in today's Tehran, as they argue, joke, cajole and comfort each other during ten brief journeys; this being Kiarostami, of course, it also explores the knotty relationship between reality, fiction and truth, and between actors, audience and film-maker. Ostensibly, as the discussions cover love, sex, marriage, divorce, sex, parenthood, prostitution, independence and identity, the film's about the position of women in Iranian society, but it's also far more than that. Funny, surprising, illuminating, ambiguous and at times extremely moving, the film is a quietly audacious experiment in which its (primary) creator's determination to remove all visible traces of 'direction' from the equation makes for unusually forthright viewing. Pace Godard, Nick Ray is no longer alone in having been desirous - or indeed capable - of reinventing the cinema.

In this splendidly lurid thriller a detective checks out the disappearance of a single woman in Room 302 of the New Hope Apartments, Seoul, a haven for the upwardly mobile. His chief informant (and soon his prime suspect) is the woman's pushy neighbour in 301, another single woman in many ways the exact opposite of the absentee. What unfolds is a hair-raising history of marital discord, sexual abuse, anorexia and bulimia... and the truth about the Korean penchant for dog-meat.

Hyams' sequel to Kubrick's big daddy of sci-fi movies may not have the novelty of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it is still a better film than anyone could have dared to expect. Scheider plays the American space agency boss trying to find out what happened to the ill-fated 'Discovery' spacecraft and its surviving crew-member. He joins a Russian space mission to Jupiter captained by the formidable Mirren, but things get pretty sticky when news comes through that back on Earth the super-powers are on the point of war. Hyams has not come up with a climax to match Kubrick's rush through the star-gate; but this is still space fiction of a superior kind, making the Star Trek movies look puny by comparison.

Wong Kar-Wai’s long-awaited, sumptuous follow-up to ‘In the Mood for Love’ makes for a rapturous cinematic experience. It’s not just the stunning production design (William Chang), exquisite camerawork (Chris Doyle, Lai Yiu Fai, Kwan Pun Leung) and superbly used music (various artists and composers, including Shigeru Umebayashi), which together give the film the febrile intensity of a nineteenth-century opera (Bellini features on the track). It’s also the subtlety and complexity that distinguish Wong’s charting of the emotional odyssey undergone by Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung) as he goes through a series of relationships with different but likewise lovely women: a prostitute (Ziyi Zhang), a gambler (Gong Li), a cabaret singer (Carina Lau), and his landlord’s daughter (Faye Wong). With such beauties surrounding him, you’d expect Chow to be happy, but the film mainly takes place in the mid-’60s, the years immediately following his heart-breaking encounter with a married woman (Maggie Cheung in ‘In the Mood for Love’). It’s a relationship that still shades and shapes his reactions to every woman he meets, and it therefore also influences the allegorical sci-fi novel he’s writing, set in the year 2046 (after the number on a hotel-room door) but inspired by his own memories and desires… Wong intercuts scenes from this book with Chow’s various affairs and non-affairs, allowing Wong to build layer upon bittersweet layer of meaning in a work as cerebrally rewarding as it is sensually sed

The vague term ‘indie rock’ has shifted a lot in meaning over three decades, but some associations have stuck, namely loud guitars, black-framed glasses and skinny teens in skinny jeans. An unabashed celebration of indie-ness in its most recognisable form, ‘1234’ is unlikely to make many converts but will appeal to anyone who’s ever bought the same single on three different formats just to get all the B-sides.Debut writer-director Giles Borg knows his territory: the film is a simple tale of homemade rock ’n’ roll romance and takes place in a series of rehearsal studios, pub back rooms and arts labs where his fey, shuffling cast of awkward twentysomethings meet, make music, make eyes and sort of fall in love to a soundtrack of late ’90s DIY seven-inches. It’s heartfelt, nicely written, competently directed and entertaining, though the the hipper-than-thou namedropping is a bit tiresome, and the underwhelming climax is frustrating in the extreme.

The vague term ‘indie rock’ has shifted a lot in meaning over three decades, but some associations have stuck, namely loud guitars, black-framed glasses and skinny teens in skinny jeans. An unabashed celebration of indie-ness in its most recognisable form, ‘1234’ is unlikely to make many converts but will appeal to anyone who’s ever bought the same single on three different formats just to get all the B-sides.Debut writer-director Giles Borg knows his territory: the film is a simple tale of homemade rock ’n’ roll romance and takes place in a series of rehearsal studios, pub back rooms and arts labs where his fey, shuffling cast of awkward twentysomethings meet, make music, make eyes and sort of fall in love to a soundtrack of late ’90s DIY seven-inches. It’s heartfelt, nicely written, competently directed and entertaining, though the the hipper-than-thou namedropping is a bit tiresome, and the underwhelming climax is frustrating in the extreme.

Proof positive that originality doesn’t necessarily equal quality, this unusual slice of digitally animated apocalypse throws up some intriguing ideas but ultimately fails to impress. 9 is a stuffed toy who comes to life in a post-human future of giant machines and widespread desolation. Leaving the workshop where he was made, he stumbles across a gang of equally misshapen straw dolls, numbered 1 to 8, who are eking out a meagre existence and hiding from The Beast, a mechanical terror in the shape of a stalking cat. But when 9 persuades his new friends to take up arms against The Beast, he inadvertently awakens an even more insidious slumbering terror: the genocidal Machine.First-time director Shane Acker’s major problem is one of tone: with its desolate  landscapes, disturbing imagery and oppressive atmosphere of impending  violence, ‘9’ is supposedly intended for adults. And yet the script is so shallow and bluntly allegorical, the characters so whimsical and transparent that even young teenagers may find it faintly patronising. The animation is stylistically impressive, but Acker’s restricted colour palette, with its washes of grey, green and brown, soon becomes a chore. An impressive voice cast struggle to inject life into the proceedings: Christopher Plummer is wonderfully obsequious as Petty Overlord 1, but Elijah Wood is merely flat and anonymous as the heroic 9. This film will surely be remembered as an intriguing failure: a triumph of ambition over ability, of ideas

It doesn't bode well: an unprepossessing title, an unheard-of production team, a synopsis – a portrait of the Ross brothers' hometown of Sidney, Ohio – which seems to promise little more than downhome self-indulgence served with warm apple pie. And perhaps it's just those lowered expectations going to work, but '45365' feels like one of the most satisfying, original and enjoyable films in this year's LFF lineup: taking their cues from early Errol Morris, specifically 'Vernon, Florida', with little dashes of everyone from Mark Twain to Harmony Korine, the Rosses have created a dizzingly detailed, thoughtful, sympathetic but highly pragmatic celebration of the modern Midwest in all its beauty, complexity, stupidity and brilliance. If you've ever wanted to watch two informed rednecks argue passionately over whether The Who's 'Squeezebox' is about an accordion or a dildo, look no further.

Read the director's guide the perfect disaster movie hereLet’s get the sniffy movie-snob protests out of the way. Yes, ‘2012’ is infantile. Yes, it treats the deaths of six billion people as little more than a tragic footnote. Yes, it’s about as interested in subtlety, narrative invention or character development as the Corkscrew at Alton Towers.But what a ride. There are moments – sights, sounds, special effects – that have never been seen or imagined before, sequences of staggering complexity, immaculate detail and breathtaking scale. In summary, it may seem like just another disaster movie, but this one is bigger, louder, crazier and more wildly exhilarating than anything previously attempted, even by  Roland ‘Independence Day’ Emmerich’s own smash ’n’ grab standards.The plot is little more than a framing device, the MacGuffin something to do with sunspots, plate tectonics and the Mayan calendar. The closest we have to a hero is John Cusack’s shambolic failed author Jackson Curtis, whose attempts to save his estranged family from a fiery death somehow involve Russian plutocrats, Himalayan plane crashes and Woody Harrelson in a fez. But nobody goes to a movie like this for the storyline. This is disaster porn, and unashamedly so: pavements crack, buildings topple, crowds flee, planes plummet and world leaders scramble to save their own skins as the planet goes to hell in a handcart.  Posterity will not be kind to ‘2012’ – and it definitely won’t work on DVD – but catch it o

Noel Clarke’s latest, ‘4.3.2.1’, is on the face of it completely different to his ‘Kidulthood’ mini-franchise. Following four west London sixth-form girls who get mixed up with stolen diamonds, it’s a brash and ambitious play for the mainstream: girl power rebooted for anyone too young to remember Riot Grrrl or even the Spice Girls. Still, jammed as it is with teen sex and misbehaving, and with a plotline that hinges on a packet of Pringles, if you’re over 21 you’re probably too old to be watching.Like a pop svengali, Clarke has put together a line-up of characters to cater for all tastes. The film splits into four sections, covering the same three days from the perspective of each. Tamsin Egerton plays a pretty, posh blonde who jets off to New York to lose her virginity. Ophelia Lovibond is the arty indie screw-up. American actress Emma Roberts is all sass and smarts, while Shanika Warren-Markland, who had a tiny part in ‘Adulthood’, announces herself as a big new talent as the butt-kicking, feisty one. Clarke himself appears and there are cameos from R&B singer Eve and ‘Clerks’ director Kevin Smith.The film doesn’t go in for subtlety. It’s frenetically paced, with non-stop music, and pops with teen issues: abortion, self-harm, bisexuality, suicide, stalking. That’s before you get to the diamond heist. But Clarke has got an unmistakable knack for writing teens. One of this lot is more worried that her mates aren’t talking to her than the fact that she has an international sm

This sprawling and episodic Uruguayan family drama follows the individual storylines of rebel schoolgirl Ana (Anaclara Ferreyra Palfy) and her separated parents. Her handsome mother, Graciela (Sara Bessio), pays stoical visits to a dying relative, while her father, Rodolfo (Humberto de Vargas), makes pitiful attempts to crawl back into the family bosom. Ana doesn’t much care for her parents’ woes, or school, or anything beyond attracting unsuitable men. Her apathy is infectious. The anecdotal plot is too loose for its undemonstrative characters, while intrusive surges of melancholic indie folk make it all feel like an overlong music video.

A look at the torture methods used by the Portuguese government in the Fascist era.